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recent acquisitions
PROGRAMME ENTWERFEN
Karl Gerstner
Teufen: Verlag Arthur Niggli, 1963. Text in German. First edition. Octavo. Paper covered thick boards with white cloth back strip. Printed dust jacket. 112 pp. Black and white illustrations throughout with some color to rear. Fragile dust jacket faintly age toned to folds with a hint of wear to spine heel and crown. Jacket condition owes more to the age of the lightweight paper stock than any handling wear and tear. Book looks and feels unread. Unknown in this condition— a fine copy in a fine dust jacket.
7.25 x 10 hardcover book subtitled “Programm als Schrift; Programm als Typographie; Programm als Bild; Programm als Methode” with 112 pages illustrated in black and white and color. The design of the book is traditional Swiss Modern -- immaculately typeset and laid out on a consistent 2-column grid, a single type family [Akzidenz-grotesk] set with a minimum of scale and weight changes.
Gerstner's most important work includes: four essays and an introduction by Gerstner and an introduction to the introduction by Paul Gredinger [the second G in GGK]. A detailed analysis of Gerstner's design methodolgies including: Programme as typeface, Programme as typography, Programme as picture and Programme as method.
In these essays, the author provides a basic introduction to his design methodology. Instead of set recipes, the method suggests a model for design in the early days of the computer era. The intellectual models it proposes, however, continue to be useful today. What it does not purvey is cut-and-dried, true-or-false solutions or absolutes of any kind - instead, it develops fundamental principles in an innovative and future-oriented way. The book is especially topical and exciting in the context of current developments in computational design, which seem to hold out the possibility of programmed design. With many examples from the worlds of graphic and product design, music, architecture, and art, it inspires the reader to seize on the material, develop it further, and integrate it into his or her own work.
"To describe a problem is part of the solution. This implies: not to make creative decisions as promoted by feeling but by intellectual criteria. The more exact and complete these criteria are, the more create the work becomes. The creative process is to be reduced to an act of selection. Designing means: to pick out determining elements and combining them." -- Karl Gerstner
Karl Gerstner (Swiss, 1930 – 2017) started his career with a foundation year at the Basel School of Arts and Crafts, and was then apprenticed to the studio of the advertising designer Fritz Bühler. There his supervisor was Max Schmid, who went on to head design at the pharmaceutical giant, Geigy, where the new Swiss graphic design developed as a house style.
Chance and enterprise gave Gerstner the finest teachers and the most inspiring and fruitful connections. He wasted none of them. He visited Cassandre in Paris and came to know Tschichold in Basel. He joined Hans Finsler’s photography course in Zurich. As the youngest member of the Swiss Werkbund design association, he met Max Bill and Alfred Roth, the veteran architect who edited the monthly Werk. Pressed by Gerstner to report more on Swiss graphic design, Roth gave the 25-year-old a whole issue of the magazine to edit and design. That November 1955 issue was a turning point. Swiss graphic design was presented, for the first time, as a logical development of Modernism. His design of Werk was radical, too. Gerstner used a complex grid to accommodate the varying proportions of the work reproduced and he ranged the text left, unjustified, – a novelty attacked by some of the pioneers.
The founding fathers of graphic design admired by Gerstner were all painters, more artists than designers. And he, too, has had a continuous career as an artist. His first book, published in 1957, was a survey of the school of concrete-constructive abstract painting to which he belongs. The small, square Kalte Kunst? [Cold Art?], as it was titled, included his guiding lights, Max Bill and Richard Paul Lohse. Bill was probably the earliest to devise controlling grids for organising text and pictures; Lohse had devised one for the monthly Bauen+Wohnen in the 1940s. As an element of their typographic grids as well as their paintings, both Bill and Lohse used the square.
The square generated the grid he devised in 1957 for Markus Kutter’s experimental novel, Schiff nach Europa [Ship to Europe]. It is an exercise in styles: conventional narrative; play script; conversation that becomes loud argument; newspaper journalism, etc. Gerstner’s typographic language varies dramatically, but is disciplined by the grid – rigorously imposed, but flexible in use – and the restriction to only grotesque fonts. In this example of ‘integral typography’, the type makes the image.
Gerstner and Kutter met when the latter joined Geigy as public relations officer in the late 1950s, and they worked together on publications for the firm’s 200th anniversary in 1958. The chief outcome was Geigy Today, the first comprehensive demonstration of the new graphic design. The square format book used all the techniques of information design that have become standard practice – charts, annotated photographs, diagrams (organigrams, Gerstner calls them). He set the type (all Akzidenz) in unjustified columns, the method he introduced at Geigy in 1954.
In 1955 Gerstner and Kutter had put together pamphlets on planning, as radical in their typography – long lines of Monotype grotesque bold – as in their ideas. In 1959, they established their own design office and published another square book, The New Graphic Art, a survey that expanded the account Gerstner had given in Werk.
The work of this ‘two-man creative team’ in the early 1960s is far from the stiff ‘Swiss’ stereotype. (With a new partner, Paul Gredinger, an architect whose chief interest was in electronic music, the firm became GGK in 1962.) While Gerstner inherited the Modernist European tradition, he also grasped the conceptual ideas of the American New Advertising, where the message is inseparable from the form. He identified this as ‘Integral Typography’ in his most influential book, Designing Programmes, a collection of essays published in 1963. The idea of permutations was central to this volume, which presented ‘a method and an approach’ to design. As in chemistry, ‘the formula creates the form’. The essence of his permutational thinking is distilled in Think Program, which accompanied his exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1973, and in Kompendium für Alphabeten (1972; later published as Compendium for Literates). Square, chunky and elegant, Compendium is an inventory of the permutations of type images available to designers. The possible styles and graphic treatments are exhaustively analysed.
As GGK grew to become a large advertising agency, Gerstner’s dreams of making a multi-disciplinary practice in the spirit of the Bauhaus faded. In 1968, to manage the huge Ford account in Germany, GGK moved to a new main office in Düsseldorf. The firm flourished, but by the beginning of the 1970s Gerstner withdrew into ‘semi retirement’. [Richard Hollis, Eye no. 43 vol. 11, 2002]
FUNCTIONAL GRAPHIC DESIGN IN THE 20'S
Eckhard Neumann
New York: Reinhold Publishing Corporation, 1967. First edition. Square quarto. Gray cloth stamped in white. Printed dust jacket. 96 pp. 113 illustrations in black and white or two colors. Jacket lightly rubbed with a tiny push to spine crown. Book looks and feels unread. Classic early design work that is now sadly out-of-print. A fine, unread copy in a very good to nearly fine dust jacket.
8.25 x 8.25 hardcover book with 96 pages and 113 illustrations in black and white or two colors. This influential book was the first scholarly study to tie together the disparate elements of the European Avant-Garde (Bauhaus, Dada, Cubism, Futurism, de Stijl, etc.) and how they related to the emerging field of Graphic Design. Highly recommended.
From the book: "This important book documents that astonishingly creative decade -- the 1920's, with its entirely new and functional visual language. The innovative art trends of the twentieth century, which include Cubism, Futurism, and Dadism, have had a determining influence on the development of today's visual language."
Eckhard Neumann reveals through a clear and well-illustrated text the close historical connection between fine art and graphic design, and discusses the origins of graphic design today."
Contents:
Introduction: Aims and Sources
The Conquest of Tradition
The New Langauge: dADa
The Search for Objectivity
Bauhaus Weimar-Dessau: Center of New Forces
New Art -- New Advertising
What is New Typography (Article by Walter Dexel 1927)
International Acitivity
The City of Frankfurt am Main: An Example of Municiple Initiative
Credits
Includes work by the following designers, artists and gadflys: Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Matter, Herbert Bayer, Joost Schmidt, Xanti Schawinsky, Johannes Canis, Karl Peter Rohl, Robert Michel, Piet Zwart, Ladislav Sutnar, Karel Teige, Sandor Bortnyik, Henryk Berlewi, Mieczyslaw Szczuka, Cesar Domela, Johannes Molzahn, Jan Tschichold, Kurt Schwitters, Willi Baumeister, Max Burchartz, Walter Dexel, Erich Buchholz, Hans Richter, John Hartfield, Wilhelm Deffke, Farkas Molnar, Oskar Schlemmer, Margit Tery-Adler, Adolf Meyer, Johannes Itten, El Lissitzky, Man Ray, Christian Schad, Ilia Zdanewitch (Iliazd), Hannah Hoch, Hugo Ball, Raoul Hausmann, Lucio Venna, Carlo Carra, Wassily Kandinsky, Marinetti, Argendo Soffici, Theo Van Doesburg, Gronowsky, Margit Tery-Adler, Wilhelm Deffke, Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart, and more.
“Nothing is as fleeting as the ideas, inventions, and documents of advertising; nothing influences the everyday life of the second half of the twentieth century more intensively and extensively than the visual manifestations of publicity. But after months or weeks, days, sometimes even hours, ads, posters, prospectuses, TV commercials, or pamphlets have fulfilled their functions and are reduced to leftovers without any actual value. Even to the designer himself advertisements of yesterday have no more significance; automatically he turns to new undertakings.
“Therefore nothing is so much used as a matter of course, imitated and continuously developed as so-called graphic design. But the direct effect of advertising and the intensive and creative search for new forms of design behind it form an important contribution to industrial culture.
“Advertisements in daily papers or magazines, pamphlets, and posters are not works of art but designed communication media, even when they are designed by "artists," as they were in the artistic revival of the 1920s. The artists made a distinction in their work between the "purposeless" (i.e. "art") and the "useful" (i.e. "advertising"). The economic situation in Europe forced painters to handle the problems of advertising design. But advertising enabled them to present their new concepts of art to the public.
“When, for instance, the Constructivist painter Henryk Berlewi, after an extended stay in Berlin, founded an advertising agency called Reklame Mechano in his native Warsaw in 1924, he saw in it a means of breaking public resistance to new trends in art. "Advertising was not its real purpose," he has said. "I regarded it as a means of penetrating society with my then revolutionary ideas of new design."
“In the Twenties, in Germany especially, various avant-garde artists had their own graphic arts studios or executed designs for industry and public institutions in addition to their independent work and teaching. But it was never a question of personal aesthetics alone. Very early, painters took up new principles of design and created a systematic form of advertising art from its revolutionary beginnings. Typography, photography, and text were fused into a whole which presented an objective, clear, and easily understandable message to consumers, free from the personality of a particular artist.
“The combination of typography and photographs pioneered by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy under the term Typo-Foto advanced the concept of functional graphics in the decisive period between 1920 and 1930. Typography was liberated from the shackles of formality, and the photograph with its variations, photomontage and photogram, was discovered to be an effective means of realistic presentation of publicity. At the same time advertising was recognized as a necessary task of modern society, its function carefully examined, and its design "optically organized," to use the phrase coined by Willi Baumeister in 1930. The overall intention of the new design, said Mart Stam and El Lissitzky in 1925, was to put "the exact before the blurred, reality before imagination."
“In the work of the Twenties, many sources are found for the visual language of the present The purpose of this book is to present the experiments, inventions, and methods developed then as a coherent whole and to show how the creative impulses continue to live. This book should also be understood as a tribute to the pioneers who formulated within a short decade a completely new visual language.
“The idea for this book was developed during the planning of an exhibition which took place in 1963 under the title Werbegrafik 1920-1930 (Advertising Graphics 1920-1930) in the Goppinger Galerie in Frankfurt am Main. Its catalog forms the foundation for this account, although much new material has been added to the original to present the trends of functional design more definitively. However, the size of the book compelled the writer to restrict the topic to events in Europe, particularly in Germany. The stirrings of parallel movements in the New World could not be considered because their sources are too scattered. But perhaps through this book the American sources of development will become clear enough to make possible an eventual enlarged study.” — Eckhard Neumann, 1967
![Gebrauchsgraphik, May 1935. Berlin: Gebrauchsgraphik, [Vol. 12, No. 2], Professor H. K. Frenzel [Editor]. Herbert Matter, Joseph Binder.](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6a074f91e54cbe1a0e669fb9/54f386cd-2a64-476c-a45a-11ee5a82c0b8/gebrauchsgraphik_1935_05_thumb.jpg)
Gebrauchsgraphik
May 1935
Professor H.K. Frenzel [Editor]
Berlin: Gebrauchsgraphik, [Vol. 12, No. 2]. Parallel texts in German and English. Quarto. Side stitched and perfect bound printed wrappers. 78 pp. Illustrated articles and trade advertisements. Multiple paper stocks. Elaborate graphic design throughout. Cover by Joseph Binder. Wrappers lightly worn with thumb creases, so a very good or better copy.
9.25 x 12.25 vintage magazine with 76 pages of editorial content plus trade advertisements. Gebrauchsgraphik utilized the latest printing and press technologies and often included custom colors, bound-in samples and advertising fold-outs, foil stamps, die-cuts and other special finishing effects.
Contents
Advertising Means of the North German Lloyd by H. K. Frenzel: 14 pages with 34 examples [8 in color] of publicity materials for the cruise ships including work by Trafton, Kuck, Allen Saalburg, Tobey, Feldtmann, Skarbina, Muriel King, Ritscher, Frau v. Reppert-Bismarck, L. S. Hunner and H. Hoffman
New Graphic Art in Switzerland by Traugott Schalcher: 18 pages with approx. 50 black-and-white examples including work by Otto Baumberger, Paul Boesch, Gebr. Fretz, Hans Finsler, Hilfiker, Imboden, Egon Prisnitz, Herbert Matter and Edmund Welf among others -- some designs uncredited
Six Humorous Talents: Emmerich Huber, Adolf E. Wuttke [Khaki], Sidney D. Banks [Carlton Studio, London], Reinhold Escher, Wilmar Riegenring and Kurt W. Rocken by H. K. Frenzel
Advertising in Finland by Dr. Anitra Karsten: 8 pages with 34 b/w illustrations including window displays, chocolate wrappers, magazine advertising, posters and folders
Marktanalytisches Archiv
Steven Heller wrote “. . . a short homage—for no other reason than I’m reminded of his work—to Vienna-born artist and designer Joseph Binder (1898–1972). He came of age when poster artists were stars. Or, as his wife Carla Binder recalled when I spoke to her in 1986, “Binder was alive during the age of Bernhard, Defke, Hadank. Elegant! And they were socially in contact with all their large accounts. They were acquaintances, friends. They were not just given an assignment” they were trusted with great responsibilities.
“Binder had always done posters on the side to make extra income. “Returning from the war in 1918 he was asked by Bernd Steiner, an excellent poster designer, [to work with him],” noted Carla, then in her late 90s.
”Still, Binder wanted to be a painter. He had studied painting for four years in his native Vienna at the Kunstgewerbeschule under professor Berthold Loeffler. “Loeffler gave Binder a fantastic critique for his graduation certificate,” recalled his widow. “And in 1926 the States Prize of Austria went to Binder.”
”Between 1933 and 1935 he visited the United States as a guest lecturer at the Chicago Art Institute and the Minneapolis School of Art. His work was represented in poster exhibitions in New York and Tokyo, and he was recognized by the Art Directors Club New York and the Museum of Modern Art. In 1936 Binder emigrated to New York and in 1944 became an American citizen.
”Binder had two studios in New York in the mid-1940s. One was for painting and the other for commercial work. “He had to walk a mile to go from one to the other,” noted Earnest W. Watson in American Artist (February 1944).
”The decision to have two studios—the physical separation of fine and commercial arts—wrote Watson, was typical of Binder’s relationship to his art forms. The former was “miles apart” from those of the poster designer. The poster represented a “faster tempo of modern living,” which has brought about a new streamline style. As it happens, his painting was non-representational color field work, while his posters were minimal reductions in representational form.
“Binder usually reduces naturalistic expressions to the minimum, his idea being that the greater the simplification … the quicker the recognition of the poster’s intention and the more powerful its impact.” For Joseph Binder, reduction was a shorthand way to express an idea.
“Binder’s influence upon American design has been considerable,” added Watson, “not alone through the example of his printed designs but through teaching and lecturing.” There was a time when his brand of pictorial modernism was the state of the art.”
” Founded in 1923 by Professor H. K. Frenzel, Gebrauchsgraphik was the leading voice of the Avant-Garde influence on the European Commercial Art and Advertising industries before World War II. In the thirties, all roads led through Berlin, and Gebrauchsgraphik spotlighted all of the aesthetic trends fermenting in Europe -- Art Deco and Surrealism from Paris, Constructivism from Moscow, Futurist Fascism from Rome, De Stijl and Dutch typography from Amsterdam, and of course the spreading influence of the Dessau Bauhaus. A journal that was truly international, presented in both German and English.
Gebrauchsgraphik was the leading voice of the Avant-Garde influence on the European Commercial Art and Advertising industries before World War II. In the thirties, all roads led through Berlin, and Gebrauchsgraphik spotlighted all of the aesthetic trends fermenting in Europe -- Art Deco and Surrealism from Paris, Constructivism from Moscow, Futurist Fascism from Rome, De Stijl and Dutch typography from Amsterdam, and of course the spreading influence of the Dessau Bauhaus. A journal that was truly international in scope , all articles and cutlines are presented in both German and English.
The thirties were the Golden Age for European Poster Art and Gebrauchsgraphik was in the perfect place to showcase all the latest and greatest trends and rising artists for the rest of the world. Gebrauchsgraphik was an incredibly influential journal and agenda setter, most notably to a young man in Brooklyn named Paul Rand. According to his biographical notes, Rand's exposure to Gebrauchsgraphik in the early thirties created his desire to become a Commercial Artist. The rest is history.
Gebrauchsgraphik utilized the latest printing and press technologies and often included custom colors, bound-in samples and advertising fold-outs, foil stamps, die-cuts and other special finishing effects.
Founded in 1923 by Professor H. K. Frenzel, Gebrauchsgraphik was the leading voice of the Avant-Garde influence on the European Commercial Art and Advertising industries before World War II. In the thirties, all roads led through Berlin, and Gebrauchsgraphik spotlighted all of the aesthetic trends fermenting in Europe -- Art Deco and Surrealism from Paris, Constructivism from Moscow, Futurist Fascism from Rome, De Stijl and Dutch typography from Amsterdam, and of course the spreading influence of the Dessau Bauhaus. A journal that was truly international, presented in both German and English.
Gebrauchsgraphik was in the perfect place to showcase all the latest and greatest European trends and rising artists for the rest of the world. Gebrauchsgraphik was an incredibly influential journal and agenda setter, most notably to a young man in Brooklyn named Paul Rand. According to his biographical notes, Rand's exposure to Gebrauchsgraphik in the early thirties created his desire to become a Commercial Artist. The rest is history.
* Design Historian and all-around mensch Steven Heller on H.K. Frenzel: “This is not the anniversary of H.K. Frenzel's birth (1882) or death (1937) but it is the commemoration of both, decades much too late.
“While researching another project through scores of issues of his historic magazine, Gebrauchsgraphik: International Advertising Art, I came across a benignly covered edition from November 1937.
“Do the math . . . that was four years after the rise to power of the Nazis in Germany, where Dr. Frenzel's magazine began publishing in 1924. This issue had many advertisements for Black Letter typefaces and an ad for ALA (Allgemeine Anzeigen Gesellschaft), which was the German advertising society to promote German newspaper and periodical advertising in Germany, which served as the Nazis' own advertising. The magazine also had features on a host of "sanctioned" German gebrauchsgraphikers, who belonged to the Reich Chamber of Commercial Arts.
“Dr. Frenzel was not pleased with the Nazification (Gleichschaltung ) of his magazine, which had never taken an overt political stand. In 1937 Frenzel died of a "bug" he caught while in Italy. Although he had recovered, seemingly it was more virulent than the doctors had thought-or so the story goes. Nonetheless, rumors quickly surfaced that he took his own life.
“The memorial article in the November 1937 issue by E. Hölscher begins, "Our late friend H.K. Frenzel would certainly not have wished that an attempt should be made in the following lines devoted to his memory to give renewed expression to the profound and general dismay caused by his unexpected decease. He himself was much too optimistic and interested in the present to indulge willingly in melancholy thoughts for any length of time, and even beyond the circle of his more intimate friends the grief and sympathy even among those who had only met him once were so really heartfelt and genuine that they require no further confirmation as evidence of general respect which he enjoyed."
