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Le Printemps de Septembre is an annual creative festival held in Toulouse, France. Leslie David created the beautiful catalog for this year’s festival which finished last week. Check out his portfolio for more top-notch work.

French graphic designer Sébastien Hayez is running a blog called Designers Books. This is a great ressources for designers that are interested in rare and out-of-prints books.

You should also take a look at his Flickr page…

I am very happy to share with you this blog started a couple of month ago by my very good friend Isabelle Swiderski, founder of Vancouver based design studio Seven25.

Design Influence features case studies, tips and resources to leverage the power of communication design specifically in the context of social change. Our goal is to engage in discussions around the role design thinking can have on examining issues we face and reimagining our ways of living.

The new issue of London-based Kilimanjaro is out. This time, the poster-size publication is featuring works from beloved William Burroughs & Gregor Muir – among others.

First published in 2003, Kilimanjaro Magazine is an art and photography magazine produced independently from London. With its signature semiotic covers and innovative format, Kilimanjaro speaks to a global creative community; an ‘art thirsty’ target audience seemingly tired of beautiful but empty publications. With back-to-back creative talent, an evolving broadsheet format and cutting edge design Kilimanjaro has established itself as an art magazine offering a point of creative difference.

Buy it here

Preservation of the Rietveld building for the Rietveld Academy

Sign the petition at http://www.rietveldforrietveld.org/english

My friends of Experimental Jetset informed me about this very important matter. Please read the message bellow and SIGN the petition!

Two years ago, Dutch design legend Wim Crouwel delivered a lecture at the Bold Italic conference in Ghent. In his talk, Crouwel mentioned the fact that, more than anything else, his main source of influence (as student of Minerva Academy, Groningen) was actually the architecture of the Minerva building. More than the lessons, the teachers, his fellow-students, it was the building that influenced him.
He continued by saying that he selected the schools of his children based on the architecture of the buildings. A beautiful revelation.
These words are testament to a very simple fact: a building is not just an empty vessel. It is a designed object, a machine with a soul. The architecture of a school has an influence on the students, maybe a deeper influence than teachers will ever have. Surroundings are an essential part of any education.

The current plans of the management of the Academy, to move the school out of its original building, are deeply disturbing. To break the bond between the Rietveld Academy and its roots is a shame. In Dutch, ‘doodzonde’. Once broken, this bond can never be fixed. It’s a mistake that can never be reversed.

In an article that was published in Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant (on 30 April, 2009), the management explained their plans by referring to the lack of space. That there is a lack of space is undeniable, but moving to another building is not the solution. The lack of space is caused by the current increase of students; a more logical solution for the lack of space would be to control this increase of students. The Rietveld should stay a small, high-quality unit, not an anonymous factory of mass education.
On that note, we should keep in mind that the current economic situation will mean a decrease in students anyway. Due to the current crisis, it is more probable that the Rietveld will shrink, not grow, in the near future. The Rietveld should embrace this return to small-scaleness, and see it as an opportunity to invest in the quality of education, rather than the quantity.

As a more important reason to move out of the original building, the article in De Volkskrant (30 April, 2009) mentions the desire to gentrify the ‘Bos en Lommer’ area in Amsterdam, a so-called ‘Vogelaarwijk’: a district that is part of a select group of districts known as the most problematic and poorest neighborhoods in The Netherlands. By locating the Rietveld academy to such a poor district, the reasoning goes, the district will be elevated to a higher standard. It’s pseudo-’thinking-out-of-the-box’ management logic of the worst kind: “Let’s dump some hipsters in there, to whiten things up a bit”.
It’s a way of reasoning that’s either terribly naive, or really patronizing. Poverty can only be solved by looking at underlying social-economic factors; it cannot be solved by moving an art academy to the “wrong side of town”.
However, a closer look reveals that this decision is not naive at all, but actually a very cynical money-making scheme. As we learn from the article in De Volkskrant, this whole plan has been thought up by the current director of the Rietveld Academy (who, as it happens, will leave the Academy in a short time), and the project developer in charge of the GAK building (the proposed future building of the Rietveld). As becomes clear in the article, the goal of this plan is to get a few millions of euros from the government and city council, to subsidize this gentrification project. This money will be used to buy the building from the project developer. (Keep in mind that this building was impossible to sell; it has been empty for many years now. In the Volkskrant article, the project developer mentions that, much to his regret, the building could not be demolished, as it is an official monument). Selling this otherwise unsellable building to the Rietveld Academy is a great way to get rid of the property and receive public money at the same time. This plan will probably mean big bonuses for all those involved. In plain Dutch, we call this GRAAICULTUUR (look it up).

What’s more, the moment the Rietveld allows itself to be used as such an instrument of gentrification, it will have to relocate everytime the managers, politicians or developers decide it’s time to gentrify another neighborhood. The academy will turn into a disembodied entity, forced to change places every few years. A ghost school, without roots, without history, without future. A soulless Golem, growing for the sake of growing, moving for the sake of moving, without any purpose at all.

