product and furniture designer, born 1928, office in Berlin

 

Although his career biography is closely intertwined with the Academy of Design in Ulm, where he taught as visiting professor in the early 1960s, he defies all the stereotypes associated with that school. He has always proceeded in a pragmatic and often unorthodox manner, placing a great deal of importance on an extended concept of functionality that takes into consideration the cultural and human context. Trained as an artist- blacksmith and enameller, the highly gifted artist actually wanted to become a painter. He studied in Paris in the 1950s and then travelled through the USA, where he came into contact with Bauhaus émigrés. In 1958, now a university lecturer, he was a co-founder of the Verband Deutscher Industriedesigner (Association of German Industrial Designers). His first series products were combi-cookers he designed in the mid-1950s (for Haas & Sohn),precursors of the white built-in appliances that would later become standard, giving the modern kitchen a technical, clinical aura for over half a century. Raacke then became interested in experimenting with “pure” form. The mono-a silverware pattern he designed toward the end of the 1950s for the company of the same name is one of the very few designs that one can with confidence call “timeless”. Although this word certainly does not apply to the same degree to the following series Oval and Clip (1973 and 1982, for Mono), they, too, are exceptionally striking. He likewise pursed a radical path in his work with Voko, at the time probably the most innovative office furniture manufacturer, for which Raacke developed the first organizational furniture. The Zeitgewinn system (1957), a construction kit consisting of cubic furnishing elements with characteristic, seminal feet of rectangular steel tubing, formed a blueprint for the office world for decades to come. Raackecollaborated with Voko for about a decade (succeeded there by Karl Dittert), until he took his leave of strict functionalism and turned his ardour toward the pop and protest culture instead. The unconventional thinker achieved a modicum of celebrity at the end of the 1960s when he developed the first furniture program made of corrugated cardboard: the Papp series including the famous Papp-Otto easychair. Raacke, who initiated so much and yet is only well-known within the industry, is alsoregarded as a pioneer of environmentally friendly design, aiming at forming so-called “design chains”: a catch phrase referring to the aspiration to repeatedly recycle products and materials.