July 2011 • Observed
Simple Influence
By Paul Makovsky
WEB
www.phaidon.com
Only Dieter Rams (of Braun fame) can claim to have inspired so many of today’s star designers, including Naoto Fukasawa, Jasper Morrison, Sam Hecht, and Jonathan Ive. The breadth of Rams’s work is detailed in Sophie Lovell’s excellent new book, Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible (Phaidon, $90), which covers the designer’s entire career and philosophy but also explains the context in which his work has come to be a model for practitioners of functional simplicity today. A visual essay documenting Rams’s house and studio details everything down to the buttons and dials on the vintage Braun pieces in his collection and should satisfy the design geek in anyone. If that’s not enough, Jonathan Ive’s description of how, as a kid, he came to love Rams’s work—it all started with a Braun MPZ 2 Citromatic—is, by itself, worth the price of the book.
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