“And yet, his admirers were moved to celebrate how the magazine-his creation-"on which he worked with absolute devotion until the lasts days of his life, has been subjected to certain changes in the course of fourteen years." Meaning over the last four the Nazi dictates against modern and culturally un-German content was verbotten.
“Frenzel wrote "The works reproduced by me in Gebrauchsgraphik are entirely in accordance with the idea I have adopted as the policy of my periodical. I wish to circumscribe a circle covering what can be regarded as good present-day graphic art. If I were to take to publishing only what satisfies me completely I should have to adopt a certain policy, and the periodical would no longer reflect the present state of graphic art."
“True to his word, Frenzel published many approaches from all over the world. The common denominator was quality. Whether modern or classical, comic or serious, experimental or traditional, he maintained a level that set the standard. With the Nazis in power, his circle had been excruciatingly tightened, his standard had dropped, his life was not worth living.”
![Rüegg, Ruedi and Godi Fröhlich: TYPOGRAFISCHE GRUNDLAGEN [BASES TYPOGRAPHIQUES / BASIC TYPOGRAPHY]. Zürich: ABC Verlag, 1972.](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6a074f91e54cbe1a0e669fb9/7a55aaf0-8d23-4490-a640-a900792a746a/ruedi_ruegg_hc_thumb.jpg)
TYPOGRAFISCHE GRUNDLAGEN
BASES TYPOGRAPHIQUES
BASIC TYPOGRAPHY
Rüegg, Ruedi and Godi Fröhlic
Zürich: ABC Verlag, 1972. First edition. Text in German, French, and English. Square quarto. White laminated boards with black tape backstrip. Printed dust jacket. Black endpapers. 220 pp. Fully illustrated in black and white with some color throughout. Designed by Ruedi Rüegg. Remarkably well preserved: Glossy jacket lightly handled, but a fine copy in a fine dust jacket.
10.15 x 10 hardcover book with 220 pages and over 150 examples of the Swiss Style and numerous text illustrations. Beautifully designed by the author and printed in Switzerland by ABC Verlag.
Contents
Introduction by J. Müller-Brockmann, Zurich
Craft and Art by Paul Rand, Weston, Conn., USA
Typographic Measurement Systems
Production Techniques
Typographic Elements
Formal Aspects
Working Principles
Applied Typography
Development of Type Forms: fascinating visual timeline showing type forms, philosophical, religious, technical or political leaders, and famous buildings from the fifth century b.c. to 1963.
From the book: “Here, for the first time, is a handbook that comprehensively deals with the technique and design elements of typographic production. This is a modern work giving extensive information which is easily understood. it is indispensable for all those concerned with the planning of texts and typesetting production.
“The book gives a comprehensive introduction to today’s technics of production, and an insight into the typographic elements and their combination-possibilities. Variations in design are shown through a representative collection of the newest typographic production from different countries.”
Ruedi Rüegg (Swiss, 1936 – 2011) was an educator, writer and one of the most highly-regarded Swiss graphic designers. After leaving the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich he worked with Josef Müller-Brockmann in Switzerland and then with Paul Rand in the USA. As a designer he was part of the Nakamoto International Agency in Japan from 1964–1965 before returning to Zurich as partner and co-owner of the design and advertising agency Müller-Brockmann & Co. In 1984 he set up his own practice with Max Baltis that would become Designalltag in 1992. Amongst his designs: the literature periodical Orte, the pictograms and information system for Zurich Airport, the posters for Opernhaus Zürich and with Adrian Frutiger the corporate identity of the Swiss PTT. Since 1988 he has been lecturer for graphic design at the Ohio State University, Carnegie Mellon University, Cooper Union School of Design and Schule für Gestaltung St Gallen.
VISUAL TRANSFORMATION
CREATIVE TENDENCIES IN GRAPHIC DESIGN, FINE ART, TECHNOLOGY, AND INFORMATION TECHNIQUES
Walter Diethelm with Dr. Marion Diethelm
Zürich: ABC Verlag, 1982. First edition. Text in German, French, and English. Square quarto. Glazed printed boards. Black back strip. Printed dust jacket. Orange endpapers. 182 pp. Fully illustrated with color and black and white examples. Remarkably well preserved: Glossy white jacket lightly handled with price sticker to front flap, but a fine copy in a fine dust jacket.
10.25 x 10 hardcover book with 182 pages with over 300 color and black and white illustrations. From the introduction “On Visual Transformation”: “Life means change, conversion, and transformation. Visualization makes it possible to grasp the idea of transformation. The extent and speed of change in a man-made environment are to be seen in urban development and also in the developed landscape ever more subjected to the needs of traffic, building, and industrialization. Visualization transforms the natural living-space into a kind of artificial super-structure, which can, perhaps, also be artistically designed.”
Contents
On Visual Transformation
Structures of Formation
Present-day Tendencies of Style in Design
Sight, Overview, Insight
Index of names features Felix Bader, Theo Ballmer, Max Bense, Josef Beuys, Igildo Biesele, Max Bill, Werner Blaser, Ken Carbone, Christo, Tom Eckersley, Buckminster Fuller, Eugen Gomringer, Gottschalk + Ash, Takenobu Igarishi, Burton Kramer, Karl Martens, Helmut Schmid, Leslie Smolan, Anton Stankowski, Rosmarie Tissi, Fred Troller, Unimark, Robert Venturi, Massimo Vignelli, Harry Weese, Jean Widmer, Richard Saul Wurman, and many more.
Walter J. Diethelm [Zürich, 1913– 1986] was a type designer credited with Diethelm Antiqua (or Diethelm Roman) (Haas, 1948-1950; Linotype, 1957: a stocky text typeface), Sculptura (1957), Arrow (1966, VGC, a Peignotian or lapidary face), Abacus, Aktiv, Capitol, and Gloriette.
The Swiss International Style derived from the idea that "abstract structure is the vehicle for communication," according to alumnus Kenneth Hiebert. "It relies on an analysis that rigorously questions and accounts for all parts of a message. The act of searching for an appropriate structure forces the designer to make the most basic inquiry about a message, to isolate its primary essence from considerations of surface style."
Hiebert wrote "The Swiss school is concerned that design be more than a frivolous cluttering of the environment." Sounds good to me.
![Bangerter and Tschanen: OFFICIAL GRAPHIC ART IN SWITZERLAND [Offizielle Schweizer Grafik / Arts Graphiques Officiels En Suisse]. Zurich: ABC Verlag, 1964.](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6a074f91e54cbe1a0e669fb9/644e2a58-bb07-4c1b-9655-da3377bc2908/bangerter_official_swiss_thumb.jpg)
OFFICIAL GRAPHIC ART IN SWITZERLAND
Offizielle Schweizer Grafik / Arts Graphiques Officiels En Suisse
Walter Bangerter and Armin Tschanen
Zurich: ABC Verlag, 1964. First edition. Text in German, French, and English. Square quarto. Glazed printed boards. White backstrip. 184 pp. Fully illustrated with color and black and white examples. Remarkably well preserved: tiny nicks to the red fore edge of the upper board, otherwise a fine, as new copy.
10.25 x 10 hardcover book with 184 pages with over 250 examples of Swiss design—including one fold-out. From a program for a presentation on Swiss Graphic Design by Richard Hollis in London (available at januzzi.com): “By the 1950s Switzerland had developed a uniquely clear graphic language which matched the country’s reputation for efficiency and precision. Evident not just in posters but in advertisements, brochures and books, Neue Grafik or Swiss Style, as it became known, was respected internationally for its formal discipline: simple methods that could make posters dramatic and give an order and elegance to typographic design. Sharing the disciplines of Swiss Concrete Art, designers organised images and text into geometrical grids. With sans-serif typefaces such as Helvetica and Univers, these were the chief components of the Swiss Style which spread across the world.”
The Swiss International Style derived from the idea that “abstract structure is the vehicle for communication,” according to alumnus Kenneth Hiebert. "It relies on an analysis that rigorously questions and accounts for all parts of a message. The act of searching for an appropriate structure forces the designer to make the most basic inquiry about a message, to isolate its primary essence from considerations of surface style.”
Hiebert wrote “The Swiss school is concerned that design be more than a frivolous cluttering of the environment.” Sounds good to me.
Designers include Walter Amrein, Werner Andermatt, Herbert Auchli, Walter Bangerter, Franco Barberis, Kobi Baumgartner, Pascal Besson, Manfred Bingler, Rudolf Bircher, Donald Brun, Robert Büchler, Fritz Bühler, Fritz Butz, Gisela Buomberger, Calame-Affolter, Alois Carigiet, Andreas Cathomas, Werner Christen, René Creux, August Diener, Hansruedi Dörig, Hans Erni, Hans Falk, Franz Fässler, Hans Fischer, M. Frey-Surback, Michel Gallay, Richard Gerbig, Roland Gfeller-Corthesy, Rolf Gfeller, Philip Giegel, René Gilsi, Edwin Habegger, Walter Häfeli, Peter Hajnoczky, Jörg Hamburger, Hans Hartmann, Edi Hauri, Armin Hofmann, Godi Hofmann, Sita Jucker, Hans Kasser, Hans Knöpfli, Alfred Koella, Hans Küchler, Ruedi Külling, Eugen and Max Lenz, Herbert Leupin, Margarete Lipps, Michel Martina, Martz + Bühlmann, Fred Mayer, Erhard Meier, André Melchior, Pierre Monnerat, Bruno Monnier, Solange Moser, H.P. Mühlemann, Werner Mühlemann, Fred Murer, Neukom + Binschewer, Frères Ongaro, P.A. Perret, Celestino Piatti, Fernand Rausser, Roth + Sauter, Jacques Rouillier, Rey, Alfred O. Sandmeier, Helen Sarasin, Beni Schalcher, Urs Schenker, Ulrich Schierle, Walter Schmid, Rolf Schmidt, Max Schneider, Fritz Schrag, Niklaus Schwabe, Hans Schwarzenbach, Fritz Seigner, Seigner + Kamm, Hugo Siegfried, Walter Sigg, Walter Speich, Heiri Steiner, Heinz Stieger, Hans Thöni, Fred troller, A. Vetter, Carlo Vivarelli, H.P. Weber, A.B. Weider, Hugo Wetli, Werbeagentur Wild, Kurt Wirth, Beno Zehnder, and Mark Zeugin.
![RAYMOND, Antonin and Noémi, Elie Faure [preface]: ANTONIN RAYMOND: HIS WORK IN JAPAN 1920 – 1935. Tokyo: Johnan Shoin, [c. 1935].](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6a074f91e54cbe1a0e669fb9/95e60a2e-ffc9-4a4a-9836-e1b705131f42/antonin_raymond_1936_thumb.jpg)
ANTONIN RAYMOND: HIS WORK IN JAPAN 1920 – 1935
Antonin and Noémi Raymond, Elie Faure [preface]
Tokyo: Johnan Shoin, [c. 1935]. First edition. Text in Japanese, English and French. Oblong quarto. Rough dyed silk over flexible boards. Stamped and debossed title band. Wire spiral binding. [38] 104 pp. Frontispiece, contents and essays followed by 104 pages of rich photogravures, line art and photo halftones on a variety of paper stocks. ‘Made in Japan’ inkstamp to front free endpaper verso. Boards and label dusted and mild staining. Wire spiral binding with a single compressed spiral. Text block bright and clean with softened corners. A well-preserved example of this elaborate title: a very good copy.
11 x 12-inch oblong spiral bound first edition with silk covered limp boards and a dynamic stamped and debossed title band. A frontispiece captures Raymond and some of his young, male Japanese assistants pausing for a group shot, followed by Elie Faure’s essay ‘The Birth of Architecture,’ presented in Japanese, English and French, and “On Japanese Residences” by Antonin and Noémi Raymond, all edited by K. Nakamura. The next 104 pages feature rich full page photogravures of Antonin and Noémi Raymond’s architecture and interior design from 1920 to 1935, as well as site sketches, floorplans, elevations and black and white letterpress halftone photography. A gorgeous production, beautifully composed and presented in a dynamic tempo similar to so many other great PhotoBooks of the era.
In 1925, the critic, poet, and one of the founders of Surrealism, Andre Breton, posed the question: when would 'all the books that are worth anything stop being illustrated with drawings and appear only with photographs?’ A few short years after this statement, the photographic image had established itself as one of the most provocative, poetic, and radical forms of representation in modern society. A plethora of groundbreaking exhibitions, books and publicity, the work of some of the most influential figures in history of photography, ushered in the creative flowering of the medium across Europe. Unquestionably the increasingly effective presence of photography was tied to the emergence of these new recruits and their passionate conviction regarding its creative worth. [Kerry William Purcell]
Antonin [Reimann] Raymond (Czechoslovakia, 1888 – 1976) was a Czech-American architect who lived and worked in New York City, Tokyo, Japan, and New Hope, PA, from the 1910s through the mid-1970s. As an artist, decorated intelligence officer in the First World War, diplomat, farmer, and architect, Antonin had perhaps one of the most incredible life stories for any architect of the 20th century. As a young architect he worked on some the of most extraordinary buildings of the first quarter of that century, including Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth Building in New York City and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Antonin and his wife and creative partner Noémi Pernessin would go on to introduce modern architecture and design to Japan and India, creating over 300 built works over their 50 year practice.
Noémi Pernessin Raymond (France, 1889 – 1980) has a no less remarkable story. She was born in Cannes, France and raised in New York, where she attended the famous Horace Mann School in Morningside Heights. Noémi went on to graduate from Columbia University, where she studied under John Dewey and Arthur Wesley Dow, who were instrumental in her introduction to Japanese art and design. She then completed her education in Paris, studying painting at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. Noémi later returned to New York to place herself within the center of its avant garde art circle, and to set up her own successful graphic and illustration studio.
It was through Noémi’s connections in the art world that Antonin eventually landed a position with Frank Lloyd Wright, and Noémi herself later worked for the architectural master on projects such as Taliesen II and decorative designs for the Imperial Hotel. As a painter, sculptor, illustrator, and award winning textile and rug designer, she would work in virtually every art and craft media, including iron work, silverware, glass, and ceramics. In collaboration with Antonin, Noémi led the design of all Raymond interiors at all scales in the Raymond office of the post-war period. It was here that she designed some of the most aesthetically advanced furniture of the mid-twentieth century, her fresh design sensibility foreshadowing the Scandinavian-vernacular hybrid style that would later be embraced by her contemporaries. Noémi's work is found in museum collections internationally.
Both Antonin and Noémi Raymond worked on Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel project in Tokyo in the early 1920s, Antonin as its project architect, and Noémi on its decorative art design elements.
After their tenure under Wright, Noémi and Antonin set up their own architectural offices in Japan in 1922, where they would live and practice for next 18 years. Their practice flourished; they built residences, embassies, clubs, universities, churches, schools, and factories. During these years, their work quickly evolved from its Wrightian origins through a period abstraction and of material experimentation in concrete, paralleling the European modernists’ work of August Perret and Robert Mallet-Stevens. By the late 1920s and early 1930s they had perhaps the most avant grade practice in Asia as proponents of the then just emerging International Style. However, they quickly understood the limits of strict Modernist Functionalism as evangelized by Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus and the Purism of Le Corbusier. By the late 1930’s, they evolved their own unique fusion of modernism and vernacular architecture that would portent the Regional Modernism in America and Scandinavia of the 1940s, 50s and 60s. Additionally, the Raymonds were instrumental in George Nakashima’s career as both an architect and one of the premier furniture makers of the 20th century. In 1936, with George Nakashima as project architect, the Raymonds built the remarkable Golconda Ashram in Pondicherry, the first work of Modern Architecture in India and a harbinger of the New Brutalism that had yet to come in the 1950s through the 1970s.
By 1938, with war looming both in Europe and in Asia, the Raymonds decided to return the United States, first in New York, and then later to a farm in New Hope, Pennsylvania. The farm and studio was to be a working/teaching atelier, similar to that of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin Fellowship, where apprentices would board and learn by working in the studio, as well as help with the farm itself. It was not just a school nor a professional office, but a way of life. They called it the New Hope Experiment.
After the war, the Raymonds reopened their Tokyo offices in 1947 to assist with the rebuilding of Japan. They would live and practice both in the United States and Japan for next 25 years, marking the most productive period of remarkable their careers. The Raymonds Readers Digest Tokyo Office Building of 1951 is widely recognized one the most seminal buildings in history of modern Japanese architecture.
Today, Antonin Raymond is known in Japan as the “Father of Modern Architecture,” and Noémi Pernessin Raymond is recognized by the Museum of Modern Art in the pantheon of great women designers of the 20th century, alongside the likes of Eileen Gray, Charlotte Perriand, Lilly Reich, Aino Aalto, Anni Albers, and Loja Saarinen. The work and lives Noémi and Antonin Raymond stand among the great design collaborations of the 20th century. [The Raymond Farm Center]
![RAYMOND, ANTONIN: ARCHITECTURAL DETAILS 1938. Tokyo/New York: Antonin & Noémi Pernessin Raymond / The Architectural Forum, 1938. First edition of 1,000 copies [stated].](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6a074f91e54cbe1a0e669fb9/e023d619-fbd9-419a-ac0a-f8689ef85999/antonin_raymond_1938_thumb.jpg)
ARCHITECTURAL DETAILS 1938
Antonin & Noémi P. Raymond
Tokyo/New York: Antonin Raymond / The Architectural Forum, 1938. First edition of 1,000 copies [stated]. First edition of 1,000 copies [stated]. Text in English. Quarto. Woven burlap covered cloth boards with handmade paper printed obi tipped on [as issued]. Wire spiral binding. Handmade paper for the endpapers, title page and front matter. 116 [x] pp. with line art and halftones on alternating heavy uncoated and matte sheets throughout. Facsimile signatures to title page along with tipped in domestic publishing information, and Printed in Japan label tipped to title page verso. Boards and first few leaves faintly curling to fore edge. Text block lightly handled, with wire binding straight and true with no internal issues. Signed by Samuel G. Wiener—OG Shreveport Modern Architect—to front pastedown. A well-preserved copy of a notoriously fragile title: a very good or better copy.
8.85 x 11-inch spiral bound first edition with woven burlap covered boards and handmade paper tipped on title and multiple paper stocks incorporated into text block. 116 pages divided equally between halftone photographs and corresponding line drawings, plans, and elevations. Self-published in Tokyo in 1938 by Antonin Raymond and distributed in the U.S. through Architectural Forum.
“One of the foundational documents of twentieth-century architecture in Japan and among the most compelling architectural books of the prewar modernist era. Rather than presenting finished buildings as monuments, Raymond focuses on the essential mechanics of construction—floors, walls, ceilings, joints, connections, materials, and structural details—revealing the synthesis of International Style modernism and Japanese building traditions that defined his practice. Designed to lie flat for consultation in the studio, the volume functions as a working architect's manual as much as a monograph. The burlap boards—coarse, durable, unapologetically material—echo the surfaces it documents, while the incorporation of Japanese rice paper similar reflects the underlying design philosophy.
“Almost as a bonus is a concluding section showcasing the Raymond office’s furniture designs, documenting their integrated approach to architecture, interiors, and furnishings. Illustrated with measured drawings paired with photographic examples, the section presents custom-designed chairs, tables, sofas, desks, screens, and accessories created for Raymond commissions during the 1930s. Blending tubular steel, wood, rattan, woven surfaces, upholstered forms, and Japanese proportions, the designs embody the distinctive synthesis of modernist construction and traditional craft that defined the Raymond practice. Many of the furnishings appear to have been produced specifically for Raymond projects and survive today primarily through the documentation provided here. Increasingly recognized as reflecting the contributions if not the authorship of Noémi Raymond (and with assistance from a young employee, George Nakashima), these plates constitute one of the earliest and most important published records of furniture associated with the Raymond office and transform Architectural Details from a technical handbook into a statement of Gesamtkunsterk.” — Lawrence Weinberg
Antonin [Reimann] Raymond (Czechoslovakia, 1888 – 1976) was a Czech-American architect who lived and worked in New York City, Tokyo, Japan, and New Hope, PA, from the 1910s through the mid-1970s. As an artist, decorated intelligence officer in the First World War, diplomat, farmer, and architect, Antonin had perhaps one of the most incredible life stories for any architect of the 20th century. As a young architect he worked on some the of most extraordinary buildings of the first quarter of that century, including Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth Building in New York City and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. Antonin and his wife and creative partner Noémi Pernessin would go on to introduce modern architecture and design to Japan and India, creating over 300 built works over their 50 year practice.
