Hasta La Ideas

Too many good ideas and interesting arguments about typography and design are trapped behind language barriers, inaccessible especially to Anglophones — I’ll pick on Americans, being one myself — who more commonly don’t read or write any language but their own. Translators, and authors like Erik Spiekermann who speak and write fluently in English as well as in their native languages, can only do so much to mitigate the problem. There remain many talented authors whose work would enrich English conversations but whose voices haven’t made the jump. Hans Rudolf Bosshard’s is one of them.

Bosshard, born in 1929, is a Swiss typographer, book designer, and former teacher of typography. He has written many books, among them Technische Grundlagen zur Satzherstellung (1980), Mathematische Grundlagen zur Satzherstellung (1985), Typografie Schrift Lesbarkeit (1996), and Der typografische Raster/The Typographic Grid (2000), the last of which Willi Kunz, one of Bosshard’s former students, has called his “magnum opus”. ¹

The table of contents of Bosshard’s most recent book, Max Bill kontra Jan Tschichold: Der Typografiestreit der Moderne, is a bit misleading. One might conclude from reading “with an essay by Hans Rudolf Bosshard” that the book is an annotated presentation of the two articles, originally published in Schweizer Graphische Mitteilungen in 1946, comprising the debate in print between the two designers. In fact, Bosshard’s essay is the book’s center of gravity; Bill’s and Tschichold’s articles feel like documentary evidence included so that the reader can check his work. Even Jost Hochuli’s afterword displaces attention from Bill’s and Tschichold’s articles. I don’t think this is a flaw of the book, for reasons that will become clear soon enough.

Bosshard’s thesis is this: The arcs of Tschichold’s and Bill’s careers brought them, for a short time in the 1930s, into very close aesthetic (and geographic) proximity; their disagreements after the war were more complex and qualified than either principal would likely have admitted (or, by extension, than many subsequent commentators recognized); and finally, and especially, the accusations of being absolutist and authoritarian, not to say objectively pro-Nazi, that each leveled at the other were without merit. But there is something substantial to learn from their debate all the same.

As he develops his defense of this thesis, Bosshard offers the reader (among other things):

• a brief historical reminder that controversies over typographic layout and decoration are nothing new, with appearances by Friedrich Bertuch, Giambattista Bodoni, Filippo Marinetti, William Morris, Georg Schmidt, and Stanley Morison;
• a reflection on Alfred Loos’s claims about ornament, and whether subsequent commentators properly understood Loos’s position (Bosshard’s answer: not really);
• selected reviews of Bill’s and Tschichold’s print and graphic work (especially their typographic work), and of their political/social opinions and aspirations previous and subsequent to the debate; and
• many informed, and humorous, asides — on concrete art, the true nature of modernism, Bill’s comic drawings for newspaper advertisements, and more.

Bosshard’s essay is noteworthy for his playfully ironic voice and his lightness of touch, both of which he uses to great effect to introduce nuance into his accounts of both Bill’s and Tschichold’s positions. It is true, as another reviewer of this book has noted, that Bosshard’s affinities lie mainly with Bill. ² Aesthetically, this might be clear enough from the way the book is designed (presumably by Bosshard himself). But regarding the debate itself Bosshard’s position is more qualified. He is certainly sharply critical of Tschichold’s response to Bill’s challenges, finding it arrogant and bombastic. Yet he also notes where Tschichold qualified his arguments, or tried to reconcile them with Bill’s, and he points out where Bill himself crossed lines — most clearly so in a letter Bill sent to Paul Rand later in 1946, in which he wrote that “Tschichold is getting ready to leave Switzerland, which means we’ll finally be rid of the evil we invited here in the first place” (Tschichold ist daran, die Schweiz zu verlassen, und so werden wir das Übel endlich wieder los, das wir von vornherein eingeladen haben). Moreover, Bosshard takes every opportunity to note where both Bill and Tschichold might have found common ground. His aesthetic choices notwithstanding, Bosshard wants us to learn from the debate, not choose a side.

