20-11-2009

Netherlands, The Hague
Royal Academy of Arts Prinsessegracht 4 2514 AN The Hague The Netherlands

Posted by: albert-jan-pool

Category: Workshop/Seminar

Field: Design

The Bauhaus, founded 90 years ago, was an an artschool that created quite a furore. It’s analytic and purist attitude with which the academy tackled the problems of design seemed to be epoch-making. The products were developed here, no matter wether it were paintings, buildings, theatre-settings, posters, advertising or typefaces showed a remarkable visual congeniality. With its clearly regonizable visual language of quadrants, circles and triangles the Bauhaus seemed to be willing to conquer the world at once.

The intensity and conviction with which the Bauhaus propagated its ideas — and even more the fascinated view with which art historians described the Bauhaus phenomenon — created the myth that any method of design that makes use of squares, circles and rectangles as basic elements not only finds its origin in the Bauhaus, but also is of undisputable high quality.

When I started studying at the academy in The Hague, Gerrit Noordzij, my professor of type design, told that the guys from the Bauhaus possibly created some interesting things, but would not have had a clue of type design at all. International colleagues would later on confirm this opinion. Especially the German DIN typeface which had been designed whilst the Bauhaus was en vogue, was thought of as an engineers chimera. Letterforms constructed with straight lines and circles couldn’t be more than an engineer’s chimera. This typeface, known from the signposts along the German Autobahn, was an ugly duckling at best.

After my typeface FF DIN, a redesign of the DIN typeface, had become succesful I decided to find the truth behind these opposite opinions. I started a research on the history of constructed sans serif typefaces and how this would possibly relate to the Bauhaus. Meanwhile this project develops into a doctor thesis which is supervised by prof. Gerard Unger at the University of Leiden.

Before I found answers, new questions turned up:
— What did the pedagogue Fröbel, the painter Itten and Soennecken, the inventor of the perforator have in common?
— How did Russian constructivism and orthographic reform relate to eachother?
— How could it happen that the Prussian Railways and the type designer Joost Schmidt developed almost identical solutions?
— Why would lithography draughtsman lay the basis for a standardized typeface instead of punch cutters who were the experts on the job?

These and other questions have become parts of a jig saw puzzle that is not yet fully interlocking. Still, I invite you herewith to come and look at some things I discovered until now, and to listen to the answers I’ve found to the questions.
The lecture is primarily held for students of the master course Type & Media at the Royal Academy of The Hague and will therefore be held in English. There will be plenty of time to raise questions and to exchange thoughts!

Time: 14.00 — 16.00 h

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