What makes a true design classic? While it at times might seem like every concept, solution, angle and aesthetic in design has already been covered and everything you see in furniture, home and design magazines are just furnitures eighter regurgitating old ideas or just design for the heck of it, not covering any new function or brining something to the table other than crazy easthetics there are some pieces that has stood the test of time, combining excellent design with the will to cover a basic function or need, often combined eighter with new innovative (cheap) manifacturing techniques or using cheap and readilly available materials. Some that comes to mind is the myriad of Eameses 'ESU' (Eames Storeage Unit) combinations for Herman Miller, the 'George Nelson Wall Unit' (also for HM) or even the String Shelving System by Swedish Nisse Strinning. My personal favourite is the '606 Universal Shelving System' by Dieter Rahmns for Vitsœ. A design that when it was premiered was so innovative, flexible and wonderfully good looking you cannot help but to wonder how people ever managed to store anything vertically before it's invention.
Niels Vitsœ started out as an entrepreneur in the furniture industry selling Danish furniture to the booming upper middleclass in postwar Germany. Having met and become friends with fellow furnocentric designer Otto Zapf several years before, in 1958 Zapf introduced Niels to young designer Dieter Rahms. A year later in 1959, the two joined forces, founding a company called Vitsœ+Zapf to realise Rams furniture ideas. It took two years for Rams to come up with the companys initial designs (a shelving and a chair system) but in 1962 the '606 Universal Shelving System' was born.
The '606 Universal Shelving System' was deemed an emediate classic, here we had the case of a piece of furniture where form perfectly followed function, not touched upon by any current trends or fads, just a perfect solution to a common residential and commercial need. Each shelve, fixture and detail on the 606 was purely there for a purpose and true to its task.
Since the initial launch of the 606 system some small add-ons has been introduced to allow for usage with new technical inventions but the strenght of the 606 has always been its utter simplicity and flexibility, a signum that has allowed it to adapt to changing markets and trends but never made it obsolete. Still offering all of the original components and fixtures after 45+ years the 606 is truly a timeless piece of furniture. A nice additional feature is that the price deprication is non existent, you can buy the system, use it for 20 odd years and when replacing shelves or cabinets, sell on your old stuff for several times more than you initially payed for it. Perhaps the final test of just how good the 606 holds up is that I had to look at it daily for 18 years every time I took a piss on the lower bathroom in my parents house and I still love it to this day, that my friends is good design!
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