geschichte und theorie des designs
TRANSCRIPT
Geschichte und Theorie des Designs
Designdisziplinen - Geschichte
Ina Wagner, Institut für Gestaltungs- und Wirkungsforschung, TU Wien
The Bauhaus and the theory of form
> Visual language > The study of material > Moholy-Nagy > The ‘Bauhaus style’
Multimedia Theatre of the 20ies
The ‘Grand Utopia’ and Russian Constructivism
Opposite styles - the 50ies
Italian ‘Radical Architecture’, 1964-1974
Inhalt
The Bauhaus - History
1919 Foundation of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Walter Gropius, director
1923 Moholy-Nagy, Kandinsky, Klee and Josef Albers teach the Basic Course - De Stijl and Constructivism begin to influence Bauhaus typography
1925 The Bauhaus moves to Dessau, a course ‘Typography and Advertising Art’ is established and taught by Herbert Bayer as part of the Printing Workshop
1930 Mies van der Rohe becomes director
1932 The Dessau Bauhaus is closed by the local government
1933 Gropius, Mies, Bayer, Moholy-Nagy, and Albers emigrate to the US
1937 A group of Chicago industrialists founds the School of Design with Moholy-Nagy as director
1938 MoMA holds the exhibition Bauhaus 1919-1928
Herbert Bayer, 1924Zeitungskiosk
The Bauhaus and Design Theory> A place were diverse strands of the avant-garde came together - architecture, theatre, painters, film makers, etc. - with a dominance of painters
> Became equated with advanced thinking in design
> Basic courses to study colour, materials (texture, rhythm, technical properties), and to achieve a rational form, which unifies function and material - to strengthen analytical thinking
> Oriented towards industrlal production
> To identify a language of vision - visual form as a universal and transhistorical script - with Gestalt psychology as a dominant theoretical source
Kandinsky’s call for a visual dictionary:
“The progress won through systematic work will create adictionary which, in its full development, willlead to a ‘grammar’ and, finally, to a theory of composition that willpass beyond the boundaries of the indic´vidual art expressions and become applicable to ‘Art’ as a whole”.
> The graphic designer as writing verbal/visual documents by arranging, sizing, framing, and editing images and texts.
The Bauhaus - visual languageThe grammar of perceptual oppositions
This series of shapes represents Kandinsky’s attempt to prove a universal correlation between color and geometry. In 1923 he circulated a questiopnnaire at the Bauhaus asking respondents to fill triangle, square, and circle with the primary colors.
A series of oppositions:
> yellow and blue represent the extremes of hot/cold, light/dark, active/passive while red is the intermediary between them
> triangle, square and circle are graphic
The Bauhaus - visual language The graph
The graph as a model of pictorial expression
> the line as a single point dragged across a page, a trace of the artists’ motion, a temporal narrative
> a plane is a record left by a moving line
The Bauhaus - visual language The grid
The grid, a structural form pervading Bauhaus art and design, articulates space according to a pattern of oppositions: veertical and hoprizontal, top and bottom, orthogonal and diagonal, and left and right.
Kandinsky called a four-square grid “the prototype of linear expressions”.
Conventional Western writing and typography is organized on a grid - so are planned urban spaces.
The Bauhaus - visual language Figure and ‘Gestalt’
In the terms of Gestalt psychology, figure refers to an active, positive form revealed against a passive, negative ground.
“Perhaps the only entirely new and probably the most important aspect of today’s language of forms is the fact that ‘negative’ elements (the remainder, intermediate, and subtractive quantities) are made active ...” (Josef Albers 1928)
Kasimir Malevich’s Suprematist Elements as a source of formal vocabularies
László Moholy-Nagy, Light-Space Modulator (1922-1930)
The installation is made of chrome plated steel, aluminium, glass, plexiglas, and wood. He himself described this kinetic sculpture, this Gesamtkunstwerk composed of color, light, and movement, which appears as a synthesis of his artistic ideas, as an "apparatus for the demonstration of the effects of light and movement".
In 1930, the "light-requisite for an electrical stage", such was another description, was exhibited at the show of the German Werkbund in Paris. Moholy-Nagy described it as follows:
"The model consists in a cubic box [...] with a circular opening (stage) at the front. Surrounding the opening, on the back side of the board, I have mounted a number of yellow, green, blue, red, and white electrical bulbs [...]. Inside the box, parallel to the front, there is a second board, also with a circular opening, around which a further set of light bulbs is mounted.
