Wilhelm Wagenfeld 1900-1990

As a young boy Wagenfeld studied drawing at the Bremer Knaben Zeichenschule before starting as an apprentice in the Silberwarenfabrik Koch& Bergfeld. He stayed with the company until 1918 and attended the Zeichenakademie in Hanau. In 1923 he went to the Bauhaus in Weimar. He designed the famous lamp collection show here in collaboration with K.J. Juncker in 1923-24

Wagenfeld was 24 years old, when he was admitted as a journeyman to the Bauhaus workshop in Weimar. Here he designed the first model of this lamp as his solution to an assignment given to him by Moholy-Nagy. As Wagenfeld said years later, the Bauhaus designs were intended to be industrial products, and indeed looked like them. In fact they were hand-crafted ...

He was a teacher at the Staatliche Kunsthochschule in Berlin from 1931 to 1935. Unlike many Bauhaus teachers he stayed in Germany during the rise of the Nazi regime and the second world war. Because of his reluctancy to serve the nazi regime he was send to the East front and finished the war in a russian prisoners camp. Before starting his own design office in Stuttgart in 1954 he was a professor at the Hochschule für Bildende Kunste in Berlin. He received the Grand Prix at the Milan Trienale in 1957 and the Bundespreis Gute Form in 1969 and 1982. He guided his design office the "Werkstatt Wagenfeld" until 1978 and remained active and interested in the design community until his death. Bremen has honoured him with his own museum, the Wilhelm Wagenfeld Haus, and his works are collected by most important museums including the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Today as well, the Wagenfeld table lamp WA 24 continues to be manufactured on this basis, following the original specifications for dimensions and materials.