Design and Modernism

Design and Modernism

Modernism is not only about responding to the modern world but the way in which we learn to understand ourselves at a deeper level.

Modernism in Design:

• Anti-Historicism - about inventing new things and not looking back. Its not historic its creating the new. 
• Truth to materials - Modernists embrace the new world and everything about it including new materials. Celebrating the new materials and their uses. Modern film making - just explores the beauty of shutter speed and uses nothing else.
• Form follows function - Modernists design places functionality before form. you solve a problem with your work, then it will have beauty and you don’t need to try and make it pretty it will have that itself as it has served its purpose.
• Technology
• Internationalism - Modernist practices aim to create a neutral but universal visual language. 

Cutlery from The Great Exhibition - 1851

• Not about functionality as they would hurt to use
• Not international, etc. Not modernist

Bauhaus styles Cutlery - 100 years old

• functionality first but beauty has followed
• if you try and make your work superficially stylish then it will quickly become outdated as trends come and go very fast. 
• success of modernist design is that the designs continue to appear modern and people will buy the designs in years to come. 

Anti-historicism - no need to look backwards to older styles.

‘Ornament is crime’ - Adolf Loos (1908)

Form following function:

Mies Van der Rohe - Seegram Building, 1958

Fitting a huge amount of people into a small block of land - build upwards

square - most sturdy and functional

Glass - allows light in all building, tough glass to withstand high winds etc.

Quarry Hill Flats, Leeds, 1938 - 78

Attempt at modernist creation.

Internationalism:

• A language of design that could be recognised and understood on an international basis.

Harry Beck, London Underground Map - 1933

• visualisation of london underground. all about communication and legibility.
• stripping london down to a simple and understandable system. 
• same design now, more or less.

Example of Herbert Bayer’s sans-serif typeface

• argued for all text to be lower case - why do we need capital letter, just takes more time and their function is minimal.