Hartmut Kowalke

I wrote this interview over twenty years ago as part of a diptych. Next to Hartmut Kowalke, Henk Cornelissen was the second core professor in the Graphic Design department at AKV St. Joost in Breda with whom I interviewed. Both “faces” of the illustrious department had announced their farewells shortly before. The teaching team conceived the plan to use this moment to produce a publication. The texts – for reasons unknown to me – were ultimately never published. Now that this has changed in the case of the interview with Hartmut Kowalke, I would like to draw the reader’s attention to the dating of the original text. By the turn of the millennium, the use of computers had certainly penetrated the design world, but with that, it was far from a foregone conclusion for every designer. The digital world had its believers and was at the same time firmly distrusted. How big an influence information and communication technology had become on society in subsequent decades was impossible to see ahead at the time. And how radically it would change design practice since then, no one really knew.

To do justice to the context in which the interview took place, and to make the text more accessible to English-speaking readers as well, minimal corrections have been made to the original typescript.

Gert Staal, Amsterdam 2025

TD bicycle club, Hartmut Kowalke third from right, ± 1970

‘Rearranging known data: that’s our business’

‘Without Gutenberg I would not be here,’ says Hartmut Kowalke on a sunny terrace in the Jordaan neighbourhood of Amsterdam. Moroccan boys are playing football in the narrow cross street and pay little attention to the customers of the café who are balancing their chairs on the sidewalk. A brewery truck stops to collect the empty bottles. Parking next to the row of tables, the driver urges customers to the side. ‘Move over, please’, it sounds almost friendly. That’s the way it is, Kowalke apologises. His house, a few hundred metres down the road, is being renovated and unfit for any decent interview. Dust and noise. He prefers the chaos of the street instead.

The conversation revolves around the influence of the computer when Gutenberg suddenly enters the arena. Kowalke has just argued that his interest in print is waning. The excitement has worn off for him. ‘So much good work is already being done in that area. I have a need for moving images again, reconnecting to the time that I started recording the work of the artist duo Ulay and Marina Abramovic. A rickety camera, but a solid focus. I knew I shouldn’t zoom in or zoom out. Their work was already sufficiently present, there was no need to add anything. It led to all kinds of exciting discoveries.’ In 1980 this fascination resulted in the book Relation, work and detour, in which some of their performances were recorded by Kowalke.

Movement was his main interest. ‘Time-based projects are an attractive thing. I have also noticed this in my work for television, for art programmes such as the Ivoren Toren (Ivory Tower) and the Heilig Vuur (Sacred Fire) that I made under the direction of Hank Onrust. A wonderful time. Without any recipe, but extremely carefully constructed; programmes that were made with great craftsmanship by people such as journalist Cherry Duyns. You needed the optimal freedom of the academy in order to function in such an environment.’

Movement would also become the main motivation for his future work. Via new media, or even in the solidified format of a book. 

‘Perhaps the book is the only exception to the static nature of printed matter. Depending on the architecture you choose, you can make 28 different books based on the same materials. For me, that is a process of slowly penetrating, overcoming my fears and then starting to explore.’

The relatively young field of digital media bears a similar promise to Kowalke. Movement, sound and an overdose of technology. And also the certainty that the medium will no longer be silenced. But what possibilities does it offer for real high-level communication? That’s what should be found out. After his departure from St. Joost art school, Kowalke will be happy to tackle this issue. ‘The computer certainly promotes communication. And more importantly, it changes people’s behaviour. The latter especially appeals to me. Recently I was in Switzerland, where my bathroom window presented me with a view of mount Eiger. You’re sitting there in the bath looking at the snowy top of that mountain. Incredible! At that moment, reality and virtuality can no longer be separated at all.’

