Hans Gugelot: The Architecture of Design

After the Second World War, the architect Hans Gugelot [hans gyʒəlo] was an important pioneer of German industrial design. He was an important personality at the HfG, his name stood for their success in the field of product development. In April 2020 his 100th birthday will be celebrated.

Hans Gugelot came to Ulm in 1954 to the newly founded Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG). There, together with a team, he developed a new product design for the Braun company, with which the company caused a sensation at the radio trade fair in Düsseldorf in 1956. Gugelot followed the instructions of the company owners Artur and Erwin Braun to design products that would express the modern attitude to life: These were the devices to play the current Cool Jazz and to drive the muff out of the apartments.

In the following years, Hans Gugelot designed numerous industrial goods for leading manufacturers: shavers, furniture, sewing machines, slide projectors, trains for local transport. The architect had become an industrial designer, a new profession that hardly anyone could have imagined at the beginning of the 1960s.

According to Gugelot, being a designer didn’t mean to be superficially cool — in his opinion, designers had a social and cultural responsibility.

The HfG archive uses selected examples to show how Hans Gugelot translated this attitude into his designs and at the same time set standards for future generations.