chiave. design ecker architekten. dea ecker, robert piotrowski by robert piotrowski from germany

chiave by ecker architekten

there is beauty in the obvious.
c'è bellezza in evidente.

background

a door handle is an architecture in miniature, reflecting in its shape and use a philosophy of design.

in the 1920's walter gropius and his colleagues at the bauhaus created a door handle that has become an icon of the modern in architecture. the simple play of cylindrical and prismatic forms - of a square section meeting a circular one – represents for many a high point in the definition of machine age sensibilities. the rationality behind the divorce of machine age icons from the realities of machine production remains in dispute. perhaps, in their zeal to produce 'machined' architecture in miniature, the beauty in the obvious was overlooked.

a variation of the 'gropius' door handle was produced later in the same decade – one with a hexagonal grip , mounted predictably against either a cylindrical or square-sectioned shank. a number of these variants can still be found in production in germany, although they never found the resonance of the original. the hexagonal shape is ideal for grasping and turning, and is easily manufactured from solid material. this is one of the reasons that allen wrenches or hex keys are ubiquitous, and have been so throughout much of the last century. because of their normalness, the beauty of these simple tools has gone largely unnoticed.

this proposal is an attempt to illustrate how the re-evaluation of existing forms can be used to create a family of sophistcated door handles and pulls. our goal is discover the beauty in the obvious.

haptic perception

every door has two sides. with the chiave lever set, the experience of opening and closing a door will be subtly different from the 'push' and 'pull' side.

the handle used to push a door open provides a flat surface at the curve of the lever as a thumb rest. the lever used to pull the door closed is the same hexagonal profile, albeit rotated by thirty degrees. this rotation offers a vertical furrow for the forefinger.