One final note. In the original article in De Volkskrant (30 April, 2009), the head of the Supervisory Board ridicules the current location of the Rietveld Academy, saying the school is much better off in a ‘multi-cultural environment’ such as Bos en Lommer. It’s a remark that shows extremely bad taste. The current location of the Rietveld is in fact a very interesting area, historically important for art, design and especially architecture. It’s an area that features such highlights as Berlage’s Plan Zuid, Duiker’s Open Air school, the Olympic Stadium and Citroen Garage by Jan Wils, and the Children’s Homes by Aldo van Eyck
Moreover, it is an area that is seen generally as a district that will have a great economic importance in the near future (see the entry on ‘Zuidas’ on Wikipedia). To dismiss this area as a district of crematoria (as the head of the Supervisory Board did) is deeply disturbing.
(We know it’s a cheap shot, but still we think it’s worth thinking about: if the director of the Rietveld, the project developer of the GAK building and the head of the Supervisory Board think it’s so important to gentrify the area of Bos en Lommer, why are they are not moving there themselves? Of course, this is something that will never happen. They rather locate a few busloads of students there).

Further reasons can be found on the website.

Sign the petition at http://www.rietveldforrietveld.org/english

Thanks in advance!

All the best,
The Rietveld Preservation Society.

Anton Stankowski (June 18, 1906 РDecember 11, 1998) was a German graphic designer, photographer and painter. He developed an original Theory of Design and pioneered Constructive Graphic Art. Typical Stankowski designs attempt to illustrate processes or behaviours rather than objects. Such experiments resulted in the use of fractal-like structures long before their popularisation by Benǫt Mandelbrot in 1975.

Clip/Stamp/Fold is the first exhibition of architectural magazines produced in the 1960s and 1970s. It was curated by architectural theorist Beatriz Colomina and a group of PhD students at Princeton University. The exhibition was first presented at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in 2006. It has since met critical acclaim especially for remaining geographically specific to each city where it is presented. While the concept is portable, the archival magazines vary, being sourced from local collections.

Take a close look at the website, it’s fantastic!

Each TOLUCA publication is the result of an intimate collaboration between an artist using the medium of photography, a writer and a designer. In most cases, it falls to the writer, chosen for the affinities his or her work presents with that of the artist, to compose a piece of fiction or poetry to accompany a handful of photographs. Artists Candida Höfer, Andres Serrano or Daido Moriyama have thus for example been paired respectively with Antoine Volodine, Mario Bellatin and Michel Bulteau.
Designers are equally chosen by the publishers for their supposed ability to engage in a dialogue with the artist and the writer. Konstantin Grcic, Jasper Morrison or Andrea Branzi, to name but a few, were thus asked to design a container for publications illustrated respectively by Jean-Marc Bustamante, Thomas Ruff and Malick Sidibé.

Emblematic of modernity, the grid gives form to everything from skyscrapers and office cubicles to Mondrian paintings and bits of computer code. And yet, as Hannah Higgins makes clear in this wide-ranging and revelatory book, the grid has a history that long predates modernity; it is the most prominent visual structure in Western culture. In The Grid Book, Higgins examines the history of ten grids that changed the world: the brick, the tablet, the gridiron city plan, the map, musical notation, the ledger, the screen, moveable type, the manufactured box, and the net. Charting the evolution of each grid, from the Paleolithic brick of ancient Mesopotamia through the virtual connections of the Internet, Higgins demonstrates that once a grid is invented, it may bend, crumble, or shatter, but its organizing principle never disappears.

The appearance of each grid was a watershed event. Brick, tablet, and city gridiron made possible sturdy housing, the standardization of language, and urban development. Maps, musical notation, financial ledgers, and moveable type promoted the organization of space, music, and time, international trade, and mass literacy. The screen of perspective painting heralded the science of the modern period, classical mechanics, and the screen arts, while the standardization of space made possible by the manufactured box suggested the purified box forms of industrial architecture and visual art. The net, the most ancient grid, made its first appearance in Stone Age Finland; today, the loose but clearly articulated networks of the World Wide Web suggest that we are witnessing the emergence of a grid of unprecedented proportions—one so powerful that it is reshaping the world, as grids do, in its image.

About the Author
Hannah B Higgins is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of Fluxus Experience.

Released: March 2009
Published by The MIT Press
7 x 9, 312 pp., 62 illus.
$24.95/£16.95

This may look like a re-post but since I found all these information later on today, I really had to make a second post about Otto Neurath.

Looking at the book and at the images related to this exhibition, you will find a lot of similarities with the graphic design work of Neurath and the “New” graphic style of some 2D motion design today…

The exhibition The After Neurath Project focuses on Otto Neurath’s relationship with architecture and his influence on urban development. Especially his ideas about the democratization of public space and how to reconcile the intimacy and tangibility of the ancient polis with the anonymity and diversity of the global metropolis have been very influential to protagonists like Paul Otlet, Cornelis van Eesteren, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky andLe Corbusier and resound in mainstream architectural and urban thinking of today.

The exhibition ‘The Global Polis’ shows the innovative ideas about the modern metropolis of Neurath -and his famous protagonists- based on the social-democratic ideals of the interbellum. Neurath was especially eager to promote participatory forms of democratic exchange (a ‘global polis’), and this exhibition shows his attempts in disciplines as varied as architecture, urbanism, graphic design and planning.

See more pictures of the exhibition here and also you can see an interview with the curator, here.