For more than fifty years Braun has been associated with well-designed and highly functional appliances for modern kitchens. The company was founded in 1921 as a small engineering shop, producing radio accessories in Frankfurt am Main. Design director Dieter Rams, who joined the company in 1955 and remained for almost thirty years, secured Braun’s success in the postwar consumer electronics market. The company’s radios, scales, fans, mixers, slide projectors, calculators, hair dryers, toasters, and juicers all embodied Rams’s mission to "omit the unimportant." These kitchen devices, including the successful Multipurpose Kitchen Machine, exemplify the belief of founder Max Braun’s son, Erwin: "Our electrical appliances should be quiet, unobtrusive helpers and servants. Like a good servant in days of old, they should come and go silently, there when wanted but unnoticed."
Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen, September 15, 2010-March 14, 2011.
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