Bosshard questions a facile connection between design (and specifically typographic) aesthetics and ideology. It’s easy to be drawn by commentary and reflections on the debate into missing what at least to Jost Hochuli (as he writes in his endnote) seems obvious: “One cannot assign ideological worldviews to symmetry and asymmetry as such. Try it anyway and you’ll only bloody your own nose and make a fool out of yourself.” While Bosshard understands the urge that Bill and Tschichold felt to ask whether what graphic artists contribute to society is for good or ill, he makes it clear that neither of them framed the question in a reasonable and useful way.

Their accusations against each other boiled down to this: Prompted by second-hand reports of Tschichold’s remarks in a lecture that the New Typography had outlived its usefulness, and was best used only in advertising and not suitable for books, Bill charged Tschichold (not by name) with having returned to a Heimatstil, conservative-cum-reactionary design principles that helped (even if unwittingly) to clear the path for more political movements, like National Socialism, that exploited the same sentiments. Tschichold in turn accused proponents of the New Typography, including Bill (whom he did name) and his (Tschichold’s) own younger self, of being absolutist, impatient, and unyielding, fixed upon an absolute and universal devotion to order that resonated with and thus supported (even if unwittingly) reactionary and fascist political ideologies like Nazism.

In 1946 it was no small matter for German-speaking Europeans, one of them a political refugee from National Socialism, to accuse each other of being objectively pro-Nazi. Of course the charges in both directions were overblown; Bill and Tschichold both were sympathetic to leftist causes and parties and opposed to the Nazi regime, and neither was as inflexible or reactionary as the other made him out to be. But the interesting question Bosshard’s essay raises is: Why did it occur to either of them that such charges were plausible in the first place?

One answer could be that the Nazis themselves believed that aesthetics and ideology were closely related. Consider the infamous 1937 traveling exhibition of so-called “degenerate art”, or the regime’s persecution of those associated with “cultural Bolshevism”. And of course, other totalitarian parties, like the Italian fascists, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and the SED (Social Unity Party) in the German Democratic Republic after the war and partition of Germany, shared this belief.

But as Bosshard points out, Italy’s fascists were notoriously opportunistic about their aesthetic tastes, espousing classical or twentieth-century typography and design depending on their message and audience. Soviet Communist party leaders were less ambivalent about their preferences, but instead of rejecting modernism, they embraced it (or at least a version of it). As for the DDR, again as Bosshard explains, while it was true that immediately after the war the SED party line was averse to anything but strictly classical, axial typography, they reversed their position in the late 1960s. And even the Nazis initially used blackletter-traditional type treatments for consumption inside the Reich only — the preferred type treatments in communications intended for foreign audiences was modernist. Moreover, in 1941, the Nazis rejected blackletter type altogether, having found themselves an occupying power and needing to communicate with people in parts of Europe where this style of script was completely alien.

So, Bosshard concludes, that someone embraces or rejects the New Typography as such tells us nothing about that person’s ideological preferences, still less about the political consequences of holding them. ³ Could there be other, better reasons that Bill and Tschichold had for thinking their charges were meaningful? In his article, Bill connects Tschichold to the Nazis by claiming that Tschichold’s traditionalism — call this the substance of his aesthetic — made him an ally of National Socialism. Tschichold, on the other hand, refers more to the attitude of the designer; it was how Bill and other moderns espoused, expressed, and enforced his aesthetic preferences that was ideologically problematic. Perhaps thinking in terms of one or the other of these approaches can help us understand why they argued as they did.

