A conversation with Nikolaus Goetze

Nikolaus Goetze is a partner and head of office at architectural firm gmp – a man in high demand who jet-sets around the world. But he still took the time to come to grips with the particular features of door handles in his work on the new FSB 1244 product collection. FSB spoke with him about gmp’s design philosophy, inspiring changes in scale and why it takes so long to design a good door handle.

As a partner at gmp, you design large-scale projects: entire cities, stadiums, high-rises and exhibition grounds. What motivated you to design a small thing like a door handle?

We are generally motivated by holistic work. We don't want to specialise in airports or single-family homes; instead we want to be involved in lots of different topics by changing scale. Our interest also comes from the fact that we are constantly putting our mark on these types of things: lighting fixtures, sinks, door handles.

We are familiar with the canon of objects in existence; we know where the weaknesses are. Or we feel a certain nostalgia for something that no longer exists. And then we sometimes design an object ourselves. We like interacting with companies like FSB, collaborating to develop something together. It allows us to bring two worlds together, our vision and the practical craftsmanship of production.

What specifically interests you about door handles?

A door handle is something very tangible. There are many things in our environment that we hardly ever touch. We see them and we’re happy when they work. A door handle, by contrast, is constantly touched. You quickly notice if it’s good or not. And it’s forever astonishing how many handles there actually are in a building. That’s what motivated me to design a door handle: they have to be inconspicuous yet still nice, and they also have to work. That is a big challenge.

Did you enjoy finding out what was important to you in a door handle?

Yes, I did. I remember the exhibition at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2014, where FSB presented the history of the door handle. At the time I wondered how many architects and designers had already worked on this theme, and asking myself whether I wanted to make my own contribution here. And wondering if my contribution would be any good. But we quickly noticed that we might still have something to add to the existing catalogue through our philosophy of form follows function and minimalism – even though there were already so many good products out there.

That’s what we set out to do in our collaboration with FSB: design a very minimalist, unobtrusive door handle that you don't notice at first glance. But one that you like the feel of in your hand, one that seems new. I think we did a really good job of that.

What specifically makes your door handle – both in terms of its form and its ergonomics?

If you were to really examine how a hand grabs a handle, you would first see how the thumb touches it. Then the index finger, which actively moves the handle. And finally the space the handle takes up, how the hand lands on the handle and presses on it.

You have to capture this process in a geometric form, which we did using round, elementary shapes. The handle emerges from the door in a circular form, as a tube. The tube is split into a half-circle in the handle itself, with a half-square added to the end. We work with simple geometric shapes: circles and squares.

Only where the index finger falls did we work in a depression in the piece, to make it pleasant in the hand. And to give you something to grab onto firmly in case of emergency. That was our aim: to design a handle from touch with few geometric shapes.

How was your experience working with FSB?

I was amazed that it takes so much time to design a door handle. Ultimately the design process was almost like a major building project. First we worked out the versions, and then we evaluated the design for production over and over again.

Can you even build it like this? Can you make it in stainless steel? In aluminium? How can different versions of it be created for all of the variations that make up a design collection, like versions for panic fittings, for example? I have huge respect after our collaboration with FSB. There is so much that goes into designing a handle!

FSB has lots of experience that they shared with us. And I think we also impressed them with the way we wanted to meet their functional standards using a very simple, minimalist approach. It was far more intensive than expected. I thought our collaboration was fantastic.

Door handles have the smallest and yet the most human impact in the building. How do you see the relationship between the architecture and the products, the door handle or lighting fixture or sink tap?

You certainly have to build hierarchies when selecting products. A product that comes into more frequent contact with a building’s users, like a door handle, should have a different reductive approach than something like a foyer light or a light over a conference table. This should draw more attention.

If a door handle is too eye-catching and too ‘pretty’, but you see it hundreds of times throughout the building, it becomes overplayed. The more discreet, the better. We generally make decisions about products based on such hierarchies. A comparable example is an office lighting fixture that repeats many, many times throughout a building. Here, too, it’s about function and looking good without being too ‘loud’. Another thing we look at is quality. How long does a door handle that is used heavily every single day last?

Will it still work months later, years later, like it did on day one? And will it still look good after long periods of use? This is where FSB takes the absolute lead for us thanks to its technology and experience.