原文：•Update:2009-12-08•Justin 0'Connor•Source: No.199 | November2009[…]The basic difference between a creative artist and an industrial designer lies in the tasks they perform and the environment in which they operate. The creative artist is respon-sible only to himself. On the work of the designer, however, depends thecommercial profit of his factory, and thus the welfare of the workers in this factory. His world is the worldof businessmen and technicians. His language must be the language of businessmen and technicians. Artistic arguments are not subject to proof. The artist is allowed to dream. The designer must be awake at every minute of his working day. He is a manager. Objectivity and clear thinking determine his actions. He must make all his dispositions with a sure hand. The artist works alone. The designer is a member of a team. The artist is silent. The designer needs to talk about his ideas. He must be able to communicate with his partners.[…][…]We must say goodbye to the familiar image of the artist in industry who, dreaming of good design, tinkers round with his spoon, the last craft worker in industry, as he was once called. We shall have to accustom ourselves to a new type of designer, one who is hard-ly to be distinguished from a clever manager –the word ›manager‹ being meant in a positive sense here. It is natural for this designer to be as familiar withquestions of production and sales as his client is. Design alone is nowadays only a part of his work. […] The industrial desi gner of today must be put in much greater touch with the values of commerce and mar-keting if he is to be successful in his work, if he is to conceive the right product for the right market at the right time.Industrial design is the creation of industrial products. The industrial designer must have the knowledge, the abilities and the experience needed to grasp the facts governing the pro-duct, to conceive the design, and to carry it out in collaboration with all those involvedin product planning, development and manufacture, up to the finished product. In his coor-dinating design activity he will benefit from his knowledge of the sciences and oftechnology as a basis. The aim of his work is to create industrial products to serve society in both a cultural and social aspect.The industrial designer is the advocate of the people. It is amazing that the user or con-sumer is only indirectly involved in the decision process governing things he requires to satisfy his needs. So, in the first place, the desig ner is the user’s or consumer’s advocate. But at the same time this makes him a product of the people. Everyone has his own yardstick. Everyone makes their own decision. The particular task of the designer is to anticipate the de-cisions which others will make in the future as if they were his own. […] The difference from previous occupational descriptions [of the industrial designer –Editor’s note] is this – that German designers speak of coordinated design work and include the social aspect to which industrial design must be subject. I do not believe that this occupational description will be the last one. This profession, which is constantly involved in a dynamic devel-opment, is seeking new fields of work and new orientations.This service, from designs by Sigrid and Günter Kupetz, is not without its charms. Excellently finished ebony handles, a straight upper camber with a flat cover and counter-sunk ebony handle, a rather higher three-cor-nered spout (useful when carrying full pots) and an idiosyncratically curved body. One would perhaps enjoy it without reservation if there were not already an ›m‹ service. Butit provides enjoyment enough. For whether this careful transfer of a ›stile cristallino‹ to silver really signifies the ultimate solution, or just an attractive preliminary stage – the fact remains that WMF has been honestly en-gaged in producing something genuine, some-thing of high quality.This monograph is the first comprehensive overview of the creative work of designer Günter Kupetz. At the same time it presents a picture of the development of industrial design in Germany. There are few other personalities in the design world whose profession-al career reflects as well as Kupetz’s does, the sense of being one of the founders of a disci-pline in the fifties and sixties of the twentieth century. Against the background of the completely changed social and economic contexts of that time, Kupetz and, with him a whole generation of young German designers, frees himself from the artisanal image of the industrial artist imposed by the Bauhaus tradition, enters into an international dialogue about contemporary industrial design and ends up by creating the profession of industrial designer in Germany.Even though Kupetz’s debut was as an artist. Bernhard Heiliger’s outstanding student de-cided, after his first successes in sculpture, to take up a position with WMF in Geislingen/ Steige. He became head of the design studio and in subsequent years createdhundreds of products for the various branches of the company. These products have also found high international acclaim. Kupetz was represented by pieces at the World Exhibition in Brussels and at the ›Triennale 1957‹ in Milan and, equally, some of his designs have found their way into the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.Kupetz’s organic, sculptural forms developed from his work as a sculptor find an echo in contemporary taste. They represent an optimistic modernity oriented towards the future, a modernity which became ever more popular during those years and which, with increasing affluence, more and more people were able to afford. Against the background of his paid work in industry, Kupetz’s wish to set his work in some sort of context and to give it the status of an independent professional discipline began to crystallise. He was increasingly re-occupied by issues surrounding the nature of