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If you look at a lot of Bauhaus projects, sort of with x-ray eyes,
what you see are things that are beautiful abstract compositions
like this is Herbert Bayer's design for a newspaper kiosk.
And if you just look at it, you see a cube with a sign on top, and
it's two rectangular shapes that integrate, that have that white
arrow that kind of curves around and points down to the kiosk.
And then the kiosk has almost a Dada kind of collage
advertisement on one side and the window to buy the magazine on the other.
The design of the kiosk itself
is this kind of very constructed architectural space.
That bright primary color again is meant to attract your attention.
And then the application of the words on it
turn it into a piece of three-dimensional graphic design.
Bayer was really interested in, again, these kind of modern spaces,
like this design for the lobby of a cinema.
That movie theater screen that you see in the upper right hand corner,
is applying the same idea of a color pallet, basic graphic design space and
then this dynamic use of lettering that's linked to the architectural space.
The graphic design that Bayer produced at the Bauhaus, this is for
a lecture by a visiting architect,
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has the same sense of the space of the poster
having a kind of architectural structure, and
then the lettering helps you perceive just what that space is.
Like the way the word Poelzig in those giant, sans-serif letters,
hugs the bottom of the poster, and the date on the upper right hand corner,
the big February 26, the way that grabs your attention to that corner.
And then the way that the dynamic of the red circle
in the center kind of connects those two.
This very, like considered placement of typography in a space practically gets us
close to an architectural rendering of space as you can get in two dimensions.
Here's another Herbert Bayer poster,
celebrating the 60th birthday of another faculty, Wassily Kandinsky.
And while everything appears to be more in motion because of that slight angle,
you still have this sense of a room being created literally,
by the way that the words are placed on the page and
that structure that's endemic to his design at that time has great clarity.
Here is an interesting, it's a catalog for the Bauhaus that Herbert Bayer
designed where he uses what I'm pretty sure is probably a Moholy-Nagy photograph
against simply rendering a most abstract view of that building and
using it as an iconic form.
Or this interesting first volume of a Bauhaus magazine
where he takes a set of tools that a design student might use,
like the pencil and the clear drafting triangle and
then these kind of white sculptural forms of a cone,
a cube and a ball as symbolic renderings of the basic tools and
the basic forms that were the obsessions at the Bauhaus during that time.
While Bayer was most well known for typography and publication design and
advertising posters that he did when he wasn't teaching at the Bauhaus,
He too, like Moholy-Nagy, was interested in multimedia and
expanded ideas of spaces that design and
especially graphic designers would work in.
So, this is a really interesting diagram that he made of
an exhibition of how one might think of the design of an exhibition
that incorporated many panels or points of views
so that you were thinking not only of what the viewer of an exhibition might see
right in front of them, but what they might see in the periphery of their vision
and how they might imagine an environment that's filled with graphic design.
There are other renderings of this diagram that exist, but what is so
important about it is, again, this kind of connection of the idea of maybe
a more immersive media, which could have come from thinking about film or
even those light-space experiments of Moholy-Nagy.
And thinking about applying Bayer's work and
thinking about applying those ideas to the design of exhibitions.
Where with print in a space you emulated this
more environmentally expansive point of view.
This sketch clearly indicates a space that you can imagine walking through and
seeing things from different points of view.
And it speaks to this area of work that Bayer was so
interested in about turning two dimensions into three and
thinking about how the audience might interact with that.
Louise SandhausFaculty, Program in Graphic Design
Lorraine WildFaculty, Program in Graphic Design