‘Without Gutenberg I would still be a farmer’, he continues. ‘And I would never have been able to read up without paperbacks. Of course, everything was wrong with the first paperback books: the back margin was too small, there were too many letters on a single page. But over time you see improvements. The exact same thing will happen with the computer. People will realise that a computer is not only an instrument to obtain information, but that they can also use the medium to deliver something. Just as with books: in order for them to be bought, they have to be made. I’m not particularly interested in the output. For me, the Internet is about the opportunity that people have to participate in the compilation of this brilliant library! Once this realisation really sinks in, the Internet can indeed change user behaviour on a global scale.’

Jazz
Hartmut Kowalke was born in 1941 in Rhineland, Germany. His father was a mechanical engineer and watercolourist in his spare time. His son still recognises the fascination for the transparent layers of paint that overlap, the irreparability of every brush stroke on wet paper. At the same time, there was an adoration for technology. Certainly, after the end of the war, when the Americans, the French and the British came to cash in on their victory in western Germany, Kowalke saw the world change day by day. ‘We lived in the British zone. The English brought cars. The first refrigerator and the first television set made their appearance. There was one of each and they slowly entered our lives. The entire culture of such a community became permeated by objects.

Vacuum cleaners; what great things! But unlike the kids now, we had plenty of time to get used to such new objects. These were exciting times. New music, new films: you felt that there was something about to happen. The Americans introduced jazz music, and those record covers shaped me during my high school years. I wanted to go to a design school, definitely not to art school. Not that I knew exactly what that was, but through my contact to an architect in Stuttgart I became aware of the design school in Ulm. That’s what I wanted to do.’

In 1962 he moved to the south of Germany, to the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, where the heavyweights of international design met at the time. It was not by chance that Ulm ‘borrowed’ the subtitle of Bauhaus in Dessau to give itself a name. There were both ideological and practical similarities between the legendary Bauhaus and the Ulm school, although founding fathers such as Tómas Maldonado have argued at length that their Hochschule pursued its own agenda, and not just revived a pre-war design discussion. In 1984, in the Italian magazine Rassegna, Maldonado wrote a retrospective: ‘The driving force behind our curiosity, our studies and our theoretical efforts was the desire to provide the design profession with a solid methodological basis. Admittedly, it was an extremely ambitious plan. We were trying to force a change in the design world that was similar to the process that turned alchemy into chemistry. That attempt, we now know, came too soon.’¹

When Hartmut Kowalke registered in Ulm, the school was still very much alive, although its heyday perhaps had already passed. Influential designers such as typographer Otl Aicher, product designer Walter Zeischegg and the Dutchman Hans Gugelot (the brain behind Braun and, according to Kowalke, one of the smartest Dutch designers whom, to his surprise, hardly anyone has heard of) were among the core teachers. Many others put their professional practice on hold for several months to teach as guest lecturers in Ulm. The students arrived from all over the world. Kowalke especially remembers the large contingent of Scandinavians he met during his Ulm years.

Old news
Ulm became famous for its highly inspired theoretical ambitions and eventually stumbled over its left-wing political commitment. Kowalke: ‘The Hochschule was relatively independent from the government, it obtained funds from industry and was financially supported in part by the Geschwisster Scholl Stiftung, named after Hans and Sophie Scholl. During the war they had been part of Die Weisse Rose, a resistance group of students who had to pay for their opposition to Hitler with their lives. This war history was certainly important to Ulm.’

Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm

The school was founded in 1955 as a crucial element in building a new, democratic Germany. The country had to break with its Nazi past, but also with the dominant post-war American import culture. During the first year of study – in the so-called Grundkurs – a deep theoretical foundation was given to the design of utensils and information. ‘That first year was extremely broad: sociology, behavioural psychology, semiotics, systems theory, ergonomics, mathematics, each of these subjects was taught. ‘Empirical studies, for example,’ Kowalke says, ‘are indispensable for our profession.’ In each case, a week of theory was alternated with a week of practical training, and all that in full working days. The first year you were supposed to live in the city, in the second year you shared a room with another student at the Hochschule, in the third year you had your own room there, and in the last year they gave you your own studio.’

