Hans-Jürgen Lannoch

Hans-Jürgen Lannoch (* 1939) studied mechanical engineering at the Technical University of Karlsruhe and economics at the Ruprecht Karls University in Heidelberg. During a one-year stay at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm, he began her artistic collaboration with Helga Lannoch (* 1941). She previously had studied sociology at the Ruprecht Karls University in Heidelberg and later switched to design and sculpture. A research scholarship took them to the Royal Collage of Art in London. After their return they founded LANNOCH PRODUKTDESIGN in 1967.
Comparable to the Bauhaus in Dessau, the Ulm School of Design was formative for an entire generation in the 1960s. The core of the education was a sensitisation of perception by means of an experimental attitude towards elementary design fundamentals such as colour, form, design, material and surface. At the centre of Ulm's basic teaching was the imparting of a general line of design in connection with theoretical as well as scientific knowledge. These were extended by the introduction of different model building and representation techniques. This led to a continuation of the teaching at the Bauhaus towards a visually determined methodology, which was particularly oriented towards mathematical-geometric ideas. As one of the first educational institutions for design that consciously placed itself in the intellectual-historical tradition of modernity, a methodology developed here that is still characterised today by systematic reflection on approaches as well as methods of analysis and synthesis.
The desire for rationality and a strict language of form determine the work of the artist couple Hans-Jürgen and HelgaLannoch. In the sense of the Ulm design line, they transfer the design of industrially manufactured mass products to objects in the groups of works they have created since the end of the 1970s. Their sculptural works always remain to be seen from four different perspectives: Functionality, Culture, Technology and Economy. They are thus part of what Uri Friedländer called a 'technical metaphor' after 1980, in which the product is no longer the sole bearer of a practical function, but takes on symbolic significance.