Dorothee Becker

Dorothee Becker was born in Aschaffenburg in 1938 where her father owned a drugstore where Becker developed a fascination for the cabinets with countless drawers full of exciting objects. After completing her secondary education she studied in Frankfurt and Munich, where she met her future husband Ingo Maurer with whom she spent a year living and working in California in the early 1960s.

Inspired by a wooden toy she designed for her children Becker designed a playful storage object out of mouldable plastic, a work that premiered at the Frankfurt trade fair in 1969 under the name "Uten.Silo" and is now considered a Pop era design classic; but which due to rising raw material prices caused by the oil crisis in the 1970s was taken out of production. Vitra rediscovered the shelf at the end of the 1990s and has since produced it in two different sizes and in various colours.

Until 1989 Dorothee Becker ran the shop Utensilo in Munich-Schwabing where she sold everyday objects and design objects for home and garden as well as a curated selection of art postcards. The Uten.Silo remained Becker's only commercially successful design. Dorothee Becker died in April 2023.