Hartmut Kowalke chose the Visual Communication department under the guidance of Otl Aicher, the designer of the Rotis font and famous for his visual identity programme for the 1972 Munich Olympics. With much affection Kowalke also speaks about Walter Zeischegg, the man who designed the famous stackable ashtray. ‘Zeischegg had the eye. He observed nature and converted those observations into utensils. All this was old news, in fact, but he placed what he saw in a new context and made very special products.’ Time and again Zeischegg posed the same question to his students: What do you want to say with your work? Even if, for example, they were told to design something mundane as packaging. The assignment was to add something unexpected, to bring about an innovation. ‘We then made packaging from waste materials, that was completely new at the time.’

Yes, Ulm was at times as strict and dogmatic as the extensive literature on the Hochschule would have you believe. ‘But we also partied a lot. I remember being amongst a group of twenty men and a few bottles of rum in a phone booth. Everyone in a suit – that’s how you recognised artists at the time.’

The importance of the Hochschule für Gestaltung? ‘I think I got a certain tightness out of it, but others can judge that better. Not really a style or anything like that. For me it is essential that everyone revealed what they knew, both students and teachers. Nobody assigned to the idea that an individual could come up with solutions just by themselves. In Ulm the software was free. In retrospect that turned out to be the decisive factor, most notably when I eventually ended up teaching myself.’

Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm

He never reached the studio stage of the Hochschule. After three years Kowalke had seen everything there was to see in Ulm and in 1965 he and a fellow student left for Munich to explore the world from there, looking for a suitable workplace. Italy, England… ‘We just called the Pentagram studio and we were immediately welcomed. We never thought about the Netherlands then. I had been in The Hague for a jazz concert once, but that was it. When we returned to Munich, there was a letter from Total Design in Amsterdam. Containing a plane ticket. They had scouted my work in Ulm and now offered me a job. At that time, about twelve people were working there. Total Design was a large agency by Dutch standards.’

Kowalke flew to the Netherlands, was picked up from the airport and delivered to Hotel Schiller at the Rembrandtplein. He was just able to leave his suitcase behind before he was dragged along to the artists’ society De Kring. ‘I was immediately told that I would still have to expect a lot of resistance: a German working in the Netherlands. I thought that was exciting. I didn’t speak the language, of course, but when I got back to the hotel I saw a painting by Mr. Schiller himself, who had made a portrait of the German chancellor Konrad Adenauer.’ Twenty years after the liberation, a German presence in the Netherlands was apparently still a sensitive matter, but the pillar of the Wirtschaftswunder was hanging on the wall of a hotel in Amsterdam.

Kindred spirits
Amsterdam turned out to be a stopover that would last a bit longer than Hartmut Kowalke initially imagined. While working at TD he met an eclectic mix of widely divergent characters, and he immediately knew that he would be dealing with kindred spirits in the office. After all, the company’s philosophy was rooted in the philosophy he had mastered in Ulm. ‘There were many personal differences between the lead designers Wim Crouwel, Friso Kramer, and Benno Wissing and the two Schwarz brothers who were the invaluable trouble-shooters within the agency. I felt at home in the mentality they represented. Soon after my arrival Total Design received a commission from a firm affiliated to one of the agency’s major Dutch clients, the Steenkolen Handelsvereniging (SHV) owned by the Fentener van Vlissingen family. Next to many other subsidiaries, their industrial conglomerate contained the PAM oil company for which Total Design had designed its famous corporate identity. The new commission, however, happened to come from Munich, and I started working there. In effect, I only travelled to Amsterdam once a month to report.’

TD corporate identity PAM

In 1967, the Dutch pavilion for the Traffic Exhibition in the Bavarian capital was realised with life-size projections, to which Hartmut Kowalke made an important contribution. It was around October 1968 when he permanently moved to Amsterdam. He started working with Benno Wissing, who has always occupied a special position in the historiography of the office: a strict functionalist who did not want to see graphic design as a service or as an artistic profession, but rather as a form of mediation or translation. As contradictory as it may sound, within Total Design Wissing was sometimes seen as the ‘decorator’. He introduced Ulm’s ideas and modern Swiss typography to the firm but in fact turned out to be less bound by the constraints of patterns than several of his colleagues.

