I grew up with HfG Ulm — not biographically, but aesthetically. The grid, the reduction, the ban on ornament: it sits deep in me, and I have never quite shaken it off. All the more reason I have the right to ask the question no one in the field dares to: what was actually there, between 1953 and 1968 on the Ulm Kuhberg? A revolution in design — or a cherished legend, tended by a small intellectual elite quoting one another?
The honest answer is uncomfortable for both camps: it was both.
A Moral Project, Not a Design Project
You do not understand the HfG if you read it as a design school. It was first a moral project. Inge Scholl, sister of the murdered Scholl siblings, and Otl Aicher wanted nothing less, after 1945, than the intellectual re-founding of Germany — financed partly with American re-education funds and through the Scholl Siblings Foundation established in 1950. Design was the vehicle, not the goal.
The thesis behind it: whoever democratises the world of things democratises society. A tidy everyday life as the antithesis of völkisch kitsch. That explains the moralising tone that still bothers me in many Ulm texts — and which at the same time gives them their stakes. These people seriously believed that a radio casing is an ethical statement. You can smile at that. But you can also read it for what it was: the attempt to give a newly emerging discipline a theoretical foundation before the market degraded it into mere sales cosmetics.
The Core Ideas — in Four Sentences
First: design is not art but a scientifically grounded discipline — ergonomics, semiotics, sociology and mathematics were on the curriculum. Second: it is not the single object that counts but the system — kit, module, grid, series production. Third: form follows not taste but function and the manufacturing process. Fourth: the designer bears social responsibility for the industrial environment he helps to create. This later called itself the “Ulm Model” — and it was the real innovation: not a chair, but a method.
Who Could Afford It?
The HfG was a milieu phenomenon: a Protestant-inflected educated bourgeoisie, intellectuals eager to denazify, international scholarship holders, plus industrialists’ sons like Erwin Braun who bankrolled the whole thing as clients. You could study there if you could afford years of foundational teaching with no immediate utility — in the economic-miracle years a tiny minority. The HfG debated the right coffee pot while the country bought kidney-shaped tables. This discrepancy between ambition and reach is the core of the legend-making: a small circle produced enormous discursive stakes, and stakes create myth.
Fifteen Years — and Fifty Years of Resonance
Founding, conflicts, dissolution — and the works that outlived the institution.
The TC 100 Test: Is Stackable Tableware Worth a Legend?
Take the hardest case: Nick Roericht’s TC 100 of 1959. A diploma student designs stackable system tableware for canteens — modular, functional, space-saving, standardised. Groundbreaking? From today’s vantage it looks like an obvious thing you’d hardly write a doctoral thesis about. But that is exactly the fallacy of hindsight: in 1959 the idea of thinking of tableware not as a service with décor but as a logistical system — from the dishwashing cycle to stacking height to breakage rate — was genuinely new.
The TC 100 was produced in series by Rosenthal/Thomas, stood for decades in canteens and flew with Lufthansa. It worked, in the most literal sense. Does anyone still care after more than fifty years? The honest answer: outside design museums and seminars, hardly. But the question is wrongly posed. No one cares about the first standardised part of a screw connection — and yet it holds our world together.
The legend is not about the plate. It is about the proof that everyday life can be designed as a system.
Institution or Individuals? An Uncomfortable Inventory
And so to the core question: was the HfG a brilliant institution — or merely the accidental address of a few extraordinary individuals? My thesis, after many years with the subject: the institution was weaker than the myth claims, and the individuals were stronger than the institutional history admits. You see it when you go through the biographies one by one — and when you place the units actually produced side by side, as in the chart above.
Bill and Gugelot: Really So Thin?
The provocation that the records of Bill and Gugelot are “relatively thin” I hold to be only half justified. With Gugelot the work-list arithmetic holds — but the M125, the SK 4 and the Carousel projector are three systems designs, each of which defined a whole product category, and he died at 45. That is not a thin body of work, it is an interrupted one. With Bill the finding is almost the reverse: a failure as rector and ideologue, he created with the Junghans watches the single most durable commercial product of the entire Ulm sphere — you can buy it new in 2026. Few models, yes. But which designer has a product in the range that is still sold unchanged after 65 years?
The Engler Case — Zeitgeist Without a University
And then there is a name that appears in no Ulm chronicle and turns the whole institution question on its head: Heinz H. Engler. He lived and worked in Biberach, not forty kilometres from Ulm — and with the “B 1100” system tableware for Bauscher he designed the world’s best-selling hotel porcelain, in production unchanged since 1962, plus the glass series for Stölzle. Stackable, break-resistant, radically reduced: the purest Ulm spirit. Only Engler was never at the HfG. He did not even have a university degree — a trained potter, a ceramics college, self-taught all the way to a professorship. In the bar chart above it is his bar, of all people, that rises highest — that of an outsider.
That leads to the heretical question: what back then was actually zeitgeist — and what was HfG? Perhaps “good form” was in the air anyway, and the school was not its source but its loudest amplifier. Engler proves that one could have the Ulm idea without Ulm — perhaps even more effectively, because closer to the factory than to the seminar.
It is the same observation that recurs today in Silicon Valley: Sam Altman dropped out of Stanford, Elon Musk left his doctoral programme there after two days. The formative figures of an upheaval are often not the model pupils of the relevant institution but those who smelled the zeitgeist earlier than their syllabuses did. Institutions ennoble ideas — but they rarely invent them alone. That is exactly the uncomfortable point of the whole Ulm legend.
What Really Resonates — and What Was Hot Air
Let us take sober stock. Hot air was: the claim to make design fully scientific. The faith in method that, in the last Ulm years, smothered any joy in designing. The moral claim to sole representation that declared every decorated plate a civilisational relapse. And a good part of the legend-tending afterwards — run by graduates who turned their own biography into a museum.
Substance was: the systems thinking that today sits in every design system, every kit, every component library. Corporate identity as a discipline — Aicher’s invention, without which neither brand management nor my own working life in B2B communication would exist in this form. The design methodology of Maldonado and Bonsiepe, which by roundabout routes became today’s UX education. The grid system in visual communication. And the Braun design language that migrated, via Rams, straight into the iPhone — perhaps the greatest quiet takeover in design history.
Ulm Against the Earthquake
And then the comparison that has pressed itself on me for months: against what today’s AI models are unleashing, the Ulm debates look like a quarrel over the curvature of a saucer. That is true — and it is not. The AI revolution is an earthquake that shakes society into its last corners; the HfG was at best a local tremor of magnitude three. But the question posed on the Kuhberg is exactly the question of today: how do you shape a new, powerful technology so that it serves people and not the other way round? Who bears responsibility for the systems they release into the world?
The Ulm people had too small an object for it — a toaster rather than a transformer — but the right attitude. That today people argue about “alignment” the way they argued in Ulm in 1958 about the right method, complete with moralising, sect-forming and rectorate crises, is an irony Maldonado would have enjoyed.
My Conclusion: A Legend, Yes — but a Deserved One
HfG Ulm was overrated as an institution and is underrated as an impulse. Fifteen years, permanently underfunded, riven by conflict, in the end wound up by a state parliament that could make nothing of its ambition. Measured against its own world-improving rhetoric: a failure. Measured against what a handful of people in a concrete building on a hill above Ulm put into the world — a discipline, a method, a visual identity for the Federal Republic, and by roundabout ways the design language of the devices on which this text is read — astonishingly successful.
So I stand by my sympathetic-but-critical stance. You do not have to believe the legend to use the inheritance. As I write this text I sit at a grid, in a reduced typography, with a single accent colour — and I know exactly where that comes from.