New Spaces 09 EN

Can be perfection be improved? A master of rhetoric will answer “no”. A perfect thing is absolute and can’t be made better. But Sven Baacke, 36, the new chief designer at Gaggenau, takes a pragmatic view. He believes that at Gaggenau perfection results from an ideal interplay of form and function. New functions can generate new forms. Baacke calls it “evolutionary design” — self-developing design, so to speak, a technical and aesthetic survival of the fi ttest. With his six-person team, Baacke, a native of Stuttgart, took on responsibility this year for the visual appeal of Gaggenau appliances, a challenge he had been warming up for during the years he worked at the side of his predecessor Reinhard Segers. Baacke fi rst came to Gaggenau as a freelance designer. From the very start, he associated the brand above all with quality, remembering the solid, indestructible ventilation hood in his parents’ home. Later on he came across a vintage Gaggenau guarantee card that had belonged to his late grandfather, a treasured bit of history that he keeps in his offi ce today. The Gaggenau design team feels that its task is subject to the Exemplary, a joy to touch Perfectly simple, simply perfect: the pattern for an oven control knob. Perfect form This weaving shuttle is made of wood and has a metal tip. For Sven Baacke it is a design treasure, and he keeps it at his workstation. 11 confl icting imperatives of tradition and innovation. On the one hand, the appliances have remarkably long life cycles and therefore are not subject to every fashionable, trendy approach to design. But on the other hand, new eating habits and living situations, as well as customers’ consciousness of sustainability and energy effi ciency, require adjustments in terms of aesthetics and functionality. “The users’ lifestyles are changing. The kitchen is becoming more open, and that makes ventilation more complex, for example. Then too, precious heat should no longer be removed with air extraction, so air recirculation solutions are becoming much more important,” Baacke says. One source of inspiration Gaggenau has drawn from time and again is professional kitchens, whose technologies are being used for appliances in private homes — for the Gaggenau Combi-steam oven, for example. At the same time, customers can also expect the appliances to fi t into the overall aesthetic and functional systems of their specifi c kitchen situations, down to the smallest detail. Technological trends are not incorporated into the design until they can truly improve functionality. “A mod-

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