TD soccer team, standing second from left Hartmut Kowalke, far right Benno Wissing with hat, 1971

Design historian Paul Hefting described the dilemma in 1996 – on the occasion of Wissing being awarded the Oeuvre Prize from the Fund for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture. Hefting: ‘(Wissing) saw the importance of this Bauhaus-like rational approach, but preferred Zwart, Schuitema, Lissitzky or Heartfield, who showed greater freedom in their work. They were not bound by rules as they were in Bauhaus and later in Ulm. Wissing calls them ‘a-categorical’, that is, flexible, varied and free in their forms and hardly theoretical. (…) TD did not speak the language of Zwart and Schuitema, “even though we loved them dearly”.’²

An extraordinarily strong bond soon developed between Wissing and Kowalke. ‘I always have that tendency with the people I work with. After a while I will even regard clients as colleagues.’ The pair of them worked for cultural clients such as the Doelen concert hall and Museum Boymans Van Beuningen, both in Rotterdam. A wonderful and productive period, judging from his descriptions. ‘That’s the really nice thing about design in the Netherlands. Dropping your pencil at five in the afternoon? You didn’t find any of that here. And of course, it is also a fantastic profession that we have! We can get involved in everything and we get paid for it too!’

He was introduced to the Dutch theatre world by Wissing. Quickly he got to know all kinds of actors and in the Wissing household he was confronted with Jacques Brel and Wim Kan, big stage names in those days. ‘It was around the time that novelist Gerard van het Reve celebrated a church wedding ceremony with his boyfriend on national television… That was unprecedented, especially for someone like me who had just come from Germany. A bit of a culture shock.’  

In fact, that notion also applies to his departure from TD in the early 1970s. As the agency grew steadily, Kowalke became creative director, in charge of his own international team. But he found it hard to handle the increasing management responsibilities. ‘We reached a stage where you were mainly busy feeding mouths. That was not my cup of tea.’ It remains unclear to what extent dissatisfaction over the strategic course of the agency led to his decision. Kowalke cleverly sidesteps this topic when he says: ‘I left on my own terms. Benno did not try to stop me. And after I left, others followed too. Suddenly the door of Total Design had opened to the other side as well.’ Wissing left a mere two months later. In his view TD had become a factory where companies, Hefting quotes, received ‘a maquillage’.

Hartmut Kowalke and Anne Stienstra, Avenue ‘Man and mode’, 1971

Together, Kowalke and Wissing continue their collaboration from within their own agency that is founded in 1972. Shortly afterwards, John Stegmeijer and Anne Stienstra join, enabling the studio to offer its clients a more versatile range of design services. Some of the clients come from TD, and new names are added as well. ‘The moment I left TD I received a call from Otl Aicher. He wanted to meet Gert-Jan Leuvelink in The Hague, who had just designed the first railway timetable for NS (Dutch Railways), which is still one of the most beautiful Dutch book designs of all time. As a designer, Aicher was involved in tv channel ZDF, where he worked on the corporate identity, but also the design of the television studios. When this groundwork was done, Aicher asked me to step in at ZDF and take over his work. Of course, I had my doubts, but I also knew that if Benno was serious about our company I would stay in Amsterdam.’ And so he did.

Front work
Around 1977 it became clear that Benno Wissing was preparing his departure for the United States. He first accepted a teaching position at the Rhode Island School of Design and in 1980 he moved there permanently. Almost ten years after his arrival in Amsterdam, Hartmut Kowalke felt that a natural brotherhood was broken. ‘Benno’s decision meant I lost my friend. I then started making lists of the people I wanted to work with. Initially only Anne Stienstra’s name came to mind. I had been working with him since my days at Total Design and in the early eighties with a larger group of designers in the Concepts agency.’ In a brochure from 1983 Concepts describes itself as ‘advisers and designers for graphic, industrial and spatial form’, a broad ambition that is fulfilled by the designers Hans Bockting, Will de l’Ecluse, Ton Haak, Floor Kamphorst, Anne Stienstra, Marcel Vroom, and Hartmut Kowalke.

