Herbert Ohl

Ohl, born in 1926, studied painting and graphic design at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Karlsruhe, Germany between 1947 and 1949. He received his diploma in architecture in 1952 and went on to study and work with Egon Eiermann at the Technische Hochschule.

Until the end of the 1960s he worked as a free-lance architect and designer in Ulm where he was Rector of the Academy of Design (HfG) (1964/66 - 1968). He moved to Milan in 1968 to design the renovation of the La Rinascente department store with architect Gino Valle and thereafter worked as an expert witness and designer for Fiat.  

Ohl developed a passion for furniture design working with companies such Fantoni, Brionvega, Arflex, Matteograssi, Wilhahn and Rosenthal and received aclaim for his "Series 45°" office system which is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Mordern Art (MoMa) in New York.

His work as an industrial designer was accompanied by roles as Technical Director of the German Design Council (1974-1982), a board member of the ICSID (International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (1975-1979), member of the Council of Experts on Building Research at the Institute for Industrialised Buildings, member of the Institute for Envrionmental Design, member of the "Gute-Form" Commission, Professor of Automotive Design at Pforzheim University of Applied Sciences (1984 - 1991) and Professor of Industrial Design at the University of Illinois in Chicago from 1988.

Ohl was awarded the New York Low-Cost-Housing-Prize in 1969 and the “Gute-Form” Prize in 1983.

He died in 2012.