Teachers from Ulm school of design
The history of the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm (hfg Ulm, or Ulm School of Design) was closely tied to the struggle to create democratic structures after the National Socialist era. Immediately after the end of the Second World War, Inge Scholl the surviving sibling of Sophie and Hans Scholl, who had been murdered by the National Socialists in 1943 for high treason because of their membership in the Weisse Rose (White Rose) resistance movement created the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung (Scholl Siblings Foundation) and championed the founding of a free university for democratic education.
After a great deal of effort and many political controversies, she succeeded, with the help of her friends Otl Aicher, Max Bill, and Hans Werner Richter, in persuading the American High Commissioner at the time, John McCloy, to support her idea. The resolution to create the Hochschule für Gestaltung was finally made in 1952, and in 1953 construction was begun, with a design by the Swiss architect and artist Max Bill. It was opened in 1955, and Walter Gropius gave the opening speech.
They had created a university whose concept for education policy, pedagogy, and design differed utterly from all such institutions. A small group of teachers and students lived and worked on the Kuhberg and strove to create a well-designed social environment. Functional products were to be as important as theoretical and empirical analyses on urbanism, technology, industry, and transforming human living and working conditions.
The hfg was originally divided into four departments: Product Design, Visual Communication, Information, and Industrial Architecture. In 1961, the Institute for Film Design was added. One important component was the internationality of both teachers and students, as a reaction to the racist nationalism of the Third Reich. Studies lasted four years, though the first year was a basic course that had to be completed as a prerequisite to being accepted into one of the departments. Viewed from outside, the hfg seemed very self-contained, unified, influential in style, and almost harmonious for a long time. From the beginning, however, there had been intense internal conflicts over the concept, education, and its direction.
Six phases can be identified. From 1947 to 1953, the period of Scholl, Aicher, Bill, and Zeischegg, the school endured struggles developing its concept, institutionalizing its structures, and above all financing the project (a constant problem that only grew worse over time). The period from 1953 to 1956 was marked by the consolidation under Max Bill, the first rector, who saw the hfg as clearly following in the Bauhaus tradition. From 1956 to 1958 the conflicts between the older supporters of the Bauhaus and the younger teachers, who called for independent training based on science and theory, began to come out into the open. In 1957 Bill left the university in protest. In the phase between 1958 and 1962, positivist ideas of a strictly mathematical methodology as a supposedly scientifically neutral value began to proliferate.
Finally, from 1962 onward Aicher, Gugelot, Zeischegg, and Maldonado pursued a pragmatic rebellion and pushed through a change to the university’s constitution, under pressure from the state government of Baden-Württemberg. The first ideas of design theory were formulated and the character of the profession was oriented more strategically around the interests of industry. By now the impending financial disaster was inevitable: the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung was deeply in debt, teachers had to be dismissed and teaching activities reduced. From 1967 on the hfg was in its death throes.
Because of increasing political controversies with the federal and state governments, public subsidies were massively reduced once again. The state government called for the hfg to be merged with the engineering school and subjected to the state laws for universities. Teachers and students argued over strategies for resistance. In October 1968 the teachers refused to teach because circumstances had become personally and financially untenable. In November the conservative government of Baden-Württemberg closed the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm.
The hfg failed for at least three reasons: financial difficulties (undoubtedly made worse by incompetent handling of funds), the discrepancy between its ambitions and their realization, and finally, and quite banally, because of the vanity and self-interest of various teachers.
Most of the famous teachers had already abandoned the sinking ship or had prospects of new contracts elsewhere. Nevertheless, the hfg in Ulm established a concept of design that went far beyond its time and national borders, changing and modernizing everyday life, communication, and the visual world once and for all.