The seven Concepts partners. From left: Hans Bockting, Will de l’Ecluse, Ton Haak, Floor Kamphorst, Hartmut Kowalke, Anne Stienstra, Marcel Vroom. Concepts was associated with the industrial designers Hans Ebbinge and Ton Haas. Photo by Maarten van de Velde (1982), at the introduction of the new partnership

Concepts – Monica de Carvalho, Hartmut Kowalke, Xandra van der Zwan, Reyn Jongenelen, Ans Zoutenbier, Anne Stienstra, Ton Haak, Hedwig, Hans Verlaat, Hans Bockting, Els Staal, Eric Vos, Denise Ghering, Karl Sewalt, Will de l’Ecluse and Marcel Vroom. Photo: Reinier Gerritsen (1983)

It was through his colleague Will l’Ecluse that Kowalke’s attention was drawn to the vacancy of design teacher at the St. Joost Academy in Breda. At a party in the Amsterdam club Paradiso he ran into St. Joost tutor Henk Cornelissen. They discussed the position that would soon come available as Sietse Wolters was preparing to leave the school and join studio BRS. Shortly afterwards Kowalke first entered the evening school of St. Joost and soon also signed up for the day programme. First for a single day a week, later two and then three. A job he now describes as ‘front service’, in direct contact with the students. ‘That’s where my loyalty lies, not in coordinating the department, a tedious task we took in turns. Let’s not forget: I didn’t choose to work in education because I loved the frustrations of the middle manager so much.’ But working at St. Joost did have consequences for his professional design practice. His commitment to the agency came under increasing pressure. ‘I was never where others expected me to be. And I realised that I had to make a choice. There were others who could hold a pencil, wasn’t it? Only then did I really choose education.’  

Hans Bockting: “In 1986, Victor Havel received the Erasmus Prize. On the occasion, the Bristol Old Vic performed Havel’s play ‘Largo Desolato’. The plastered head I used in the poster is Hartmut Kowalke’s, one of my Concepts partners. Reinier Gerritsen was the photographer.”

Diaspora
Working in Breda, a small city in the south of the Netherlands, reminded him of his studies in Ulm in several ways. Both places are characterised by a ‘diasporic feeling’. A small town, an isolated art community and above all the solidarity that results from this. ‘Breda was an excellent school, certainly one of the best in the field of graphic design. And it still is today. In terms of professionalism and diversity, we serve a large community, and certainly not only the most talented. We have trained image makers, classical typographers and concept makers. It is precisely this breadth that is important to me: the profession must remain a bit of a utopia.’

Quality, Kowalke realises, cannot be achieved without curricula and organisational charts. But infinitely more important are the people who will implement it. People such as typographer Chris Brand. ‘I had met Chris before. He taught calligraphy in the first year. He did this with such a broad perspective that students from all kinds of disciplines followed his lessons. He represented something special, both as a craftsman and as a person.’ Although Kowalke had ‘little direct contact’ with his colleague Henk Cornelissen during these years, he also notes that building the department was a shared effort – a matter of mutual trust rather than secure planning, he admits. And perhaps precisely the result of the contradiction between the two personalities.

Kowalke: ‘Henk is persistent in his strategy, or should I say in his tactics. He has great endurance. He manages to work from A to B along a straight line, while for me such a trajectory involves bends, spirals and detours. The interesting thing is that we arrive at the same point in completely different ways. I roughly know what my goal is. I can determine the strategy. As a tactician, Henk knows which weapons will help us reach our target. I think we needed those different qualities, and that’s why we complemented each other as teachers so well. 

