A 1986 door handle returns, this time entirely in metal

German hardware manufacturer Franz Schneider Brakel has brought back the FSB 1138 door handle, designed in 1986 by Dieter Rams with his student Angelika Knoop and dropped from the catalogue in 2005. The shape is unchanged — circular rose, index-finger recess, gently rounded lever — but the original combination of aluminium and thermoplastic has been replaced by an all-metal aluminium construction.

That substitution is the whole story. The thermoplastic parts proved insufficiently durable, which is why the handle was discontinued; the metal version extends its life and develops a patina instead. The design came out of a 1986 FSB workshop led by Otl Aicher that asked international designers to treat the door handle as the point where a person meets a building. Rams has called it a source of inspiration for how we shape our surroundings, and Klaus Klemp describes its function as immediately legible. An object returning because its material was corrected, not its form, is a rarer event than it sounds.