the job and the professional ethics of the designer. He became a member of the Deutscher Werkbund association of artists and sought contacts with national and international colleagues. Influenced by the first International Design Congress, organised by the German Design Council in 1957 and the British designer Sir Paul Reilly, Kupetz became in 1959 one of the co-founders of the Association of German Industrial Designers (VDID) the first professional association for industrial designers.It was no more than consistent that the professional occupation of industrial designer as he had experienced it should lead him into fully freelance work in 1960 and finally, in 1962, into teaching. Thus, in taking over the newly founded teaching department of Industrial Design at the Kassel School of Industrial Art, he saw an opportunity to bring this new pro-fessional occupation into the purview of teaching and to test it in practice.The more important teaching was to him, the more Kupetz realised the dilemma in which he was placed. He knew the importance of technical, economic and social influences on the design process and wanted to integrate the sciences into design training as auxiliary disciplines. At the same time, he rejected any approach to the design process which was overly scientific. Kupetz therefore used the architectural term of (design) planning, a process in which of course scientific knowledge had an influence on design, but without dominating it. On the other hand – in contradistinction to the Ulm school – he considered the artisticaspect of design to be important. Here in his publications he made use of an enabling for-mulation by which, instead of art, he introduced the concept of intuition into his ideas of teaching. It was intuition, he said, which distinguished the designer from the engineer.Increasingly his interests were no longer restricted to training students. In his opinion, neither the industrial-art schools of his time nor the polytechnics of fine art were adequately structured for design training in Germany. He devoted himself to an evaluation of the school of industrial art, which led in 1971 to the foundation of the Polytechnic of Art and Design. In 1973 he was appointed to the Polytechnic of the Fine Arts in Berlin, where he became Professor of Product Design and Product Planning. The reorganisation of the Polytechnic of the Arts in Berlin saw Kupetz as a member of the Organising Commission where he attempted to bring his ideas to bear on the organisation of the Industrial Design Department. In his inaugural lecture as professor in Berlin Kupetz was already summing up in surprising fashion the job definition which he had proposed only a few years before:»The difference from previous occupational descriptions is this: German designers speak of coordinated design work and include the social aspect to which industrial design mustbe subject. I do not believe that this occupational description will be the last one. This pro-fession, which is constantly involved in a dynamic development, is seeking new fields of work and new orientations.« What distinguished Kupetz from his colleagues was his ability to question his own actions and to recognise that there were ever more possibilities of reaching solutions in design – and against a background of social change.For those seeking to classify Kupetz’s creative work, it is the mass market, where what matters first and foremost is meeting basic consumer needs (furniture, utensils and itemsfor everyday use) which provided the initial social context for his endeavour. Even before he had finished his creative career in industry this context had changed radically. From the beginning of the 1970s the German market begins to diversify. In a saturated market, new consumer needs come to the fore. Representation, involvement, identification, hedonism now form the central concerns of design led by market needs.Kupetz designed well over 1.000 products. These included metal-ware, glass, jewellery, packaging, furniture, durables and machinery. Some of his designs, such as the mineral water bottle for the German spring-water company, for which he was awarded the Federal Prize for Good Design in 1982, became best-sellers a million times over and are still inuse today. Other pieces, like many of the containers he designed for WMF or the first key-pad Telefone for AEG Telefunken were real design innovations in their field. Theall-em-bracing and multilayere d way in which Günter Kupetz’s work has developed, is, atthe same time, only conceivable in an industrial context. What characterises his output is his percep-tion that the design of anonymous products for the mass market is a socially important task, which must be accomplished with the highest possible regard to quality.»The professional responsibility of the designer is a personal responsibility to society, which he intends to serve through his work. His work for industry is therefore bound to a continual further development of his knowledge and abilities, but to an ever watchful moral receptivity too. In particular he must gain a comprehensive view of the whole life of man and be familiar with its needs, its customs and its desires. He should recognise theim-portance of his task. Looked at in this way, he is the vehicle of values both ideal and con-crete«, wrote Kupetz in 1963. With the dissolution of a mass market determined by basichuman consumer needs, Kupetz lost the context which shaped his work. He did not regret this, but recognised that his conception of industrial design is today a historical one. The fact that, notwithstanding this, many of his designs still seem contemporary today is attrib-utable to their outstanding formal qualities.The challenge of publishing a book on the work of one's own father has its appeal, though it is not without difficulties as one approaches the task. Many of the things that one knew intimately - and which one therefore