Single bulbs light up at different places according to a pre-set plan. They illuminate a continuously moving mechanism, made partly of transparent, partly of cut-out materials, in order to create linear shadows on the back wall of the closed box. When the presentation takes place in a dark room, the back wall of the box can be removed and the color and shadow projected on a suitable screen of open dimensions.
The ‘Bauhaus style’
Marcel Breuer, Evolution of the chair at the Bauhaus from 1921 to 1925“In the end you are seated on an air cushion”.
Walter Gropius, Wagon-lit
Parallelen Theater - Architektur
Die Paral lelen des Theaters zu gebauter Architektur waren ein Diskussionsgegenstand der 30er Jahre, an dem sich Architekten, Maler und Theatermacher beteiligten.
1925 erschien der Band “Die Bühne im Bauhaus”, mit Beiträgen von Oskar Schlemmer, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy und Walter Gropius.
Neben der Mobilisierung aller räumlichen Mittel kam der Bühnentechnik eine tragende Rolle zu:
“Die technische Bühne sei ein Präzisionswerk maschineller Funktionen, das, einem industriellen Montagesaal oder einem Verschiebebahnhof vergleichbar, von einer Blockstation, einem zentralen Kommandostand mit Klaviatur für alle Bewegungs- und Lichtfunktionen aus in Tätigkeit gesetzt wird, so einfach wie möglich, aber auch so vielfältig wie möglich” (Gropius, 1934).
“Inszenieren heißt also auch, Bewegungen im Raum zu ordnen, Räume durch Bewegung zu strukturieren; ohne Bewegungsspuren wird kein Raum zum inszenierten Raum” (Brauneck, 1993, S. 35).
Multimediales Theater der 20er JahreOskar Schlemmer Die Bühne als die Bewegung von Form und Farbe
Von Schlemmers Bauhaus Tanzgastspiel in Berlin wurde gesagt, der bewegte Körper verschwinde oft “hinter der Bewegung, hinter bewegten Stoffen und Formen, hinter Metall, Glas, einem System von Kreisen, Stäben, Würfeln, usw.” Scheinbar leblose Requisiten würden intelligent beflügelt, “wie Licht auf Glas” (zitiert nach Fiebach, 1995).
Die Verschränkung von raumbildenden mit darstellenden Elementen - zwei Raumkonzeptionen :
> den kubischen Raum mit seinen Kanten und Verbindungslinien
> das Beziehungsnetz, das sich aus den Bewegungen des Körpers ergibt.
”Sonach bleibt – Idee, Stil und Technik entsprechend – zu schaffen das Abstrakt-Formale und Farbige, das Statische, Dynamische und Tektonische, das Mechanische, Automatische und Elektrische, das Gymnastische, Akrobatische und Equilibristische, das Komische, Groteske und Burleske, das Seriöse, Pathetische und Monumentale, das Politische, Philosophische und Metaphysische” (Schlemmer 1925).
Multimediales Theater der 20er Jahre Enrico Prampolini
In der Architektur, wie im Theater, geht es um raschen Szenenwechsels durch wechselnde Möblierungen sowie die Überlagerung von Lichträumen und Projektionen möglich.
Enrico Prampolini (1915) hat diesen Prozeß der Inszenierung begrifflich als illuminierende Bühne gefaßt:
“Das Bühnenbild wird nicht länger ein farbiger Hintergrund sein, sondern eine farblose elektromechanische Architektur, die durch die chromatischen Ausstrahlungen einer Lichtquelle kräftig belebt wird … - schaffen wir die illuminierende Bühne: leuchtender Ausdruck, der mit all seiner emotionellen Kraft die Farben, die die Theaterhandlung erfordert, ausstrahlen wird” (19S. 97).
Dies erlaubt die Kommunikation spezifischer Raum-Qualitäten - Licht, Bewegung, Rhythmik.
Multimediales Theater der 20er Jahre Piscator I
Funktionalisierung von Bühnenbild, Licht und Film in ‘Hoppa, wir leben!’Konstruktion einer lichttransparenten Etagenbühne - ein fahrbares Spielgerüst mit beweglichen ProjektionswändenSchneller Szenenwechsel durch LichtwechselDreidimensionalität der transparenten Projektionsflächen ermöglicht Licht- und RaumerlebnisStehende Projektionen (John Heartfield) sowie Integration von bewegten Bildern Von den Schauspielern verlangte dies Exaktheit und TimingModerner Ausdruckstanz (Mary Wigman)
The ‘Grand Utopia’ > Italian ‘Futurists’ - Balla, Severini, Carrà, Boccioni, Depero - as predessors - fascination of the city, of technology, of speed and noise
> Leon Trotsky, 1917: “Futurism is against mythicims, the passive deification of nature, it is in favour of technology, scientific organization, the machine, planning, human will, courage, speed, precision, and it is in favour of the new human being who is armed by all these things”.
