Design Classics – Braun Atelier 3 Bauhaus Tube

The Braun Atelier 3 (price range: $800 – $1500 depending upon condition, completeness, etc.) is an early Rams work for Braun, marking a significant aesthetic development and available through das programm (an shop that only sells objects designed by Dieter Rams that were issued between 1955 and 1995, the time when Rams was Braun’s Director of Design). Rams follows Gugelot’s use of a concave corpus, a device that appears in most of Gugelot’s G – series works for Braun. He follows him too in the enclosure of the corpus within expressed end elements. Although both of these characteristics remain in evidence in Rams’ Atelier 3 design, the substitution of wood for anodised aluminium constitutes a significant break, as does the introduction of an asymmetrical face for the receiver module.

das programm writes: “The transition from ‘natural’ materials towards the manifestly industrial, and the blocking of anthropomorphism by a rejection of symmetry, adopting instead a more abstract, machineic formalism are both central elements around which Ram’s developed his functionalist vocabulary throughout the 1960′s. (Interesting to note also, the evolution of the Atelier series as a precondition for the Vitsoe 606 Universal Shelving System, a design that must have been in preparation contemporaneously with the Atelier 3. Although it never seems to be mentioned, the resemblance between the Atelier 3 (also the RCS 9) and the basic 606 element is striking. Also interesting, then, is the subterranean line of influence connecting Gugelot to the 606 design through the earlier Atelier models. Gugelot’s relation to the Ram’s shelving system design is generally thought through its difference from his own earlier M 125…)” ❚