never needed to classify - have to be looked at again from a distance. This is not only a question of gaining a certain academic objectivity, but one has also to rekindle an enthusiasm for things that have become a well-known part of one's everyday life. This is not a job that one could risk undertaking alone.I am, therefore, most grateful to Stephan Ott, who, with conceptual creativity, great love of, and attention to detail have worked with me to make this book possible. Annemarie Jaeggi and Florian Hufnagl as well as Marcus Botsch have set out the context of Günter Kupetz’s work in their remarkable and indeed brilliant contributions. In his photographs, Ingmar Kurth has lent a cool poetry to Günter Kupetz’s designs and transposed them into the 21st century. Armin Illion has taken his inspiration from the sculptural character of Kupetz design and created corresponding and equally exciting graphics.My thanks to all friends, collaborators and colleagues for their many comments and good wishes, and to WMF AG, the GDB eG (Registered Association of GermanSpring-Water Pro-ducers) and to the publishers Birkhäuser for their generous support in helping to make this project a reality.When Günter Kupetz started at Württembergische Metallwarenfabrik in Geislingen-Steige on 1 April 1954, the business was enjoying an upswing again for the first time since the end of the Second World War. After dreary years of slog in a time of poverty –when there was certainly a lively demand for daily table cutlery, but no consumption worth speaking of – now WMF intended to expand its range to feature a newly created set of products, expressive of their own age, to attract a new generation of loyal customers.In the years immediately after the war the people at WMF were still basing theirap-proach on what was already available, using the tools which had survived and the company’s well-supplied materials store, to take up production again in as seamless a way as possible. Nor was there any sign of a change in taste, for the range introduced in the 1920s and 1930s was still selling well – a range featuring a bourgeois, cautiously historicising approach, such as the cutlery, largely designed by Kurt Mayer, some of which was still being produced into the 1980s, and which provided the company with its commercial basis.When in 1948 the economic reform brought a new impetus to the market, WMF start-ed to look for new designers. In Wilhelm Wagenfeld they certainly found the most famous one in Germany, someone who represented the objective attitude of form elicited fromfunction of product, fully adapted to the industrial manufacturing process. As a trained sil-versmith, who had studied at the Bauhaus in Weimar and had managed to maintain a modern approach, both in the glass and ceramics industries, all during the National Socialist period, he, almost more than any other, had broad experience as a designer in all product sectors of WMF.The contract agreed with Wagenfeld in 1949 appointed him artistic director for the high-quality-product sector, with his own studio at WMF. Yet initially, to Wagenfeld’s irritation, his designs were largely used for glass products, while those for metal articles were shelved, or even rejected, by the company’s internal new-product committee. The reasons for this were economic considerations, for the production of the wooden models needed to manu-facture glass products meant much lower capital investment than theexpensive tools for producing metal goods. Moreover the majority of consumers in Germany, in the wake of Bauhaus, had no great admiration for these kinds of formally reductive, inconspicuously attractive and timeless consumer goods – something reflected clearly in their sales figures.Wagenfeld’s famous metalwork productions for WMF, which were to bring thecom-pany great success, and which have become a part of design history, found support above all from WMF’s American partner, Gordon Fraser. His sure eye for the US market, the pre-ference there for everything practical and rational, and the lack of a traditional bourgeois table culture in the European way, all made it easier to launch modern forms and to intro-duce stainless steel as a material. While people in the USA associated WMF with a contem-porary objectivity, and the name of Professor Wagenfeld was used here for advertising, i n Germany these products were only a small segment of the company’s broad product range.This thoroughly ambivalent attitude towards Wagenfeld could be plainly seen in the pre-sentation of a model shop window at WMF’s one-hundredth birthday celebrations in 1953. Here his timelessly shaped models were placed in a fashionably colourful setting of curving, kidney-shaped table stands, with a background of asymmetrical wooden frames, beneatha perforated ceiling. On the back wall hung a placard, reading ›G ood Design / WMF / Pro-fessor Wagenfeld‹, which emphasised his international, particularly American reputation. The word ›design‹, which was being increasingly adopted in German usage, was actually a concept for which Wagenfeld had no high opinion. He called himself an industrial pattern maker and even refused to join the Association of German Industrial Designers (Verband der Deutschen Industrie-Designer – VDID), which Kupetz co-founded in 1959.As a result, in 1953 Wagenfeld withdrew somewhat from his employment with WMF, opening his own workshop in Stuttgart in the following year. He kept his studio inGeis-lingen, but was an external member of staff, only there at irregular intervals. Now WMF began to look for someone young and talented, who might possibly be trained up as a fu-ture director of the artistic studio in succession to Kurt Mayer, who had now been working at the company for 25 years. As a result of an advertisement, the choice fell on the 28-year-old sculptor Günter Kupetz, whose sculptural work was just then enjoying its first successful exhibitions in Berlin. It