Basel to Boston: an Itinerary for Modernist Typography in America Robert Wiesenberger, Elizabeth Resnick

Basel to Boston: An Itinerary for Modernist Typography in America Robert Wiesenberger, Elizabeth Resnick

In 1982, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) garnered the second annual Design Leadership Award, granted by the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), for its “outstanding demonstration of an institutional commitment to design over a substantial period of time in a variety of media.”1 The award citation named three organizations within MIT, as well as the three women who directed them: Design Services (formerly known as the Office of Publications), led by Jacqueline S. Casey (1927–1992); the MIT Press and its design director, Sylvia Steiner (b. 1937); and the Visible Language Workshop, an experimental graphics program headed by Muriel Cooper (1925–1994). More than once, the award citation refers to an “MIT style.” What came to be the recognizable look of MIT communications over a 30-year period owes its greatest debt to “Swiss” or “Interna- tional Style” typography, characterized at least in part by sans serif typefaces like Helvetica and Akzidenz Grotesk, grid systems for organizing content, asymmetric layouts, and ample use of white space as a compositional element. MIT designers practiced this style before it was taught in most U.S. design programs, well 1 “Design Leadership Award,” in AIGA before it became the lingua franca of international corporate mod- Graphic Design USA: The Annual of the ernism, and long into the 1980s.2 The style remains ubiquitous American Institute of Graphic Arts, vol. 3 today, as dramatized in the 2007 cult documentary, Helvetica. (New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, The aim of this article is neither to define nor further cele- 1982), 47. 2 The sophistication of MIT’s design pres- brate this style. The risks of doing so are pointed out by Dietmar ence was lauded at the time, in terms of Winkler, who worked in MIT’s Office of Publications from 1965 to both the “effectiveness” of the institution 1970, in his review of Helvetica: “The film reminds us of the many and the foresight of its leaders: “MIT’s design history accounts that present the subject in heroic terms, work has become a pioneering American tiptoeing through a vast political minefield, leaving the reality of Standard of how design can play a role 3 in increasing the overall effectiveness of the competing contexts unexplored.” For Winkler, these compet- educational institutions. In such a huge ing contexts are, on the Swiss side, a philosophical approach and and political structure as a university, longstanding guild-based tradition of craft, and on the U.S. side, a this vision reflects the dedication and belated bastardization of this tradition by designers interested in foresight of the university administrators elevating “commercial art” to the status of “graphic design.” His as well as the designers.” Bill Bonnell, “Objective Visual Design: Recent verdict is blunt: “In the U.S., Swiss Design was nothing more than American Developments,” Graphis 173, a style, a quick opportunity for direct plagiarism by the not so well no. 4 (October 1973): 44. skill-trained typographers and designers.”4 3 Dietmar R. Winkler, “Helvetica, the Film and the Face in Context,” Visible Language 44, no. 3 (2010): 369. 4 Ibid., 371. © 2018 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 28 DesignIssues: Volume 34, Number 3 Summer 2018 https://doi.org/10.1162/desi_a_00495

