Hans Bellmann : Designers : Vitra.com

Hans Bellmann, born in 1911 in Turgi, Switzerland, completed an apprenticeship as a draughtsman and studied from 1931 to 1933 at the Bauhaus in Dessau and Berlin. He subsequently worked as an architect in the studio of Mies van der Rohe. Returning to Switzerland in 1934, he began work as a freelance architect and industrial designer in Zurich in 1946 and developed a whole series of “Typenmöbel” (type furniture). In 1951, he outfitted the exhibition “Kunst und Wohnkultur” at Kunsthaus Luzern. From 1948 to 1955, he taught at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich and in 1958/59 at the Allgemeine Gewerbeschule Basel. For the 1953/54 academic year, Hans Bellmann was appointed by Max Bill as a guest lecturer at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm and in 1964/65 he served as a visiting critic at Harvard University in Cambridge, USA. His designs are characterized by an absolute economy of means and their clear unornamented forms. Hans Bellmann has had a lasting influence on industrial design in Switzerland and was one of the forerunners of classical modernism. He died in 1990 in Muri.