says a great deal for Kurt Mayer’s courage and determi-nation to innovate that he brought to Geislingen – initially for six months – anartist still unversed in industrial design, and gave him a chance to find his feet in a new field.In this probationary period Kupetz familiarised himself with sheet metal as a material and with the production techniques of hollow ware. In complete contrast to Wagenfeld, who译文：as a draughtsman via the handicraft of the silversmith, Kupetz approached his task as a sculptor. By bending, buckling, folding, cutting and soldering the sheet metal, he began by testing the material’s possibilities. Soon he was also experimenting with metal bars and wire. His first creations were bowls and small recepta-cles made from sheet brass, which were themselves by no means intended for production: asymmetrical shapes, suggesting sculptural associations, and representing current demand for table receptacles to hold salted snacks, pretzels and nuts.Günter Kupetz drew his ideas from various sources of inspiration. His pretzel holders, reminiscent of abstract sculptures, his bowls on high stands and standing ashtrays of metal wire contained references on the one hand to contemporary sculptors such as Reg Butler, but were also connected with the light, floating furniture and interior-design items made from finest steel piping of the kind designed by Helmut Magg in those years for Deutsche Werkstätten. Plastic qualities, on the other hand, came to the fore in the organic glass orchid vases in which Kupetz paraphrased the sensuous female torsos of his Berlinsculp-tures. A final impetus came from the organic shapes of Scandinavian design, which Kupetz had already discovered in various journeys to Denmark in the early 1950s. Timo Sarpaneva, Henning Koppel and Tapio Wirkkala were examples of such influences.Among the sales representatives and managers of the WMF branches, whose judgement–close to the customers as it was – w as a yardstick for the general public’s contemporary taste, these first works by Kupetz produced great enthusiasm. Here a young designer had successfully touched the nerve of the period! Sales figures for the goods produced to his designs after 1955 would confirm this assessment. Thus Kupetz had found his place within the WMF –»fresh and unconventional (…), unusual without being eccentric, and modern without being doctrinaire«, was how his models were characterised in one of the com-pany’s own advertisi ng brochures of 1958. Along with Kurt Mayer, who represented conti-nuity and tradition in the company, and Wilhelm Wagenfeld, whose timeless modernity enjoyed great recognition – especially abroad – Günter Kupetz representedthe ›get up and go‹ of the youn ger generation in Germany after the war. The irritation which his designs caused in established client circles was something he himself portrayed, humorously and suc-cinctly, in caricatures for the company’s in-house magazine.Some of the articles subsequently produced by Günter Kupetz also owe their formal origins to the wealth of experience which he gained in his first six months at the WMF. These include his children’s cutlery from 1954-55,with its characteristic bend in the handles of knife, fork and spoon, helping to strengthen the material. And the floatingly light platters and elegant bowls which commenced production in 1956, maintaining their stabili-ty through their flowingly raised edges. None of these items denies its origin in its basic material – sheet metal. Far from it: the impressive simplicity of their form actually seems to emphasise the way they are produced, using few work stages and few tools.It is certainly here that one of the main differences must be found in the external look of designs by Kupetz and Wagenfeld, but in their method of work, too. While Kupetz seems to start more closely from his material, its requirements under machining and its efficiency of production, thus emphasising the character of flat and hollow ware, much of Wagenfeld’s work gives rather the effect of handicraft-developed models for serial production. This is true particularly of his larger metal items, such as cake tins, tea caddies, hotel dishes, soup tureens, sauce boats and beakers, which – particularly in their silvered version – do not look like factory goods, while Kupetz restricts himself largely to stainless steel. One expla-nation for this may be that some of Wagenfeld’s metal designs for the WMF were further developments of earlier work in ceramics or glass and owe their initial form to this other material.A further difference between these two designers, both working for the WMF, can be found in their interest in patterning, which Wagenfeld permitted unwillingly and in few cases. In his early days at WMF Kupetz experimented with ammonium-chloride colouration on brass products and irregular perforations; from the 1960s he even incorporated etched patterns to designs by his wife, Sigrid Kupetz, and worked with her to design a moulded glass with a lively kerb pattern. It was used for glass inlays, which he combined with his simple stainless-steel plates, or for a whisky set –of ice bucket, men’s and women’s cups – which achieved a certain fame, because Louis Armstrong said it was the best in the world.In 1961 Kupetz, like Wagenfeld before him, left WMF in disappointment, since many of his designs had been rejected by the new-products committee. To his irritation, the com-pany did not sell the models he had designed for inexpensive production more cheaply, butassimilated them to the high price levels of the WMF. After founding his own studio in Stuttgart, in 1962 Kupetz joined the Kassel School of Industrial Art, where till 1973 he taught industrial design. During this time he remained associated with the WMF as a free-lance designer and had a significant influence on its product range in the 1960s, particularly with material combinations for glassware and hollow ware.。