The problem, though, is that Tschichold’s recovered traditionalism apparently did not extend to any design elements, such as blackletter type, that specifically corresponded to Nazism (and given how the party leaders had shifted their aesthetic ground during the war, it’s not even clear how much difference it would have made had it done so). Also, Tschichold’s renewed preferences for axial typography and seriffed faces were perfectly welcome at Penguin Books, where he began to work in late 1946 — and Penguin, it should go without saying, was hardly a nest of reactionary traditionalists. As for the idea that Bill’s impatience and absolutism made him a natural ally of Nazism, ten minutes of reading Tschichold is enough to demonstrate that he was often even less encumbered by tact or polemical nuance. At best we could say Tschichold was too inclined to criticize in others what he suffered from himself. In any case, it undermines his association of attitude and ideology.

And of course, even if there were something to either line of argument, the two principals would have been arguing past one another anyway. This would make it difficult to extract any meaning from their debate regarding the nominal object of their disagreement, namely typographic modernism.

Yet, having shown that the clash of the typographic moderns wasn’t quite the definitive argument over the ideology of typographic style it’s been made out to be, Bosshard doesn’t dismiss its significance. He cites with approval both Bill’s 1988 rejection of much contemporary design as Gestalterei, “design for design’s sake” — noting in his final observations that Tschichold would have agreed completely with Bill on this point — and he endorses Paul Rand’s suggestion that Bill and Tschichold should have avoided the question of style in their debate altogether. For Bosshard, as for Rand, the real issue at stake in their argument was quality and judgment.

Here I think is where we can find the real political significance to their argument as well. Consider the values associated with design modernism, many of which Bill and Tschichold invoked in their debate: honesty, sensitivity to context (expressed in phrases like “organic” or “contemporary methods”), simplicity, earnestness, practicality, efficiency, progress, purity (of form), precision, function, harmony, standardization, reproducibility, accessibility. Think also about the values these contrast with, some of which again appear in Bill’s and Tschichold’s arguments: fashion, decoration/ornament, “Heimatstil”, nostalgia, tradition, absolutism, arrogance, impatience, disengagement, exclusivity.

It would be easy to aestheticize some of the positive values, like purity and function and efficiency. As Otl Aicher has pointed out, many moderns in fact did so — specifically, members of what he called the “second” wave of modernism: those, like the Bauhäusler, informed mainly by their experience with fine arts. ⁴ Aicher argued that in so doing they became too enamored of the consistency of their commitment to these values, neglecting their obligation to negotiate these values in a constellation of contingent social, historical, and material circumstances.

But we can reconstruct from modernist values a higher-level view of design that many moderns themselves may not have fully appreciated in their own work. To understand what I mean, consider George Orwell’s short essay Politics and the English Language, which coincidentally also appeared for the first time in print in 1946. One can read it strictly as a writing guide, and focus on its examples of terrible prose, its humorous analogies and snarky evaluations, and its checklist of principles of style. (This is how most people in the US who have encountered the essay do read it, because it was a mainstay of basic composition curricula in colleges and universities for decades.) But doing so misses Orwell’s actual point: that bad writing is bad not only in the sense that it is aesthetically unpleasant, or neglects a set of arbitrary rules of style. It is bad also, and more importantly, in the sense that it prevents us from thinking about what we are doing (to steal a phrase from Hannah Arendt) when we are writing or speaking. It makes condoning atrocities easier by deadening our imagination, perception, and perspective, even to the point of hiding from us how we might be perpetrating those atrocities ourselves.

In other words, Orwell criticized bad writing because it obstructs political judgment. It detaches words from meanings, indeed from the practice of making meaning in the first place — making them literally “bullshit”, as the philosopher Harry Frankfurt understands the term — and allows us to seem to write (and talk) about the world while holding it at arm’s length. ⁵ Eradicating the bad habits Orwell described was a way to make it more difficult for us to engage in this sort of political stupidity, because clear prose and conscious, reflective composition undermines our ability to hold simultaneously mutually-contradicting positions and to deny direct experience.

