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.