Noémi Pernessin Raymond (France, June 23, 1889 – August 19, 1980) has a no less remarkable story. She was born in Cannes, France and raised in New York, where she attended the famous Horace Mann School in Morningside Heights. Noémi went on to graduate from Columbia University, where she studied under John Dewey and Arthur Wesley Dow, who were instrumental in her introduction to Japanese art and design. She then completed her education in Paris, studying painting at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. Noémi later returned to New York to place herself within the center of its avant garde art circle, and to set up her own successful graphic and illustration studio.
It was through Noémi’s connections in the art world that Antonin eventually landed a position with Frank Lloyd Wright, and Noémi herself later worked for the architectural master on projects such as Taliesen II and decorative designs for the Imperial Hotel. As a painter, sculptor, illustrator, and award winning textile and rug designer, she would work in virtually every art and craft media, including iron work, silverware, glass, and ceramics. In collaboration with Antonin, Noémi led the design of all Raymond interiors at all scales in the Raymond office of the post-war period. It was here that she designed some of the most aesthetically advanced furniture of the mid-twentieth century, her fresh design sensibility foreshadowing the Scandinavian-vernacular hybrid style that would later be embraced by her contemporaries. Noémi's work is found in museum collections internationally.
Both Antonin and Noémi Raymond worked on Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel project in Tokyo in the early 1920s, Antonin as its project architect, and Noémi on its decorative art design elements.
After their tenure under Wright, Noémi and Antonin set up their own architectural offices in Japan in 1922, where they would live and practice for next 18 years. Their practice flourished; they built residences, embassies, clubs, universities, churches, schools, and factories. During these years, their work quickly evolved from its Wrightian origins through a period abstraction and of material experimentation in concrete, paralleling the European modernists’ work of August Perret and Robert Mallet-Stevens. By the late 1920s and early 1930s they had perhaps the most avant grade practice in Asia as proponents of the then just emerging International Style. However, they quickly understood the limits of strict Modernist Functionalism as evangelized by Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus and the Purism of Le Corbusier. By the late 1930’s, they evolved their own unique fusion of modernism and vernacular architecture that would portent the Regional Modernism in America and Scandinavia of the 1940s, 50s and 60s. Additionally, the Raymonds were instrumental in George Nakashima’s career as both an architect and one of the premier furniture makers of the 20th century. In 1936, with George Nakashima as project architect, the Raymonds built the remarkable Golconda Ashram in Pondicherry, the first work of Modern Architecture in India and a harbinger of the New Brutalism that had yet to come in the 1950s through the 1970s.
By 1938, with war looming both in Europe and in Asia, the Raymonds decided to return the United States, first in New York, and then later to a farm in New Hope, Pennsylvania. The farm and studio was to be a working/teaching atelier, similar to that of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin Fellowship, where apprentices would board and learn by working in the studio, as well as help with the farm itself. It was not just a school nor a professional office, but a way of life. They called it the New Hope Experiment.
After the war, the Raymonds reopened their Tokyo offices in 1947 to assist with the rebuilding of Japan. They would live and practice both in the United States and Japan for next 25 years, marking the most productive period of remarkable their careers. The Raymonds Readers Digest Tokyo Office Building of 1951 is widely recognized one the most seminal buildings in history of modern Japanese architecture.
Today, Antonin Raymond is known in Japan as the “Father of Modern Architecture,” and Noémi Pernessin Raymond is recognized by the Museum of Modern Art in the pantheon of great women designers of the 20th century, alongside the likes of Eileen Gray, Charlotte Perriand, Lilly Reich, Aino Aalto, Anni Albers, and Loja Saarinen. The work and lives Noémi and Antonin Raymond stand among the great design collaborations of the 20th century. [The Raymond Farm Center]
![Ruder, Emil: TYPOGRAPHIE: EIN GESTALTUNGSLEHRBUCH [Typography: A Manual Of Design / Typographie: Un Manuel De Creation]. Teufen AR: Verlag Arthur Niggli, 1967.](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6a074f91e54cbe1a0e669fb9/a8cacc4a-f114-47f7-abac-b4586ff2873c/ruder_typographie_niggli_1967_thumb.jpg)
TYPOGRAPHIE: EIN GESTALTUNGSLEHRBUCH
Typography: A Manual Of Design / Typographie: Un Manuel De Creation
Emil Ruder
Teufen AR: Verlag Arthur Niggli, 1967. First edition. Text in German, English and French. Square quarto. White cloth stamped in black. Printed dust jacket. 274 pp. Two fold outs. Black and white illustrations throughout, with occasional spot colors in red, yellow and blue. Book design by the author. Remarkably well preserved: a fine copy in a fine dust jacket, rare thus.
9.25 x 9.75 hardcover book with 274 pages and many black and white and 2-color illustrations from studies by the author or by students in the Typography Course of the AGS Basel. Every conceivable typographic problem in relation to texture, weight, color, legibility spacing and leading is explained in 19 chapters.
This classic work of modern typography offers one of the most intelligent and attractive treatises on the design of typography for contemporary use. A great, and increasingly scarce, exploration of experimental typography.
Contents:
Introduction "More than graphic design, typography is an expression of technology, precision and good order."
Writing and printing "A good designer must refrain from mixing writing and printing."
Function and form "The typographer clothes the word with visible form and preserves it for the future. "
Form and counter-form "The various effects obtained by the compination of letters are determind by the interplay of the white of the counter and the white of the set width. "
The techniques of typography "It is in this unchanging appearance of all the letters that the beauty of typography resides; its essential nature lies in the repetition of the type characters and the repetition inherent in the printing process. "
Arrangements "The aim of all good typography is form subordinated to legibility."
Geometrical, optical and organic aspects "Optical illusions cannot simply be dismissed as fancies, and every creative artist must reckon with the problems they pose. "
Proportions "No system of ratios, however ingenious, can relieve the typographer of deciding how one value should be related to another."
Point, line, surface "Everything is movement: the dot moves and gives rise to the line, the line moves and produces a plane surface, and plane surfaces come together and create a body."
Contrasts "The relationship between the printed and the unprinted area must be one of tension, and this tension comes about through contrasts. "
Shades of grey "The smallest quantity of black consumes white; it takes white away and lies at a lower level than the white surface. "
Colour "There should be tension between a bright colour and black, and this tension should be clearly apparent in the first draft of a printed work. "
Unity of text and form "The large number of typefaces available to the typographer today is not so much a sign of a hight level of culutrual activity as rather evidence of a lack of international coordination and the resultant frittering away of effort."
Rhythm "Handwriting can be seen to underlie any good typeface. "
Spontaneity and fortuity "Time and again, however,we find printed works which make no claim to formal beauty and yet have a distinctive charm for all their technical shortcomings. "
Integral design "A book must be consistently designed throughout, including the title-page and, if possible, the cover title."
Variations "Variation involves singling out a mean value and calls for the ability to put this mean value through as many transformations as possible."
Kinetics "Runs of movement can embody the following themes: increase and decrease of value or increase and decrease of size; loosening up of compact elements and gathering together of scattered values into a compact form; eccentric and concentric movements; movements running from top to bottom and from bottom to top; movements from left to right and from right to left; movements from inside out and vice versa; movements along a diagonal or through an angle, etc."
Lettering and illustration "There are two different approaches to the problem of achieving harmony between printing type and picture. One way is to seek the closest possible formal combination between test and picture, and the other is to seek a contrast between them. "
Hiebert wrote "The Swiss school is concerned that design be more than a frivolous cluttering of the environment. " Sounds good to me!
Emil Ruder (Switzerland, 1914 – 1970) was a typographer and graphic designer, who with Armin Hofmann joined the faculty of the Schule für Gestaltung Basel (Basel School of Design), where he established himself as one of the masters of the so called Swiss Style of design.
Ruder is distinguishable in the field of typography for developing a holistic approach to designing and teaching that consisted of philosophy, theory and a systematic practical methodology. He expressed lofty aspirations for graphic design, writing that part of its function was to promote "the good and the beautiful in word and image and to open the way to the arts." He taught that typography's purpose was to communicate ideas through writing, as well as placing a heavy importance on Sans-serif typefaces. No other designer since Jan Tschichold was as committed as Ruder to the discipline of letterpress typography or wrote about it with such conviction.
The Swiss Style (as a conditional continuation of International Typographic Style) was developed after WWII in Switzerland, and was defined by the use of sans-serif typefaces, and employed a page grid for structure, producing asymmetrical layouts. By the 1960s, the grid had become the routine procedure for organizing page layouts. Ruder demonstrated a grid of nine squares as the basis for different sizes of image, with 24 possible positions and shapes of the image.
Also stressed was the combination of typography and photography as a means of visual communication. The primary influential works were developed as posters, which were seen to be the most effective means of communication.
Emil Ruder was born in Zurich, Switzerland on March 20, 1914. He was trained as a typesetter in Basel (1929-1933), and studied in Paris from 1938-1939. Ruder published a basic grammar of typography entitled, Typographie. The text was published in German, English and French, by Swiss publisher Arthur Niggli in 1967. The book helped spread and propagate the Swiss Style, and became a basic text for graphic design and typography programs in Europe and North America. In 1962 he helped to found the International Center for the Typographic Arts (ICTA) in New York.
Ruder began his education in design at the age of fifteen when he took a compositor's apprenticeship. By his late twenties, he began attending the Kunstgewerbeschule Zürich where the principles of Bauhaus and Tschichold's new typography were taught.
Ruder first began teaching in 1942 at the Allgemeine Gewerbeschule in the Swiss city of Basel. There, he was in charge of typography for trade students. He became the head of the Department of Apprentices in Applied arts by 1947. In 1947 Ruder met the artist-printer Armin Hofmann. Their teaching achieved an international reputation by the mid-1950s. He was a contributing writer and editor for Typografische Monatsblätter (Typographic Monthly), which was a popular trade publication of the time.
During the post war years when, in almost every field of applied art, there was still no sign of transition to a new form of expression better fitted to the times, Emil Ruder was one of the first pioneers to discard all of the conventional rules of traditional typography and to establish new laws of composition more in accord with the modern era. In spite of his love for pictorial thinking, he was never tempted to indulge in merely playful designs in which the actual purpose of printing - legibility - would be lost. Ruder's insistence that the primary aim of typography was communication did not exclude aesthetic effects.
After twenty-five years of teaching, Ruder published a heavily illustrated book capturing his ideas, methods and approach. The book, Typographie: A Manual for Design, represents a critical reflection on Ruder’s teaching and practice as well as a lifetime of accumulated knowledge. Other than publishing his book Typographie, he is known for his use of the grid system in Swiss Style design as well as his poster designs.
![43 Rassegna: Reklame & Architektur. Vittorio Gregotti [Direttore responsabile], Milan: Editrice CIPIA, 1990.](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6a074f91e54cbe1a0e669fb9/02075e69-551a-46ef-a240-1350e15dd42c/rassegna_43_italian_thumb.jpg)
43 Rassegna: Reklame & Architektur
Vittorio Gregotti [Direttore responsabile]
Milan: Editrice CIPIA, 1990. Original edition [anno XII, 43/3 – settembre 1990]. Text in Italian. Quarto. Plain thick wrappers. Printed dust jacket. 88 [xxiv] pp. 141 illustrations. Illustrated articles and advertisments. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. Lightly handled with a few smudges to wrappers, but a very good or better copy.
9 x 12 soft cover book with 124 pages and 141 illustrations, some in color. The bulk of the journal [88 pages] is devoted to Reklame & Architektur.
Contents
Reklame & Architektur by Jacques Gubler
Immagine e ecultura dell'elettricita a Buenos Aires [The Image and Culture of Electricity in Buenos Aires] by Pancho Liernur
Il sogno pubblicitario Olivettiano [The Olivetti Advertising Dream] by Albe Abriani and Evelina Calvi
Arte di programma in Unione Sovietica [Program Art in the Soviet Union] by Vieri Quilici
Padiglioni, allestimenti e reclame futuristi [Futurist Pavilions, Exposition Design and Advertising] di Ezio Godoli<
Architetture e pubblicitarie [The Advertising Architecture] di L. H. De Koninck by Dario Matteoni
Architettura e pubblicita nella Germania del Terzo Reich [Architecture and Advertising in Third Reich Germany] di Uwe Westphal
L'architettura Bata [Bata Architecture] di Vladimir Slapeta
Vernacolo commerciale a Las Vegas [Commercial Vernacular in Las Vegas] di Steve Izenour and David A. Dashiell III
MEG Print hpl: Complesso alberghiero Eurohotel a Fiano Romano, Progetto di Giorgio Troncarelli, Abet Laboratoria
Tessuti per Sity e Baisity: L'espressione di uno stile di vita, B&B Italia
Once Upon a Time: Nuovo Espace Castelli a Parigi, Progetto di Ronald Cecile Sportes, Castelli
Michelangelo e la Sistina: Illuminotecnica tra restauro e mito, Progetto di Massimo Alfieri, iGuzzione illuminazione
Portafinestra: L'immagine del Mobile, Progetto di Luca Meda, Moleteni & Co.
Come un biglietto da visita: Funzionalita e immagine dell'ascensore in spazi pubblici, Sabiem
Idromassaggio ed elettronica: Il benessere programmato, Teuco
OSRAM Professionals. L'evoluzione del progetto luce: Negozio Miroglio ad Alba, Progetto di Enrico Cappelli, OSRAM
Artists, architects and designers include L. H. De Koninck, Peter Behrens, J. J. P. Oud, Hannes Meyer, Jean Tschumi, Giovanni Pintori, Louis I. Kahn, L. Figini and G. Pollini, Le Corbusier, Richard Meier, Hans Hollein, James Stirling, Kenzo Tange, Marco Zanuso, El Lissitzky, I. Casnik, A. Vesnin, A. Krinskij, Enrico Prampolini, Fortunato Deprero, Nicola Mosso, Cesare Andreoni, Bernhard Rosen, Vladimie Karfik and Frantisek L. Gahura among many others.
Under the loose directorship of Vittorio Gregotti, Rassegna was an Italian Design magazine underwritten by six Italian firms: Ariston, B&B Italia, Castelli, iGuzzini illuminazione, Molteni and co., and Sabiem. Each issue was devoted to a single designer or theme and lavishly produced, with high-quality reproduction and carefully selected and presented illustrations.
27 Rassegna: Ludwig Hilberseimer 1885 / 1967
Vittorio Gregotti [Direttore responsabile]
Bologne: Editrice CIPIA, 1986. Original edition [anno VIII, 27/3 – setembre 1986]. Text in Italian with parallel captions in English. Quarto. Plain thick wrappers. Printed dust jacket. 88 [xxxvi] pp. 155 illustrations. Illustrated articles and advertisements.Lightly handled with a tanned spine, but a nearly fine copy.
9 x 12 soft cover book with 136 pages and 155 illustrations, some in color. The bulk of the journal [88 pages] is devoted to the work of Ludwig Hilberseimer. This book features extensive information culled from the Ludwig Karl Hilberseimer Papers collection, including drawings, photographs, and other printerial material, held by the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries in the Art Institute of Chicago.
Contents
Editoriale by Vittorio Gregotti
Ritratto di un architetto come giovane artista by Marco De Michelis
Apollo e Dioniso: Hilberseimer critico d'arte by Agnes Kohlmeyer
L'architettura della Grossstadt by Christine Mengin
Hilberseimer e Mies: intersezioni e lontananze by Francesco Dal Co
Chicago: la Grossstadt Americana by Peter Beltemacchi
Regesto delle opera e dei progetti 1885/1938
Advertising section
Ludwig Karl Hilberseimer (Germany, 1885 – 1967) was a German architect and urban planner best known for his ties to the Bauhaus and to Mies van der Rohe, as well as for his work in urban planning at Armour Institute of Technology (now Illinois Institute of Technology), in Chicago, Illinois.
Hilberseimer studied architecture at the Karlsruhe Technical University from 1906 to 1910. He left before completing a degree. Afterward he worked in the architectural office Behrens and Neumark. Until 1914 he was coworker in the office of Heinz Lassen in Bremen. Later he led the planning office for Zeppelinhallenbau in Berlin Staaken. Beginning in 1919 he was member of the Arbeitsrat für Kunst and November Group, worked as independent architect and town planner and published numerous theoretical writings over art, architecture and town construction.
In 1929 Hilberseimer was hired by Hannes Meyer to teach at the Bauhaus at Dessau, Germany. In July 1933 Hilberseimer and Wassily Kandinsky were the two members of the Bauhaus that the Gestapo identified as problematically left-wing. Like many members of the Bauhaus, he fled Germany for America. He arrived in 1938 to work for Mies van der Rohe in Chicago while heading the department of urban planning at IIT College of Architecture. Hilberseimer also became director of Chicago's city planning office.
Street hierarchy was first elaborated by Ludwig Hilberseimer in his book City Plan, 1927. Hilberseimer emphasized safety for school-age children to walk to school while increasing the speed of the vehicular circulation system.
Beginning in 1929 at the Bauhaus, Hilberseimer developed studies concerning town construction for the decentralization of large cities. Against the background of the economic and political fall of the Weimar Republic he developed a universal and global adaptable planning system (The new town center, 1944), which planned a gradual dissolution of major cities and a complete penetration of landscape and settlement. He proposed that in order to create a sustainable relationship between humans, industry, and nature, human habitation should be built in a way to secure all people against all disasters and crises.
His most notable built project is Lafayette Park, Detroit, an urban renewal project designed in cooperation with architect Mies van der Rohe and landscape architect Alfred Caldwell.
Under the loose directorship of Vittorio Gregotti, Rassegna was an Italian Design magazine underwritten by six Italian firms: Ariston, B&B Italia, Castelli, iGuzzini illuminazione, Molteni and co., and Sabiem. Each issue was devoted to a single designer or theme and lavishly produced, with high-quality reproduction and carefully selected and presented illustrations.
25 Rassegna: Sigfried Giedion, Un Progetto Storico / Sigfried Giedion, A History Project
Vittorio Gregotti [Direttore responsabile]
Bologne: Editrice CIPIA, 1986. Original edition [Anno VIII, 25/1 – marzo 1986]. Text in Italian with parallel captions in English and translated English, French and German articles to rear. Quarto. Plain thick wrappers. Printed dust jacket. 88 [xxxiv] pp. 112 illustrations. Illustrated articles and advertisements. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. Wrappers lightly worn and spine sunned: a very good or better copy.
9 x 12 soft cover book with 122 pages and 112 illustrations, some in color. The bulk of the journal [88 pages] is devoted to Sigfried Giedion's coverage of the Modern movement of the early 20th century.
Contents
Editoriale by Vittorio Gregotti
Giedion e il suo tempo by Stanislaus von Moos includes work by Eugen Zoller, Max Bill, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, Francis Picabia and Burnham and Co.
Una storia della storia dell'archittetura del XX secolo by Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani includes work by Henri Labrouste, Victor Horta, Otto Wagner, August e Gustae Perret, Tony Garnier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret
Bauen in Frankreich. Eisen, Eisenbeton: Introduzione by Sigfried Giedion includes work by Sigfried Giedion, Victor Baltard and Felix Callet, Louis-Charles Boileau, Paul Sedille, Henro Labrouste, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Gustave Eiffel, Mart Stam, Ferdinand-Joseph Arnodin, Auguste and Gustave Perret and Tony Garnier
Un libro di storia al servizio di una causa by Sokratis Georgiadis includes work by Sigfried Giedion, Auguste and Gustave Perret, Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier and Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret
"Konstruktion un Chaos": il grande progetto in compiuto by Dorothee Huber
Esposizioni reali e esposizioni immaginarie by Gottfried Korff
Giedion e la nozione di stile by Joseph Rykwert
Illustrated advertising section
Sigfried Giedion (Bohemia, 1888 – 1968) was a Bohemian-born Swiss historian and critic of architecture. His ideas and books, Space, Time and Architecture, and Mechanization Takes Command, had an important conceptual influence on the members of the Independent Group at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in the 1950s era.
