On the Death of Volker Fischer (1951 – 2020)
Text: Klaus Klemp

The "boutique" comment was indeed critical and serious, and referred not least to design and the commercial trivialization of good ideas. In the second half of the 1980s and the early 1990s, design certainly became more cheerful and joyful, even if not always more meaningful. However, Volker Fischer saw the profound in what appeared to be superficial. And he could criticize a society of amusement just as much as a soulless architectural and design functionalism.
Endowed with brilliant discernment and a fabulous memory, he wrote texts without ever having to consult another book. This was possible even in a holiday cafe on the Belgian North Sea coast. In addition, every morning in his office, he spent two hours studying the latest international design magazines, and in the evenings at home, he read all relevant books. Fischer not only knew the facts and opinions of almost all authors, but could also seriously establish novel connections that were sometimes more than surprising. He particularly enjoyed inventing or reinterpreting words, such as "microarchitecture" for tableware, before the term became common for computers.
He always thought of design and architecture together. For him, product design was the small but indispensable sister of architecture. His range of interests and knowledge was broad. No designer, architect, design company, or design museum was unknown to him. He could lecture for hours on nanotechnology and its impact on the future, or give a long opening speech on the topic of holes. There was hardly anything he didn't know something about.

Exhibition catalog "Design today", Prestel, 1988, Credit: Thilo Schwer

Volker Fischer was not the apostle of postmodernism that some considered him to be. He understood the function-critical awakening of the 1960s as a constructive correction, indeed ultimately as a revitalization of modernism. Fischer, always impeccably dressed in a tie and collar - and after his hair thinned a bit - with a ponytail, like his hero Ettore Sottsass, was also quite unconventional. He used to deliver his elaborate speeches at exhibition openings in verse.
After studying art education, German language and literature, linguistics, and art history in Kassel and Marburg, Volker Fischer received his doctorate in 1979 with an extensive work on nostalgia. At the time, it was the first comprehensive work on the subject par excellence. After a brief period as cultural officer for the city of Marburg, in 1981 he became deputy director of the German Architecture Museum in Frankfurt am Main, which was then being founded and initiated by Heinrich Klotz. His new position suddenly catapulted him from the rather manageable Marburg cultural scene onto the big stage. Suddenly, it was no longer the Oberhessische Presse, but the New York Times, knocking at his door and asking questions. He mastered this challenge with confidence.

Exhibition "Design today" at the German Architecture Museum Frankfurt am Main, 1988, Credit: DAM Deutsches Architekturmuseum

In 1988, with the exhibition "Design heute" (Design Today), he not only conceived one of the first major design exhibitions of the 1980s in Germany but also popularized the topic of design through extensive media resonance. Unquestionably with a postmodern impetus, this internationally acclaimed exhibition also gave ample space to Dieter Rams, a proponent of restrained, function-oriented design. In 1994, Fischer moved with the design collection he had built up from the Architecture Museum to the Museum Angewandte Kunst Frankfurt, then still called the Museum of Arts and Crafts, and established the design department there. This brought the museum back to its roots, because when it was founded in 1877, the focus was not so much on arts and crafts but on exemplary utility objects. Like most comparable arts and crafts museums of the Gründerzeit, the Frankfurt museum also tended over the decades more and more towards arts and crafts of all times and places. Therefore, the initially small design department, which today again plays an obvious role in the museum, was a kind of revival of the original idea.

form Design Classics series, initiated by Volker Fischer in 1997

He had a narrow back house in Frankfurt-Sachsenhausen converted into a home for himself and his family by architects Berghof/Landes/Rang. It was an intelligent postmodern conversion of an existing building, so to speak, the practice to the theory. At the very top, glassed on all sides, was the prolific writer's study with a view over the city. More precisely: the prolific dictation writer's study, because Volker Fischer almost never wrote his texts by hand, but dictated them into a dictaphone. This was faster and necessary to keep up with his effervescent ideas at an adequate speed.
Volker Fischer was not only an author but also an initiator and editor of important publications, such as the "Design Classics" in Verlag form since 1998, which are currently being re-edited in part. Indispensable for design students to this day is his source volume "Theories of Design," which he co-edited with Anne Hamilton in 1999 and which contains the most important texts on design theory of the 19th and 20th centuries. Many more books and essays would have to be listed here.

form Design Classics series, initiated by Volker Fischer in 1997

Fischer was also one of the initiators of the "Designhorizons" series of events and exhibitions, which took place in Frankfurt during the autumn trade fair for several years starting in 1989 and developed into a solid network of designers, companies, authors, and curators. In 2008, he was a founding member of the Gesellschaft für Designgeschichte (Society for Design History).
His teaching activities at the HfG Offenbach should also be mentioned, where he taught design history and design theory for many years as a long-time lecturer and, since 1992, as an honorary professor.
In recent years, Volker Fischer increasingly withdrew – unfortunately. As a cultural and design scholar and as a design critic, he intelligently and knowledgeably moved things forward and got to the point. He introduced many new positions on design with sharp wit and passionately argued for them. Volker Fischer passed away on November 27, 2020. Someone like him is missed.