The Braun HLD 4 hair dryer was designed by Dieter Rams in 1970. Cooper Hewitt records examples in red, blue, and yellow molded plastic, with electronic components contained within a rounded rectangular body. The museum’s discussion notes the tangential fan that helped make the compact shape possible and relates the slotted grille to Rams’s earlier audio equipment.
The design brings the working parts into a single handheld volume. A broad grille, a dark control, and the projecting cable are the main interruptions in the colored shell. This differs markedly from the familiar arrangement of a separate handle beneath a projecting nozzle. The three examples shown together make the repeated structure and differences in color particularly easy to read.
The HLD 4 extends the archive’s Braun material beyond radios and phonographs to personal appliances. It also complicates the idea that the company’s design language was always pale or neutral. The same emphasis on ordered controls and restrained geometry could be combined with the bright plastic colors associated with the late 1960s and 1970s.
Braun T3 pocket radio
