furniture designer, born 1931, office in Kronberg / Hesse

 

The son of a cabinetmaker family, who studied mathematics and physics, originally wanted nothing to do with the banal everyday world of furniture. But things turned out differently. In the late 1950s, Otto Zapf and the Dane Niels Wiese met at the Furniture Fair in Cologne. Both were excited about the Bauhaus, the radically redesigned Braun products and the idea of systematization. They had seen the model homes by the world’s leading architects exhibited in 1957 at the Berliner Interbau show and decided to establish a furn i t u re company in the spirit of the “International Style” that prevailed there. Vitsoe/ Zapf would become, like Bofinger or Behr, a germ cell of the modern furniture trend that sprouted in West Germany. Some of the early products are based on designs by Dieter Rams. In the 1960s, after his alliance with Vitsoe and Rams had come to an end, Zapf made a name for himself with variable and idea-rich living concepts, which regularly appeared in the magazineSchöner Wohnen, one of the must-reads for modern domestic trends. The Comodus easychair with removable cover followed, as well as the even more unconventional Softline, a cabinet and shelf system with snap-on, snap-off surfaces. At the time Zapf was the first furniture designer with his own showroom and later his own factory. He attracted attention in the early 1970s with his “lounge landscapes” Pillorama and Pollorama: modular, multifunctional and ground- covering systems of upholstered elements in which the Ulm sense of order and the relaxed lifestyle of the late 1960s generation entered into a liaison. At the beginning of the 1980s he experienced the “American Dream”: Knoll International furnished the administrative building of a telephone company with the Zapf Office System designed a decade earlier. 7,500 workplaces were set up, at the time the largest single furniture order ever and the beginning of a long, fruitful co-operation with the upscale American manufacturer that opened the doors of large offices to Zapf. This project alsorepresented the breakthrough of systematic design in the workplace, ushering in a completely new, holistic office concept. Zapf, the design entrepreneur, who continues to commute between Hesse and the USA, once again caused a furore in the mid-1980s, with the Wingset shelf system (at first for Vitra, later for Habitat), adding another highlight to his innovative oeuvre. The 1990s then saw Contur, a plywood chair with a stretched “tongue” in the backrest, a simple instrument forcontinuous relaxed sitting.