Extract

The young man in the photo stares back at us. He sits at a table, his chin in his right hand, head tilted slightly so that a shadow is cast over the right side of his face. It makes his left side appear all the brighter. A metal object lies on the table before him, as if for­got­ten. What a self-con­fi­dent image!

When the photo was pub­lished in an ad­ver­tise­ment for German fit­tings man­u­fac­turer FSB Franz Schnei­der Brakel, Jasper Mor­ri­son was just thirty years old and the world barely knew him. The metal object on the table is his first in­dus­try order, the FSB 1144 door handle. And yet in the photo he looks self-as­sured, as if he already knew the suc­cess­ful career ahead of him as a fur­ni­ture and product de­signer.

The ad agency must have sensed it, too, because they at­tribute a con­fi­dent state­ment to the serious de­signer in the picture: ‘I hope you like it, what’s more I hope you buy it!’ And make the man the central focus of the ad, with in­for­ma­tion about the product and the man­u­fac­turer’s logo right at the bottom in tiny let­ter­ing.

FSB pre­sents Jasper Mor­ri­son’s design in spring 1990 as a new product at the In­ter­na­tional Hard­ware Fair in Cologne. The 1144 is made of alu­minium and com­prises an entire product col­lec­tion.

In ad­di­tion to the door handle, there is also a window handle, nar­row-stile door handle, a doorstop for walls and one for floors, a hat and coat hook, and a door­knob and cabinet knob.

Jasper Mor­ri­son gave the handle two faces: the front is shaped like a wedge, while the grip section stretches to a broad, flat rounded end – de­pend­ing on how you look at it when it is turned, either one view or the other comes to the fore. And yet the design has a har­mo­nious look, thanks to the cleanly en­twined lines and sur­faces that tran­si­tion seam­lessly into the other and lend the handle a strik­ing effect.

The FSB 1144 col­lec­tion quickly proves a success: in 1991 it wins the Staat­spreis of the German federal state of North Rhine–West­phalia and in 1992 the German Product Design Award. That same year, the Hanover In­dus­try Forum lauds it as one of the top ten prod­ucts of the year; the award is pre­sented by the Min­is­ter Pres­i­dent of Lower Saxony at the time and future German Chan­cel­lor, Gerhard Schröder.

The German fi­nan­cial news­pa­per Han­dels­blatt writes of the com­men­da­tion: ‘an au­thor­i­ta­tive design of the best modern prove­nance... that has every hope of break­ing out of the small circle of design freaks into the hearts of the masses.’ The design is also well re­ceived in­ter­na­tion­ally: in Feb­ru­ary 1991 a four-col­umn article appears in the London Times, de­scrib­ing the col­lab­o­ra­tion with FSB in detail under the head­line ‘A door handle on the future’.

Italian ar­chi­tec­ture and design mag­a­zine Domus pre­sents the 1144 product col­lec­tion in summer 1992. British jour­nal­ist and design expert Alice Raw­sthorn deems the design a classic just five years after its launch.