It is a little world
- Cubed
In the 1960s, the designer Robert Propst worked with the Herman Miller company to produce “The Action Office”, a stylish system of open-plan office furniture that allowed workers to sit, stand, move around and configure the space as they wished.
Propst then watched in horror as his ideas were corrupted into cheap modular dividers, and then to cubicle farms or, as Propst described them, “barren, rathole places”. Managers had squeezed the style and the space out of the action office, but above all they had squeezed the ability of workers to make choices about the place where they spent much of their waking lives.
...It should be easy for the office to provide a vastly superior working environment to the home, because it is designed and equipped with work in mind. Few people can afford the space for a well-designed, well-specified home office. Many are reduced to perching on a bed or coffee table. And yet at home, nobody will rearrange the posters on your wall, and nobody will sneer about your “dog pictures, or whatever”. That seems trivial, but it is not.
The brick is one of those old technologies, like the wheel or paper, that seem to be basically unimprovable. ‘The shapes and sizes of bricks do not differ greatly wherever they are made,’ writes Edward Dobson in the fourteenth edition of his Rudimentary Treatise on the Manufacture of Bricks and Tiles. There’s a simple reason for the size: it has to fit in a human hand. As for the shape, building is much more straightforward if the width is half the length.
Rousseau’s Emile argued that education is the cultivation of inherent faculties, rather than the imposition of knowledge. Taking this path, Pestalozzi recast the teacher as a protective figure who follows and stimulates the child’s inherent intelligence.
The Basic Course was a general introduction to composition, color, materials, and three-dimensional form that familiarized students with techniques, concepts, and formal relationships considered fundamental to all visual expression, whether it be sculpture, metal work, painting, or lettering. The Basic Course developed an abstract and abstracting visual language that would provide a theoretical and practical basis for any artistic endeavor.
See how many a pretty thing
I always from the cube can bring:
Chair and sofa, bench and table,
Desk to write at when I’m able,
All the household furniture,
Even baby’s bed I’m sure;
Not a few such things I see;
Stove and sideboard here can be.
Many things, both old and new,
My dear cube brings into view;
So my cube much pleases me,
Because through it so much I see.
It is a little world.
In 1923 Kandinsky proposed a universal correspondence between the three elementary shapes and the three primary colors: the dynamic triangle is inherently yellow, the static square is intrinsically red, and the serene circle is naturally blue.
The series ▲■● represents Kandinsky’s attempt to prove a universal correlation between color and geometry; it has become one of the most famous icons of the Bauhaus. Kandinsky conceived of these colors and shapes as a series of oppositions: yellow and blue represent the extremes of hot/cold, light/dark, and active/passive, while red is the intermediary between them. The triangle, square, and circle are graphic equivalents of the same polarities.
A key difference between verbal language and the modernist ideal of a visual “language” is the arbitrariness of a verbal sign, which has no natural, inherent relationship to the concept it represents. The sound of the word “horse”, for example, does not innately resemble the concept of a horse. Ferdinand de Saussure called this arbitrariness the fundamental feature of the verbal sign. The meaning of a sign is generated by its relationship to other signs in the language: the sign’s legibility lies in its difference from other signs.
“The more exact and complete the criteria are, the more creative the work becomes. The creative act is reduced to an act of selection.”
— Karl Gerstner, Designing Programmes (1963)
The nineteenth century saw an increasing separation between the treatment of the surface and the structure of designed objects. Mass production and a mobile market economy encouraged the production of heavily ornamented yet cheaply fabricated products. Affordable manufacture allowed the burgeoning middle class to acquire “luxury” goods fashioned after objects formerly reserved for an elite.
Between 1835 and 1850 Froebel worked on his “Gifts and Occupations” — a set of geometric blocks (Gifts) and basic craft activities (Occupations), that would become the centerpiece of his pedagogical theory. The Gifts and Occupations were introduced in a highly ordered sequence, which began in the child’s second month and concluded in the last year of kindergarten.
Just one of many examples of beautiful typography and layout throughout the book. Love the page design.