Wilhelm Wagenfeld was born on 15 April 1900 in Bremen in Germany. A Bauhaus student, he was one of the most important German industrial designers of the 20th century.
After an apprenticeship at a silverware factory and studies at the drawing academy in Hanau, he attended the Bauhaus from 1923 to 1925, where he completed the preliminary course under László Moholy-Nagy and trained in the metal workshop, working alongside Marianne Brandt.
Wilhelm Wagenfeld became famous for his lamp with a glass base and opal glass shade, which he designed with Karl J. Jucker in Weimar in 1924 as his journeyman's piece. The WG24 lamp (now produced by Tecnolumen) was highly praised by his masters and sold in large numbers. The small, delicate table lamp looks as simple as a street lamp, is a symbol of early minimalism developed in Germany and has become synonymous with Bauhaus classics.
During his time in Weimar – first as an assistant, then until 1930 as a teacher at the State Building College – many more products followed, above all lights, tableware and other everyday goods, all marked by great formal rigour and the effort to create the ultimate design product. For Wagenfeld, a product should be "unpretentious": he had in mind a useful, affordable yet attractive everyday object.
In 1942, Wagenfeld was drafted into the army and sent to the Eastern Front, from where he only returned from Russian captivity in autumn 1945.
In 1954, he founded the "Werkstatt Wagenfeld" to develop industrial prototypes.
Many designs in glass and metal for companies including Jenaer Glaswerk Schott & Gen., Braun, Rosenthal, Fürstenberg and WMF came from the "Werkstatt Wagenfeld". For Jenaer Glas, he experimented with pressed glass, which until then had been dismissed as a cheap material – resulting in, among other things, the stackable Kubus storage containers. With his simple designs for household objects in metal and glass that were as practical as they were beautiful, Wagenfeld became one of the most important industrial designers of his time.
The Werkstatt Wagenfeld closed in 1978.
Since 1980, the 1924 Bauhaus lamp and other designs from the 1920s have been reissued by Tecnolumen in Bremen.
Wilhelm Wagenfeld died in Stuttgart on 28 May 1990 and was buried in Collex-Bossy, Switzerland.
