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Art Concret, Basic Design and Meta-Design

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Art Concret, Basic Design and Meta-Design 324 TUGboat, Volume 38 (2017), No. 3 Art Concret, Basic Design and meta-design Otl Aicher (subsequently the corporate identity de- signer of Lufthansa and the Munich Olympic Games), Marcel Herbst Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart, Johannes Itten, Abstract Hermann von Baravalle, T´omasMaldonado, and others. One who enrolled in this studio course was This note links Concrete Art (l'art concret), a vis- William S. Huff, an American architecture student ual art form originating around 1925, with Basic and, later on, an associate of Louis Kahn who went Design as taught in first-year design courses. It ex- to Germany on a Fulbright grant to attend the HfG tends this view by approaching the topic from a rule- for the 1956/57 academic year. The course which based, meta-design perspective using METAPOST Huff took was taught by Maldonado and, upon re- and Nicola Vitacolonna's engine for TeXShop. turning to the U.S., Huff proceeded to teach this course (even part-time at the HfG during the period 1 Introduction of 1962{66) until his retirement (mainly as a member Art academies of the 19th century had their introduc- of the architecture faculty of the Carnegie Institute tory courses. The Bauhaus (1919{33), the famous of Technology/Carnegie Mellon University [1960{72] design school located first in Weimar, then in Dessau, and the State University of New York at Buffalo and eventually in Berlin when the Nazis forced it to [1974{98]). close in 1933, introduced a first year introductory As a student of the HfG myself (1958{62), I had course that was to serve as a model for other de- heard of Huff, and had seen some of the works of his sign schools. This introductory course, the Vorkurs students, but I had never met him in Ulm. I came or Grundlehre, was emulated by schools around the to realize the significance of Huff's work later on, globe in an attempt to initiate students to the ba- when I read Douglas Hofstadter's essay on Huff [7]. sics | the fundamental principles | of design. Around 2009 I learned that Huff had handed over In post-World-War-II Germany, the idea came the various designs of his students to the archive of up to found anew a Bauhaus. The plan was formu- HfG, and in the winter of 2013/14 the Ulm Museum lated by (among others) Inge Scholl, the sister of curated a show based on his legacy: Basic Design | Hans and Sophie Scholl; Hans and Sophie were, as Von Ulm in die USA und zur¨uck. Perhaps two years members of the resistance group Weiße Rose, ex- earlier I had established mail contact, and in 2015 I ecuted by the Nazis. Inge and her husband-to-be, visited William Huff in Pittsburgh, where he lives. Otl Aicher, a graphic designer, were involved in the Huff creatively extended the foci of Basic De- post-war Ulmer Volkshochschule (Ulm Adult Educa- sign as taught in Ulm, and he implicitly shifted tion Center), and they initially pursued the notion the limiting æsthetic boundaries of Concrete Art. to found a school in Ulm that was to focus on politi- Basic Design, as seen by Huff, has a strong rule- cal education. When Max Bill (architect, designer based orientation, and because of this feature it may and artist | and former student of the Bauhaus) was be approached via meta-design [4] and can be pro- invited to join the planning team, the idea took hold grammed. Huff's students did not use the computer to found a \new" Bauhaus. John McCloy, the U.S. to create their designs, but I found this feature attrac- High Commissioner in Germany at the time, sup- tive and, hence, started to program designs (using ported the project, and eventually the Hochschule METAPOST, and with the help of our son, Joshua f¨urGestaltung (HfG) in Ulm opened its doors in 1953 Aaron) which we had been playing with as students, (to be shut, in 1968, by a regressive government) [10]. or patterns Huff's students had come up with. The HfG had, like the Bauhaus, a formative, propædeutic year designed to initiate students to 2 Concrete Art and Basic Design various design professions (product design, architec- Concrete Art evolved as an offshoot of several ver- ture, graphic design, et cetera). Part of the curricu- sions of abstract art such as Constuctivism (with lum of this first year was a \basic design" studio, Kasimir Malevitch or El Lissitzky as exponents) and and Max Bill, the first rector of the HfG and an De Stijl (with Theo van Doesburg, Piet Mondrian early advocate of Concrete Art, recruited various or Georges Vantongerloo as members). A first mani- people of similar orientation to teach this course: festo of De Stijl, dating from 1918, lists nine points, Josef Albers (a Bauhaus ´emigr´e,former rector of none of which bear a direct relation to stylistic ele- Black Mountain