A conversation with Nikolaus Goetze

Niko­laus Goetze is a partner and head of office at ar­chi­tec­tural firm gmp – a man in high demand who jet-sets around the world. But he still took the time to come to grips with the par­tic­u­lar fea­tures of door handles in his work on the new FSB 1244 product col­lec­tion. FSB spoke with him about gmp’s design phi­los­o­phy, in­spir­ing changes in scale and why it takes so long to design a good door handle.

As a partner at gmp, you design large-scale pro­jects: entire cities, sta­di­ums, high-rises and ex­hi­bi­tion grounds. What mo­ti­vated you to design a small thing like a door handle?

We are gen­er­ally mo­ti­vated by holis­tic work. We don't want to spe­cialise in air­ports or sin­gle-fam­ily homes; instead we want to be in­volved in lots of dif­fer­ent topics by chang­ing scale. Our in­ter­est also comes from the fact that we are con­stantly putting our mark on these types of things: light­ing fix­tures, sinks, door handles.

We are fa­mil­iar with the canon of objects in ex­is­tence; we know where the weak­nesses are. Or we feel a certain nos­tal­gia for some­thing that no longer exists. And then we some­times design an object our­selves. We like in­ter­act­ing with com­pa­nies like FSB, col­lab­o­rat­ing to develop some­thing to­gether. It allows us to bring two worlds to­gether, our vision and the prac­ti­cal crafts­man­ship of pro­duc­tion.

What specif­i­cally in­ter­ests you about door handles?

A door handle is some­thing very tan­gi­ble. There are many things in our en­vi­ron­ment that we hardly ever touch. We see them and we’re happy when they work. A door handle, by con­trast, is con­stantly touched. You quickly notice if it’s good or not. And it’s forever as­ton­ish­ing how many handles there ac­tu­ally are in a build­ing. That’s what mo­ti­vated me to design a door handle: they have to be in­con­spic­u­ous yet still nice, and they also have to work. That is a big chal­lenge.

Did you enjoy finding out what was im­por­tant to you in a door handle?

Yes, I did. I re­mem­ber the ex­hi­bi­tion at the Venice Bi­en­nale of Ar­chi­tec­ture in 2014, where FSB pre­sented the history of the door handle. At the time I won­dered how many ar­chi­tects and de­sign­ers had already worked on this theme, and asking myself whether I wanted to make my own con­tri­bu­tion here. And won­der­ing if my con­tri­bu­tion would be any good. But we quickly noticed that we might still have some­thing to add to the ex­ist­ing cat­a­logue through our phi­los­o­phy of form follows func­tion and min­i­mal­ism – even though there were already so many good prod­ucts out there.

That’s what we set out to do in our col­lab­o­ra­tion with FSB: design a very min­i­mal­ist, un­ob­tru­sive door handle that you don't notice at first glance. But one that you like the feel of in your hand, one that seems new. I think we did a really good job of that.

What specif­i­cally makes your door handle – both in terms of its form and its er­gonom­ics?

If you were to really examine how a hand grabs a handle, you would first see how the thumb touches it. Then the index finger, which ac­tively moves the handle. And finally the space the handle takes up, how the hand lands on the handle and presses on it.

You have to capture this process in a geo­met­ric form, which we did using round, el­e­men­tary shapes. The handle emerges from the door in a cir­cu­lar form, as a tube. The tube is split into a half-cir­cle in the handle itself, with a half-square added to the end. We work with simple geo­met­ric shapes: circles and squares.

Only where the index finger falls did we work in a de­pres­sion in the piece, to make it pleas­ant in the hand. And to give you some­thing to grab onto firmly in case of emer­gency. That was our aim: to design a handle from touch with few geo­met­ric shapes.

How was your ex­pe­ri­ence working with FSB?

I was amazed that it takes so much time to design a door handle. Ul­ti­mately the design process was almost like a major build­ing project. First we worked out the ver­sions, and then we eval­u­ated the design for pro­duc­tion over and over again.

Can you even build it like this? Can you make it in stain­less steel? In alu­minium? How can dif­fer­ent ver­sions of it be created for all of the vari­a­tions that make up a design col­lec­tion, like ver­sions for panic fit­tings, for example? I have huge respect after our col­lab­o­ra­tion with FSB. There is so much that goes into de­sign­ing a handle!

FSB has lots of ex­pe­ri­ence that they shared with us. And I think we also im­pressed them with the way we wanted to meet their func­tional stan­dards using a very simple, min­i­mal­ist ap­proach. It was far more in­ten­sive than ex­pected. I thought our col­lab­o­ra­tion was fan­tas­tic.

Door handles have the small­est and yet the most human impact in the build­ing. How do you see the re­la­tion­ship between the ar­chi­tec­ture and the prod­ucts, the door handle or light­ing fixture or sink tap?

You cer­tainly have to build hi­er­ar­chies when se­lect­ing prod­ucts. A product that comes into more fre­quent contact with a build­ing’s users, like a door handle, should have a dif­fer­ent re­duc­tive ap­proach than some­thing like a foyer light or a light over a con­fer­ence table. This should draw more at­ten­tion.

If a door handle is too eye-catch­ing and too ‘pretty’, but you see it hun­dreds of times through­out the build­ing, it becomes over­played. The more dis­creet, the better. We gen­er­ally make de­ci­sions about prod­ucts based on such hi­er­ar­chies. A com­pa­ra­ble example is an office light­ing fixture that repeats many, many times through­out a build­ing. Here, too, it’s about func­tion and looking good without being too ‘loud’. Another thing we look at is quality. How long does a door handle that is used heavily every single day last?

Will it still work months later, years later, like it did on day one? And will it still look good after long periods of use? This is where FSB takes the ab­solute lead for us thanks to its tech­nol­ogy and ex­pe­ri­ence.