Word: bauhaus
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Behrens' idea of wedding artistic form to machine production strongly influenced the Bauhaus school of design, which his former assistant Walter Gropius founded in 1919 at Weimar. In graphics as in industrial design and architecture, the Bauhaus stripped away historic associations and ornaments in a search for essences. Letter forms no longer followed the paths of the scribe's pen or engraver's burin, but were constructed with ruler and compasses. The new type faces, posters and symbols were not always easily legible. But they were blunt and provocative, the ideal style for mass communication, advertising...
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Herbert Bayer, who both taught at the Bauhaus, brought the new graphic style to U.S. advertising studios. Says Bayer, 82, who was consultant and director of design for the Container Corp. of America from 1946 to 1965: "I told my friend Walter P. Paepcke, then Container's president, that a modern corporation should project a socially and culturally responsible personality. It should be a tastemaker and thought provoker. It should contribute to civilization." The result was Container's famous 20-year advertising campaign featuring "Great Ideas of Western Man," with illustrations by such notable...
Despite some minor eccentricities, Michael Graves' building makes primary that element most wanting in a Bauhaus-inspired glass box: human scale...
Graves has since won other important commissions, notably a 27-story corporate headquarters in downtown Louisville, Ky., for Humana Inc., and an addition to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, designed by Bauhaus Architect Marcel Breuer. Yet it remains to be seen whether Graves' heavy-handed Pop surrealism-"a dash of deco and a whiff of Ledoux," as leading Postmodernist Architect Robert Venturi calls it-will influence workaday architecture. New inspirations are needed, but they should be inspirations that are real, joyful and charming...
...true of De Stijl design. Its aesthetic was seamless, from painting to furniture to architecture, where it made few concessions to the flabby and imperfect human body. Gerrit Rietveld's penitential chairs, rigidly geometric and painted in their bright, winking primaries, go far beyond the ordinary level of Bauhaus discomfort as practiced in the '20s. Yet one cannot imagine Rietveld's masterpiece, the tiny Schroder house in Utrecht, being furnished with anything else. Such interiors were not open to redecoration: the pattern is absolute, the space a sermon. One would need to be the truest of believers...