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Leaving aside this polemic, this article asks instead, in the interest of better understanding the U.S. design context: Why MIT? How did aspects of Swiss design become embedded there so early, and why was the Institute so receptive to them? Although MIT maintained an “institutional commitment” to design, as the AIGA award notes, its visual direction came from the personal initiative of its young designers, and it owes a particular debt to two all-but- (c) forgotten figures. The style also fit into a historical discourse on design at MIT and served certain of its institutional priorities. All Figure 1 of these factors predisposed the institution to be one of the earliest Jacqueline S. Casey, posters for MIT Design and most important sites for the growth of modernist graphic Services: (a) Artists and the Scientific design in the United States. Community, 1969 (13.5 x 22.5 inches, offset). Jacqueline Casey worked at MIT’s Office of Publications Client: MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies; (b) The Moon Show, 1969 (12 x 20 (renamed Design Services when she became director in 1972) from inches, offset). Client: MIT Committee on the 1955 until her retirement in 1989, shaping MIT’s visual landscape Visual Arts, Hayden Gallery; (c) Six Artists, both within and beyond its labyrinthine, poster-lined corridors. 1970 (21 x 20.5 inches, offset). Client: MIT Casey’s work is nearly synonymous with what would later be Committee on the Visual Arts, Hayden Gallery. called the “MIT style.” (See Figure 1.) All images from the Jacqueline S. Casey Collection, Courtesy of Massachusetts College of Art and Design Archives.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/desi_a_00495 by guest on 01 October 2021 But where would Casey—who majored in fashion design at the Massachusetts School of Art and who did not benefit from lessons in advanced typography—have found this style? By her own account, in the male-dominated environment of MIT, her two most important influences were women: her former classmate and friend at the Massachusetts School of Art, Muriel Cooper, who hired her, and a young Swiss named Thérèse Moll, who was a visiting designer in the Office of Publications for just four months in 1959. Although Casey and Cooper have finally started to get their due, Moll has remained a footnote at best.5 And of the two, Cooper’s own work at the Office of Publications during this period shows that she was not yet practicing the Swiss style. Moll’s story is little known, in part because she took her own life just two years later.6 Yet Moll, an outstanding young designer, was profoundly important to those who worked briefly alongside her, and for the future path of design at MIT. MIT established its Office of Publications in 1951. Its first director, John Mattill, formerly of MIT’s news office, was tasked with “planning and publication of all official Institute publications, including the Catalogue, official announcements, and material bearing the imprint of the Institute.”7 Before this change, offices from around MIT would go directly to the printer when a new prospectus or pamphlet was needed; “design,” as such, did 5 See David Reinfurt and Robert Wiesen- not enter the discussion.8 Mattill’s ambitions for the program berger, Muriel Cooper (Cambridge, MA: emerged from the spirit of the institution, as he later explained: MIT Press, 2017); Dietmar R. Winkler, “Our search for new knowledge [at MIT] implies the highest cre- ed., Posters: Jacqueline S. Casey: Thirty Years of Design at MIT (Cambridge, ativity, and we seek to stimulate our students’ imagination. So our 9 MA: MIT Museum, 1992); and Ellen college publications, too, must show creativity and imagination.” Lupton, ed., MIT/CASEY (New York: Mattill was a writer and editor, not a designer, so he asked Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design the advice of MIT’s resident avant-garde émigré, Gyorgy Kepes. and Typography, 1989). Since 1945, Kepes, a former colleague of Bauhaus master Lászlò 6 According to public records, Moll was born November 17, 1934 and died Moholy-Nagy in Berlin, London, and then Chicago, had been September 27, 1961. teaching visual design in MIT’s Department of Architecture. Kepes 7 “Memorandum on the Organization of the recommended Muriel Cooper for the job, a young Boston designer Publications Office at the Massachusetts who graduated from the Massachusetts School of Art in 1951.10 Institute of Technology,” MIT Institute Kepes likely knew Cooper from Boston design circles, and at the Archives, n.d. 8 John Mattill, telephone interview by very least, the two would have met while she was freelancing at Robert Wiesenberger, March 16, 2015. Boston’s Institute for Contemporary Art in 1951, the same year 9 Mary Ann Ademino, “College Publica- Kepes worked with the museum as a designer. With Cooper’s hir- tions,” Communication Arts 9, no. 4 ing, MIT became one of the very first U.S. universities to centralize (1967): 43. its publications and employ a full-time, in-house designer.11 10 Cooper graduated with a degree in “General Design” in 1948, worked Cooper began working in the Office of Publications in unhappily for a year in New York adver- March 1953. She created diverse printed matter for MIT, although tising agencies, and then returned to her most of her first four years were dedicated to designing pamphlets alma mater for a BFA and BS in Teacher for the roughly 30 to 40 summer session courses offered there each Education, which she completed in 1951. 11 Mattill and Cooper both claim that it was the first, although the authors are not able to verify the claim.