He was the first secretary-general of the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne [CIAM]. He has also taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. He was a cool dude and knew everybody.
Under the loose directorship of Vittorio Gregotti, Rassegna was an Italian Design magazine underwritten by six Italian firms: Ariston, B&B Italia, Castelli, iGuzzini illuminazione, Molteni and co., and Sabiem. Each issue was devoted to a single designer or theme and lavishly produced, with high-quality reproduction and carefully selected and presented illustrations.
14 Rassegna: Il Diseno dei Materiali Industriali / The Materials of Design
Vittorio Gregotti [Direttore responsabile]
Milan: Editrice CIPIA, 1983. Original edition [anno V, 14/2 – giugno 1983]. Text in Italian with parallel captions in English. Quarto. Plain white paper wrappers. Printed dust jacket. 128 pp. 186 color and black and white illustrations. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. Lightly handled, so a nearly fine copy.
9 x 12 soft cover book with 128 pages and 186 illustrations, some in color. The bulk of the journal [88 pages] is devoted to the Materials of Design.
Contents
Zig-zags Strips and Shapes by Tilmann Buddensieg
Ceramic as an Industrial Product by Andrea Thym
The Mannesmann Case by Otakar Macel
Necessity: Mother of Invention by Manolo De Giorgio
The Italian Way in Plastics by Giampiero Bosoni
Jean Prouve: The Great Tinsmith by Francois Chaslin
Applied Aluminum by Giampiero Bosoni and Manolo De Giorgi
Depero and the Industrial Art of Buxus by Paolo Thea
Linoleum by Torsten Ziegler
Leo Baekeland and the First Synthetic Material by Patricia Griffiths-Waddle
Pigro: Una nuova "machine a repos", Progetti di Carlo Bimbie e Nilo Gioacchini, B&B Italia
Galerie Castelli: Allestimenti per lo showroom di Parigi Castelli
Esprit Nouveau: Riproducibilita du un modello, Grandi Lavori Strutture
La qualita della visione: Nove appuntamenti con la pubblicita, iGuzzini illuminazione
Mobili, componibilita, pareti: La serie 505 Large, Progetto di Luca Meda, Molteni & Co.
L'ascensore tra passato e futuro: Nuovi ascensori per edifici risturrati, Sabiem
L'evoluzione della serie: Forni e piani ad incasso, Ariston
Designers include Mies van der Rohe, Mart Stam, Marcel Breuer, Gerrit Rietveld, Gaston Eysselinck, Gio Ponti, Roberto Menghi, Gino Colombini, Achille and Pier Giacomo, Marco Zanuso, Jean Prouve and Fortunato Depero among others.
Under the loose directorship of Vittorio Gregotti, Rassegna was an Italian Design magazine underwritten by six Italian firms: Ariston, B&B Italia, Castelli, iGuzzini illuminazione, Molteni and co., and Sabiem. Each issue was devoted to a single designer or theme and lavishly produced, with high-quality reproduction and carefully selected and presented illustrations.
10 Rasseggna: Allestimenti / Exhibition Design
Vittorio Gregotti [Direttore responsabile]
Bologne: Editrice CIPIA, 1982. Original edition [anno IV, no. 10 – guigno 1982]. Text in Italian with parallel captions in English and translated English articles to rear. Quarto. Plain thick wrappers. Printed dust jacket. 88 [xxvi] pp. 177 illustrations. Illustrated articles and advertisments. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. Wrappers lightly worn and soiled, but a very good or better copy.
9 x 12 soft cover book with 114 pages and 177 illustrations, some in color. The bulk of the journal [88 pages] is devoted to Exhibition Design in the 20th century.
Contents
Introduzione by Pasquale Plaisant and Sergio Polano
Una macchina visual: L'allestimento d'arte e i suoi archetipi moderni by Germano Celant includes work by Giacomo Balla, Ivan Puni, El Lissitzky, Marcel Duchamp, Frederick Kiesler and Walter Gropius.
Una logica della rappresentazione: Gli elementi della struttura espositiva by Nicola Marras includes work by Achille Castiglioni with Paolo Ferrari and Max Huber
Per mettersi in mostra: La Biennale di Venezia e i suoi allestitori by Giandomenico Romanelli includes work by Carlo Scarpa, Franco Albini and Livio Castiglioni and Davide Boriani among others
La technologia del cartone: Invenzione futurista di ambienti spettacolo by Pierpaolo Vetta includes many works by Fortunato Depero among a few others
La Triennale di Milano 1923-1947: Allestimento, astrazione, conteestualizzazione by Giacomo Polin includes work by Carlo Carra, Fortunato Depero, Gigi Chessa, Giuseppe Terragni, Joseph Hoffmann, L. Figini and G. Pollini, Giovanni Muzio and Mario Sironi, Luigi Piccinato, F. Albini, G. Pagano, R. Camus, G. Palanti, T. Mazzoleni and G. Minoletti, Ettore Prampolini, Max Bill, F. Albini and G. Romano, BBPR and Renzo Camus among others
L'autorappresentazione del fascismo: La mostra del decennale della marcia su Roma by Giorgo Ciucci includes work by Mario De Renzi e Adalberto Libera, Ettore Prampolini, Marcello Nizzoli, Giuseppe Terragni and Mario Sironi among others
La Quadriennale di Roma: Fra tradizione e innovazione by Silvio Pasquarelli
L'assenza dell'oggetto: Allestimento alla Triennale 1947-1968 by Gaddo Morpungo
Lo spettacolo da visitare: Allestimento e comunicazione visiva by Gaddo Morpungo
L'allestimento e l'industria: L'effimero e il suo contrario by Pierparide Vidari includes work by Marcello Nizzoli, Herbert Bayer, Malcolm Allum, Albert Leclerc, Erberto Carboni, Achille et Pier Giacomo Castiglioni, Gio Ponti and Constantino Corsini among others
Allusione e illusione: Note sulla progettazione di alcune mostre contemporanee includes work by Achille Castiglioni, Constantino Dardi, Aldo Rossi, Daniela Ferretti, Maurizio Di Puolo, M. Albini, F. Helg, Roberto Einaudi, Paolo Piva, Marco Dezzi Bardeschi, Guido Canali, Gregotti Assoc., Bruno Monguzzi and Roberto Menghi among others
Illustrated advertising section
Under the loose directorship of Vittorio Gregotti, Rassegna was an Italian Design magazine underwritten by six Italian firms: Ariston, B&B Italia, Castelli, iGuzzini illuminazione, Molteni and co., and Sabiem. Each issue was devoted to a single designer or theme and lavishly produced, with high-quality reproduction and carefully selected and presented illustrations.
7 Rassegna: Carlo Scarpa, Frammenti 1926 / 1978
Vittorio Gregotti [Direttore responsabile]
Bologne: Editrice CIPIA, 1981. Original edition [anno III, no. 7 – luglio 1981]. Text in Italian with parallel captions in English and translated English articles to rear. Quarto. Plain thick wrappers. Printed dust jacket. 88 [xxvi] pp. 144 illustrations. Illustrated articles and advertisements. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. Wrappers lightly worn with mildly sunned spine: a nearly fine copy.
9 x 12 soft cover book with 114 pages and 144 illustrations, some in color. The bulk of the journal [88 pages] is devoted to the work of Carlo Scarpa. This book considers the full spectrum of Scarpa's work, and closely follows Scarpa's complex, multidimensional personality, covering the vicissitudes of his career, his ideas and their relationship to those of the modern masters, his cultural milieu, and his unique architectural contribution, which is imbued with a profound feeling for craft.
Contents:
Editoriale: Vittorio Gregotti
Carlo Scarpa, Frammenti 1926/1978
Brescia, progetto per il Monumento ai Caduti in Piazza della Loggia: Arrigo Rudi
Feltre, progetto per il Museo Archeologico Sotterraneo: Ferruccio Franzoia
Parigi, progetto per il Museo Picasso: Arrigo Rudi
Volevo ritagliare l'azzurro del cielo: Carlo Scarpa
Bibliografia
Illustrated advertising section featuring design work by Ceramiche Ragno, Laura Mandelli, iGuzzini, Makio Hasuike, Ariston, Richard Sapper and B&B Italia.
Carlo Scarpa [1902 - 1978] belongs to the generation of Italian architects working in a period when political conditions placed severe restrictions on architectural expression. Yet Scarpa's achievements surpassed anything else being done in Italy between the wars and exemplified the best work done in the 'Rationalist' tradition.
At the time of his death in 1978 at the age of 72, Carlo Scarpa was at the height of his fame and influence. His buildings and projects were being studied by architects and students throughout the world, and his decorative style had become a model for architects wishing to revive craft and luscious materials in the contemporary manner. Yet Carlo Scarpa remains an enigmatic character in the history of modern architecture and design. His work does not submit easily to explanation and analysis, despite attempts by numerous architects and historians, nor is it particularly photogenic.
"During the late 1920s and 1930s Carlo Scarpa became acquainted with a number of influential intellectual figures in Italy and abroad. Massimo Bontempelli, Carlo Carra, and Arturi Martini became his friends. It was during this time that Carlo Scarpa also began a relationship with the Venini Glass Works in Venice, for whom Scarpa created many designs. He painted avidly during this period in a novecento style reminiscent of Mario Sironi and Carra. Also during the late 1920s, Carlo Scarpa began his career as an interior designer and industrial designer.
Under the loose directorship of Vittorio Gregotti, Rassegna was an Italian Design magazine underwritten by six Italian firms: Ariston, B&B Italia, Castelli, iGuzzini illuminazione, Molteni and co., and Sabiem. Each issue was devoted to a single designer or theme and lavishly produced, with high-quality reproduction and carefully selected and presented illustrations.
21 Rassegna: Louis I. Kahn 1901/1974
Vittorio Gregotti [Direttore responsabile]
Bologne: Editrice CIPIA, 1985. Original edition [anno VII, 21/1 – marzo 1985]. Text in Italian and English with parallel captions in Italian and English. Quarto. Plain thick wrappers. Printed dust jacket. 88 [xxxii] pp. 250 illustrations. Illustrated articles and advertisements. Lightly handled, but a nearly fine copy in publishers dust jacket.
9 x 12 soft cover book with 124 pages and approx. 250 illustrations, some in color. The bulk of the journal [88 pages] is devoted to Louis I. Kahn, an architect who quickly moved beyond a dogmatic approach to modernism and incorporating nods to ancient Greece, Egypt, and Italy. Isamu Noguchi called him "a philosopher among architects."
Contents
Modern Connection by Vittorio Gregotti
Louis I. Kahn and Philadephia. Notes on Modernization and the Trans-Historical City by Kenneth Frampton
Between order and Form. Fragments of an Idea of History by Maurizio Sabini
Value and Aim in Sketching by Louis I. Kahn
Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, CA [1959-1965] with text by Jonas Salk
Parliament and Government Centre, Dacca, Bangladesh [1962-1974] with text by Florinda Fusaro and David Wisdom
Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX [1966-1972] includes an interview with Kahn by Marshall Meyers
Castles of Eternity. The Architectural Hyerogliphics of Louis I. Kahn by Joseph Burton
Kahn and Yale by William S. Huff
List of Works and Projects
Bibliography
Un allestimento per Apta: Salone del Mobile di Milano, Castelli
Prisma: Un sistema per l'illuminazione, Progetto di Bruno Gecchelin, iGuzzini illuminazione
Architetture razionali II: "108," disegno di Luca Meda, Molteni & Co.
Immagini di un'industria: La produzione: il quadro di manovra, Sabiem
Panellabile e integrata: Due nuove serie di lavastoviglie, Ariston
Ario: Progetto studio Kairos, B&B Italia
Under the loose directorship of Vittorio Gregotti, RASSEGNA was an Italian Design magazine underwritten by six Italian firms: Ariston, B&B Italia, Castelli, iGuzzini illuminazione, Molteni and co., and Sabiem. Each issue was devoted to a single designer or theme and lavishly produced, with high-quality reproduction and carefully selected and presented illustrations.
Louis Isadore Kahn (born Itze-Leib Schmuilowsky) (1901 – 1974) was born into a poor Jewish Estonian family and achieved much fame and noriety as an American architect and major-league player based in Philadelphia. After working in various capacities for several firms in Philadelphia, he founded his own atelier in 1935. While continuing his private practice, he served as a design critic and professor of architecture at Yale School of Architecture from 1947 to 1957.
From 1957 until his death, he was a professor of architecture at the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. Kahn created a style that was monumental and monolithic; his heavy buildings for the most part do not hide their weight, their materials, or the way they are assembled. Louis Kahn's works are considered as monumental beyond modernism. Famous for his meticulously built works, his provocative proposals that remained unbuilt, and his teaching, Kahn was one of the most influential architects of the twentieth century. He was awarded the AIA Gold Medal and the RIBA Gold Medal. At the time of his death he was considered by some as "America's foremost living architect."
Kahn trained at the University of Pennsylvania in a rigorous Beaux-Arts tradition, with its emphasis on drawing. After completing his Bachelor of Architecture in 1924, Kahn worked as senior draftsman in the office of the city architect, John Molitor. He worked on the designs for the 1926 Sesquicentennial Exposition. In 1928, Kahn made a European tour. He was interested particularly in the medieval walled city of Carcassonne, France, and the castles of Scotland, rather than any of the strongholds of classicism or modernism. After returning to the United States in 1929, Kahn worked in the offices of Paul Philippe Cret, his former studio critic at the University of Pennsylvania, and then with Zantzinger, Borie and Medary in Philadelphia.
In 1932, Kahn and Dominique Berninger founded the Architectural Research Group, whose members were interested in the populist social agenda and new aesthetics of the European avant-gardes. Among the projects Kahn worked on during this collaboration are schemes for public housing that he had presented to the Public Works Administration, which supported some similar projects during the Great Depression. They remained unbuilt.
Among the more important of Kahn's early collaborations was one with George Howe. Kahn worked with Howe in the late 1930s on projects for the Philadelphia Housing Authority and again in 1940, along with German-born architect Oscar Stonorov, for the design of housing developments in other parts of Pennsylvania. A formal architectural office partnership between Kahn and Oscar Stonorov began in February 1942 and ended in March 1947, which produced fifty-four documented projects and buildings.
Kahn did not arrive at his distinctive architectural style until he was in his fifties. Initially working in a fairly orthodox version of the International Style, he was influenced vitally by a stay as Architect in Residence at the American Academy in Rome during 1950, which marked a turning point in his career. After visiting the ruins of ancient buildings in Italy, Greece, and Egypt, he adopted a back-to-the-basics approach. He developed his own style as influenced by earlier modern movements, but not limited by their sometimes-dogmatic ideologies.
Kahn's teaching career began at Yale University in 1947. He eventually was named as the Albert F. Bemis Professor of Architecture and Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1956. Kahn then returned to Philadelphia to teach at the University of Pennsylvania from 1957 until his death, becoming the Paul Philippe Cret Professor of Architecture. He also was a visiting lecturer at Princeton University from 1961 to 1967.
Kahn was elected a Fellow in the American Institute of Architects (AIA) in 1953. He was made a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1964. He was awarded the Frank P. Brown Medal in 1964. In 1965 he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate Academician. He was made a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1968 and awarded the AIA Gold Medal, the highest award given by the AIA, in 1971, and the Royal Gold Medal by the RIBA, in 1972.
In 1974, Kahn died of a heart attack in a men's restroom at Penn Station in Manhattan. He had just returned from a work trip to India. Owing to police miscommunications in both New York City and Philadelphia, his wife and his office were not notified until two days after his death. After his long career, he was in debt when he died.
Kahn had three children with three women. With his wife, Esther, whom he married in 1930, he had a daughter, Sue Ann. With Anne Tyng, who began her working collaboration and personal relationship with Kahn in 1945, he also had a daughter, Alexandra Tyng. When Tyng became pregnant in 1953, to mitigate the scandal, she went to Rome, Italy, for the birth of their daughter. With Harriet Pattison, he had a son, Nathaniel Kahn.
Kahn's obituary in the New York Times, written by Paul Goldberger, mentions only Esther and his daughter by her as survivors. All of his children and their mothers attended the funeral. In 2003 Nathaniel Kahn released a documentary about his father, entitled, My Architect: A Son's Journey. The Oscar-nominated film provides views and insights into the architecture of Kahn while exploring him personally through people who knew him: family, friends, and colleagues. It also provides insights into Kahn's unusual and complicated family arrangements.
Louis Kahn's work infused the International style with a fastidious, highly personal taste, a poetry of light. His few projects reflect his deep personal involvement with each. Isamu Noguchi called him "a philosopher among architects." He was known for his ability to create monumental architecture that responded to the human scale. He also was concerned with creating strong formal distinctions between served spaces and servant spaces. What he meant by servant spaces was not spaces for servants, but rather spaces that serve other spaces, such as stairwells, corridors, restrooms, or any other back-of-house function such as storage space or mechanical rooms. His palette of materials tended toward heavily textured brick and bare concrete, the textures often reinforced by juxtaposition to highly refined surfaces such as travertine marble. He is often well remembered for his deliberation about the use of brick, on how it can be more than the basic building material:
“If you think of Brick, you say to Brick, ‘What do you want, Brick?’ And Brick says to you, ‘I like an Arch.’ And if you say to Brick, ‘Look, arches are expensive, and I can use a concrete lintel over you. What do you think of that, Brick?’ Brick says, ‘I like an Arch.’ And it’s important, you see, that you honor the material that you use. [..] You can only do it if you honor the brick and glorify the brick instead of shortchanging it.”
47 Rassegna: Mart Stam 1899 – 1966
Vittorio Gregotti [Direttore responsabile]
Bologne: Editrice CIPIA, setembre 1991. Original edition [anno XIII, 47/3 – setembre 1991]. Text in Italian. Quarto. Plain thick wrappers. Printed dust jacket. 88 [xxxiv] pp. 194 illustrations. Illustrated articles and advertisments. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. Lightly handled, but a fine copy.
9 x 12 soft cover book with 136 pages and 194 illustrations, some in color. The bulk of the journal [88 pages] is devoted to the work of Dutch architect, urban planner, and furniture designer Mart Stam. Under the loose directorship of Vittorio Gregotti, RASSEGNA was an Italian Design magazine underwritten by six Italian firms: Ariston, B&B Italia, Castelli, iGuzzini illuminazione, Molteni and co., and Sabiem. Each issue was devoted to a single designer or theme and lavishly produced, with high-quality reproduction and carefully selected and presented illustrations.
Contents
Editoriale by Vittorio Gregotti
Ritratto di un architetto [Portrait of an Architect] by Gerrit Oorthuys
Mart Stam o la rappresentazionedella nuova architettura [Mart Stam or the representation of New Architecture] by Werner Muller includes work by Mart Stam, Hans Schmidt, Granpre Moliere, Wladimir Schuchow, Theo Van Doesburg and Mondrian among others
Influenze e contatti. La rivista ABC [Influences and Contacts. The ABC Magazine] by Simone Rummele
L'architettura di Mart Stam tra avanguardia e funzionalismo [Mart Stam's Architecture Between Avantgarde and Functionalism] by Jose Bosman
Viaggio di ritorno dall'Unione Sovietica all'Olanda [The Return Journey from The Soviet Union to Holland] by Jeroen Schilt
La dittatura del modern [The Dictatorship of the Modern] by Simone hain
La linea continua del sedersi [The Continuous Line of Sitting ] by Otakar Macel
Elenco delle opera e dei progetti [List of Works and Projects] by Gerrit Oorthuys, Werner Muller and Sabine Lebesque
Illustrated advertising section includes Pubblicazioni per il XXX Salone del Mobile di Milano [Art Director: Luca Meda; Graphic Design: Felix Humm]
Mart Stam (1899 – 1986) was a Dutch architect, urban planner, and furniture designer. Stam was extraordinarily well-connected, and his career intersects with important moments in the history of 20th-century European architecture, including chair design at the Bauhaus, the Weissenhof Estate, the "Van Nelle Factory", an important modernist landmark building in Rotterdam, buildings for Ernst May's New Frankfurt housing project then to Russia with the idealistic May Brigade, to postwar reconstruction in Germany.