Improving our prose, then, is more than an exercise in aesthetics or a clash of different styles (florid or plain, indirect or direct, polysyllabic or concise, and so on). It is a political activity, helping to prevent the degradation of political judgement — more precisely, to prevent the conditions under which our political judgment is likely to suffer. His stylistic preferences notwithstanding, what is most important to Orwell is that we are actively choosing to write the way we do. We don’t allow tradition, habit, fashion, or ideology to supplant our judgment of what quality writing looks like.

This might seem like a roundabout way to make a point about the political significance of a debate over modernist typography. But “design bullshit” is not a bad translation of “Gestalterei” — not just design for its own sake, but design for its own sake that presents itself as design not for its own sake. It is design concerned mainly to impress upon the viewer/reader/user that it is Designed, and therefore Meaningful and Good. And this kind of pretense quickly outstrips the capacity of experience and feedback to keep the designer’s judgment in check, making it all the more likely that judgment will fail.

By contrast, Bosshard finds beneath Bill’s and Tschichold’s arguments over style a shared sensitivity to the ways that obsessing over aesthetics can eclipse a genuine concern for function and purpose. When Bosshard discusses the high modernism of a few of Tschichold’s later projects (like the cover of the English translation of his 1935 Typographische Gestaltung), for example, or Bill’s advertising and comic illustrations, he reveals in both designers a capacity for judgment and stylistic flexibility in service to the quality of design that puts their falling-out over the New Typography into proper perspective. That they may not always have been aware of this capacity themselves, or that their judgment may have failed them at times, doesn’t diminish their significance.

And the capacity for critical reflective judgment in design is no less politically significant than it is in writing. The ability to choose and articulate reasons for choosing design strategies makes it more likely that a designer will be able to strike the balance Norman Potter describes when he writes that while “designers are not privileged to opt out of the conditions of their culture, but are privileged to do something about it … to act for the community, as (in limited respects) the trained eyes and hands and consciousness of that community.” ⁶ Both the inability to extricate one’s judgment from those conditions and the desire to place one’s judgment entirely above them invite the sort of thoughtlessness that makes political catastrophe of any ideological flavor more likely.

In his afterword, Jost Hochuli reveals for the first time anywhere his discovery of an account of a chance meeting between Tschichold and Bill long after their exchange of essays. Sometime between 1967 and 1974 — Tschichold’s daughter-in-law, Lilo Tschichold-Link, who related the story to Hochuli, couldn’t recall exactly when it happened — the playwright and author Max Frisch had invited Bill to visit him at home in Berzona, Switzerland, where Tschichold also lived. Bill came an hour too early, and decided to look in on Tschichold. The two of them, Tschichold-Link recalls, sat in Tschichold’s garden and conversed over a glass of wine (she unfortunately couldn’t or didn’t tell Hochuli what they talked about). “Humanity wins!”, exclaimed Robin Kinross upon being told of their meeting.

This story, I think, we read best as Hochuli’s — and Bosshard’s — invitation to leave the hyperbole, the clashes of style and personality and pride, where Bill and Tschichold did. And perhaps this is why it doesn’t seem unusual that Bosshard’s and Hochuli’s commentary overshadows the two essays that are its nominal object.

Bosshard’s remarkable achievement in this book is to show us that there is far more to the “clash of the moderns” than the opportunity for subsequent readers to choose a side. The debate is really an opening into a more interesting and fruitful discussion about the real significance and quality of design and the nature of design judgment. A book with so profound a point to make, and so pleasant to read, is surely worth translating. It might even be worth learning German for.