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Figure 2 year. The nearly square, bi-fold pamphlets sought to communicate Muriel Cooper, Summer session pamphlet the often-arcane technical content of MIT’s courses using photog- covers for MIT Office of Publications: raphy and photomontage—usually of technical (a) Weather Forecasting (1954); (b) Plastics imagery, such as magnified cellular structures or weather maps— in Building (1956); (c) Noise Reduction (1957); and (d) The Psychology of Man-Machine in addition to bold color, and sometimes eccentric typography. Systems (1957). All images from the Muriel R. Cooper found abstract patterns in these technical images, in many Cooper Collection, Courtesy of Massachusetts ways fulfilling Kepes’s long-term project of reuniting art and College of Art and Design Archives. science through visual form, and through graphic design in particular.12 (See Figure 2.) 12 Kepes described the place of “contem- In 1955, to handle the increasing workload, Cooper hired porary advertising art” in healing the her classmate and friend, Jacqueline S. Casey (née Shepherd), to rift between overspecialized disciplines join the office. “I had always known Muriel and admired her,” in his landmark work, Language of Vision (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1944). Casey recalled. “She offered me a job, a temporary job, to come He elaborated on these themes—and and help her during the busy season, which in the old days meant especially on the role of finding order 30 to 40 special summer programs, each one a design project. in natural patterns as a common ground Although I never studied graphic design, I wanted to know how to for artists and scientists—in The New Landscape in Art and Science (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1956). Both works were influential to Cooper.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/desi_a_00495 by guest on 01 October 2021 do something. So I accepted her offer.”13 Casey had worked as a fashion illustrator, as a production manager for a fashion daily, and for a six-month stint, as an interior decorator. “I was strong in drawing,” she noted; “I needed something that was more challeng- ing and intellectual, even though I loved fashion and clothes… it was not the kind of life I was interested in. I was so happy when Muriel Cooper said she needed an assistant.”14 In September 1957, Cooper began a Fulbright Fellowship in Milan to study exhibition design and graphic design. The trip was brief and unsuccessful, as she was sick most of the time and had to return home early because of an illness in the family. Nevertheless, Cooper no doubt experienced the city’s rich design culture at that time, including the many designers working there who had come from Switzerland. In her absence, the Office hired Ralph Coburn, who had studied architecture at MIT before leaving to pursue his painting practice full-time.15 Although not trained in typography, Coburn’s sharp eye and hard-edged, geometric abstract style—he was a close friend and confidant of Ellsworth Kelly—were reflected in his design for MIT. Mattill’s next inspired decision—after founding the Office of Publications, hiring full-time designers, and giving them free reign—was to initiate a visiting program for designers from Europe. The reason was pragmatic, but the results were profound: Designers would come for the period from January to May to handle the rush of work to produce summer session materials, and in the process, MIT staff would learn by working alongside them.16 In 1958 the first invited designer was George Adams, an Austrian who had studied at the Bauhaus, where he was known as Georg Teltscher. After him came a much younger designer, Thérèse Moll, who visited the office in early 1959.17 Casey recalled: Thérèse Moll, a young Swiss designer, was the critical visitor. She introduced the office to European typography. She had been well-trained in the design [of] modular systems. This use of proportions in designing publications series became a useful tool for developing MIT’s image. Although much has been modified by time, technology 13 Jean A. Coyne, “MIT Design Services Offices,” Communication Arts 15, no. 4 and the work of other designers in the office, the basics 18 (1973): 44. that Thérèse brought with her are still operating today. 14 Janet Fairbairn, The Gendered Self in Graphic Design: Interviews with 15 Moll came with impeccable Swiss training. Born in Basel in Women (MFA Thesis, Yale University 1934, she studied at the Gewerbeschule Basel (Basel School of School of Art, 1991), n.p. 15 See Janine Mileaf, Ralph Coburn: Design) from 1949 to 1954, where she counted among her teachers Random Sequence (Chicago: The Arts two of the great standard-bearers of the Swiss style: Armin Club of Chicago, 2017). Hofmann and Emil Ruder. As Dorothea Hofmann, Armin’s wife 16 Winkler, Posters, 16. 17 Ibid., 9. As Winkler recalls, other visiting designers included Denis Postle, John Lees, Walter Plata, and Paul Talman. 18 Winkler, Posters, 17.

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Figure 3 and Moll’s classmate, recalls, “Ruder taught principles of spacing, Thérèse Moll, Black and white exercises for a the grid, rhythmic values, color, etc. years before ‘new graphic course taught by Armin Hofmann, Allgemeine 19 Gewerbeschule, Basel, Switzerland, 1950–51. design’ made the grid its dogma.” Moll was one of Hofmann’s First published in Armin Hofmann, “A Contri- exemplary students; he published her early student work to illus- bution to the Education of the Commercial trate his landmark book, Graphic Design Manual: Principles and Artist,”Graphis 80 (December 1958): 504–17. Practice (1965), which became one of the most widely read state- In figures (a) and (b), certain parts of the 20 picture plane are blanked out from the grid ments of Swiss design principles. (See Figure 3.) of black bars, giving rise to both black and Moll worked as an assistant in one of Europe’s great de- white figures. In figures (c) and (d), certain sign offices, Studio Boggeri, in Milan, soon after receiving her parts of the picture plane are blanked out Swiss Federal Diploma in March 1954; she later worked with Karl from the grid of white bars, giving rise to the Gerstner upon her return, from 1955 to 1957. Moll met Gerstner same result. Images courtesy of Armin and Dorothea Hofmann. when both were students in an evening lettering class taught by

