design and modernism lecture

design and modernism

• modernism is a subjecive response to the modern
• anti historicism - it doesn't look backward its about being progressive and inventing new things its about pushing things forward 
• 'ornament is crime' - adolf loos (1908)
• truth to materials - looking to new ways of making visual communication and celebrating them, embrace the new world and all of its traping iincluding new materials to work with
• form follows function - you solve a problem with your design and if you solve that problem perfectly the thing you create will have beauty, you dont design something to be beautiful first
• technology - a product of and a celebration of new technologies 
• internationalism - modernist practices aim to create a neutral but universal visual language of culture available to all, one style of making one style of creating, utopian social project
• in stripping down an object t its bare design essentials you create a thing which doeesnt belong to any culture or time
• if you design to capture a style at a paticular moment then a few years down the line it will look outdated
• concrete was a thing of beauty at this time it was a modernist material a new material
• illustration - not copying old styles and trying to create a new style 
• lies van der riche - seagram building 1958, not nationalistic, no historical connotations

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• quasi communist, equal utopia, clean shiny and new, equal spaces and plots of land 
• Bauhaus - interdisciplinary art school reinvented the way art and design was taught, you had an interdisciplinary programme photographers taught typography everyone working together 
• a diffusion of high art into everyday life
• the Bauhaus design didn't become available to all, there was lots of naf versions of modernism reproduced 
• internationalism - a language of design that could be recognised and understood on an international basis
• Herbert Bayer - sans serif typeface, argued for all text to be lower case they don't aid the process of reading 
• constructivists - no distinction between being a graphic designer being a film maker being a photographer - they were all creatives working on projects together
• modernism is a beautiful example of the utopian dream the the time, its egalitarian nature and reduction as artificial boundaries between people
• its life becoming art
• female practitioners emerging, women were constructivists as much as men 
• the visual language of modernist constructivism get diffused into wall paper and textiles
• soviet working mens club?!
  
  
• russian bauhaus, hard to find any books on it, we dont like to think of russia as being as culturally developed as us
• western fasion is desgned to sexually objectify women, this moderist design for workers suits aimed to do the opposite, same clothes for both genders 
• letatlinn, sky-bike (flying machine) sadly never worked like his tower 
• dehumanising and standardising?
• nazis shut down the bauhaus - scared about the dream of a fair and international collabarative world