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Bauhaus at 100: its legacy in five key designs
- stuartd 8y agoYou can download the original Bauhaus books as PDFs from https://monoskop.org/Bauhaus#Books https://monoskop.org/Bauhaus#Books
- sbr464 8y agoIt's a small mention in the article, but there's a single zip file link[1] to avoid downloading each. [1] https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=0B2lHLEBLCofZQ2tuNVVYMjdHbVE https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=0B2lHLEBLCofZ...
- drderidder 8y agoThe first example being related to typography reminded me that Jan Tschichold was one of those influential typographers who's book, The Form of the Book, along with Raul Rosarivo's Divina Proporcion Tipographica, re-popularized the "Secret Canon" of medieval incunabula and brought the Golden Ratio to bear on book layout. Unfortunately we've lost a lot of that beautiful layout design but it can still be found in a few places. For a while, MacBook screens very closely approximated the Golden Rectangle.
- mattkevan 8y agoTschichold was a design genius. His first book ‘The New Typography’ set out the rules for modernist design, rejecting all old forms of design. Some of the work he did at that time basically set the template for most design we have now. My old design tutor, who’s father was one of the UK’s leading modernist typographers and knew Tscichold, had a piece of his that she said had almost every modern design cliche, though done for the first time here. Later, after a run-in with the nazis, he moved to the UK, rejected modernist design ideology as a little too fascist and revived traditional book design. He also designed the Penguin Classics book series - a major design achievement itself.
- _Microft 8y agoDieter Rams' design principles can be found in his Wikipedia article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieter_Rams#%22Good_design%22_principles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieter_Rams#%22Good_design%22_... by the way. He worked for the company Braun and you will most likely recognize some of the iconic designs when searching for it.
- pizzapill 8y agoThis article shows how much Apple was inspired: https://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2013/11/30/jony-ives-no-longer-so-secret-design-weapon/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2013/11/30/jony-i...
- dchest 8y agoThere's also a recently released documentary about him: https://www.hustwit.com/rams/ https://www.hustwit.com/rams/
- sbr464 8y agoI recommend seeing 'rams' also, it's very well done.
- cpmsmith 8y agoThanks, I didn't know about that. Gary Hustwit is the same person that directed Helvetica, which is a classic design film IMO.
- arawde 8y agoThere is also Objectified, about industrial and product design, which I believe is his best. It has a small segment with Rams in it.
- weinzierl 8y agoWhile Dieter Rams' work was certainly influenced by the Bauhaus he wasn't a member neither of the school nor the movement. Rams was born in 1932 a year before the Bauhaus was pressured to close its doors by the Nazis. He belonged to different generation of artists. Rams is considered a protégé of the Ulm School of Design This school is probably best known for the invention of the iconic Olympic pictograms by one of it's founders and the corporate identity for the German airline Lufthansa.
- man-and-laptop 8y agoRegarding modern architecture, I'm not a fan. It's not like a painting which you can hang up on your wall at your own leisure. No, these are buildings that people have to live in and around. I think London is worse off with the Shard. I can't comment on the rest. [edit: removed a paragraph about a tangential topic]
- rwmj 8y agoAlso those chairs are really uncomfortable.
- 13of40 8y agoI was in a satellite office of my company in Poland a couple of months ago, and scattered around the place were these meter high plastic egg pod things that looked like robots from a Portal game. Took me a while to realize they were garbage cans. For god's sake, people, can't we even let a trash can be itself?
- mrweasel 8y agoSadly I can't remember where I heard it, it may have been in the documentary "Objectified", but there's a designer that raises an interesting point. It's something along the lines of: "Why are there still uncomfortable chairs? It's a solved problem, we know how to design chairs."
- oh_sigh 8y agoNot all chairs should be comfortable. Really comfortable chairs in the subway would be ridiculous.
- extrememacaroni 8y agoWhy?
- colechristensen 8y agoHonest question: where do I find out how to design a comfortable chair?
- bch 8y agoThat kitchen looks lovely in the still image, but is it functional? Its jars look hard to reach and dust-prone (unless the idea is to keep a smaller quantity of coffee in-reach and restock that every few days?) and the pull-out drawers look to serve a (negative) dual role of being suboptimal themselves (can only tall people look in them?) and make the over-cupboards slightly more inaccessible.
- telesilla 8y agoProbably in comparison to what there was before: standalone cabinets with less shelf space, stoves with legs, furniture that could move and didn't match, more to clean around and under hence more dust, and not being efficient with limited space. Given it's version 1.0 it seems pretty good considering what came before!
- bch 8y agoGood points. If it is a “v1.0”, this might be an example of the moment of paradigm shift but not “polished” or tweaked to completely contemporary expectations. I’m so used to seeing Bauhaus (esp knock-on or secondary influences a la Dieter Rams) that are so awesome that finding apparent flaws is jarring to me. Perhaps the article could have done better than a work in progress prototype (if that’s indeed what’s being observed), or I can get cool with Bauhaus not introducing designs fully formed and perfect as like The Birth of Venus.
- stronglikedan 8y agoJudging from the height of the door handle and the faucet(?) controls, it looks like everything is shorter than it appears in the picture. In my estimation, for an average height of between 5-6 feet, the jars are at head level and the drawers are at abdomen level, which would be ideal.
- mrweasel 8y agoThat seems rather low, if it is to be functional. The funny thing is that it a "fitted kitchen" yet there's a large gap between the sink and the rest of the kitchen. It seems like it could fit better.