Hermann Carelman (b. 1929)
Founder, Carelman Industries™ — Design Beyond Reason
Hermann Carelman was born in 1929 to a French mother, Solange Lefèvre, a typist devoted to order and white space, and a Swiss father, Klaus Carelman, an accountant with a passion for industrial catalogues. Raised between Paris and Zürich, he grew up speaking French with a German accent and thinking in Helvetica.
From an early age, he displayed a fascination with contradiction: he would catalogue his own toys by weight rather than function, and reassemble clocks so that they kept perfect time in reverse.
In 1948, he enrolled at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm, but was expelled for “systematic insubordination to function.” Undeterred, he joined the Bauhaus as a janitor.
There, sweeping after masters he could not yet name, he absorbed form through osmosis and began what he would later call his “Pragmatic Aesthetic of the Absurd.”
In the 1950s, Carelman studied briefly in Frankfurt, auditing lectures by members of the Frankfurt School. Adorno’s theories of negative dialectics fascinated him, but he considered them “too optimistic.”
During this period, he coined his first and only theoretical contribution: “Functional Nihilism.”
“If every object exists to serve, then true freedom lies in the object that refuses.”
— Carelman, On the Silence of the Useful (1956)
Returning to Paris in the early 1960s, Carelman began producing one-off prototypes in his kitchen. His earliest works — a toaster without slots, a lamp that casts only shadow, and a book whose pages are glued together to preserve their integrity — attracted a small cult of admirers from the Collège de France and the local plumbing supply community.
By 1969, convinced that absurdity required corporate structure, he founded Carelman Industries™ — “a serious company for unserious ideas.” Based in Zürich “for fiscal neutrality and moral clarity,” the firm established itself as Europe’s leading manufacturer of rigorously useless design.
Philosophy
Carelman’s design philosophy, Functional Nihilism, stands at the intersection of German metaphysics, Swiss precision, and French irony. It is not a school but a stance: the disciplined refusal to make sense.
According to Carelman, an object should embody three virtues:
Apparent Purpose — It must seem entirely reasonable at first glance.
Hidden Inoperability — Upon use, it should reveal the futility of reason.
Documented Conviction — Every absurd detail must be justified with impeccable logic.
He argued that design should “restore tragedy to the domestic sphere” — that the failure of a coffee pot could be more philosophical than a successful chair.
Influences & Collaborations
Between 1970 and 1980, Carelman maintained correspondence with thinkers, artists, and engineers who were all slightly disillusioned with success. He was loosely affiliated with the Situationists, though he found them “too recreational,” and collaborated briefly with the Zürich Concrete Art group, designing a square teapot that was never produced due to “ethical constraints.”
In 1974, he lectured at the Kunstgewerbeschule Zürich on The Ethics of Handles, a talk that lasted three hours and featured no examples.
He was also known for his friendship with an anonymous IBM typographer, whom he credited with teaching him “the beauty of meaningless order.”
Legacy
Though he officially retired in 1998, Carelman continues to advise the company, reviewing all new projects for excess coherence.
His collected writings — Designs for the End of Use (1982) and The Bureaucracy of Beauty (1991) — are out of print but still cited in graduate theses about “post-functionalist ontology.”
In 2019, the Carelman Archive celebrated his 90th birthday with an exhibition titled “Order and Other Errors”, held simultaneously in Zürich, Paris, and the basement of a defunct Bauhaus museum.
Selected Writings (translated excerpts)
“The object should not merely fail — it should fail with precision.”
— Manifesto for the Useless, 1969
“Form follows failure.”
— Lecture, Ulm School of Design, 1955
“Perfection is the enemy of confusion, and confusion is the mother of progress.”
— Internal Memo, Carelman Industries, 1971
Enduring Myth
No verified photograph exists of Hermann Carelman smiling. Colleagues describe him as “methodically content.”
He is rumored to spend his mornings cataloguing screws by disappointment level.
The Historic 1969 Building
From its humble beginnings in a modest Zurich industrial park, the Carelman Industries™ headquarters has stood as a monument to disciplined irrationality. Completed in 1969, the building was conceived as both a workplace and a philosophical statement: form stripped of meaning, function elevated to ritual. Its three stories of unwavering symmetry were designed to inspire confusion in perfect balance.
Architectural critics have described it as “heroically neutral.” The façade, a grid of windows that refuse to open, symbolizes the company’s commitment to controlled impracticality. Inside, corridors lead efficiently to nowhere, and every door opens onto the possibility of another idea. From this unassuming temple of logic, Carelman Industries™ continues to expand its global mission—to manufacture the unnecessary with absolute conviction.