> Internationalisation of the ‘rational form’ - Gerrit Rietveld, Theo van Doesburg - inspired by painters Piet Mondrian, Kazimir, Malevitch, and the late Kandisnky - inspired by cubism
> > Malevitch’ Suprematism
Picasso, 1914
El Lissitzky, 1920
Léger, 1924
Carlo Carra
Depero
Russian Constructivism
> The Russian designer Vladimir Tatlin held that design should “derive from exploring and exploiting a material’s intrinsic qualities, and be considering how it might combine with other materials”
> Art in the service of industrial production for the people - the object as defined by its social utility, its form a consequence of its function and structure - design of clothes that are adapted to the movements of the body
Ilja Soujetine -china
Tatlin - cloth, furniture ...
Varvara Stepanova - textiles
Lioubov Popova - posters, textiles
Rodchenko - advertisment
Maiakowski - from poetry to slogans
Djiga Vertov - docummentaries
The red and blue chair - Gerrit Rietveld
Wooden chair with colour used according to the rules of a ‘spatialization of form’ - red for the back, blue for the seat , black for the arm rests, yellow for highlghting the edges
A translation into 3D of a painting by Piet Mondrian
1923 House Schröder, Utrecht - red, blue, and yellow for the volumes, white and black for the horizontal and vertical structures
Opposite styles - the 50ies
> The cold war, the Korean war, independence of former colonies
> Gilbert Bécaud with Vespa
> Drive-in, drugstore, supermarket, refrigerator, Walt Disney, Las Vegas
> Jacques Ellul, 1954 The notion of autonomous technology
> Beginning of commercial aviation, first atomic reactor
> Diffusion of radio and TV
> New materials - PVC
> Mechanisation of the household
> 1958 World exhibition in Brussels - the Atomium
The taste of organic forms
Frederick Kiesler, Endless House
> Goes back to the surrealism of Jean Arp, Joan Miró, to Alexander Calder, the late Kandinsky, Salvador Dali, and others
> Imaginary architectures of Frederick Kiesler and Erich Mendelsohn
Radical architecture - 1964-1974In Austria - Hans Hollein, Walter Pichler, Haus-Rucker-Co., Coop Himmelblau, “Salz der Erde”
Themes: anti-design, nomadism, ephemeral urbanism, auto-generated structures, ecology ....
Radical architecture - Italy
Archigram, Walking City, 1964
Archizoom, Bed
> Modernity as scandal, fracture, opposition - against the rationalism of the Bauhaus and the ‘industrial order’
> Discovery of complexity - 1966, Robert Venturi: Complexity and Contradiction
> Not to exclude the irrational but to use it in productive ways
> Product design as going beyond funtional and form, to include the affective, symbolic, poetic
> A new relationship between design and architecture - supremacy of design as based on its power to transform reality
> To liberate the creativity of the masses
Andrea Branzi, La Casa Telecomandata, 1986
Ettore Sottsass, 1964
‘Icon’ chairs
The chair SaccoPiero Gatti, Cesare Paolini, Franco Teodoro, 1986
A plastic bag filled with small, flexible polyterene spheres
Symbol of the anit-form
Inspired by pop art - Claes Oldenburg’s Joe Sofa, a gigantic base-ball
Inspired by the hippie movement - another notion of ‘sitting’
The chair ProustAlessandro Mendini, 1978
Part of Alchimia
Creating ambivalence by mixing the mysterious with the banale
Decoration to provoke and to distort the meaning of objects
The chair FeltriGaetano Pesce, 1987
To combine, tradition, innovation and research
The big industrialists and design Olivetti1911 First Italian type writer
1932 First portable typewriter, designed by Aldo Magnelli and his painter brother
The factory in Ivrea became a symbol of modern architecture
Adriano Olivetti sponsored research on industrial design and sculpting
1952 MoMA retrospective on Olivetti
AlessiFounded 1921 by Giovanni Alessi
Cooperation with designers and architects such as
Richard Meier, 1983 Silver service hommage à Malevitch
Aldo Rossi, 1984 Cafetière from stainless steel
Philippe Starck, 1983
Ettore Sottsass,1969Typewriter Valentine
Mario Bellini, 1973Calculator