His style of design has been classified as New Objectivity, an art movement formed during the depression in 1920's Germany, as a counter-movement and an out growth of Expressionism.
Martinus Adrianus Stam was born in Purmerend, Netherlands on 5 August 1899 to a tax collector and his wife. He attended a local school in Purmurend, before training in Amsterdam at the Royal School for Advanced Studies (Rijksnormaalschool for Teekenonderwijzers) for two years between 1917 and 1919.
After qualifying in 1919, Stam began working as a draftsman with an architectural firm in Rotterdam. He boldly stated between his qualification and first career that "We have to change the world." The architectural firm was run by the architect Granpré Molière. Molière was a traditionalist, and had a different style of design to Stam, but the two worked together well, and Stam was invited to work for Molière personally in his studio in Rotterdam.
However, in 1920, Stam was imprisoned for refusing to serve in the military (dienstweigeren), something which was compulsory in the Netherlands at that time. Those that refused to conscribe were imprisoned for the time period of which the service would take place. Stam was released in 1922, and later that year, created what has been said to be his first major achievement - in 1922, through a contest, he was appointed to draw up urban infrastructure plans for the The Hague region. This was a standard plan in many senses, but the main striking feature, was that the majority of the roads, particularly in coastal areas, ran perpendicular to the beach.
By the end of 1922, Stam had moved to Berlin, where he began to develop his style as a New Objectivity architect. In the 3 year period, he had successfully worked in to major agencies - Bureau Granpré Molière, and To Van der Mey. This work would benefit him greatly through his later years.
His first major work in Berlin was under prominent architect — and Tater's brother —Max Taut. Stam was assigned to design a variety of buildings across Germany, notably assisting Taut in the design of the German Trade Union Federation Building, Düsseldorf. During this time, he also worked with Russian avant-garde architect El Lissitzky. The pair's most striking design was the Wolkenbügel, or cloud iron, a t-shaped skyscraper supported on 3 metal framed columns. Although never built, the building was a vivid contrast to America's vertical building style, as the building only rose up a relatively modest height then expanded horizontally over an intersection so make better use of space. Its three posts were on three different street corners, canvassing the intersection. An illustration of it appeared on the front cover of Adolf Behne's book, Der Moderne Zweckbau, and articles on it written by Lissitzky appeared in an issue of the Moscow-based architectural review, ASNOVA News (journal of ASNOVA, the Association of New Architects), and in the German art journal Das Kunstblatt.
In Zurich in 1923 he co-founded the magazine 'ABC Beitrage zum Bauen' (Contributions on Building) with architect Hans Schmidt, future Bauhaus director the Swiss architect Hannes Meyer, and El Lissitzky.
Stam is also credited for at least part of the design of the Van Nelle Fabriek in Rotterdam, built from 1926 through 1930. This coffee and tea factory is still a powerful example of early modernist industrial architecture, recently rehabilitated into offices. An embarrassing dispute over the authorship of this design caused Stam to leave the office of Leen Van der Vlugt, the credited designer.
After moving to Berlin, Stam devised a steel-tubing cantilever chair, using lengths of standard gas pipe and standard pipe joint fittings. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe became aware of Stam's work on the chair during planning for the Weissenhof Siedlung and mentioned it to Marcel Breuer at the Bauhaus. This led almost immediately to variations on the cantilevered tubular-steel chair theme by both Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer, and began an entire genre of chair design. In the late 1920s, Breuer and Stam were involved in a patent lawsuit in German courts, both claiming to be the inventor of the basic cantilever chair design principle. Stam won the lawsuit, and, since that time, specific Breuer chair designs have often been erroneously attributed to Stam. In the United States, Breuer assigned the rights to his designs to Knoll, and for that reason it is possible to find the identical chair attributed to Stam in Europe and to Breuer in the U.S.
Stam contributed a house to the 1927 Weissenhof Estate, the permanent housing project developed and presented by the exhibition "Die Wohnung" ("The Dwelling"), organized by the Deutscher Werkbund in Stuttgart. This put him in the company of Le Corbusier, Peter Behrens, Bruno Taut, Hans Poelzig, and Walter Gropius, and the exhibition had as many as 20,000 visitors a day. In 1927 he became a founding member, with Gerrit Rietveld and Hendrik Petrus Berlage, of the Congrès Internationaux d`Architecture Moderne (CIAM).
In the late 1920s Stam was part of the team at the New Frankfurt project. In 1930 Stam became one of the 20 architects and urban planners organized by Frankfurt city planner Ernst May who traveled together to the Soviet Union to create a string of new Stalinist cities, including Magnitogorsk. The "May Brigade" included Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, her husband Wilhelm Schütte, Arthur Korn, Erich Mauthner and Hans Schmidt. Stam was there in February 1931 to participate in the struggle to build rational worker housing from the ground up, an effort ultimately defeated by adverse weather, corruption, and poor design decisions. Stam moved to planning activities in Makeyevka in Ukraine in 1932, then to Orsk, with his friend Hans Schmidt (again) and with Bauhaus student and future wife Lotte Beese, then to the copper-mining Soviet city of Balgash. Stam returned to the Netherlands in 1934.
Stam was later named director of the Institute of Industrial Art in the Netherlands. From 1948 to 1952 he moved to postwar Germany, with its major reconstruction projects. In 1948 he took a professorship at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Dresden and began advocating a modern, strict structure for the heavily destroyed urban landscape, a plan which most of the citizens rejected as an "all-out attack on the identity of the city", and which would have obliterated most of the remaining landmarks. In 1950 Stam became director of the Advanced Institute of Art in Berlin. Returning to Amsterdam in 1953, Stam and his wife moved to Switzerland in about 1966 and withdrew from public view. He died, aged 86, in Zürich.
12 Rassegna: Architettura nelle Riviste D'Avantguardia / Architecture in the Avant-Garde Magazines
Vittorio Gregotti [Direttore responsabile]
Milan: Editrice CIPIA, 1982. Original edition [anno IV, n. 12 - dicembre 1982]. Text in Italian with English translations to rear and parallel English cutlines. Quarto. Plain white paper wrappers. Printed dust jacket. 114 pp. 225 color and black and white illustrations. Interior unmarked and clean. Out-of-print. Wrappers faintly dust spotted and spine mildly sunned. Spine heel pushed, but a nearly fine copy in a nearly fine dust jacket.
9 x 12 soft cover book with 114 pages and 225 illustrations, some in color. The bulk of the journal [88 pages] is devoted to the Architecture in the Avant-Garde Magazines.
Contents
I dispacci dell'avanguardia by Jacques Gubler
Centralita e periferia: il contributo dell'Europa Centrale by Antoine Baudin
Memorie de Bucarest by Radu Stern
Manometre: architettura sotto pressione e gravita della scrittura by Richard Quincerot
Il momento Inglese by Broan Hanson
Gli anni del Contro by Franco Raggi
La rete delle reviste
Il cotto: Evoluzione e prospettive di un materiale "antico" Habitema
Ricerca e nascita di un prodotto: iGuzzini illuminazione
Marlo: Il letto come "unita integrata" [On progetto di Afra e Tobia Scarpa, Molteni & C.]
La cerniera elemento portante: Dal particolare al generale, Ariston
Un nuovo spazio espositivo: Un progetto di Antonio Citterio, B&B Italia
Penelope: Un progetto di Charles Pollock, Castelli
Designers include Moholy-Nagy, Mart Stam, Hannes Meyer, Kurt Schwitters, El Lissitzky, Lajos Kassak, Fernand Leger, Karel Teige, Henryk Berlewi, Tony Garnier, Anthony Cox, Theo Crosby and Edward Wright, Archigram and Peter Murrat among many many others.
Under the loose directorship of Vittorio Gregotti, Rassegna was an Italian Design magazine underwritten by six Italian firms: Ariston, B&B Italia, Castelli, iGuzzini illuminazione, Molteni and co., and Sabiem. Each issue was devoted to a single designer or theme and lavishly produced, with high-quality reproduction and carefully selected and presented illustrations.
![6 Rassegna: Il Campo della Grafica Italiana [The Field of Italian Graphics]. Milan: Editrice CIPIA, aprile 1981.](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6a074f91e54cbe1a0e669fb9/94a69553-c6e8-44b5-8360-7f51f70e5483/rassegna_6_thumb.jpg)
6 Rassegna: Il Campo della Grafica Italiana
[The Field of Italian Graphics]
Vittorio Gregotti [Direttore responsabile]:
Milan: Editrice CIPIA, 1981. Original edition [anno III, n. 6 – aprile 1981]. Text in Italian with English translations to rear and parallel English cutlines. Quarto. Plain white paper wrappers. Printed dust jacket. 164 pp. 554 color and black and white illustrations. Multiple fold-outs. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. Wrappers lightly handled, but a nearly fine copy.
9 x 12 soft cover book with 164 pages and 554 color and black and white illustrations. The bulk of the journal [104 pages] is devoted to IL CAMPO DELLA GRAFICA ITALIANA. Features hundreds of Posters, Advertisements, Catalogues, Packaging and Corporate Identity Packages from the Golden Age of Italian Graphic Design. Rassegna 6 is one of the finest single collections of Italian Graphic Design yet published. Highly recommended.
Under the loose directorship of Vittorio Gregotti, RASSEGNA was an Italian Design magazine underwritten by six Italian firms: Ariston, B&B Italia, Castelli, iGuzzini illuminazione, Molteni and co., and Sabiem. Each issue was devoted to a single designer or theme and lavishly produced, with high-quality reproduction and carefully selected and presented illustrations.
Contents
Il campo della grafica italiana: storia e problemi by Giovanni Anceschi
Una B rossa fra due punti: Colloquio con Antonio Boggeri
Una posologia progettuale by Omar Calabrese
Il campo della grafica italiana: progetti [Testi di Renato Giovannoli, Bruno Monguzzi, Massimo Vignelli, Tomás Maldonado, Franco Fortini, Maurizio Ferraris, Isabella Pezzini, Enzo Mari, Tomás Maldonado & Gui Bonsiepe, etc. ]
La forma delle piastrelle by Ceramiche Ragno
Sistema per illuminazione esterna: Un progetto di Bruno Gecchelin [iGuzzini]
Mou e Monk, Tavoli e sedie: Un progetto di Afra e Tobia Scarpa [Molteni & C.]
Design Dl, Spazi per cucina: Un progetto di Makio Hasuike [Ariston]
Alanda, Forma, equilibrio, uso: Un progetto di Paolo Piva [B&B Italia]
Strutture-arredo: Un'applicazione del Pert integrata a un'archittetura [Castelli]
Designers include Antonio Boggeri, Bruno Munari, George Grosz and John Heartfield, Kurt Schwitters, László Moholy-Nagy, Piet Zwart, Herbert Bayer, Max Huber, Ezio Bonini, Albe Steiner, Aldo Calabresi, Remo Muratore, Giovanni Pintori, Franco Grignani, Pino Tovaglia, Giuseppe Trivisani, Xanti Schawinsky, Bruno Monguzzi, Massimo Vignelli, Walter Ballmer, Enzo Mari, Tomas Maldonando, Italo Lupi, A. G. Fronzoni, Saul Steinberg, Michele Spera, Bob Noorda, Giulio Cittato and Mimmo Castellano among others.
In 1933, a new direction in Italian Avant-Garde design were trumpeted by the opening of the Studio Boggeri in Milan in the heart of the industrial north. Former violinist Antonio Boggeri opened his self-named studio to spread the avant-garde stylings of The Ring of New Advertising Artists to the Italian peninsula. This being Italy, things quickly got complicated, with strict Bauhaus dogma yielding to Milan's playful karma. Boggeri's all-star roster started with Bauhaus-trained Xanti Schawinsky and quickly grew to include Marcello Nizzoli, Erberto Carboni, Imre Reiner and Kathe Bernhardt.
Boggeri and his colleagues paid tribute to the homegrown aesthetic of Marinetti’s Futurism, but were firmly forward-looking with their embrace of contemporary trends such as PhotoMontage, Collage and the ideology of the New Typography, while -- in the spirit of inclusiveness -- mixing in every other “Ism” of the 1930s Avant-Garde. The exuberance of early Boggeri output got Mussolini's attention, and Il Duce followed the aesthetic leads of Hitler and Stalin by clamping down on the artistic diversity radiating out of Milan.
Studio Boggeri survived the was and quickly came to the the forefront of the postwar Italian design Renaissance, trading the Avant-Garde stylings of the prewar years for the cool calculations of the Swiss through the fifties al the way into the eighties, all the while maintaining their essential spirit of levity.
Antonio Boggeri’s (Italian, 1900– 1989) first love was the violin. The musical prodigy enrolled at the Technical Institute of Pavia at age 16 where he added a Kodak 4x4 camera to his creative toolbox. Within two years he relocated to Milan and met Antonio Crespi. In 1924, Crespi bought the leading printing company in Milan, Alfieri & Lacroix and Boggeri was offered a job at Alferi & Lacroix.
After Boggeri gained printing experience at Alferi & Lacroix, he opened Studio Boggeri in Milan in 1933. Boggeri was heavily influenced by Russian photomontage techniques, the typographic modernity of Jan Tschichold and the work emanating from the Dessau Bauhaus. Before Fascism calcified European culture Milan was one of the Continental creative crossroads, attracting talent from neighboring Switzerland, Austria, and all the southern regions of Italy.
Studio Boggeri quickly grew into one of the best and most important design studios in the world. The Studio connected the dots between Italian and Swiss graphic design like no one before, solidifying Modernism as the dominant principle of graphic design. No other firm could match the an outstanding Boggeri roster : Albe Steiner, Aldo Calabresi, Antonio Boggeri himself, Armando Milani, Bob Noorda, Bruno Monguzzi, Bruno Munari, Carlo Vivarelli, Enzo Mari, Ezio Bonini, Fortunato Depero, Franco Grignani, Imre Reiner, Marcello Nizzoli, Max Huber, Remo Muratore, René Martinelli, Roberto Sambonet, Walter Ballmer, Xanti Schawinsky, and many others.
Antonio Boggeri was invited by Alliance Graphique Internationale for exhibition in Paris (1951), London (1956), Lausanne (1957) and Milan (1961). He received the Triennale gold medal and was awarded the Life of Adverstising Award in 1967. He appointed an honorary member of Art Director Club of Milan. Studio Boggeri closed in 1981. Antonio Boggeri passed away in Santa Margherita Ligure on November 10th, 1989.
30 Rassegna : Piet Zwart: L'Opera Tipografica 1923 – 1933 / Piet Zwart, the Typographical Work 1923 – 1933
Bruno Monguzzi
Bologna: Editrice C.I.P.I.A. s.r.l. , 1987. First edition [anno 9, 30/2]. Text in Italian with parallel captions in English and English translation at the rear. Plain stiff wrappers. Printed dust jacket. [xxviii] 88 pp. 173 color and black and white illustrations. Out-of-print. Interior unmarked and very clean. Wrappers very lightly handled, but a nearly fine copy.
9 x 12 softcover book with 88 pages devoted to Piet Zwart's typographical work from 1923-1933. Lengthy essay by Bruno Monguzzi along with 173 color and black and white examples of Zwart's avant-garde Dutch typography. Rassegna 30 presents the most extensive published collection of Zwarts' early typography to date. My highest recommendation.
Under the loose directorship of Vittorio Gregotti, Rassegna is an Italian Design magazine underwritten by six Italian firms: Ariston, B&B Italia, Castelli, iGuzzini illuminazione, Molteni and co., and Sabiem. Each issue is devoted to a single designer or theme and is lavishly produced, with high-quality reproduction and carefully selected and presented illustrations.
During his prolific career, Piet Zwart (1885-1972) worked in many spheres, often concurrently. These included graphic design, architecture, architectural criticism, furniture design, industrial design, painting, writing, photography, and design education. His association with the advanced design movements in other parts of Europe and his acquaintance with artists such as Schwitters, Berlage, Schuitema, Van Doesburg, Huszar, Rietveld, Wils, Kiljan, and Lissitsky all helped to crystallize his own convictions and aesthetic visions. Glimmers of the Bauhaus, De Stijl, Constructivism, Nieuwe Bouwen (New Construction), and Dada all surface in Zwart's oeuvre.
In 1919 Zwart worked as draftsman for Jan Wils' De Stijl company. Two years later he became assistant of architect H.P. Berlage. Zwart later wrote: "At that time the relationship of architect to co-worker was completely different from today. Assistants are now usually mentioned, at least if they are of any importance. In those days not, you were the humble employee, the architect was your employer and the relationship was quite fixed."
At the age of 36 Zwart did his first typographic work for the Dutch importer Vickers House. Zwart's 1923 Vickers House Metamorphic advertisement for "zagen, boren en vijle" (saws, drills and files) clearly has its roots in El Lissitsky suprematisch worden van twee kwadraten in 6 konstrukties Published by Van Doesburg in 1922. Like Lissitsky, Zwart made use of the visual pun, and a single N serves as the final letter of the first three words, Zagen, boeren en vijlen. Then the design is shifted so that another N becomes the first letter of the word Nu. Finally, the N is transformed into an H, becoming the first letter of the words Het and Haag. The center diagonal stroke of the H is separated from the two verticals, and comes to a horizontal rest in the last stage. This design already shows hints of Zwart's phenomenal N.K.F advertisements, which began in 1923. The viewer is guided through the labyrinthine composition, an early example of Zwart's intent to include the time factor and structure information in a design.
In 1923 Berlage introduced Zwart to his son-in-law, who was on the board of directors for the Nederlandsche Kabel Fabrick (Dutch Cable Factory). This began an extraordinary client-designer relationship that would continue until 1933. During these ten years, he produced no less than 275 advertisements for the Tijdschrift voor Electrotechniek (Magazine for Electro-technology) and the publication Sterkstroom (Strong Current). Essentially typographic, these advertisements constitute Zwart's major contribution to Dutch typography and form. Together with Werkman's The Next Call and Schuitema's work for the Berkel Scale and Meat-Packing Companies, it is the most original, venturesome, and provocative work by the avant garde in The Netherlands during this period. It is the genesis of what would eventually change the face of Dutch graphic design.
Like most others during this period, Zwart was self-taught in typography, and although he had been designing printed pieces since the end of 1921, acquiring the Nederlandsche Kable Fabriek as his main client made him realize just how little he actually knew about printing technology:
"The first design that I made for the NKF was hand drawn. I was still not finished with it when the publication had already come out. At that time I realized that this was not a very good way to work and then plunged headfirst into typography. The nice thing about all of this was that I actually learned about it from an assistant in the small printing company where the monthly magazine in electro-technology was being produced.
"... After going through the bitter experience of that piece being too late, I made more sketches and then played typographic games with the assistant in the afternoon hours, how we could make this and that....
"Actually, that's how I came to understand the typographic profession, I didn't know the terms, I didn't know the methods, I didn't even know the difference between capitals and lower case letters."
By 1924 the influence of Lissitsky on Zwart was evident, and some of the telephone cable advertisements of that year were again very close to pages from El Lissitsky suprematisch worden van twee kwadraten in 6 Konstrukties. The NKF assignment can be divided into four segments: the magazine advertisements (1923-1933); Het Normalieenboekje (Normalization Booklet) (1924-25); the 64-page catalog published in Dutch and english (1928-29); and the information booklet Delft Kabels (1933). Het Normalieenbockje, one of Zwart's least known works, represents a turning point in his typography. One major difference is the use of an additional contrast, color, which was absent in th advertisements. However, color was included not as a decorative element, but more as a graphic cue.
Zwart referred to himself as typotekt, a combination of the words typographer and architect. To a large extent this term did indeed express Zwart's conception of his profession-the architect building with stone, wood, and metal; the graphic designer building with typographic material and other visual elements; As the architect finds the right place for the windows, doors, and other parts of the building, the typographer assigns the positions of letters, words, lines and images. For Zwart, typography was also a question of ideology, and he wanted to free the reader from what he considered to be the monotonous typography of the past. Reading would now be a process that directly involved the reader. He felt that it would be possible through the new typography actually to change the way people read. Le Corbusier defined a house as a machine a habiter, and in the same sense Zwart's typography could be called a "machine for reading."
