Design

“A trifle extreme maybe but what is too much today, won’t be enough tomorrow. After all, anything worth doing is worth overdoing, and nothing exceeds like excess.”

I consult this book every morning before I go to work. Modern Fashions by David Buchan, 1979, for the Glenbow Museum in Calgary. To showcase his wardrobe art, David Buchan created these pieces based on Esquire magazine ads from the ’60s. They were also enlarged and used as photo-murals in the exhibition. And here’s a selected timeline of his work.

From right to left:
Roger Hilton, Gwyther Irwin, Bernard Meadows, Joe Tilson, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 1965
Op Losse Schroeven: situaties en cryptostructuren, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 1969
Frank Stella, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 1970

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Let’s start Monday morning off with a Friday Find (found Friday, Jan. 4): 3 catalogues from the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam) designed by Wim Crouwel and Total Design.

Take a minute to appreciate Crouwel’s graphic restraint, his enslavement to the grid and his dedication to Univers.

Take another minute to read these excerpts describing how prevalent Crouwel’s design was in the Netherlands:

“It was actually quite difficult to avoid Wim Crouwel’s work. In the 1960s the Netherlands was inundated with posters, catalogues, stamps designed by him—even the telephone book.”
—Karel Martens

“Wim Crouwel’s work has been a part of our lives since the day we were born. We grew up in a graphic landscape created by Crouwel and his contemporaries. The books we used at school, the telephone book, stamps: a lot of the printed matter in the Netherlands was designed by studios such as Total Design. (As a matter of fact, the city where both Erwin and Danny were born, Rotterdam, had a logo designed by Crouwel). As a consequence, we feel as if the graphic language of Crouwel is our mother tongue, our natural language. It’s a part of our roots.”
—Experimental Jetset

NOTE: Both of the above excerpts are from IDEA magazine #323, a recently published feature issue about Crouwel and his work.

Pantone’s color of the year!

As an attempt to discover new books and ideas, I (along with my fellow design fellow, Vance) have been making a habit of visiting the Walker Art Center’s expansive library every Friday afternoon. Never before having such a rich resource available to us, we inevitably stumble upon many, blog-worthy, printed materials. Pending their level of worthiness as well as their state of ‘oh-snap-ness’, we will simply document our findings under the categorization of “Friday Finds.” Ideally, our “finds” will be posted shortly after the find has been made to preserve their freshness. (Please excuse this commencing “Friday Finds” post as it is already 4 days old.)

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During my most recent visit, I found a stack of Avalanche, a magazine that existed from 1970-1976.

Thanks to Emmet for borrowing me Conception. Conceptual Documents 1968 to 1972 (designed by Stuart Bailey), I was able to learn a little more about Avalanche magazine. Here are some quotes from the book describing the magazine:

“…Avalanche, first published in Fall 1970 in New York by Willoughby Sharp and edited by Eliza Béar, developed a characteristic style of a straightforward purportedly unmediated platform for conceptual art and documentation.” (pp. 157)

“The aim of publishing, as represented in…Avalanche and similar publications, was to present primary…information, as far as possible, to let people think about art for themselves.” (pp. 165)

Certainly Avalanche proved to be an important conceptual art publication in the 1970s. And from a design perspective, the cover of the magazine had the right moves with its bold logotype set in Helvetica in combination with the no-nonsense portraits.

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A poster show curated by Zak Kyes for the Architecture Association in London “emerges from a desire to draw attention to a number of recent developments in the field of graphic design that highlight its increasingly fertile relationship with architecture. Broadly, this involves a loose network of fellow-travellers whose work mobilises graphic design as a specifically critical activity.”

The results are “sometimes utterly bewildering,” says Brett Steele. There’s also a nice publication which you can see here.

There is something so money about seeing rap lyrics contextualized in such an analytical format. Here are a couple favorites:

Ice Cube “It Was a Good Day”

Naughty By Nature “O.P.P.”

(Thanks to Brad Surcey for the link)

Having grown up in St. Louis and now living in Minneapolis I rarely get the opportunity to spend much time in my old stomping grounds. When I do here are four places I always like to visit for both their architectural intrigue as well as the memories they hold.

St. Louis Planetarium
Architect: Gyo Obata of Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum
Completed: 1963
Obata studied under Eero Saarinen at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. Oh and the bow is temporarily on the building for the holiday season.

The Gateway Arch
Architect: Eero Saarinen
Completed: 1968
Many people don't know about this architectural gem . . . It's kind of hidden. The exhibition Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future will be opening at the Walker and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in September of 2008.

Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts
Architect: Tadao Ando
Completed: 2001
Commissions for the building include Ellsworth Kelly's wall sculpture Blue Black, and Richard Serra's torqued spiral sculpture Joe.

Climatron
Architect: Murphy and Mackey, Architects
Completed: 1960
A Geodesic dome structure which incorporates the principles of R. Buckminster Fuller, the inventor of the geodesic system. The Climatron is located on the grounds of the Missouri Botanical Gardens.

Coudal links up More Party Animals, which is playful design with a bit of a point:

More Party Animals is an apolitically-political idea born out of a heartfelt disenchantment with the status quo. As the current system continues to polarize this country, we strongly believe America is in need of a wider selection of political parties.

We say our idea is apolitical because More Party Animals is steadfastly devoted to being policy-free. Our animals represent a potential symbol for new beliefs, not the beliefs themselves. That, we leave up to you.

Our purpose is to encourage and help people start their own party, promote their own ideas and create a genuine alternative that might actually catch on. More choices leads to better results…it’s the American way.

Are red white and blue so engrained in the design palette of the American political system? Apparently so. At least the quixotic usage of the elephant and donkey provide some fodder to build upon for political design fun. And the animal logos look good on t-shirts, too.

This entry also posted at The UnConvention.

Uta Eisenreich, Network (Teamwork), 2002

Kyle’s post at Arkitip about Maurice Scheltens triggered a happy memory of seeing photographer Uta Eisenreich’s work for the first time. Since the last time I checked she’s apparently designed a sweet website that’s structured like a pin-up board. Uta sets up conceptual situations often based on meticulously contrived (though loosely executed) human interaction, and then photographs the results. Her projects include kidnapping a group of foreign business travelers in a small bus with darkened windows, creating a spatial representation of a computer desktop, directing incoming cars to park chromatically, and participating in breakdancing duels where instead of breakdancing, she and her opponent get in the circle and create towering arrangements of ordinary objects, trying to outdo each other in height and beauty. That performance is called Close to the Edge.

Some of my favorite photographs of hers are from a series called Network (Teamwork) in which she creates physical sociograms by asking kids questions about each other and mapping the connections. Which 3 kids would you invite to your birthday? Who do you know least well in your class? These and other “schoolyard mandalas” the kids created are an interesting take on the visual language of education and schools. I imagine Steven Willats would enjoy them too.

I just remembered I had these photos i thought i’d share. The photos are from last February when Andrew and Emmet visited NC State. They did a very nice presentation of projects done at the Walker’s Design Department dating back to 1998.

Above: One of the slides in the presentation: Poster for Allan Wexler exhibition designed by Daniel Eatock.

It was indeed a mini-Walker reunion when we went for dinner following the lecture. I happened to be that semester at NC State as a Designer in Resident.

Pictured from left to right: Santiago Piedrafita, Deb Littlejohn, Meredith Davis, Andrew Blauvelt, Emmet Byrne, Alex Quinto, Matt Peterson, and Katie Meaney.