College in Asheville, NC, and, after ments of design: it is more a call for participation 1950, faculty member of Yale University and chair and a statement regarding social conditions. of its Department of Design | and, presumably, the Concrete Art, on the other hand, with its in- person who had coined the term \basic design"), tersection of membership, is more specific than the Marcel Herbst TUGboat, Volume 38 (2017), No. 3 325 manifesto of De Stijl. The term art concret is said way until he was satisfied with the result. In similar to have been coined by Theo van Doesburg, and in fashion, the programmer-designer can interactively a new manifesto, published 1930 [1], six principles play with his program by adjusting parameters, un- were emphasized, four of which (namely the second til the design is satisfactory. Because turn-around to the fifth) have direct bearing on the style (and on times of design production become greatly reduced, the particular approach): as we all know (and as font designers working with METAFONT • the art work has to be completely pre-conceived know), design itself, and the didactic (L’œvre d'art doit ^etre enti`erement con¸cueet approach to design education, can be seen in a new form´eeavant son ex´ecution); light. Lastly, I should also mention that Basic Design, • the art work must be constructed with elements approached from a meta-design angle, is not simply which only represent themselves ([. ] doit ^etre computer generated art. Computer generated art [. ] construit avec des ´el´ements purement plas- (making use, for instance, of fractals) normally lacks tiques [. ] Un ´el´ement pictural [et le tableau] the historical link that I have sketched above: it does n'a pas d'autre signification que `lui-m^eme'); not follow the ascetic æsthetic of Concrete Art, it is • the picture and its elements ought to be simple; frequently rather baroque (or even tacky) in appear- • the technical execution [of the picture] ought to ance, and often lacks the implicit link to applications be exact, anti-impressionistic. (such as architecture or design). This manifesto is, implicitly, a rejection of abstrac- tion (as practiced, for instance, by Piet Mondrian). 3 Meta-design It is to be seen in the context of a new focus on Meta-design, so natural to TEXnicians or users of machines and technology, shared by a range of artis- TEX-related programs, is not frequently used in art tic movements (including Futurism), and in relation or design schools (speculation on why this is the case to a culture which embraced architecture, product would require another note). But meta-design was design, graphic design, typography, and art, in the somehow anticipated at the HfG in Ulm, in that sense of a Gesamtkunstwerk (synthesis of the arts). topics of operations research were part of the general This Neue Sachlichkeit (new objectivity, new sim- curriculum (taught by Horst Rittel who subsequently plicity, functionalism), part also of the Bauhaus, was moved to Berkeley). We were introduced to graph not restricted only to the visual art and design but theory on the basis of D´enesK¨onig[9], and later affected philosophy as well [5]. I acquired the text of Claude Berge [2]. I became After 1933, Concrete Art gained momentum conscious of the four-color problem, of the problem where it could (with people like Hans Arp, Sophie on subdivision of a square with squares (of unequal Tæuber-Arp, Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart, Ri- size), and the famous problem of K¨onigsberg which chard Paul Lohse, Max Bill, Verena Lœwensberg). Leonhard Euler had formulated. For architecture Many of the works of these artists are not conceived students, graph theory was seen as a natural ally to follow rules, but some are, particularly those of because geographic maps or floor plans could be Lohse and Bill, and the ones that are rule-based translated, uniquely, into graphs; but the converse, so can be programmed; even those that do not follow important in practical applications, was not that easy specific rules may be \recreated" (or simulated) using to find | that is, given a graph (of some relations), random variables. how to produce an associated floor plan. Many of the rule-based works created by con- Meta-design of Basic Design patterns, as I men- crete artists are also problem-based and, hence, can tioned in the Introduction, is a new avocation of easily be used in the context of assignments in a Basic mine, spawned by old age (e.g. instead of solving Design course. The advantage of programmed design crossword puzzles). I am a lover of Concrete Art, is obvious: in the old days, students were given at charmed by its frugal æsthetic, and I was taken aback least one month to come up with a particular de- by its seeming stagnation during the past half cen- sign; today, program generation can proceed much tury.
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