Notes

1. Kunz makes the remark in his essay on the occasion of Bosshard’s 80th birthday, Unbeirrt durch die Irrläufe der Zeit, reprinted online at his website. ⤴
2. See Martin Z. Schröder’s review of the book. Thanks to Indra Kupferschmid for pointing me to the review. ⤴
3. One could question just how different absolutisms of the right and left really are, and answer Bosshard by arguing that the ideological split would be better thought of as being between democratic beliefs, on the one hand, and authoritarian or totalitarian beliefs on the other. But even this would be problematic, since, as Andreas Koop has noted for example, the typographic preferences of both the modern bureaucratic state and of anti-authoritarian political movements tend toward modernism, as least as far as the serif/sans question is concerned: they both prefer sans serif faces. See Koop, Die Macht der Schrift (Verlag Niggli, 2012). ⤴
4. See Aicher’s essay die dritte moderne, reprinted in die welt als entwurf (Ernst & Sohn, 1991/1992). ⤴
5. Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton University Press, 2005). ⤴
6. Potter, What is a designer, 4th ed. (Hyphen, 2002), p. 35. ⤴

Controversial modernist, notorious drinker, architectural tycoon—Edward Durell Stone wore many hats during his long and storied career. In “Edward Durell Stone: Modernism’s Populist Architect,” historian Mary Anne Hunting hopes to uncover yet another dimension of the figure: that of an architect for the everyman. Although reliant on funding from…

Continue Reading…

The first retrospective book on the 20th century’s film title master

Saul Bass, best known for transforming the way movies begin, was in fact a designer of incredible versatility. As design historian Pat Kirkham shows in his forthcoming book on Bass (co-authored with Bass’ daughter Jennifer), the legendary “visual communicator” also applied his graphic wizardry to album and book covers, typefaces, packaging, retail displays, a hi-fi system, toys and a postage stamp. He also illustrated a children’s book, collaborated with architects, directed films and developed identities for companies including Quaker, United Airlines, Dixie, AT&T, Kleenex, the Girl Scouts and more.

For much of his prolific career Bass worked side by side with his wife Elaine. Together, they came up with beautifully simplified concepts—many that still serve as benchmarks for intelligent design—and led the duo to work with and be revered by masters in their fields like Martin Scorsese, Milton Glaser, Massimo Vignelli, Otto Preminger and Alfred Hitchcock.

Defining himself simply as “a creative person in the deepest sense of the word,” Bass allowed his imagination to guide the way, toying with metaphors and abstract symbols until he reached a point where it would make sense to his audience, yet purposely leaving out one element for the viewer to fill in. “The ambiguous is intrinsically more interesting, more challenging, more involving, more mysterious and more potent,” he explains. “It forces reexamination, adds tension, gives it life.”

Perhaps Bass’ most significant contribution was his ability to make Modern Art relatable to everyone. While his style experimented with abstraction and other contemporary tropes, his artistic interpretations were still easily digestible, having emotional impact no matter the project or medium.

Despite being one of the most sought-after designers of the 20th century, he never denied how terrifying a blank page can be. His tenacity, trying idea after idea even when they weren’t working, was a significant part of his process. “A modest amount of imagination with a great ability to persevere can produce an important work,” Bass proposed. The approach also speaks to the advantages of working on a range of projects. “By simultaneously working on a variety of problems, I find that one creative problem helps me solve another.”

With more than 1,400 illustrations—including many never-seen-before storyboards—”Saul Bass: A Life in Film & Design” is an incredible look at the inner workings of his genius. The monograph will be available beginning October 2011 from publisher Laurence King, where you can sign up to be notified of its availability. You can also pre-order it from Amazon.

Insight from Charlotte Perriand’s photography on the design legend’s life and work

Even design dilettantes will know Charlotte Perriand as a famous architect, pioneer of 20th-century interiors design and as the designer behind some of Le Corbusier’s most iconic furniture. But taking on a less-known side of the legend, the exhibition “From Photography to Design” at Paris’ Le Petit Palais explores her creation process, narrowing in on her body of photographic work.

Ordered by Le Corbusier himself, Perriand began using photography for her preliminary studies before moving on to the still images as a means to observe the “laws of nature,” and the urban context in which she found ideas for her experiments with forms, materials and spatial arrangements. The exhibit consists of beautiful photographs—of natural objects like driftwood, bones, stumps and stones, as well as compressed metals and other industrial fragments sourced from scrap metal dealers—shown side by side furniture pieces inspired by the shapes or materials pictured. Suggestive of the muse Perriand found in nature, a method she called “the shapes lab,” examples include a smooth round pebble found on North Sea shores that gave way to the organic forms of her wooden tables.