Others such as the poets Mallarme and Apollinaire in France, Van Ostaijen in Belgium, and Marinetti in Italy, had already accentuated words in their work through typography. Lissitsky had used this method in, for example, his poster Beat the Whites with the Red Edge, as had the Futurists and Dadaists. Zwart took the idea a step further by developing it into an unprecedented, transcendent, and feasible typographic method.
In 1923, when Zwart became acquainted with Schwitters and Lissitsky, the latter showed him the "photogram" process and his constructivist interpretation of Vladimir Mayakovsky's poem "For Reading Out Loud." In the photogram technique elements are placed on of above light-sensitive paper, which is then exposed to an enlarger light. Zwart produced photograms as early as 1924, but for the next several years the were used sparingly, for Zwart felt the their value in functional typography was limited.
Later in 1938 Zwart referred to his work as "functional" typography. Its purpose was "to establish the typographic look of our time, free, in so far as it is possible, from tradition; to activate typographic forms; to define the shape of new typographic problems, methods, techniques and discard the guild mentality." Functional and constructive typography were basically one and the same. It was called functional because it discarded aesthetic norms and was based on purely utilitarian objectives; constructive because it had a rational structure and renounced subjectivity and relied on modern technology.
As the printing of photographic reproductions became increasingly more feasible Zwart began to use them in his compositions, and by the summer of 1926 this "phototypography" also started to become part of his visual inventory. His first use of photographs was in the 1928-29 catalog for NKF in which he incorporated close-up cross-section photographs of electric cables. Products had never before been presented with such clarity. He achieved a dynamic balance between text, photograph, and white space on the page. Double-page spreads work as single compositions, and the catalog is distinguished by dramatic contrasts, asymmetry, and spaciousness.
At first Zwart had to use the work of commercial photographers, but he soon became increasingly dissatisfied with the then-popular soft-focus approach, which was essentially an attempt to imitate painting. In 1928 he bought his own camera and very quickly learned the photographic technique. Within a year eh was able to supply all of his own pictures. Zwart's work was characterized by sharp, fine-grained, close-up images and the use of angles and textures. He was also secretary of the Dutch contingent to FIFO, the 199 international photography exhibition in Stuttgart where Zwart, Schuitema, and Kiljan were among the Dutch participants. After being exposed to the advanced work of photographers such as the American Edward Weston and the Russian Alexander Rodchenko, he lamented the rudimentary state of contemporary photography in The Netherlands.
Zwart's designs fulfilled most of Jan Tschichold's criteria for Elementare Typographie, published in Typographische Mittelungen in 1925. Zwart's typography was functional, simple, and organized and restricted to basic typographic elements and photography. By 1930 he began to use mainly lowercase letters. The typefaces were unpretentious variations of sans serifs, nonessential decorative elements were excluded; color was used only for accent; and romantic "artistic" tendencies were rejected. With his 1925 card and envelope designs for the experimental theater group in The Hague, WijNu (We Now), Zwart briefly reverted to his Dada phase with a profuse use of assorted kinds and sizes of typefaces and symbols.
Rassegna 53
Karel Teige, Architettura e Poesia
Vittorio Gregotti [Direttore responsabile]
Bologna: Editrice Compositori srl, 1993. Original edition [anno XV, 53/1, Marzo 1993]. Text in Italian. Slim quarto. Thick printed French folded wrappers. 118 pp. Illustrated articles and trade advertisements. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. Wrappers lightly handled, but a nearly fine copy.
9 x 12 soft cover book with 118 pages and 175 color and black and white illustrations. The bulk of the journal [88 pages] is devoted to the work of Karel Teige in all of his areas of expertise: architecture, typography, book design and collage.
Under the loose directorship of Vittorio Gregotti, Rassegna was an Italian Design magazine underwritten by six Italian firms: Ariston, B&B Italia, Castelli, iGuzzini illuminazione, Molteni and co., and Sabiem. Each issue was devoted to a single designer or theme and lavishly produced, with high-quality reproduction and carefully selected and presented illustrations.
Contents
Editoriale by Vittorio Gregotti
Karel Teige e gli architetti del Devetsil [Karel Teige and the Devetsil Architects] by Rostislav Svacha
Sotto le bandiere del positivismo [Under the Banners of Positivism] by Simone Hain
"Nejmensi byt," la casa minima ["Nejmensí byt," The Minimum Dwelling ] by Eric Dluhosch
L'architettura del libro [Book Architecture] by Zdenek Primus
Karel Teige e la nuova tipografia [Karel Teige and the New Typography] by Karel Srp
Sulle tracce de l'architettura moderna [In Search of Modern Architecture] by Manuela Castagnara Codeluppi
Il paradiso perduto; teige e la Russia sovietica [Paradise Lost: Teige and Soviet Russia] by Otakar Macel
Surrealismo e funzionalisimo: il duplice cammino di Teige [Surrealism and Functionalism: Teige’s Dual Way] by Hans Cisarova
" I consider covers as a manifesto of the book: and this is their true commercial mission, a fact that is confirmed by the editors. It is therefore important that they strike the onlooker in as meaningful and expressive a manner as possible. To achieve this purpose, it is indispensable that their composition be characterized by a somewhat provoking energetic and active chromatic and formal balance; since energy is required, banal regularity is excluded." -- Karel Teige
Because of location and history, Prague has long been a crossroads for various intellectual, religious and artistic currents. Cohabitation by Czech, German and Jewish communities created an inspirational cultural environment during the decade that began in 1910. Albert Einstein lectured at Prague's German university for three semesters; his stay overlapped with the blossoming of Czech cubism -- the most characteristic manifestation of the pre-war Avant-Garde in Prague. Prague received Picasso and Braque like nowhere else; Cubism there affected not only fine art but also the practical arts and even architecture. Art historian Vincenc Kramar referred, in his 1921 book KUBISMUS, to the essential relationship of the new art to "the transformation of our idea of the world, as reflected in Einstein's theory and in the studies of the fourth dimension."
Prague became the capital of independent Czechoslavakia after the fall of the Hapsburg monarchy in October 1918 and quickly became a magnet for the propagators of the great radical artistic movements of the era, including such ISMs as Dadaism and Futurism.
Avant-Garde activity in 1920s Prague was concentrated around the art group Devetsil, founded in October 1920 by Karel Teige. The Devetsil artists produced poetry and illustration, but they also made contributions to other art forms, including sculpture, film and even calligraphy. The first Devetsil manifesto formed the basis of Poeticism by urging new artists to look deeper into ordinary objects for poetic quality.
"In photomontage and typophoto the present day has a new type of writing and a visual language . . . Only through many experiments will we learn to use this new means of communication, this new way of writing. With it, we will be able to write new truths and new poetry." To Teige every aspect of modern life contained poetic value. Especially the new visual language made possible by technological advances in photographic reproduction, printing and typesetting. Teige understood the importance of reproduction as both a means and an end to artistic expression -- revolution could just as easily spring from a type case as from a rifled gun barrel.
Karel Teige (1900--1951) is known mainly as a theorist of the fine arts and architecture, a columnist, critic, editor, and organizer of events on the Czech arts scene in the 1920s. He was also a leading figure of the avant-garde group Devetsil (1920--32), which included at various times hundreds of important figures in painting, literature, architecture, photography, film, and theater. In 1934 Teige joined the Prague Surrealists, and from that year till his premature death he made nearly four hundred collages. During his life, however, he had few possibilities to make them known and the collages remained his private passion. It is now clear that they constitute a vital part of the history of European Surrealism.
Karel Teige's surrealist collages were not primarily intended for public exhibition. They were produced by Teige for private use and were never exhibited during his lifetime. Teige produced over 300 of these collages between the years of 1935 and 1951 and very few of them were released until the year after his death, when they were published in the samizdat journal Zodiac by the surrealist group of which he was leader.
This fact is significant since one of the aims of the Prague Devetsil group had been to use new forms such as the pictorial poem as a way of anticipating the extinction of the hung picture, with its bourgeois and capitalist associations. Teige's vision, that art should become life and art should be made by everyone, is encapsulated in the very genre of collage. For Teige, these collages were both a personal lyrical expression of his own (very male) subjective awareness and also a visual interpretation of his ideology.
Although these collages are unmistakably Czech in feeling -- many of them feature the Czech countryside -- all the collages in this exhibition have the hallmark of the international surrealist movement and influences of such artists as René Magritte, Max Ernst and Man Ray. Teige absorbed the strategies of the modern movement during his trips to Paris in the 1920s; he then disseminated these influences among his many contacts and through his role as a prolific publisher and editor. The effect of Man Ray was particularly potent in the Czech-speaking world, an influence that can be seen in many of these collages.
This exhibition demonstrates Teige's importance as an active, creative artist who was very much a part of the modern movement. This role has been overlooked until quite recently, not only because so little of Teige's cubist work from the 1920s has survived, but mainly because his identity as a theorist, editor and typographer has eclipsed the creative aspect. To some extent this is because Teige's priority was always the cause of Marxist society, a utopia he believed in and hoped for. Around the time he began to produce his collages, he speculated about "the possible interrelationship between socialist realism and surrealism."
Because surrealism is based on the irrational language of the subconscious, its meanings are subliminal and opaque. Works of surrealism have to be "read" like the metaphors in a poem, rather than just looked at as aesthetic objects. However, this is especially the case with Teige's pieces since they represent such a private aspect of his artistic expression. — Sue Bagust
26 Rassegna: Il Progettoo del Mobile in Francia, 1919 – 1939 / Furniture Design in France 1919 – 1939
Vittorio Gregotti [Direttore responsabile]
Milan: Editrice CIPIA, Giugno 1986. Original edition [anno VIII, 26/2 – giugno 1986]. Text in Italian with parallel captions in English. Quarto. Plain thick wrappers. Printed dust jacket. 88 [xxx] pp. 202 illustrations. Illustrated articles and advertisements. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. Wrappers lightly edge worn and spine sunned. Text block head dust spotted, but a very good copy.
9 x 12 soft cover book with 118 pages and 202 illustrations, some in color. The bulk of the journal [88 pages] is devoted to the French Furniture Design.
Contents
Prefazione
La questione del gusto nazionale by Yvonne Brunhammer
Archittetura dell'"ensemblier"
Emblematica della tecnica e artigianato by Raymond Guidot
Per un'alisi comparata dei progettisti by Giampiero Bosoni
Gabbia strutturale [Stand al Salone del Mobile 1985, B&B Italia]
Changi Airport, Singapore [Sistemi di sedute Axis 3000, Castelli]
Illuminotecnica per lo sport [Progetto luce per un centro di attivita ginnica iGuzzini illuminazione]
Quasi una sedia, un letto, un pianoforte [Il letto teatro: Un progetto di Aldo Rossi e Luca Meda, Molteni & C.]
Il mondo dell'incasso [Una mostra in occasione dell'Eurocucina 1986, Ariston]
Ristrutturazione e recupero energetico [MEG Print hpl, Abet Laminati]
Designers include Jacques-Emil Ruhlmann, Rene Herbst, Louis Sue, Paul Bigot, Andre Mare, Robert Mallet-Stevens, Djo-Bourgeois, Le Corbusier, Paul Colin, M. Desnos, Paul Legrain, Francis Jourdain, Louis Sognot, Pierre Chareau, Rene Prou, Andre Groult, Jean-Michel Frank, Jean Prouve, Robert Block, Maurice Dufrene, Paul Follot, Marcel Guillemard, Jules Leleu, Eugene Printz, Jean Dunand, Andre-Leon Arbus, Paul Iribe, Leon-Albert Jallot, Le Corbusier, Auguste Perret and Charlotte Perriand among others.
Under the loose directorship of Vittorio Gregotti, Rassegna was an Italian Design magazine underwritten by six Italian firms: Ariston, B&B Italia, Castelli, iGuzzini illuminazione, Molteni and c., and Sabiem. Each issue was devoted to a single designer or theme and lavishly produced, with high-quality reproduction and carefully selected and presented illustrations.
![Rassegna 3: I Clienti di Le Corbusier. Milan: Editrice CIPIA, Luglio 1980, [anno II, n. 3]. Vittorio Gregotti [Direttore responsabile].](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6a074f91e54cbe1a0e669fb9/8b5d0ac0-0a6f-4e19-8403-a43b96b826dd/rassegna_03_thumb.jpg)
3 Rassegna: I Clienti di Le Corbusier
Vittorio Gregotti [Direttore responsabile]
Milan: Editrice CIPIA, 1980. Original edition [anno II, n. 3 – Luglio 1980]. Text in Italian with parallel English cutlines. Quarto. Plain paper wrappers. Photo illustrated dust jacket. 96 [xlviii] pp. Illustrated articles and advertisements. Dust jacket lightly worn and spine mildly wrinkled and darkened. A very good or better copy.
9 x 12 soft cover book with 128 pages and approx. 500 illustrations, some in color. The bulk of the journal [96 pages] is devoted to I Clienti di Le Corbusier. Under the loose directorship of Vittorio Gregotti, Rassegna was an Italian Design magazine underwritten by six Italian firms: Ariston, B&B Italia, Castelli, Ceramiche Ragno, i Guzzini and Molteni. Each issue was devoted to a single designer or theme and lavishly produced, with high-quality reproduction and carefully selected and presented illustrations.
Contents
La questione del clitne by Pierre-Alain Croset
Dall-orologica alla farfalla by Jacques Gubler
E i mobili? Me lo chiede? By Julius Posener
La matita del cliente by Tim Benton
Le Corbusier e l'Arlecchino by Pierre Saddy
Una conversazione con Heidi Weber by Pierre-Alain Croset
Il progetto Wanner by Christian Sumi
Il nostro cliente e it nostro padrone by Jean-Louis Cohen
Piuttosto visionario . . . by Brian Brace Taylor
A Roma con Bottai by Giorgio Ciucci
Sul cantiere di Marsiglia by Daniele Pauly
Le Corbusier a Mosca by Christian Borngraber
I clienti di le Corbusier by Brigitte de Cosmi e Pierre-Alain Croset
Sistema parete [Partizione interne per l'edilizia industrializzata Castelli]
Una ceramica per l'interno e l'esterno [La Monocottura Ragno]
I proiettori UFO [Tecnologia per la luce iGuzzini]
Morna [Filosofia di un letto: Un progetto di Afra e Tobia Scarpa, Molteni & Co.]
OSA -- Open System Ariston [Un progetto di Makio Hasuike]
Diesis [Un esempio di coerenza: Un progetto di Antonio Citterio e Paolo Nava, B&B Italia]
Architects, designers and artists other than Le Corbusier include Paul Poiret, Louis Sue, Pierre Patout, Cecil Beaton, Lesgourgue, Jean Lurcat, Jean-Charles Moreux and Charles de Beistegui among others.
Le Corbusier (Swiss, 1887–1965) born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris was a Swiss-born French Architect and Artist who belonged to the first generation of the so-called International school of architecture.
At age 13, Le Corbusier left primary school to attend Arts Décoratifs at La Chaux-de-Fonds, where he would learn the art of enameling and engraving watch faces, following in the footsteps of his father. There, he fell under the tutelage of L’Eplattenier, whom Le Corbusier called “my master” and later referred to him as his only teacher. L’Eplattenier taught Le Corbusier art history, drawing and the naturalist aesthetics of art nouveau. Perhaps because of his extended studies in art, Corbusier soon abandoned watchmaking and continued his studies in art and decoration, intending to become a painter. L’Eplattenier insisted that his pupil also study architecture, and he arranged for his first commissions working on local projects.
After designing his first house, in 1907, at age 20, Le Corbusier took trips through central Europe and the Mediterranean, including Italy, Vienna, Munich and Paris. His travels included apprenticeships with various architects, most significantly with structural rationalist Auguste Perret, a pioneer of reinforced concrete construction, and later with renowned architect Peter Behrens, with whom Le Corbusier worked from October 1910 to March 1911, near Berlin.
These trips played a pivotal role in Le Corbusier’s education. He made three major architectural discoveries. In various settings, he witnessed and absorbed the importance of (1) the contrast between large collective spaces and individual compartmentalized spaces, an observation that formed the basis for his vision of residential buildings and later became vastly influential; (2) classical proportion via Renaissance architecture; and (3) geometric forms and the use of landscape as an architectural tool.
In 1912, Le Corbusier returned to La Chaux-de-Fonds to teach alongside L’Eplattenier and to open his own architectural practice. He designed a series of villas and began to theorize on the use of reinforced concrete as a structural frame, a thoroughly modern technique.
Le Corbusier began to envisage buildings designed from these concepts as affordable prefabricated housing that would help rebuild cities after World War I came to an end. The floor plans of the proposed housing consisted of open space, leaving out obstructive support poles, freeing exterior and interior walls from the usual structural constraints. This design system became the backbone for most of Le Corbusier’s architecture for the next 10 years.
In 1917, he moved to Paris and assumed the pseudonym Le Corbusier. In Paris he worked as an architect on concrete structures under government contracts. He spent most of his efforts, however, on the more influential, and at the time more lucrative, discipline of painting. Then, in 1918, Le Corbusier met Cubist painter Amédée Ozenfant, who encouraged Le Corbusier to paint. Kindred spirits, the two began a period of collaboration in which they rejected cubism, an art form finding its peak at the time, as irrational and romantic.
With these thoughts in mind, the pair published the book Après le cubisme (After Cubism), an anti-cubism manifesto, and established a new artistic movement called purism. In 1920, the pair, along with poet Paul Dermée, established the purist journal L’Esprit Nouveau (The New Spirit), an avant-garde review.
In the first issue of the new publication, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret took on the pseudonym Le Corbusier, an alteration of his grandfather’s last name, to reflect his belief that anyone could reinvent himself. Also, adopting a single name to represent oneself artistically was particularly en vogue at the time, especially in Paris, and Le Corbusier wanted to create a persona that could keep separate his critical writing from his work as a painter and architect.
In the pages of L’Esprit Nouveau, the three men railed against past artistic and architectural movements, such as those embracing elaborate nonstructural (that is, nonfunctional) decoration, and defended Le Corbusier’s new style of functionalism.
In 1923, Le Corbusier published Vers une Architecture (Toward a New Architecture), which collected his polemical writing from L’Esprit Nouveau. In the book are such famous Le Corbusier declarations as “a house is a machine for living in” and “a curved street is a donkey track; a straight street, a road for men.”
Le Corbusier’s collected articles also proposed a new architecture that would satisfy the demands of industry, hence functionalism, and the abiding concerns of architectural form, as defined over generations. His proposals included his first city plan, the Contemporary City, and two housing types that were the basis for much of his architecture throughout his life: the Maison Monol and, more famously, the Maison Citrohan, which he also referred to as “the machine of living.”
Le Corbusier envisioned prefabricated houses, imitating the concept of assembly line manufacturing of cars, for instance. Maison Citrohan displayed the characteristics by which the architect would later define modern architecture: support pillars that raise the house above the ground, a roof terrace, an open floor plan, an ornamentation-free facade and horizontal windows in strips for maximum natural light. The interior featured the typical spatial contrast between open living space and cell-like bedrooms.
In an accompanying diagram to the design, the city in which Citrohan would rest featured green parks and gardens at the feet of clusters of skyscrapers, an idea that would come to define urban planning in years to come.
Soon Le Corbusier’s social ideals and structural design theories became a reality. In 1925-1926, he built a workers’ city of 40 houses in the style of the Citrohan house at Pessac, near Bordeaux. Unfortunately, the chosen design and colors provoked hostility on the part of authorities, who refused to route the public water supply to the complex, and for six years the buildings sat uninhabited.
In the 1930s, Le Corbusier reformulated his theories on urbanism, publishing them in La Ville radieuse (The Radiant City) in 1935. The most apparent distinction between the Contemporary City and the Radiant City is that the latter abandoned the class-based system of the former, with housing now assigned according to family size, not economic position.
The Radiant City brought with it some controversy, as all Le Corbusier projects seemed to. In describing Stockholm, for instance, a classically rendered city, Le Corbusier saw only “frightening chaos and saddening monotony.” He dreamed of “cleaning and purging” the city with “a calm and powerful architecture”; that is, steel, plate glass and reinforced concrete, what many observers might see as a modern blight applied to the beautiful city.