19 Dorothea Hofmann, in a letter to Eliza- beth Resnick, April 2, 2015. 20 Hofmann did not credit any of the work shown in his book. His wife, Dorothea,

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Figure 4 Hofmann in 1950–1951.21 In 1957 she left Gerstner’s studio to work Thérèse Moll for J. R. Geigy A. G., Basel, in the design office at J. R. Geigy A. G., a pharmaceuticals company Switzerland: (a) Prospectus for Micoren, that, since the 1940s had built one of the most renowned design Respiratory and circulatory stimulant (1957); (b) Advertisement for Micoren, against departments in the world, in no small part through the employ- 22 acute oxygen deficiency (1957). Images ment of Hofmann’s students. (See Figure 4.) Within a year, she courtesy of Armin and Dorothea Hofmann. left Geigy to start her own design practice, working with a variety of industrial and scientific clients in Basel. (See Figure 5.) Then, early in 1959, Moll arrived in Cambridge, MA, to work at MIT.23 It is likely that Gerstner paved the way for Moll’s visit. American awareness of Swiss design and contact with its expo- attributes this student work to Moll from nents grew substantially with the 1957 exhibition, Swiss Graphic the 1950–1951 year of the trade school Designers, which appeared at and was circulated nationally by program (Fachklasse). Students at Basel Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art. The exhibition, which was spent their first year in a Vorkurs (prelimi- nary course), after which Hofmann taught accompanied by a lecture tour, presented the work of Gerstner, the next four years of Fachklasse. Letter Hofmann, Josef Müller-Brockmann (who wrote the catalog intro- from Dorothea Hofmann to Elizabeth duction), Ruder, and others. In the catalog preface, the Cincinnati- Resnick, April 2, 2015. based graphic designer, Noel Martin, suggested that Americans, 21 According to Dorothea Hofmann, who “accept confusion and clutter as a matter of fact” and “love to Gerstner sat next to Moll in the class. He had already finished his design edu- add chrome [and] unnecessary moldings and break up large spaces cation but still attended classes in the into small ones,” have much to learn from the Swiss. “Good artists, evening. Shortly afterward they became designers and architects know the value of organizing, simplifying a couple. (Letter from Dorothea Hofmann and creating order,” he wrote. “It is the true basis of art.... This is to Elizabeth Resnick, May 31, 2015.) what makes Swiss Design outstanding.”24 In conjunction with the 22 See Andres Janser and Barbara Junod, eds., Corporate Diversity: Swiss exhibition, Gerstner embarked a lecture tour in the United States, Graphic Design and Advertising By Geigy, speaking about his work and about Swiss design, while visiting 1940–1970 (Baden: Lars Müller, 2009). various institutions and design studios. He appears to have visited 23 Verband Schweizerischer Grafiker, MIT in 1958, which is likely where he recommended that Moll “l’Association des graphistes suisses” receive an invitation to work as a visiting designer.24 In addition to [Association of Swiss Graphic Designers], ed., Schweizer Grafiker: Handbuch, Graphistes suisses: Manuel [Swiss Graphic Designers: Handbook] (Zurich: Verlag Käser Presse, 1960), 173. 24 Noel Martin, “Preface,” in Swiss Graphic Designers, ed. Contemporary Arts Center, (Cincinnati, OH: Cincinnati Art Museum, 1957), n.p.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/desi_a_00495 by guest on 01 October 2021 her gaining work experience abroad, Moll’s visiting America would also have allowed her to continue the process of evangeliz- ing on the Swiss approach to design. As Jan Conradi explains, “Ruder and Hofmann encouraged their students to follow their example: to travel the world, and to lecture and publish as advo- cates for rational design.”26 Coburn and Casey also would have known about the Geigy design work from journals widely read in America, like Gebrauchs- graphik and Graphis.27 The work of both Gerstner and Moll for Geigy and other Swiss industrial clients also had been published in 1957 in an article titled “Swiss Designers of the Younger Gene- ration.”28 The migration of Swiss designers across the Atlantic had

