60s Dieter Rams wall system metal shelves for Vitsoe

Dieter Rams was born in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1932. He was influenced by his grandfather who was a carpenter. Rams’s early awards for carpentry designs led to him training as an architect as Germany was rebuilt in the early 1950s. Rams applied for a job at the German electrical products company, Braun, in 1955. He was recruited by Erwin and Artur Braun following the death of their father and his job was to modernize the interiors of the company that was launching revolutionary electrical products. Rams became a protégé of the Ulm School of Design (successor to the Bauhaus) luminaries Hans Gugelot, Fritz Eichler and Otl Aicher. He quickly became involved in product design for Braun. Together with his design team, he was responsible for many of the seminal domestic electrical products – and some furniture – of the 20th century. Many of his designs have become a source of inspiration for Apple. Rams’s designs are in the collections of many museums. Dieter Rams has received numerous international design awards during his career. In 1959 at Braun, Dieter Rams (23 years at that time) presented a sketch of his proposals for the new interiors at the company. The sketch is still on the website of Braun. On the back wall of the boldly modern scheme can be seen the very first notion of a track-based, wall-mounted storage system. In 1959, Dieter Rams asked Erwin Braun if he could design furniture for Niels Vitsœ and Otto Zapf. Braun’s spontaneous answer was “Yes. It will help the market for our radios.” A year later the wall-mounted 606 Universal Shelving System was launched. The dual career of Dieter Rams continued until his retirement from Braun in 1997. He remains convinced that the very best design can only be achieved from design teams within companies.

We offer a wall system with metal shelves in the aluminum hanging legs, as part of the 606 design range, in good condition. The shelves can be mounted just the way you need it in many different settings as we show in our pictures.