furniture designer, born 1926, lives in Darmstadt / Hesse

 

He is one of the war children generation of designers who – like Hans Theo Baumann or Otto Zapf for example – is to thank for the fact that the second wave of Modernism was able to gain a foothold in the young and prosperous post-war Federal Republic of Germany. After studying architecture – with Egon Eiermann, among others – he began to work independently in the mid-1950s and lived until the end of the 60s in Ulm. At an early phase the active designer was already attracting notice with his unusual and analytical acuity, developing out-of-the-ordinary concepts such as the “Kugelkino” spherical cinema. It thus came as no surprise when in 1966 he was appointed director of the Academy of Design in Ulm, the closing of which he thus experienced first hand. Ohl and Richard Sapper were the first German designers to set up permanent business contacts with Italy. He has even more in common with his somewhat more famous colleague, such as the unconditional rationality of his designs, the constant urge to transcend limitations and the fact that he never copies but has continually been copied by others. Ohl worked for a few years for automaker Fiat. One of his main fields of activity besides automobiles and construction systems was furniture. His Italian clients included companies such as Arflex, Fantoni and Matteograssi. For Fantoni he developed among other things the intelligent worktable Evolution 2 and the grip-less cabinet system 24 Grad, whose hinges are one of his wonderworks. Important designs that came onto the German market are Multipli (for WK Wohnen), a cabinet system that is as comprehensive as it is variable, and the chairs Swing ( for Rosenthal) and Circo. Typical for the unerring pioneer is the OLine chair collection with its unusual use of nylon webbing (for Arflex, and Nuvola as a further development for Wilkhahn) as well as a wire chair that he, against all the rules, developed to series maturity in his garage with the help of a master metalsmith from Odenwald. A citizen of the world, Ohl has never taken a narrow view of things. While teaching in Chicago, for example, he developed a “World Peace Tower”, which was exhibited at the famous Athenaeum.