Systems design with Polyform

Design in the modern industrialised countries of the 1960s is characterised by a strong trend that can be described by terms such as standardization, typification, scientific analysis, systematization, rationalization, elementarization, building blocks, and modular combinatorics. This also applies to the GDR. Two exemplary product developments were selected for the exhibition, both of which were initiated and led by the Central Institute for Design and ultimately not realised.

The television model by Jürgen Peters (1931–2009) was part of a series of experiments from the 1960s. In the model, the rotatable screen and the control unit are structurally separated for the first time, as design publicist Heinz Hirdina (1942–2013) mentioned. A few years later, the bright red prototype of the tv set was an appropriate accessory in a model living room — documented in a photograph from the Polyform series of pictures with which the renowned theatre photographer Maria Steinfeldt had staged the system.

The Polyform modular furniture system offered a construction kit not only for users but also for large-scale manufacturers and was intended to provide a wide range of sizes, functional combinations as well as space-creating constructions, colour and surface qualities.
The Polyform development project was launched in 1967 at the Central Institute for Design in Berlin, and it was accompanied by great enthusiasm on the part of the designers, since it corresponded to ideas of open modernity and the desire to make a difference. The architectural character of Polyform was no coincidence: the design collective was made up almost exclusively of architects. Herbert Pohl (1935–2023), Lothar Walk and Klaus-Dieter Mädzulat were associated with the academy of fine and applied arts in Berlin-Weissensee, while the interior designer Karl-Heinz Burmeister (b. 1933) — who, like Pohl, had trained as a carpenter — came from the college of applied art in Heiligendamm. The architect Selman Selmanagić, in particular, who had studied at the Bauhaus and taught at Weissensee, familiarised the young men with an ‘interlocking’ approach to all design disciplines, according to which it was impossible to ‘separate the planning of a city from that of a house, or a dwelling, or indeed even a cupboard’.