Lecture 13: Design and Modernism

Modernism - The subjective experience of the individual in the modern world 

About how the modern world helps us to understand ourselves at a deeper level. 

Modernism is about regaining order and structure. 

Pushing things forward, not looking backwards, inventing, not historic, not quoting

Modernism in design :

• anti-historicism Pushing things forward, not looking backwards, inventing, not historic, not quoting
• Truth to materials celebrate the materials and not disguise them. Simple geometric forms appropriate to the material being used. 
• Form follows function design something to work and then the beauty comes in the elegance in which it serves its purpose 
• Technology embracing the new technologies 
• Internationalism utopian ambition to bring the world together by having one mode of visual communication across the whole planet 

If you follow the trends then it will be lost with time as fashion changes. Modernism was trying to make a style which stripped everything down to its essence so that they became timeless. 

New York is exemplar city of high modernism - Mies van der rohe, Seagram building, 1958

Logic, rationality and reason 

Quarry Hill Flats, Leeds, 1938-78

The Bauhaus - whole wall of glass to make the art studios light, new typeface for the name on the side, all disciplines working together. 

Harry beck underground map - not accurate in distance layout, but it is a visualisation of the London Underground to make getting around as easy as possible. Form follows function, the legibility was the most important, just need to understand london, not understand each of the distances between the stations. 

Modernist do not use the decorative features such as serifs, also argue that all letters should be lowercase(don't communicate anything and don't help with the process of reading) - Herbert Bayer's

The constructivists: Tatlins model of the monument to the third international. Aesthetic of the modern as the iron and other materials are celebrated. 

Stepanova & Popova: 

VKhUTEMAS- Progressive Art School

Just like the Bauhaus but soveit