In an exhibition entitled “Begreifbare Baukunst – zur Bedeutung von Türgriffen in der Architektur”, FSB, makers of door and window hardware from eastern Westphalia, takes a look at the relationship between architecture and one of its smallest designable elements, the door handle. A door handle, after all, is effectively architecture in miniature that reflects the design approach of its originator in both form and function.
FSB feels that decisions on door handles always need to be made against the backdrop of the surrounding architecture. Their design is an expression in compressed form of that of the space around. Either they serve as an harmonious part of the whole or else they are quite deliberately at odds with the rest of the scheme. The Brakel firm provides a compelling case for not adopting uniform solutions: its comprehensive range includes designs to suit any form of contemporary and classical architecture.
The exhibition sees FSB point up symbiotic links between architecture and door handles past and present. Grippingly on show alongside projects by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Joseph Maria Olbrich and Peter Behrens is, for instance, the lever handle that Walter Gropius developed in 1922 together with Adolf Meyer, his office head, for the Fagus Works at Alfeld on the river Leine. The unfussy handle was presented to an appreciative public in Weimar’s Musterhaus am Horn the following year. Very much in the spirit of the Bauhaus, FSB was itself inspired by this handle to give some thought to the question of architectures for the human hand. Artists of a great many persuasions were involved in bringing about the holistic “Bauhaus” ideal and can be said to have belonged to two basic camps in the final instance. One faction advanced the cause of non-figurative abstraction using elemental forms and colours whilst the other was intent on coming up with new sculptural forms, from within Modernism itself, to counter the sobriety of the movement.
The allure of the Bauhaus persisted in postwar Europe – and with it the debate on the form and content of any design fit for its age. One signature it bore was that of Le Corbusier: a chapel he designed that was consecrated in 1955 is testimony to a late switch to sculptural form, with wall panels curving towards each other, deep recesses and reveals, and a projecting roof. He designed a large processional door for the sacral building whose handle is a bronze sculpture.
On display opposite was a bungalow designed by the architect Sep Ruf in the early 1960s to a commission by Federal Chancellor Ludwig Erhard, a structure that accorded well with the young Federal Republic’s sense of itself. It is the architectural embodiment of a new beginning morally and politically, of a new openness to the wider world that is revealed in the overall impact of transparency and in level access all around the building. This is a structure that veritably unites a radically unfussy architectural style with unpretentiously fashioned handles: Ruf designed a purist push-andpull pad handle for the large glazed sliding door – a square black fitting flanked by an aluminium stile.
Functional objects inspired by the Bauhaus serve as benchmarks for good design even today. Still today, architects design bespoke handles for their buildings. It’s no coincidence that they aspire to work with FSB so often: like virtually no other firm, the Brakel makers of door and window hardware entertains a dialogue with architects and designers as a means of developing formally perfect and, at the same time, functional door openers that do justice to their host architecture in every respect. This also involves ongoing adoption of the Four-Point Guide to Good Grip thought up for FSB 25 years ago by Otl Aicher, designer and co-founder of the Ulm Design College: a door handle can only fulfil its purpose if it provides support for both thumb and palm, has a forefinger furrow, and is suitably grippable.
FSB’s striving for the perfect means of accessing spaces and buildings – be they “analogue” door and window handles or “digital” access control solutions such as the biometric Fingerscan 2.0 door pull – long predates the legendary Design Workshop held at Brakel in 1986, in the course of which designers of global repute impressively went about their creative business. The exhibition shows tools that have served as “extensions of the human hand” through the ages in conjunction with the architecture for which they were designed and puts the case for decisions on door handles being an integral part of the building process.