BASIC PRINCIPLES OF DESIGN
The Foundation Program at the School of Design
Basel Switzerland
Manfred Maier
Manfred Maier: BASIC PRINCIPLES OF DESIGN [The Foundation Program at the School of Design Basel Switzerland]. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1980. First edition thus. Quarto. Text in English. Laminated thick printed wrappers. 384 pp. Black and white and color illustrations throughout. Wrappers lightly creased and edgeworn. Spine crown and heel darkened with small dampstains. Out-of-print and rather uncommon. Covers designed by Wolfgang Weingart. A very good copy.
9.25 x 12 softcover book with 384 pages profusely illustrated in both color and black and white. The Foundation Program of the School of Design in Basel, Switzerland presented in four parts in this collected volume, each of which is a complete unit in itself and provides an introduction, course descriptions and detailed illustrations.
A very important book in the History of Graphic Design Education.
- VOLUME 1
- Object Drawing
- Object and Museum Drawing
- Nature Drawing
- VOLUME 2
- Memory Drawing
- Technical Drawing and Perspective
- Lettering
- VOLUME 3
- Materials Studies
- Textile Design
- Color 2
- VOLUME 4
- Color 1
- Graphic Exercises
- Dimensional Design
According to Katherine McCoy, in 'Education in an Adolescent Profession': "Art schools and university art departments have been slow to realize that design is not simply a commercial application of fine-arts ideas and processes. Acceptance of graphic design as a separate and distinct discipline -- with significantly different intentions, history, theory, methods and processes -- has been quite slow. Compounding the problem has been growing eagerness among university art departments to compensate for shrinking fine arts enrollments with graphic design programs, whether prepared or not.
"... The Bauhaus, while it used the master/apprentice workshop method, was a revolutionary school model that contributed much to design education. The Bauhaus attempted to organize and codify the revolutionary ideas of the early twentieth-century "isms" and proto-modern experiments into an educational method for the new industrial era. The modernist imperative for abstraction and experimentation was applied to a system of design education fundamentals. The Bauhaus Basic Course was the first in design education to declare that basic design principles underlie all design disciplines; that primary design education should begin with abstract problems to introduce these universal elements before students proceed to tackle programmatic design problems applied to specific scales, needs and media. This emphasis on abstraction and experimentation, and the rejection of accepted traditional formulas, represented a radical new attitude in education.
After World War II, the Bauhaus idea had a major impact on design schools in the U.S. Many adopted the model in its pure form, requiring design students in all disciplines to begin with the system. Today, if one peels away the layers in any design program, the persistent residue of this movement is evident.
Yet the Bauhaus lessons of the 1920s took a surprisingly long time to be established in European and U.S. schools, largely due to the limited resources of the Depression years, German politics of the 1930s, and World War II. Before the war, the U.S. benefited from the arrival of a number of Bauhaus émigrés who introduced these revolutionary ideas to both established universities and new schools. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Herbert Bayer settled in Chicago, with Moholy beginning his New Bauhaus. After World War II, Mies' Armour Institute and Moholy's School of Design were soon integrated into the new Illinois Institute of Technology, where much of Mies' influence remains in the architecture program, but little beyond Moholy's memory remains in Institute of Design. Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer went to Harvard's school of architecture, and Josef Albers to Yale. Their influence today might come only from the momentum they gave to those institutions, enabling them to grow and prosper to the present.
Unfortunately, the Bauhaus idea that design fundamentals should precede applied design has been limited mainly to introductory art and design courses, after which design students rapidly move into their areas of specialization. Once in specialized graphic design courses, most schools immediately focus students on applied projects that simulate or imitate professional practice-- a modern version of the apprentice system-- rather than continuing an orderly sequence of fundamental design concepts and methods.
Fortunately, the past twenty years have seen a number of American graphic design programs develop carefully structured curricula based on educational methods that go far beyond the superficial simulation of professional practice and the "aha" intuitive approach. This new development is another descendant of the Bauhaus as well, but by way of the "Swiss school" of graphic design. The great Swiss innovators of the 1950s and 1960s can be seen as representing the classic phase of modernism, the heirs to Bauhaus graphic design and other early modern European graphic designers. These Swiss innovators applied the Bauhaus functionalist ethic to a systematic graphic method that shared the Bauhaus values of minimalism, universality, rationality, abstraction and structural expressionism.
This fresh and highly professional graphic design was first transmitted beyond Switzerland to the rest of Europe and the U.S. through Swiss design magazines and a few books, notably Graphis and the "Swiss" bibles by Muller-Brockmann, Gertsner, Hoffmann and Ruder. Then, in the late 1960s, several professional offices began to practice these ideas to solve the needs of large corporate clients in Holland, Great Britain, Canada and the U.S.
... Although "Swiss" graphic design was first adopted in U.S. by professionals in their design practices, soon several leading U.S. graphic design schools followed suit, going directly to the source. A number of Swiss teachers and their graduates, from Armin Hoffman's Basel school in particular, put down roots in schools including Philadelphia College of Art, University of Cincinnati and Yale. (The Swiss influence seems to have been particularly strong in U.S. and Canadian schools; Europeans have often expressed a certain mystification at this North American reverence for the Basel method.) Manfred Maier's book, Basic Principles of Design, on the Basel foundation program, was finally available in the U.S. in 1977, spreading this method farther. Under the influence of this highly structured educational method and its emphasis on the prolonged study of abstract design and typographic form, these American schools began to carefully structure their curricula. Based on objectivity and rationalism, this educational system produced a codified method that was easy to communicate to students, giving them a foundation for a visual design process and composition that went far beyond the superficial emulation of their heroes.
© 1998 High Ground Design. Excerpted from www.highgrounddesign.com [xlist_2018]