At the end of the 1930s and through the end of World War II, Le Corbusier kept busy with creating such famous projects as the proposed master plans for the cities of Algiers and Buenos Aires, and using government connections to implement his ideas for eventual reconstruction, all to no avail.
On 27 August 1965, Le Corbusier ignored his physician’s orders and went for a swim in the Mediterranean Sea at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France. His body was found by bathers and he was pronounced dead at 11 a.m. President Lyndon B. Johnson said, “His influence was universal and his works are invested with a permanent quality possessed by those of very few artists in our history.”
![Rassegna 52: Gli Ultimi CIAM. Milan: CIPIA, December 1992. [anno XIV, 52/4 ], Vittorio Gregotti [Editor].](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6a074f91e54cbe1a0e669fb9/7bf395b9-abd2-4a89-a981-063ca4a12de3/rassegna_52_thumb.jpg)
52 Rassegna: Gli Ultimi CIAM
Vittorio Gregotti [Editor]
Milan: CIPIA, 1992. Original edition [anno XIV, 52/4 -- December 1992]. Text in Italian. Quarto. Plain paper wrappers. Photo illustrated dust jacket. 88 [xlviii] pp. Illustrated articles and advertisements. Dust jacket lightly spotted and spine mildly and darkened. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. A very good or better copy.
9 x 12 soft cover book with 118 well-illustrated pages. The bulk of the journal [88 pages] is devoted to the final years of CIAM (International Congress for Modern Architecture).
Contents
Editoriale by Vittorio Gregotti
I CIAM del dopoguerra: un bilancio del Movimento Moderno by Jos Bosman [includes work by Le Corbusier, Jose Luis Sert, Sir John Leslie Martin, Sven Backstrom, William Conklin, Aldo Van Eyck, Marcel Lods, Vladimir Bodiansky, J.-J. Honegger, Geir Grung, Arne Korsmo, Gunnar S. Gundersen, Robert Geddes, Blanche Lemco, Stanislawa Nowicki, George W. Qualls, John Voelcker, Jane Drew, Alison and Peter Smithson, Pat Crooke, Andrew Derbyshire, Brera e Waltenspuhl, George Candilis, Luigi Figinie Gino Pollini, Peter Ahrends, and Herbert Prader e Franz Fehringer
Una biblioteca impossibile by Carlo Olmo: includes work by Le Corbusier, Marcel Breuer, Pier Luigi Nervi, Bernard Zehrfuss, Walter Gropius, Jose Luis Sert, Kenzo Tange, Takashi Asada, Sachio Otani, and Louis I. Kahn
Il Gruppo Italiano e la tradizione del modern by Sara Protosani: includes work by BBPR, Ernesto N. Rogers, Ignazio Gardella, Giancarlo De Carlo, Franco Albini, Bottoni, Cerutti, Gandolfi, Morini, Pollini, Pucci, Putelli, Giancarlo Palanti, and Mario Tevarotto among others
La fine dei CIAM e il ruolo inglese by Roston Landau: includes work by Gruppo MARS and Alison e Peter Smithson
Il contributo olandese: Bakema e Van Eyck by Francis Strauven [includes work by Jacob Berend Bakema e Johannes Hendrik van den Broek, Gruppo Opbouw, and Aldo van Eyck
Il Gruppo Marocchino e il tema dell'habitat by Jean-Louis Cohen: includes work by Michel Ecochard, ATBAT-Afrique, Jean Hentsch, Andre Studer, G. Candilis, S. Woods, E. Bodiansky, Jean-Francois Zevaco, Gaston Jaubert, Hans Scharoun, Karl Bottcher, Wils Ebert, Peter friedrich, Ludmilla Herzenstein, Reinhold Lingner, Luis Seitz, Herbert Weinberger, Hans e Wassily Luckhardt, and Max Taut
Berlino e l'influenza dei CIAM in Germania dopo il 1945 by J. Christoph Burkle: includes work by Hans e Wassily Luckhardt, Hans Scharoun, con il gruppo del Ring, Willy Kreuer e Gerhard Jobst, Walter Gropius, Jacob Berend Bakema e Johannes Hendrik van den Broek, and Alison e Peter Smithson
I Darmstadter Gesprache by Werner Oechslin
L'incontro di Otterlo by Arjen Oosterman e Rob Dettingmeijer: includes work by Jacob Berend Bakema e Johannes Hendrik van den Broek, J. G. Berghoef, Giancarlo De Carlo, Alison e Peter Smithson, and Kenzo Tange
Epilogo: una conversazione con Giancarlo De Carlo
Sponsors' section includes projects by iGuzzini illuminazione, Molteni & co., Sabiem, B&B Italia, Castelli, Abert Laminati, and OSRAM
The Congrès internationaux d'architecture moderne (CIAM), or International Congresses of Modern Architecture, was an organization founded in 1928 and disbanded in 1959, responsible for a series of events and congresses arranged across Europe by the most prominent architects of the time, with the objective of spreading the principles of the Modern Movement focusing in all the main domains of architecture (such as landscape, urbanism, industrial design, and many others).
The International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM) was founded in June 1928, at the Chateau de la Sarraz in Switzerland, by a group of 28 European architects organized by Le Corbusier, Hélène de Mandrot (owner of the castle), and Sigfried Giedion (the first secretary-general). CIAM was one of many 20th century manifestos meant to advance the cause of "architecture as a social art.”
Other founder members included Karl Moser (first president), Hendrik Berlage, Victor Bourgeois, Pierre Chareau, Sven Markelius, Josef Frank, Gabriel Guevrekian, Max Ernst Haefeli, Hugo Häring, Arnold Höchel, Huib Hoste, Pierre Jeanneret (cousin of Le Corbusier), André Lurçat, Ernst May, Max Cetto, Fernando García Mercadal, Hannes Meyer, Werner M. Moser, Carlo Enrico Rava, Gerrit Rietveld, Alberto Sartoris, Hans Schmidt, Mart Stam, Rudolf Steiger, Szymon Syrkus, Henri-Robert Von der Mühll, and Juan de Zavala. The Soviet delegates were to be El Lissitzky, Nikolai Kolli and Moisei Ginzburg, although at the Sarraz conference they were unable to obtain visas.
Other later members included Walter Gropius, Alvar Aalto, Uno Åhrén, Louis Herman De Koninck (1929) and Fred Forbát. In 1941, Harwell Hamilton Harris was chosen as secretary of the American branch of CIAM, which was the Chapter for Relief and Post War Planning, founded in New York City.
Josep Lluís Sert, co-founder of GATEPAC and GATCPAC (in Saragossa and Barcelona, respectively) in 1930, as well as ADLAN (Friends of New Art) in Barcelona in 1932, participated in the congresses as of 1929, and served as CIAM president from 1947 to 1956.
The organization was hugely influential. It was not only engaged in formalizing the architectural principles of the Modern Movement, but also saw architecture as an economic and political tool that could be used to improve the world through the design of buildings and through urban planning. The fourth CIAM meeting in 1933 was to have been held in Moscow. The rejection of Le Corbusier's competition entry for the Palace of the Soviets, a watershed moment and an indication that the Soviets had abandoned CIAM's principles, changed those plans. Instead it was held onboard ship, the SS Patris II, which sailed from Marseille to Athens.
Here the group discussed concentrated on principles of "The Functional City", which broadened CIAM's scope from architecture into urban planning. Based on an analysis of thirty-three cities, CIAM proposed that the social problems faced by cities could be resolved by strict functional segregation, and the distribution of the population into tall apartment blocks at widely spaced intervals. These proceedings went unpublished from 1933 until 1943, when Le Corbusier, acting alone, published them in heavily edited form as the "Athens Charter."
As CIAM members traveled worldwide after the war, many of its ideas spread outside Europe, notably to the USA. The city planning ideas were adopted in the rebuilding of Europe following World War II, although by then some CIAM members had their doubts. Alison and Peter Smithson were chief among the dissenters. When implemented in the postwar period, many of these ideas were compromised by tight financial constraints, poor understanding of the concepts, or popular resistance. Mart Stam's replanning of postwar Dresden in the CIAM formula was rejected by its citizens as an "all-out attack on the city."
The CIAM organisation disbanded in 1959 as the views of the members diverged. Le Corbusier had left in 1955, objecting to the increasing use of English during meetings.
For a reform of CIAM, the group Team 10 was active from 1953 onwards, and two different movements emerged from it: the New Brutalism of the English members (Alison and Peter Smithson) and the Structuralism of the Dutch members (Aldo van Eyck and Jacob B. Bakema).
Under the loose directorship of Vittorio Gregotti, RASSEGNA was an Italian Design magazine underwritten by six Italian firms: Ariston, B&B Italia, Castelli, iGuzzini illuminazione, Molteni and co., and Sabiem. Each issue was devoted to a single designer or theme and lavishly produced, with high-quality reproduction and carefully selected and presented illustrations.
![Dreyfuss, Henry, R. Buckminster Fuller [foreword]: SYMBOL SOURCEBOOK [An Authoritative Guide to International Graphic Symbols]. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972.](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6a074f91e54cbe1a0e669fb9/9df544ec-ca3f-40f9-816d-865246814006/symbol_sourcebook_thumb.jpg)
SYMBOL SOURCEBOOK
An Authoritative Guide to International Graphic Symbols
Henry Dreyfuss, R. Buckminster Fuller [foreword]
New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972. First edition. Quarto. Publishers tan cloth stamped in red. Printed dust jacket. 292 pp. 1,000 + black and white illustrations. Book design by Henry Dreyfuss. Tan cloth with tiny smudge to rear panel. Dust jacket with trace of wear to upper and lower edges, including a half-inch closed tear to upper front corner. Even with the uniformly sun faded spine, still one of the nicest copies we have handled: a fine copy in a nearly fine dust jacket.
8.75 x 11.25 hardcover book with 292 pages and over 1,000 graphic symbols. "Dictionary" of symbols used internationally. Arranged into ingeniously devised sections to access information easily. Contents listed in 18 languages. A convenient reference tool divided by discipline, graphic form and by meaning, semantography (a phrase coined by Leibnitz) is a complete system which crosses all language barriers.
This book is the culmination of a lifetime of collecting and codifying graphic symbols as they are used in all walks of life throughout the world by Henry Dreyfuss. Compiling them all together in this "dictionary" of symbols. This large format book is a must have for international travelers & all interested in graphic art.
The name Henry Dreyfuss is synonymous with industrial design. Dreyfuss was one of the "big four" industrial designers, along with Walter Dorwin Teague, Norman bel Geddes and Raymond Loewy.
US industrial designer. Henry Dreyfuss was born in Brooklyn, NY to a family in the theatrical materials supply business. He completed studies as an apprentice to Norman Bel Geddes in 1924 and produced 250 stage sets for a number of theatres before 1928. He opened his own office in 1929 for stage and industrial design activities.
In 1929, he won a "phone of the future" competition by Bell Laboratories and began work in 1930 in collaboration with Bell staff. The result of this association was the "300" tabletop telephone, with a receiver and transmitter in a "combined handset" resting in a horizontal cradle. Molded in black phenolic plastic, it was introduced in 1937 and produced until 1950.
In 1933 he designed a new "flat-top" deluxe refrigerator introduced by General Electric, eliminating the previously exposed refrigeration unit by placing it beneath the cabinet. He also designed a new Toperator washing machine for Sears & Roebuck.
Henry was featured in a 1934 article, "Both Fish and Fowl," in Fortune magazine, written anonymously by George Nelson, which had a dramatic impact on the new field of Industrial Design. An early client was Westclox, for whom he designed an alarm clock introduced in 1935, and later their famous Big Ben alarm clock in 1939.
In 1934 he was engaged by the Hoover Company, and designed its 1936 Model 150 upright vacuum cleaner with the first plastic hood in Bakelite. His retainer fee was $25,000 per year. He designed a bottle for The American Thermos Bottle Company that appeared in 1936.
In 1936, his design of a Mercury locomotive debuted. It featured cutout holes in the "white-walled" driver wheels, lit by concealed spotlights at night. In 1938, with great fanfare, New York Central introduced 10 new streamliner steam engines and cars designed by Dreyfuss for its Twentieth Century Limited New-York-Chicago run. An upgraded version of his Mercury design, the new J 3 4-6-4 Hudson locomotives featured finned bullet-noses reminiscent of ancient warrior helmets.
In 1938 Dreyfuss's John Deere Model A tractor was introduced. Dreyfuss started working with Deere in 1937.
At the New York World's Fair in 1939, Dreyfuss designed the Democracity model in the Perisphere, representing an American city and its surrounding suburbs of the year 2039. He also designed the AT&T pavilion, featuring Vodar, an early voice synthesizer.
At the start of the war in 1941 Dreyfuss, along with Raymond Loewy and Walter Dorwin Teague were involved in the design of strategy rooms for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Dreyfuss built four 13-foot rotating globes, one each for Roosevelt, Stalin, Churchill, and the Joint Chiefs. Commercially, he designed the best-seller Skyliner fountain pen for Eversharp.
The Society of Industrial Designers (SID) was established in 1944 by 15 practitioners, including Dreyfuss, who served as its first Vice-President. After the war in 1946, Henry hired William F. H. Purcell and Robert Hose, both of whom became partners in the firm.
In 1949 the model 500 desk telephone was put into service by AT&T. Designed by Dreyfuss, it was the first to be offered in colors other than black beginning in 1954, and was still the most commonly used model in the US in 1995.
Dreyfuss appeared on the cover of Forbes Magazine in 1951. In 1953 Minneapolis Honeywell introduced a circular wall thermostat designed by Henry. Dreyfuss began consulting with the company in 1937.
Dreyfuss published Designing for People in 1955, an autobiography that included the first publication of "Joe" and "Josephine" anthropological charts. Dreyfuss focused on design problems related to the human figure, working on problems from "the inside out", and believed that machines adapted to people would be the most efficient. The technical discipline called Human Factors was begun during the war and resulted in standards for the design of military equipment. Such data formed the basis of post-war design standards by Dreyfuss.
By 1960, The Whitney Library of Design published Measure of Man, by Dreyfuss, an ergonomic data guide compiled from military records by the Dreyfuss office. It featured Joe and Josephine and popularized the idea of fitting products to human scale. The term "ergonomics" was coined in the early 1950s to describe the new profession focused on the study of human-equipment interaction.
Although Hoover discharged Dreyfuss in 1954, in 1955 they introduced their Model 82 Constellation vacuum cleaner designed by him, a spherical shape that glided on an air cushion of its own exhaust.
In 1956 the wall-mounted telephone was re-introduced by Bell Telephone. Designed by Henry Dreyfuss Associates (HDA), it was intended as a companion to the desktop model "500." In 1958 Bell introduced his design for the first push-button telephone sets. And in 1959 Bell introduced the "Princess" phone, with hand/mouthpiece spanning the dial, and fitting compactly on the base. Its petite size was designed by HDA to appeal to teen-age girls
HDA designed a number of safety razors. The Pal stainless steel razor for American Safety Razor (1961), the Gem razor, for ASR Products Company (1965), and the Flicker, a women's rotary manual safety razor, for the American Safety Razor Company (1972).
In 1963 the Polaroid Land Company introduced its Model 100, the first to allow removal of photo to develop while shooting the next, designed by HDA. They also designed the General Motors Futurama for the 1964 World's Fair in New York, the most popular exhibit.
In 1965 The Industrial Design Society of America (IDSA) was formed by the merger of IDI, ASID and IDEA, becoming the single voice of industrial design in the US. Henry Dreyfuss was its first President. That same year, the "Trimline" telephone was introduced. Designed by Donald M. Genaro of HDA in collaboration with Western Electric staff, it combined receiver, transmitter and dial into a single element nested into a compact base.
Dreyfuss formally reorganized his office in 1967 as Henry Dreyfuss Associates, naming Donald M. Genaro, James M. Conner, and Niels Diffrient as associates. Henry retired to Pasadena, CA in 1969, but continued to serve the profession. Representing the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) in 1971, he chaired the first meeting of the International Organization of Standards Technical Committee (ISO/TC) in Berlin which set international standards for 145 signs and symbols. In 1972, McGraw-Hill published his Symbol Sourcebook: An Authoritative Guide to International Graphic Symbols.
Henry Dreyfuss died in 1972. [The Industrial Design Society of America]
![MARTENS. Carel Kuitenbrouwer [intro]: KAREL MARTENS: COUNTERPRINT. London: Hyphen Press, 2004.](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6a074f91e54cbe1a0e669fb9/c8073f3d-59e1-4468-bcd5-f5f65c512648/karel_maertens_counterprint_thumb.jpg)
KAREL MARTENS: COUNTERPRINT
Care Kuitenbrouwer [introduction]
London: Hyphen Press, 2004. First edition thus [originally published in Dutch as ‘Karel Martens: Weerdruk’ by Lecturis BV, Eindhoven]. Text in English. Printed wrappers with poster to recto bound to textblock [as issued]. 32 pp. Colorful counterprints bound together in Japanese style. Book design by Hans Gremmen, under the supervision of Karel Martens, at the Werkplaats Typografie in Arnhem. Wrappers inevitably—but lightly— worn, otherwise a nearly fine copy.
8.25 x 11.75 softcover book with roughly 32 pages consisting of a series of Marten’s Counterprints, as well as an Introduction by Carel Kuitenbrouwer and ‘The world as a printing surface’ by Paul Elliman. “[Hyphen Press] have published a short book that shows some of the uncommissioned printed work of Martens, with an essay on ‘The world as a printing surface’ by Elliman. This is very much an object-book, in which the work is not so much reproduced as bodied forth.”
Throughout his career as a designer, Karel Martens has made artistic (uncommissioned) work. In his early days he used sheets of paper, cut to make reliefs. Then he began to make prints from Meccano, metal plates and washers, and other found objects. These prints were made in very small numbers, or were perhaps one-offs. They were studies in form and colour, done as experiments or intended as gifts to friends. The work was very much in the Dutch tradition of experimental printing (the artist H.N.Werkman is the great exemplar here). But Martens kept this work largely apart from his graphic design work. He has occasionally shown it in exhibitions, and some pieces were published in the book Karel Martens: printed matter / drukwerk.
This is the first publication devoted to Martens’s prints. It is made in association with the printer Lecturis, in Eindhoven, and is produced to the highest quality. Bound in Chinese/Japanese fashion, like the first Martens book, it has a strong quality as an object. We are producing a limited number of copies (4,000) and will not reprint. The main text in the book is an essay by the English designer Paul Elliman: ‘The world as a printing surface’. Dutch critic and teacher Carel Kuitenbrouwer provides a short introduction. The book is designed by Hans Gremmen, under the supervision of Karel Martens, at the Werkplaats Typografie in Arnhem.
“Martens builds patterns from parts. He prints textures in time, moving his objects from place to place and capturing the traces in the image, ink by ink and layer by layer. These ‘moving’ pictures create abstraction from specific and rational shapes, while their color can be quiet or ‘sugary’ to the eye. By studying the prints, you can pick out the blocks he builds on. These are small pleasures, but they emerge from close viewing, and ultimately the compositions are at once careful and graceful, subtle and vivid. This is refined craft with tools reinvented as toys: precision in play. In the end, these minutiae are mesmerizing.” — Al Matthews, 16 August 2004
Hyphen Press is a London-based publisher founded by Robin Kinross in 1980. It has produced around thirty books on a diverse range of topics, but most of its publications are devoted to typography and graphic design.
CAN OUR CITIES SURVIVE?
José Luís Sert and CIAM
Herbert Bayer [Designer]
Subtitled AN ABC OF URBAN PROBLEMS, THEIR ANALYSIS, THEIR SOLUTIONS [Based on the Proposals Formulated By the C.I.A.M. International Congress for Modern Architecture / Congre Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne]. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1942. First edition. Oblong quarto. Charcoal cloth titled in red. Printed photomontage dust jacket. 259 pp. One illustrated fold-out. Black and white illustrations throughout. Dust jacket, binding and book design/typography by Herbert Bayer. Cloth sunned along lower edges and a pair of small etched areas to front panel [see scan]. Foxing early and late with several pages with mild tacking, as usual for this heavily-inked volume. The rare Herbert Bayer photomontage dust jacket is essentially complete, but with mild soiling and chipping, and edge wear including several small closed tears. A good copy with a good example of the classic Herbert Bayer dust jacket.
