Rationality and Revolt - Tomás Maldonado: Jan Sagasser (scholarship holder)
Tomás Maldonado taught at the HfG Ulm from 1954 to 1967 and had a decisive influence on the school’s program. The “Designer in Residence” scholarship, awarded for the third time in 2023 by the HfG Archive in collaboration with the HfG Ulm Foundation, was dedicated to Maldonado’s work as a design theorist.
Tomás Maldonado was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on April 25, 1922. With his work at the Ulm School of Design and his essays and lectures written at the time, Tomás Maldonado made a significant contribution to the HfG leaving the Bauhaus as a role model behind and actively contributing to the development of the profession of modern industrial designer.
Little known in the Federal Republic of Germany, Tomás Maldonado received numerous awards and is still highly regarded in Italy and South America in particular for his writings and his many years of academic work. He died in Milan in 2018 at the age of 96.
The 2023/2024 scholarship holder was Jan Sagasser. Born in 1997, Sagasser studied product design at the Schwäbisch Gmünd University of Art and Design. Following a research-oriented design approach, he deals with topics relating to the ecological compatibility of products and the socio-cultural changes required for a sustainable transformation of consumer awareness. Together with his project partner Raphael Jung, he was recently awarded the Federal Ecodesign Prize by the Federal Environment Agency for his work on the product design of resource scarcity.
Maldonado’s essay “Environment and Revolt” from 1972 was the starting point for his engagement with Tomás Maldonado as part of the designer-in-residence scholarship at the HfG Archive. As this in turn only marked the beginning of Maldonado’s work in the field of environmental design, which was to be the focus of the rest of the project, extensive research followed in which the most diverse fields that Maldonado had dealt with in his long career as an intellectual were examined and reflected upon.
The findings that emerged from this research should provide a basic understanding of Maldonado’s thinking in the field of environmental design and illustrate the relevance of his approaches to the current environmental discourse.
