Design

Learning to Design

In a filmed interview, Denise Scott Brown observed that learning to design was similar to learning how to ride a bicycle—you got on, fell off, got back on, and by the end of the day you were riding. The implication is that design—like bicycle riding—can be learned, but it cannot be taught. Allan Greenberg made much the same point to me in a recent conversation. If law was taught like architecture, he said, law students would spend all their time in moot court, but moot court actually plays a very small role in a legal education. Many accomplished architects did not attend an architecture school—Edwin Lutyens,

… Read more

Big Blue

The expected but still untimely passing of Steve Jobs has led to many observations about his national influence on design. But Apple was not the first American high-tech corporation to emphasize design. That distinction properly belongs to IBM. In 1956, Thomas J. Watson, the company’s founder, hired Eliot Noyes, an architect, to oversee IBM’s design initiatives. Thanks to Noyes, designers such as Charles Eames and Paul Rand (who was responsible for the IBM logo) came on board, and architects such as Marcel Breuer and Eero Saarinen were commissioned to design IBM buildings (Jobs commissioned Peter Bohlin to design the distinctive line of Apple stores as well as a headquarters for Pixar,

… Read more

Art Nouveau

The standard rap on Art Nouveau, as I remember from my student art history books, is that it was a short-lived (roughly 1890-1905) hiatus between the historic revival styles of the nineteenth century and the true-blue modernism of the Bauhaus. Art Nouveau was largely pooh-poohed,, written off as an aesthetic dead-end that sprang full-blown from the (feverish) artistic imaginations of architects and designers such as Antonio Gaudi, Victor Horta, Hector Guimard, the young Peter Behrens, Louis Comfort Tiffany and (though he is usually not included in this company), Louis Sullivan. The problem for art historians is that the sinuous decorations of the style obviously have little to do with the abstract minimalism of the Modern Movement.

… Read more

Saul Bass

I met Saul Bass and his wife Elaine in 1994, at a design conference in  Aspen. He was a sweet man, but I remember being rather in awe of him.  Bass (1920-1996), a graphic designer, had elevated the opening credit sequence of movies into a miniature art form. His credits included the titles (and sometimes the posters) for The Man with the Golden Arm, Anatomy of a Murder, and Around the World in 80 Days—where the opening sequence was actually at the end. Most of the title sequences were animated,

… Read more