#Repost @alice.rawsthorn with @repostapp ・・・ Marianne Brandt - 5. For a radical designer like Marianne Brandt, who believed passionately in design’s potential to improve the lives of millions of people through mass production, running the design team at the Ruppelwerk metal factory in Gotha in the early 1930s must have seemed like a golden opportunity to put her principles into practice. The reality of corporate life proved more arduous. Ruppelwerk's senior management may have been happy to hire a young woman as head of design, but not all their employees felt the same. Brandt found herself battling against the company’s hierarchical culture, and the conservative taste and misogyny of many of her (mostly male) colleagues. She aired her frustration in letters to László Moholy-Nagy and other Bauhäuslers, describing herself as being trapped between dislike of Ruppelwerk’s conservatism and her responsibility to keep the factory going to protect the workers’ jobs. After the German economy collapsed in the 1930s depression, Brandt also faced the financial pressure of supporting relatives and friends, including several Bauhäuslers, who were out of work. Even so, she succeeded in producing a succession of modernist styled products at Ruppelwerk, including these lacquered aluminium and tubular steel lights. #design #industrialdesign #mariannebrandt #bauhaus #laszlomoholynagy #ruppelwerk #strikealight
