Collection Stiftung HfG Ulm

Documents

Approximately 30,000 documents concerned with the administration of the Ulm School of Design and the Geschwister-Scholl-Stiftung (correspondence with companies, donors, design institutions, students and lecturers, and accountants), construction records and plans for the school building, material printed by the Ulm School of Design, documents on student bodies, on the running of the school, on the development groups, the teaching program, and curricula. Lecture notes, student work, and documents concerning the magazines ulm and output are also included.

Graphic works

6,500 sketches, draft drawings, technical drawings, and graphic works from Foundation Course classes, the Visual Communication, Industrial Design, and Building Departments, as well as the construction plans for the HfG building.

The graphic works in the collection were produced in classes taught by Aicher, Albers, Bill, Frøshaug, Gonda, Huff, Itten, Kapitzki, Maldonado, Nonné-Schmidt, Peterhans, Sugiura, Vordemberge-Gildewart, among others.

Photographs

11,000 black and white negatives with contact prints, around 3,000 black and white original enlargements and 6,000 slides. Shots of the HfG building, student work, serial products, photos taken of classes and events, portraits of lecturers, taken with the primary aim of documenting and presenting the school.

Ernst Hahn, Wolfgang Siol, Roland Fürst, Ernst Stritzinger and Hartwig Koppermann each took their turn in running the photography workshop, and acted as technical teachers in the field of photography. Other photography and photographic theory lecturers at the HfG were Ernst Scheidegger, Christian Staub and the guest lecturers Horst Baumann, Peter Cornelius, Ernst Fieger, Chadwick Hall, Will McBride, Thomas Rago, Wolfgang Rölli, Rolf Schroeter, and Caro Schumacher.

Objects

350 objects and prototypes from classes in the Industrial Design and Building Departments. Serially-produced products from the Ulm School of Design’s development group designs.
The objects were designed to be suitable for daily use, serial production, and industrialized construction.

The objects in the collection were created in industrial design classes taught by Max Bill, Gui Bonsiepe, Hans Gugelot, Georg Leowald, Herbert Lindinger, Tomás Maldonado, and Walter Zeischegg. Those from the Building Department come from classes taught by taught by Max Bill, Rudolf Doernach, Herbert Ohl, Claude Schnaidt, and Werner Wirsing.

Library

The Ulm School of Design’s (HfG) library, with approximately 6,000 volumes and journals, constitutes a unique collection of literature on environmental and design matters in the 1950s and 1960s. The focus is on the social sciences, philosophy and psychology, regional planning, architecture, design and technology, semiotics, and cybernetics. In addition, there are basic works on mathematics, the natural sciences, history, and a selection of fiction. Among the journals are complete back copies of architecture and design periodicals, as well as political and cultural magazines.

This inventory of works from the past is complemented by a small library dedicated to the Ulm School of Design and history of design. It is not possible to take books away from the reference library. However, study areas and photocopying facilities are available.

Diploma projects

236 students of the 640 who attended the Ulm school completed a diploma project. These projects, with only a few exceptions, had both a theoretical and practical component. The accompanying written documentation is virtually complete, and is kept in the library of the HfG-Archiv, where it can also be viewed. Countless designs and models belonging to the practical section are kept in the Archive repository.

Press Archive

A collection of c. 4,300 articles on the school and its influence in public life from 1946 to 1973. The texts are in chronological order.

Exhibition panels

350 exhibition panels compiled at the Ulm School of Design (HfG) about the school and work produced in classes. These include, for example, the 1958 exhibition to mark the fifth anniversary of the HfG’s founding, the photography exhibition of 1963–64, and landscape and product photos.