PressDieter Rams. A Style Room

Permanent Presentation

“Less, but better.” – With his unpretentious, functional, visually long-lived and at the same time highly aesthetic products, Dieter Rams contributed to shaping the image of post-war German design. His approach still influences emerging generations of designers today. A passionate advocate of better and more sustainable design, Dieter Rams is considered one of the most successful and influential industrial designers of the twentieth century.

On the occasion of his eighty-fifth birthday in 2017, the Museum Angewandte Kunst payed tribute to the designer with the opening of the Dieter Rams Style Room. The room on the museum’s second floor features changing exhibits to illustrate the interrelated aspects of content and biography that distinguish Dieter Rams’ approach to design. Important designs for Braun and the Universal Shelving System 606 have as much a place here as a comfortable Rams lounge chair on which visitors are welcome to take a seat and page through catalogues and books. Two monitors show photos of other Rams designs and the designer’s private residence. Models from the museum’s extensive collection enhance selected works from the early phase of his career.

Since the Dieter Rams Style Room was rearranged to mark Rams’ 90th birthday in 2022, Dieter Rams’ most important products and designs are being displayed alongside photographs by his wife, Ingeborg Rams for the first time.

To honour Ram’s 94th birthday, the Museum Angewandte Kunst has redesigned the Dieter Rams Style Room once again in May 2026. The exhibition now focuses primarily on the development and evolution of device types, illustrated by the radio-turntable combinations and the T1000 world receiver. Alongside design sketches, the reconstructed model of a design variant that Dieter Rams would actually have preferred is on display for the first time. Further examples include design metamorphoses of flash units, slide projectors, film cameras and hi-fi receivers. Dieter Rams is also present in the exhibition space via a visitors’ book featuring his combative quotes from his 2011 lecture in Hong Kong, Design for a More Humane Environment.

Braun’s collection of models has been made available to the museum by the company on permanent loan and is currently being catalogued in collaboration with Prof. Klaus Klemp of the HfG Offenbach. In addition, the museum is establishing an archive containing the designer’s personal papers and photographic collection in cooperation with the Dieter and Ingeborg Rams Foundation.

Curator: Prof Dr Klaus Klemp

Press release 2022

Press release 2026

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