furniture and product designer, born 1931, office in Kapsweyer / Baden-Württemberg

 

He is part of the generation born around 1930 that brought forth a whole series of outstanding creative personalities – including such disparate ones as Luigi Colani and Peter Maly – and which shaped the identity of German design, especially to foreign eyes, with a profile that still predominates today. One can search in vain, however, for a uniform, immediately recognizable signature uniting all of Gerd Lange’s various designs. On the contrary, he would deem such a facile, fashionable uniformity to be superficial. One of the prime aims of the avowed functionalist is instead the long service life of his products. This demand for dependability also extends to his own person. He has been working for some of his clients, such as Steelcase Strafor, for several years now. After completing his state exams in the 1950s, Lange has always been self-employed. He already began at that time to work as a team with his wife and manager, Renate. He opened his studio in a former mill in the village of Kapsweyer in the Palatinate region in the early 1960s. His spacious workplace, far away from the hustle and bustle of city life, gives the early riser the peace and quiet he needs to indulge in his laid-back work style. His workday is shaped to a great extent by the elaborate creation of models. He has gained industry-wide fame especially through his chairs, but by no means wants to be reduced to the identity of mere chairmaker. Excursions onto other terrain included a coffee maker (for AEG) and plastic shelves (for Wogg). In 1965 he designed the Farmer-Sessel ( Farmer Easychair, for Bofinger), a simple and inventive wooden peg construction. Two years later, it was followed by the stackable SM 400 plastic chair, which is produced by Drabert in Minden, where it is still today a highlight of the collection. Later he created Flex, the first plastic chair with wooden legs (for Thonet). A man like Gerd Lange never retires. He is still making individual pieces of furniture and overseeing the re-design of his chairs in the Old Opera in Frankfurt.