The lineage of the white box

April 1919, Weimar. Architect Walter Gropius merges the Academy of Fine Arts and the School of Arts and Crafts to establish the Staatliches Bauhaus. The manifesto's cover was a woodcut engraved by the painter Lyonel Feininger: a cathedral with three sharp spires radiating beams of light. In this manifesto, Gropius called for sculpture, painting, applied art, and craft to be reunited into a single guild without class distinctions — for the wall dividing art and craft to be torn down, and for both to move forward together toward a new architecture.

One interesting fact: the word "function" appears nowhere in this manifesto. The industrial functionalism people would later come to call "Bauhaus-like" — stripping away ornament to focus purely on use — is not yet present in this 1919 document. The first manifesto reads, if anything, closer to Expressionist and Romantic language. It was only some years later that the school actually turned toward function and mass production. The white walls, glass, and unadorned forms we now associate with the name "Bauhaus" were not born at the moment of its founding, but made afterward.

The Bauhaus moved from Weimar to Dessau in 1925, settling into this glass-and-concrete building designed by Gropius. But in 1931, the Nazi Party won a majority on the Dessau city council, and pressure to close the school began the following year. The Nazis attacked the Bauhaus as a hotbed of "degenerate art," a den of Jewish and internationalist left-wing intellectuals. In late 1932, then-director Mies van der Rohe rented an old factory building in Berlin with his own money and continued the school privately. For ten months, classes continued without major interference.

But on April 11, 1933, Berlin police, acting on orders from the new Nazi government, closed even that building. Fourteen years after its founding, the Bauhaus effectively vanished, dressed in the formality of a self-closure. Its professors and students scattered to the United States, Switzerland, Israel, and elsewhere, and only the principles they had taught spread out across the world. The school as a physical body disappeared, but its principle did not.

In 1953, twenty years after the Bauhaus's closure, a new design school opened its doors in Ulm, Germany. It was founded by Inge Aicher-Scholl, her husband Otl Aicher, and Max Bill, who had trained at the Bauhaus. Inge Aicher-Scholl carried an extraordinary personal history: she was the older sister of Hans Scholl and Sophie Scholl, siblings executed for resisting the Nazis. She was also the author of the first book on the White Rose resistance movement, published in 1952, and it fell to her to hold the school's finances together to the very end. Max Bill served as founding director and even designed the school's building himself, completed in 1955.

Ulm did not consider itself a simple reenactment of the Bauhaus. It is regarded as a school that took the Bauhaus's project of uniting art, craft, and technology and radicalized it into a far more rigorous methodology, drawing in sociology, psychology, and systems theory. And in 1955, Hans Gugelot designed a new product for Braun together with Ulm students, drawing attention at the Düsseldorf Radio Fair. It was the moment the principle crossed over from the Bauhaus to Ulm, and from Ulm to an appliance company. This school, too, did not last long. In 1968, when state funding was cut off, it closed after just fifteen years. Like the Bauhaus before it, Ulm too vanished under political pressure.

In 1955, 23-year-old Dieter Rams joined Braun as an architect and interior designer. His first assignment was not product design at all, but reworking office spaces and showrooms to fit the company's new design direction. At the time, Braun was partnering with the Ulm School of Design to overhaul its entire product language. The following year, in 1956, Rams, together with Hans Gugelot and Wilhelm Wagenfeld, released the SK4, a radio and turntable combined into a single unit.

The original design called for a metal lid, but it rattled whenever the volume was turned up. Rams proposed replacing the lid with acrylic, a material that had only just become available, and the result was a radio whose transparent cover let the record show through underneath. People nicknamed this transparent, coffin-like form "Snow White's Coffin." The exhibition label on the object now held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York reads: "Design: Hans Gugelot and Dieter Rams, Ulm School of Design." It was the first moment Ulm's name was engraved side by side with a Braun product.

In 1958, Braun released the T3, the first pocket-sized transistor radio. MoMA's collection credit reads: "Dieter Rams, Ulm School of Design, Germany." This is a credit listing not just the name of a Braun designer, but the school itself alongside him. The following years brought sibling models, the T4 and the T41. All three shared the same visual grammar: a white body, a circular dial, and a grid-patterned speaker grille.

In 1961, six years after joining the company, Rams became Braun's chief design officer. Then, in the late 1970s, he looked back at the world he inhabited and asked himself a question: "Is my design really good design?" The world he saw was one where "form, color, and noise" had become impenetrably tangled together, and he recognized that he himself was contributing to that chaos. In December 1976, he gave a lecture at Vitsœ in New York addressing this concern. The thinking refined there would later be distilled into what became known as "Ten Principles for Good Design." At its foundation lay the phrase "Weniger, aber besser" — "Less, but better." Rams is said to have heard this phrase from his grandfather, a carpenter.

In 1987, Rams, together with fellow designer Dietrich Lubs, created the ET66 calculator. It featured a black body with round buttons, numbers in black, operator symbols in brown, and only the "=" button set apart in yellow. There was no ornament — every point a finger touched had a reason to be there. This calculator is still cited as one of the most compact demonstrations of the "less, but better" principle, and is held today in the collection of London's Victoria and Albert Museum.

Klaus Klemp, design curator at the Museum of Applied Arts in Frankfurt, points to Braun products like this one as proof that designs made half a century ago still hold up today. The conditions he lists are: durable, easy to use, self-explanatory, environmentally friendly, and above all, deeply appealing. The ET66 was an object that met those conditions within the 20th century. And more than twenty years later, several media outlets pointed out that the button layout and color contrast of this calculator bore a striking resemblance to the iPhone's calculator app. The design of the iPhone calculator app was gradually revised afterward, but by then, the initial resemblance had already been widely discussed.

The iPod, released by Apple in 2001, is often said to evoke the T3 with its white body and circular dial. But strictly speaking, the story is a little more complicated. According to reporting, the very operating concept of scrolling through a menu with a click wheel came from the Bang & Olufsen Beocom 6000 telephone, which Apple marketing executive Phil Schiller had taken note of. What was inherited from the T3 was not the mechanics of the wheel, but rather the attitude of a white box stripped of ornament. This first-generation iPod is now held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, credited to "Jonathan Ive, Apple Industrial Design Team, 2001."

In the foreword to Sophie Lovell's official biography of Rams, Ive recalled that the first Braun product to enter his parents' home was a Citromatic juicer. He described the consistency with which Rams embodied his philosophy across such an enormous range of products as "breathtaking." Rams responded in kind. In the 2009 documentary "Objectified," he named Apple as one of the few companies designing according to his ten principles. In a 2011 interview ahead of a new book's publication, he said: "Apple has achieved what I never managed to — making people line up to buy something purely because of the power of the product. I had to line up for rations after the Second World War." In 2018, director Gary Hustwit made the feature-length documentary "Rams," with music by Brian Eno. The film captured not only his connection to Apple, but also the concerns about overconsumption that Rams himself had long carried. A single principle, born in Weimar, arrived nearly a hundred years later inside a device that fits in the palm of a hand.