Ferdinand Kramer

Ferdinand Kramer (1898-1985), a German architect and designer, was one of the pioneers of modernism and is today best remembered for his minimalist furniture, which has now been reissued in a successful series of re-editions by the e15 brand. The son of the owner of the most famous hat shop in Frankfurt, Kramer's youth was marked by the tragic events of the First World War, which forced him to give up part of his higher education to enlist and fight at the front in Russia and France. Upon his return, he studied for a semester at the Bauhaus, which he then abandoned to continue his studies in Munich under Theodor Fischer. From 1920 to 1933, he was a member of the Deutscher Werkbund, an association that promoted a convergence between applied arts and new industrial production methods; in this capacity, some of the furniture he created was exhibited at the legendary Weissenhof exhibition in 1927, curated by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe for the Werkbund, which is considered one of the milestones in the foundation of the modernist style. Much of his activity as an architect was concentrated in his native Frankfurt, where from 1925 to 1930 he assisted Ernst May in the construction of the Neues Frankfurt public housing complex. Disliked by the Nazi Party, in 1937 his architectural license was revoked and he therefore chose to emigrate to America, where he made a name for himself, among other things, for the design of a series of knock-down furnishings, a prefiguration of the now famous “IKEA model”. He then returned to Frankfurt in 1952 to take up the role of director of construction at the local Goethe University Frankfurt, a role he held until 1964 that allowed him to create over twenty university structures in collaboration with a team of young architects.