Dieter Rams is one of the most influential product designers of the twentieth century. Even if you don’t immediately recognize his name, you have almost certainly used one of the radios, clocks, lighters, juicers, shelves or hundreds of other products he designed.

He is famous not only for this vast array of well-formed products, but for his remarkably prescient ideas about the correct function of design in the messy, out-of-control world we inhabit today.

These ideas are summed up in his ‘ten principles’ of good design: Good design is innovative, useful, and aesthetic. Good design should be make a product easily understood. Good design is unobtrusive, honest, durable, thorough, and concerned with the environment. Most of all, good design is as little design as possible.

Photographer Florian Böhm was invited to document the archive and Rams' house, providing a previously unseen look at the world of Dieter Rams.

Dieter Rams, Braun promotional material and image of the 606 shelving programme and prototypes for handles in the workshop, Rams House, Kronberg, Frankfurt, Germany

'It was exciting to browse through the densely preserved collection of Braun design history - which is mostly Dieter Rams',' enthuses Böhm. 'Larger objects in the archive stood out, corridors of TVs for example, but a lot of the archived products were concealed in boxes or in shelves, and often in closed storage units. Only a small amount was easily accessible with the camera, more or less by chance, when openly placed, in transition from one place to another or more visibly wrapped in clear plastic.'

PC 3 record player with spare parts for other hi-fi systems and face plate for hi-fi unit, Braun Archive, Kronberg, Frankfurt, Germany

Böhm continues: 'My interest was the condition of the archive, the site itself and the kind of mutated nature these objects seem to have developed within the archive arrangements and their new purpose in this context. I am fascinated with the reality of a physical archive and the analog logistics involved - the labelling, shelving, lighting, protection and accessibility. The preserved objects remain unused and seem to convert to pure information, as carriers of cultural identity.'

Dieter Rams seated in chair from 620 chair programme and with TG 550 reel-to-reel tape recorder, Rams House, Kronberg, Frankfurt, Germany

Rams' house - his only piece of architecture - is remarkable for the detail and the design principles applied to it. 'One idea was to follow Rams through the house while he was telling personal anecdotes about objects that are meaningful to him,' Böhm explains of his approach to photographing the house. 'A zoom into the higher resolution of the space, a macro view on the personal arrangement of things, beyond the ridged functional first impression of the space, for example, the workshop in the basement of his house, is full of interesting objects and traces of Rams.'

Dieter Rams, a prototype for a chair and and SK 4 record player, Rams House, Kronberg, Frankfurt, Germany

Book for sale on Amazon: Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible
By Sophie Lovell and Klaus Kemp - Foreword by Jonathan Ive
Edited by Phaidon Press

Yossi Milo Gallery is announcing an exhibition of photographs by Ezra Stoller (American, 1915-2004).

Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright, Bear Run, PA
Gelatin Silver Print - 1971

A pioneer in the field of architectural photography, Ezra Stoller was commissioned by architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Paul Rudolph, Eero Saarinen, I.M. Pei, Marcel Breuer and Richard Meier, because of his unique ability to capture the building according to the architect's vision and to lock it into the architectural canon.  His photographs convey a three-dimensional experience of architectural space through a two-dimensional medium, with careful attention to vantage point and lighting conditions, as well as to line, color, form and texture.

Seagram Building, Mies van der Rohe with Philip Johnson, New York, NY
Gelatin Silver Print - 1958

Ezra Stoller was born in Chicago in 1915 and graduated from New York University in 1938.  He worked briefly with the photographer Paul Strand in the Office for Emergency Management before being drafted in 1942 into the U.S. Army, where he taught photography at the Army Signal Corps Photo Center in Long Island City.  During his long career, he also photographed factories and technical facilities as well as residential projects.  In 1961, he became the first photographer to be awarded the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal. His photographs have been exhibited internationally and belong to numerous museum collections.

TWA Terminal at Idlewild (now JFK) Airport, Eero Saarinen, New York, NY
Gelatin Silver Print - 1962

Ezra Stoller's gelatin silver prints include images of architectural interiors and iconic landmarks.  Based on his background in architecture and industrial design, Stoller used a large-format camera to photograph monumental 20th century buildings, including the Guggenheim Museum, the TWA terminal at Idlewild Airport (now John F. Kennedy International Airport), the Seagram Building, the Salk Institute, Yale Art and Architecture Building and Fallingwater.  In addition to well-known photographs of these locations, the exhibition will include lesser-known photographs of small homes and guest houses which provide a fresh look at the masterful eye that established Stoller as the preeminent photographer of modern architecture.

Yossi Milo Gallery 
525 West 25th Street - New York NY 10001
Exhibition from January 6 to February 12 2011