This approach led to efficient, ergonomic and outstandingly simple work, explained by Perriand’s assertion, “beauty must come out of rational organization of elements; it doesn’t need any additional decoration.” She always kept it simple, proving that less is more, in particular when it came to the materials that defined her career. Equating wood and iron used in her furniture with cement in architecture, Perriand established the tradition of the “machine age” aesthetic with minimal, bent chrome steel tube and leather furniture.

Perriand’s photographs bear the mark of her distinct approach to modernism too. Though beautifully black and white and minimal, pictures of simple objects—such as an ice cube lit up by a sunbeam, fishing nets and boat sails or crackled desert earth—feel warm and feminine. A collecter of everyday objects from Japan, she saw no hierarchy among things; from the most humble to the most complex and sophisticated, they all deserve the same attention. The result of her democratic designs were pieces of furniture that she said were made for people to live in and be comfortable, rather than reflections of her own behaviors.

She designed her famous series of relaxing chairs (chaise lounges and swivel chairs currently in production by Cassina) after observing relaxing bodies. In the show the ergonomic seating is displayed along with the photographs she took of dozens of portraits of resting people, including lying-down fishermen in ports, a Corsican grandmother at siesta, or friends napping on tree branches.

Drawn to social commitment, the exhibition also takes a look at the survey she made of slums and other poor unsanitary areas in Paris in the early ’30s, helping to drive home a central point of the show. Positioned, as the major part of it is, within the permanent collection of the museum consists in dispatching Perriand’s unassuming pieces of furnitures among Louis the XVIth or older historical pieces from the permanent collection.

The strategy, introduced by the Louvre museum’s new initiative inviting contemporary artists to play with the permanent collections, isn’t just a smart way to have the permanent collection re-visited. In this case, the move elegantly highlights how starkly different Perriand’s populist style and influence was from the past—and how similar it is to today.

Images at the top: “Banquette Tokyo” 1954, © AChP_ADAGP, Paris 201; “Arête de Poisson” 1933, © AChP_ADAGP, Paris 2011

Eero Aarnio launches an update to his renowned 1968 Pastil Chair on a new private-sale site

Getting a “do-over” usually only happens in video games, and it’s even rarer still in the world of design. With Eero Aarnio‘s molded fiberglass Soap Chair, he’s improved on his own classic design, creating a version of his revered 1968 Pastil Chair for today’s lifestyle.

The designer says, “I like to keep my design range as wide as possible. For example, the smallest object I designed is a tooth pick for Finnair and the largest one is my studio home.” For the chair he added an integrated handle for easy transport and a built-in cup that holds mobile phones or remote controls—updates that allow for spontaneous furniture rearranging for those always-on-the-go. Also in keeping with current sustainable thinking, Aarnio explains that to “confirm the quality and trust that my new chair lasts for generations to come and thus be part of sustainable development,” the seating is produced in Finland at the same factory where his arguably more famous Ball Chair was made.

Like Ball and his other furniture, the living legend (he’s worked for five decades as a photographer and furniture and interior designer) derived the Soap Chair’s name from its shape. Drawing by hand in full 1:1 scale before forming a model in wood, Aarnio then studied the shape from every angle and test sat to ensure it’s balanced and ergonomically correct. The new design features soft corners and only comes in two colors—white because “it always looks good in fiberglass” and light blue because that is one of the colors typically occurring in Savon de Marseille (although he may add more soap colors to the collection later).

The Soap Chair (photographed at Aarnio’s home in Finland) launches today exclusively on the new members-only site DesignStory (joining is a snap). Available for one week only alongside other notable works, each of the ten on offer is signed by Eero Aarnio and sells for $1,850.