12.5 x 9.25 hardcover book with 259 pages with more than 300 photographs, diagrams and illustrations, Index, and Introduction by Sigfried Giedion. An influential and seminal work on city planning CAN OUR CITIES SURVIVE? was published during the Second World War and was much cited in the rebuilding that took place in war's aftermath. The Book is based on the comprehensive proposals formulated by C.I.A.M. for town planning, including requirements of dwelling areas, recreation in cities, weekend/vacation recreation, workplaces, transportation, urban street systems, a total view of the city, and identifies the main barriers to large scale planning.
Includes work by Miguel Covarrubias, Pierre Jeanneret, Alvar Aalto, Arne Jacobsen, Oscar Storonov, Alfred Roth, Berenice Abbott, Walter Gropius, Werner Moser, Marcel Breuer FRS Yorke, Le Corbusier, John Held, Willem Van Tijen, Mart Stam and many other.
The International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM) was founded in June 1928, at the Chateau de la Sarraz in Switzerland, by a group of 28 European architects organized by Le Corbusier, Hélène de Mandrot (owner of the castle), and Sigfried Giedion (the first secretary-general). CIAM was one of many 20th century manifestos meant to advance the cause of "architecture as a social art".
Other founder members included Karl Moser (first president), Victor Bourgeois, Pierre Chareau, Josef Frank, Gabriel Guevrekian, Max Ernst Haefeli, Hugo Häring, Arnold Höchel, Huib Hoste, Pierre Jeanneret (cousin of Le Corbusier), André Lurçat, Ernst May, Fernando García Mercadal, Hannes Meyer, Werner Max Moser, Carlo Enrico Rava, Gerrit Rietveld, Alberto Sartoris, Hans Schmidt, Mart Stam, Rudolf Steiger, Henri-Robert Von der Mühll, and Juan de Zavala. The Soviet delegates were to be El Lissitzky, Nikolai Kolli and Moisei Ginzburg, although at the Sarraz conference they were unable to obtain visas. Other later members included Alvar Aalto and Hendrik Petrus Berlage. In 1931, Harwell Hamilton Harris was chosen as secretary of the American Group of CIAM.
The organization was hugely influential. It was not only engaged in formalising the architectural principles of the Modern Movement, but also saw architecture as an economic and political tool that could be used to improve the world through the design of buildings and through urban planning.
As CIAM members traveled world-wide after the war, many of its ideas spread outside Europe, notably to the USA. The city planning ideas were adopted in the rebuilding of Europe following World War II, although by then some CIAM members had their doubts. Alison and Peter Smithson were chief among the dissenters. When implemented in the postwar period, many of these ideas were compromised by tight financial constraints, poor understanding of the concepts, or popular resistance. Mart Stam's replanning of postwar Dresden in the CIAM formula was rejected by its citizens as an "all-out attack on the city."
José Luís Sert (1902 – 1983) played a leading role in defining urban design education and practice. He created the first professional degree program in urban design at Harvard in 1959 and shaped the profession through projects in the Boston area and beyond. He received a degree in architecture in 1929 from the Escuela Superior de Arquitectura in his native Barcelona. In the subsequent decade, he was among the leading young Spanish architects, active in both CIAM (International Congress for Modern Architecture) and GATEPAC (Grupo de Arquitectos y Técnicos Españoles para el Progreso de la Arquitectura Contemporánea). Sert gained an international reputation with his design for the Spanish Pavilion built for the 1937 International Exposition in Paris. Immigrating to the United States in 1941, he was from 1941 to 1958 a founding partner in Town Planning Associates, a design firm specializing in both architectural and urban design projects, with a particular focus on Latin America.
In 1958 Sert opened, with Huson Jackson and Ronald Gourley, Sert, Jackson & Gourley in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the firm's work included private residences, museums, and numerous large-scale commercial and educational commissions in the United States and abroad. The firm produced several buildings for Harvard University, including the Science Center, Holyoke Center, and Peabody Terrace. Sert served as Dean of Harvard's Graduate School of Design from 1953 until 1969. During his extraordinarily vibrant and productive tenure, he oversaw a variety of innovations in the curriculum, including the establishment of the first formal professional degree program in Urban Design.
"During the 1950s and 60s, urban design came to represent the physical shaping of cities through localized interventions rather than sweeping master proposals, and was increasingly characterized by the collaboration of professionals from a range of design backgrounds, and the arts," says Mary Daniels, Librarian, Special Collections, Harvard Design School. "Sert was instrumental in bringing together architects, landscape architects, and planners to engage in the formation of the city. Through his teaching and practice, he fostered the integration of the design disciplines at all scales of the urban framework, and the creation of new 'hearts of the city' that would become unique centers of collective vitality."
Herbert Bayer (1900 – 1985) is one of the individuals most closely identified with the famous Bauhaus program in Weimar, Germany. Together with Walter Gropius, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Wassily Kandinsky, Bayer helped shape a philosophy of functional design that extended across disciplines ranging from architecture to typography and graphic design. Endowed with enormous talent and energy, Bayer went on to produce an impressive body of work, including freelance graphics commissions, Modernist exhibition design, corporate identity programs, and architecture and environmental design.
He was born in Haag, Austria, and apprenticed in a local architectural design and graphic arts studio. By 1920 he was in Germany and a year later enrolled in a recently established, state-funded school of design called the Bauhaus. Then located in Weimar, the Bauhaus came to represent an almost utopian ideal that "modern art and architecture must be responsive to the needs and influence of the modern industrial world and that good designs must pass the test of both aesthetic standards and sound engineering."
Though Bayer came to the Bauhaus as a student, he stayed on to become one of its most prominent faculty members. His design for a new Sans-serif type called Universal helped to define the Bauhaus aesthetic.
He left in 1928 and moved to Berlin where he opened a graphic design firm whose clients included the trend-setting magazine Vogue. During this period, he also created or art-directed a number of memorable exhibitions. As with other designers of his generation, Bayer became alarmed over the increasingly repressive political situation in Germany and finally left in 1938 for New York. Within a short period of time, he was well-established as a designer and, among other achievements, had organized a comprehensive exhibition at MoMA on the early Bauhaus years. He also formed important connections with the publishers of Life and Fortune magazines, General Electric, and Container Corporation of America. CCA's chief executive, Walter Paepcke, became an important patron of Bayer's in the years to come, beginning with an invitation to move to Aspen, Colorado, to become a design consultant for the company. Bayer also supervised the architectural design of the new Aspen Institute, and then many of its program graphics. Bayer remained in Aspen until 1974, when he moved to California. There he worked on various environmental projects until his death in 1985.
![Emigre 31 [Raising Voices]. Berkeley, CA: Emigre, 1994, Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko.](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6a074f91e54cbe1a0e669fb9/f40a56fa-5371-4603-802e-7078aea36d69/emigre_31_thumb.jpg)
Emigre 31
Raising Voices
Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko
Berkeley, CA: Emigre, 1994. Original edition [7,500 copies]. Slim quarto. Thick saddle stitched wrappers. [40] pp. Multiple paper stocks. Elaborate graphic design throughout. Lightly handled, but a nearly fine copy of this journal whose size and contents inevitably invited abuse.
11.25 x 16.75 saddle stitched magazine exploring the nature of heritage in contemporary Graphic Design, circa 1994. Printed at Cal Central, Sacramento, CA. Designer and Editor: Rudy VanderLans. Digital type design and typesetting: Zuzana Licko. Designer at large: Gail Swanlund.
Contents
Lyndon Valicenti, (inside cover illustration)
Rudy VanderLans, Raising Voices (introduction)
Mail (including Teal Triggs, Gunnar Swanson, Mike Kippenhan, Brian Smith, Martin Venezky and Lisa Ashworth)
Rudy VanderLans, separate conversations with Andrew Blauvelt, Diane Gromala, Michael Rock and Kali Nikitas
Andrew Blauvelt, The Cult(ivation) of Discrimination: The Taste-Making Politics of Steven Heller (essay)
Lisa Ashworth, A Sublime Proposal: What if Paul Rand were a Woman? (essay)
From Emigre's website: “Emigre, Inc. is a digital type foundry based in Berkeley, California. Founded in 1984, coinciding with the birth of the Macintosh computer, the Emigre team, consisting of Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko, with the addition of Tim Starback in 1993, were among the early adaptors to the new digital technology.
“From 1984 until 2005 Emigre published the legendary Emigre magazine, a quarterly publication devoted to visual communication. Emigre created some of the very first digital layouts and typeface designs winning them both world-wide acclaim and much criticism. The exposure of these typefaces in Emigre magazine eventually lead to the creation of Emigre Fonts, one of the first independent type foundries utilizing personal computer technology for the design and distribution of fonts. They created the model for hundreds of small foundries who followed in their footsteps.
“As a team, Emigre has been honored with numerous awards including the 1994 Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design, and the 1998 Charles Nypels Award for excellence in the field of typography. In 1993 they were selected as a leading design innovator in the First Annual I.D. Forty. Emigre is also a recipient of the 1997 American Institute of Graphic Arts Gold Medal Award, its highest honors. In October 2010 the Emigre team was inducted as Honorary members of the Society of Typographic Arts, Chicago, and in 2013 Licko received the prestigious Annual Typography Award from the Society of Typographic Aficionados. Most recently Emigre received the 29th New York Type Directors Club Medal. Watch the video tribute shown at the presentation of the TDC Medal in the Rose Auditorium at The Cooper Union in New York City in July 2016.
“Complete sets of Emigre magazine are in the permanent collections of: The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Design Museum in London, The Denver Art Museum, The Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, The Museum fur Gestaltung in Zurich; and in 2011, five digital typefaces from the Emigre Type Library were acquired by MoMA New York for their permanent design and architecture collection.“
![Emigre 25 [Made in Holland]. Berkeley, CA: Emigre, 1993. Vincent van Baar, Gerard Forde and Armand Mevis [Guest Editors].](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6a074f91e54cbe1a0e669fb9/f7d50ffb-4a6c-42b7-8e05-34f8795af6e9/emigre_25_thumb.jpg)
Emigre 25
Made in Holland
Vincent van Baar, Gerard Forde and Armand Mevis [Guest Editors]
Berkeley, CA: Emigre, 1993. Original edition [6,500 copies]. Slim quarto. Thick saddle stitched wrappers. [38] pp. Multiple paper stocks. Elaborate graphic design throughout. Lightly handled, but a nearly fine copy of this journal whose size and contents inevitably invited abuse.
11.25 x 16.75 saddle stitched magazine exploring the nature of heritage in contemporary Graphic Design, circa 1993. Printed at Cal Central, Sacramento, CA. Art Direction by Vincent van Baar and Armand Mevis and Design by Vincent van Baar, Anne Burdick, Linda van Deursen and Armand Mevis.
Contents
Berry van Gerwen, Design Vibrator (photograph with text)
Vincent van Baar, Gerard Forde and Armand Mevis, Letter from the Editors
Gerrit Achterberg, Ichthyology (poem and image chosen by Mart. Warmerdam)
Rick Vermeulen, Bookery (review of Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung by Lester Bangs)
Michiel Uilen, Super D, The Midnight Message (essay)
Harmine Louwé, (various advertisements throughout issue)
Ton van Bragt, Science (essay and illustration)
Gerard Forde, Less is More More or Less (essay)
Ko Sliggers, Kookery (text and photograph)
Gerard Forde, interview with Armand Mevis
Berry van Gerwen, Interiors (illustration)
Vincent van Baar et al., Inquisition, questions by fax for Irma Boom
Vincent van Baar, Centerfold: Gert Dumbar (photograph: Lex van Pieterson, text: Anne Burdick)
Gerard Forde, interview with Mart. Warmerdam
Roelof Mulder, (portfolio of work)
Linda van Deursen, Catalogue (models wearing invitation cards, photographs: Jodokus Driessen)
Gerard Forde, interview with Lex Reitsma
Roelof Mulder and Karel Martens, New Release (typeface made of faces)
Joseph Plateau, (portfolio of work)
Joseph Plateau, Film (film stills)
Erik van Blokland, Travel (essay)
Tula Mond, Society (photographs of awards opening)
Biographies
Back cover: Competitors! Colleagues? (extracts from interviews)
From Emigre's website: “Emigre, Inc. is a digital type foundry based in Berkeley, California. Founded in 1984, coinciding with the birth of the Macintosh computer, the Emigre team, consisting of Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko, with the addition of Tim Starback in 1993, were among the early adaptors to the new digital technology.
“From 1984 until 2005 Emigre published the legendary Emigre magazine, a quarterly publication devoted to visual communication. Emigre created some of the very first digital layouts and typeface designs winning them both world-wide acclaim and much criticism. The exposure of these typefaces in Emigre magazine eventually lead to the creation of Emigre Fonts, one of the first independent type foundries utilizing personal computer technology for the design and distribution of fonts. They created the model for hundreds of small foundries who followed in their footsteps.
“As a team, Emigre has been honored with numerous awards including the 1994 Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design, and the 1998 Charles Nypels Award for excellence in the field of typography. In 1993 they were selected as a leading design innovator in the First Annual I.D. Forty. Emigre is also a recipient of the 1997 American Institute of Graphic Arts Gold Medal Award, its highest honors. In October 2010 the Emigre team was inducted as Honorary members of the Society of Typographic Arts, Chicago, and in 2013 Licko received the prestigious Annual Typography Award from the Society of Typographic Aficionados. Most recently Emigre received the 29th New York Type Directors Club Medal. Watch the video tribute shown at the presentation of the TDC Medal in the Rose Auditorium at The Cooper Union in New York City in July 2016.
“Complete sets of Emigre magazine are in the permanent collections of: The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Design Museum in London, The Denver Art Museum, The Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, The Museum fur Gestaltung in Zurich; and in 2011, five digital typefaces from the Emigre Type Library were acquired by MoMA New York for their permanent design and architecture collection.“
PUBLICITY AND GRAPHIC DESIGN IN THE CHEMICAL INDUSTRY
Chemie Werbug und Grafik
Publicité et Graphisme dans L’Industrie Chemique
Hans Neuburg
Zürich: ABC Verlag, 1967. First edition. Text in German, French, and English. Square quarto. Glazed printed boards. White fabricoid back strip with black, embossed titles. Printed dust jacket. 239 pp. Fully illustrated with color and black and white examples. Book design by Walter Bangerter. Dust jacket with a tiny closed tear near lower front corner and one near spine crown on rear panel. Book looks and feels unread. Unknown in this condition — a fine copy in a fine dust jacket.
10.25 x 10 hardcover book with 239 pages fully illustrated in spectacular color and dense black and white halftones courtesy of ABC Druckeri + Verlags AG [printing], Walter Nievergelt AG [engravings], and Printcolor AG [inks]. Author Neuburg and Walter Bangerter conceived the book design and Bangerter designed the book and contributed an essay. Other contributors included René Rudin, Victor N. Cohen and Josef Müller-Brockmann. Each essay featured a facsimile signature for the authors.
“Publicity and Graphic Design in the Chemical Industry” is widely recognized as the pinnacle of Zürich’s ABC Verlag publishing program and one of the most sought-after books in the Graphic Design canon. Copies in collectible condition rarely appear in commerce, and this copy is possibly unique due to its pristine condition, especially in regards to the volatility of the light sensitive purple ink used.
The preface clearly states the books’ lineage and purpose: “In planning our series of books on problems and achievements in graphic design, we had a quite definite programme in mind. Volume 1 dealt with graphic art in a Swiss town. Volume 2 was dedicated to official Swiss graphic art. Volume 3 then went more deeply into the specific problems and showed Swiss industrial graphic design. The present volume, Number 4, is conceived as an instructional book. The problems of publicity and graphic design in the chemical industry, pharmaceutics, agricultural chemistry and colour chemistry are submitted and presented for discussion by means of exemplary pieces of work.
“After the first three volumes have not only been received with approval by specialists both at home and abroad but have also had the distinction of being included among the best books by the Swiss book trade, we hope that this volume dealing with publicity and graphic design in the Swiss chemical industry will have a similar success.
“We were aware from the beginning that the material of the publicity and graphic design in the chemical industry deals with very special means and must be elaborated like a book. Graphic design in the pharmaceutical branch is more or less concerned with imparting information.There is no actual object to be depicted in the advertisements and brochures. The abstract character of the offers demands an accurate study of publicity resources and a presentation that is easily grasped visually. We believe that we have kept this object in view. In conclusion we also allude to the divergence of this sphere into three parts which again demand concentration on the whole range of problems in the chemical industry.”
Contents :
Preface: Hans Neuburg
The Publicity of the Swiss Chemical Industry: Hans Neuburg
Dynamic Chemistry: René Rudin
Some Aspects Regarding Publicity in the Chemical Industry: Victor N. Cohen
Problems of Composition in Graphic Design in the Chemical Industry: Josef Müller-Brockmann
Graphic Conception in the Service of Pharmaceuticals
Juggling with Type
Publicity Pamphlets, Cards, Brochures, etc.
Announcements for Pharmaceutical Products
Publicity Campaigns
Publicity for Prestige
The Special Field of Packaging for Pharmaceutical Preparations
Publicity and Design Problems in Agricultural Chemistry
Publicity and Design Problems in Colour Chemistry
Two Examples from Marginal Field of Publicity and Graphic Design in the Chemical Industry
Various Possibilities of Application
The World of Chemistry
The Graphic Preparations for this Book
Index Firms
Index Designers, Photographers and Agencies
Includes work by the following Graphic Designers, Photographers, and Typographers: Roland Aeschlimann, Igildo Biesele, Harry Boller, Kurt Brunner, Samuel Buri, Atelier Ciba, Atelier Cilag Chemie, Advico AG Devico, Atelier Durand Huguenin, Atelier Eidenbenz, Hans Erni, Suzanne Fornerod, Stephan Geissbühler, Karl Gerstner, Carl B Graf, René Groebli, Otto Gyssler, Erwin Halpern, J Hauser, Peter Hemann, Hans Hinz, Toshihiro Katayama, Charlie Keller, Peter Kräuchi, Alain Le Foll, Herbert Leupin, Nelly Loewensberg Rudin, Atelier Lorch Heinrich, August Maurer, Paul Merkle, Hermann Meyer, Therese Moll, W V Mutzenbacher, Hans Neuburg, Siegfried Odermatt, Beny Olonetzky, Fred Troller, Kurt Wirth, and many others.
“By the 1950s Switzerland had developed a uniquely clear graphic language which matched the country’s reputation for efficiency and precision. Evident not just in posters but in advertisements, brochures and books, Neue Grafik or Swiss Style, as it became known, was respected internationally for its formal discipline: simple methods that could make posters dramatic and give an order and elegance to typographic design. Sharing the disciplines of Swiss Concrete Art, designers organised images and text into geometrical grids. With sans-serif typefaces such as Helvetica and Univers, these were the chief components of the Swiss Style which spread across the world.” [Richard Hollis]
Swiss modernist graphic designer Hans Neuburg [1904 – 1983] helped pioneer and define the International Typographic Style along with Josef Müller-Brockmann, Wim Crouwel, Otl Aicher, Armin Hofmann and Jacqueline Casey. Neuburg grew up in Zurich, where he received technical-teaching at Orell Füssli. From 1932 he was head of publisher Jean Haecky Import AG in Basel. In 1936 he had his own design studio in Zurich. He was editor of various graphic magazines such as Camera, New Graphics and art critic for Tages-Anzeiger, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, and created major exhibitions in Prague, Zurich, Brussels, Bern and Lausanne. In 1963, he was Vice President of the International Association of graphic Icograda.
In the 1950s he was part of the editing team of the “Neue Grafik – New Graphic Design – Graphisme Actuel” magazine, together with Richard Paul Lohse, Josef Müller-Brockmann and Carlo Vivarelli. Graphic design is presented into a wide range of applications: from advertising, type, commercial architecture, and exposition or industrial documentation. He later wrote three books about these fields: Graphic Design in the Swiss Industry, Publicity and Graphic Design in the Chemical Industry and Conception of International Exhibition.