Teachers St. Joost, 1994 Standing: Geert Setola, Hugues Boekraad, Henk Cornelissen, René Pijnenburg, Paul van ‘t Hullenaar, Bas Wilders. Seated: Hartmut Kowalke, Rens Holslag, Dominique Ampe, Jaap van Triest

‘Henk has accused me more than once of being only concerned with form, while his focus is on content. From his perspective, that reasoning is correct. But for me, form is the vehicle for conveying content, to make contexts work. I must be able to recognise the content in the form.’ Kowalke refers to a project he did with the students. They were asked to look for a text that made a statement about form and then design a poster around that text. One of the students quoted the legendary conductor Von Karajan, the man who, on the eve of his death, managed to persuade the authorities to close a highway south of Munich so that for once in his life he could drive home in his Ferrari at top speed. Von Karajan said: ‘Whoever messes up the form, messes up the content’. Kowalke: ‘Wonderful! And absolutely correct.’

It is poster assignments such as these that Kowalke has fond memories of. Especially because by definition posters cannot be designed in an attic room, he says. In addition to the necessarily fragmentary character of a poster, combining elements such as language, image and hierarchy, the medium distinguishes itself by its specific place. ‘You have to go out into the street for a poster. That means noise, environments, colleagues. Everything. But if you do it right, not everything at once.’

Hartmut Kowalke has come to understand that the great challenge of the moment lies in the streets. This is where the mobility of contemporary culture becomes apparent, to which an academy needs react decisively in order not to irreversibly lose its connection to reality. The streets, he says, might even have more learning to offer to young people than an art school. This line of thought matches the stories of his students, who almost without exception indicate that their apprenticeship with Hartmut Kowalke should be situated especially in the immediate vicinity of a bar. There were conversations taking place in the café for which the academy apparently did not offer the appropriate space. There, in the studio of the street, Kowalke’s front service turned into a small guerrilla operation.

St. Joost teachers and students

Hartmut Kowalke with a.o. Max Kisman, René Knip, Jacques Koeweiden, Freek Kuin, Anthon Beeke and Sascha Happee, 2013

An overkill of images
‘I look back on my years in Breda with pride. Not because I may have done well. My pride lies in the fact that I dare to admit that, although I started  teaching by fate, I’ve actually become a teacher. I’ve managed to avoid the dangers of education as a surrogate for what you could not prove as design professional. And over the years, it has probably turned into an addiction. I still find great pleasure in the daily interactions with students, in the flexibility and resilience that this requires. An absolute condition. No, I don’t fit in with the youth anymore. You must acknowledge how old you are. Of course, there is an increasing fear that you lose touch with the current situation. On the other hand, I still have a healthy aversion to comments such as: “We’ve seen that before”. There is nothing new in the overkill of images of our current culture! Rearranging known data, that’s our job.’

In fact, during their education students should relearn how to look, he says. They need to recognise patterns and learn to see regularities to discover that they are not necessarily their enemy. ‘Apparently the design profession operates within all kinds of constraints. But those who have learned to look at the context of that situation realise that there is hardly any question of limitation. Don’t be fooled by the argument that the world has suddenly become so complex. Nonsense! Complexity has always existed. Perhaps the difference with the past is that there is much more emphasis on speed nowadays. Haste, panic… We hardly have any time left to make things our own. That is certainly a task I have set myself in recent years. To dare to take that step back. To enjoy being able to let go… Putting things into perspective, seeking depth, gaining life experiences.’

Hartmut Kowalke at 70th birthday celebration Hans Bockting, 2015

Noten
1 Rassegna VI 19/3, Sett . 1984, The Legacy of the School of Ulm2 Paul Hefting: Benno Wissing. Oeuvre Prize 1996. Stichting Fonds voor beeldende kunsten, vormgeving en bouwkunst (Foundation Fund for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture), Amsterdam 1996. 

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Hartmut Kowalke
born on 14 January 1941, Mettmann Duitsland
died on 23 January 2025, Breda

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Author of the original text: Gert Staal, April 2000
English translation and editing: Peter Hofstee
Portrait photo: Aatjan Renders