It may not seem like it, but an iPhone or MacBook Pro starts from the same fundamentals as a specific orange juicer, an electric and off-white one, with the five letters of the German brand
Braun
written on the front. The
Citromatic MPZ 2
, that's what the gadget is called, came on the market in 1972, and in 2011 Jony Ive, the man who was in charge of Apple's design for almost three decades, remembered the day his parents bought the juicer in question. , right in the foreword to a book on
Dieter Rams
, the designer who came up with it: “Their surfaces were devoid of imperfections, they were bold, pure, coherent, they were perfectly proportioned.
No part seemed hidden or exaggerated.
At a glance you knew what the product was and how to use it.
I was delighted with him, and it stuck in my memory.
So much so that I still remember it with surprising clarity ”.
The legendary Citromatic MPZ2 juicer was Braun Española's first product.
What Ive commented then, apart from clarifying where the intuitive devices of the famous manzanita come from, helps to explain why the Citromatic triumphed in its day. Its design was designed to minimize the drawbacks of a routine exercise, instead of leaving your wrist preparing the juice every morning. As soon as you placed half an orange on the pineapple-shaped juicer, which was mechanical and rotating and did not remove the pulp from the fruit, the juice came out through the anti-drip nozzle, which allowed it to be closed when the glass was full, conserving the vitamin C in the that mothers insist so much, and open it again if you wanted to refill a second glass.
In addition, Citromatic did not generate drama when washing it. Its pieces separated without problem and, once dry, it was not necessary to store them in the kitchen cupboard: they could be assembled again and leave the juicer in view of everyone, because it did not get in the way. Its lines had been reduced to the essential, the body was not overloaded with colors - on the contrary, it was monochrome - and its shape, deep down, was silent, invisible, or very little intrusive, as the design critic Stephen Bayley, in 2007, described the objects of Dieter Rams in the British newspaper
The Guardian
.
Objects, by the way, which in the case of the ones he engineered for Braun ranged from transistors, radiophones, and speakers, to weighing scales, hair dryers, fans that were also heaters, alarm clocks, and even lighters and calculators.
All of them now appear in the virtual exhibition with which the German brand celebrates 100 years of life, and in which a journey through its great milestones is traced until reaching a conclusion: Braun is what it is, in large part, thanks to Rams - Stephen Bayley also dubbed him the Michelangelo of the machine age - although Rams would never have come across those products had it not been for the context surrounding the Frankfurt company in 1951, when the founder's two sons took over the reins.
Dieter Rams photographed in Frankfurt in 1979.Martyn Goddard / Getty
One was an engineer, and his goal was to excel in the field of electronics. The other, passionate about design, took at face value what Wilhelm Wagenfeld, professor at the Bauhaus, said at a conference on the future of the sector: you have to aspire to simple products. No sooner said than done. Braun sought the collaboration of the Ulm school - precisely, the successor to the Bauhaus - before hiring Rams as the newly graduated architect that he was, and who had not yet even thought of approaching industrial design. He did it once already within the German house, and in the early sixties he was appointed chief designer.
From there, he was doing what he considered, accompanied by Gerd Alfred Müller –author in 1957 of KM 32, a simplified version of current kitchen robots–, Floiran Seiffert –his is the KF 20 Aromaster coffee maker dated from 72– , Reinhold Weiss –signed the HT 1 toaster– or Jurgen Greubel, with whom Rams made the Citromatic with the Catalan Gabriel Lluelles, after Braun acquired the Spanish company Primer and started producing at its new headquarters in Barcelona. The juicer, in 1970, won the gold medal at the Premis Delta in Barcelona, along with a Ramón Bigas vase-bin and Ettore Sottsass's Lettera 36 typewriter.
To continue celebrating Braun's centenary, of course preserving the rules that the originals respected: no small screens, the brand's logo should appear almost imperceptibly, except for unnecessary buttons, and those that had no choice but to add, yes or no. they did have to be multifunctional. All this, not for taste or mania, but because an object needed to be useful, understandable to anyone, discreet and honest with whoever used it, consistent in each of its details, as well as aesthetic, timeless, with a certain degree of innovation, durable in the long term, and therefore sustainable with the environment. They were the principles that Dieter Rams had in mind when it came to raising his designs, that in order for them to be good, according to him, they should have as little design as possible.
Rams is no longer in the German brand, but the truth is that Braun continues to explore the idea of good design in 2021. At the end of the year it will announce a new edition of its BraunPrize, focused on young product designers, while these months its team is meeting with various figures to discuss the issue. The first was Virgil Abloh. And as the American creative director has already shown, for him a good design in the 21st century involves versioning something that has already been done in the past. Specifically, a Rams audio device, titled Wandanlange, from 1965.