(a) begun some two years earlier, when Hofmann visited the United States to teach, first at the Philadelphia College of Art and then at

(b)

Figure 5 the Yale School of Art the next year. (He returned regularly to Thérèse Moll, (a) Advertisement for Vepalen, Yale as a visiting critic for the next 30 years.) Hofmann was also a producer of tubing (1958). Client: Vepalen, an invited speaker at the Sixth International Design Conference Pratteln, Switzerland; (b) Prospectus for Zebra in Aspen in 1956, where he lectured on design education and combi-boiler (1958). Client: Charfeu Ltd., Basel, Switzerland. Images courtesy of Armin showed work created by both Gerstner and Moll, among others. To and Dorothea Hofmann. be sure, Swiss typography was the most exciting thing happening on the international design scene, as Casey and Coburn would have well known. Coburn was “always up on everything,”29 as Ellsworth Kelly (who learned much from him) attested. European modernism was also in the air in the United

25 Dorothea Hofmann, in a letter to Elizabeth States, and Cambridge was no exception. Alvar Aalto built dorms Resnick, dated August 11, 2015. at MIT in 1947; Eero Saarinen completed an auditorium and cha- 26 Jan Conradi, Unimark International: The pel in 1953 and 1954; and by 1964, I. M. Pei finished his first of Design of Business and the Business of many buildings there. At Harvard, Gropius built his graduate cen- Design (Baden, Switzerland: Lars Müller, ter in 1950, José Luis Sert finished the student center in 1961, and 2010), 11. 27 For example, see Lawrence Alloway, Le Corbusier would complete his only building in North America “J.R. Geigy, A.G.,” Graphis 12, no. 65 (1956): 194–99. 28 R. S. Gessner, “Swiss Designers of the Younger Generation,” Graphis 69, no. 13 (1957): 12–39. 29 Harry Cooper, “Ellsworth Kelly,” Harvard Review, no. 22 (2002): 66.

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Figure 6 two years later. Multilingual editions or English translations of Thérèse Moll, Summer session pamphlets the major texts on Swiss design were on the way: Josef Müller- for MIT Office of Publications (1959): Brockmann’s The Graphic Artist and His Problems in 1961; Gerstner’s (a) Organization for Research & Develop- Designing Programmes, first published in English in 1964; Hof- ment; (b) Aesthetics of Surfaces. Images courtesy of Armin and Dorothea Hofmann. mann’s Graphic Design Manual in 1965; and Müller-Brockmann’s Grid Systems in Graphic Design in 1981.30 30 Josef Müller-Brockmann, The Graphic Swiss design also fit the ethos of a polytechnic institution. Artist and His Design Problems (New The Swiss developed this mode of “new objectivity” [neue Sachlich- York: Hastings-House, 1961); Karl keit] in the immediate postwar period, and as Winkler explains, Gerstner, Designing Programmes (New “[F]or this particular generation, design was a philosophy of posi- York: Hastings House, 1964); Armin Hofmann, Graphic Design Manual: tivism, a commitment to a specific modern form of interest, not Principles and Practice (New York: modish or faddish, but encapsulating a constructive worldview Reinhold, 1965); Josef Müller-Brock- [Weltanschauung].”31 MIT, like Geigy before it, was addressing the mann, Raster Systeme für die visuelle problem of assigning graphic language to complex and often invis- Gestaltung: Ein Handbuch Für Grafiker, ible processes—some even of a potentially threatening nature— Typografen, und Ausstellungsgestalter 32 [Grid Systems in Graphic Design: while maintaining an air of objectivity and authority. Both used A Visual Communication Manual abstracted scientific imagery to inspire their patterns. In MIT’s for Graphic Designers, Typographers, case, the school needed brochures for courses with titles like Neu- and Three Dimensional Designers] roelectric Activity, Industrial Photoelasticity, and Shear Strength of (Niederteufen: Verlag Arthur Soil (all offered in the 1959 summer session). Niggli, 1981). 31 Winkler, “Helvetica, the Film and the The few brochures Moll produced during her stint at MIT, Face in Context,” 370. which appeared in the summer of 1959, clearly bear her mark (see 32 Nelly Rudin refers to the difficulty of Figure 6). They are disciplined yet dynamic, and they follow a communicating with a public based on clear internal system. For the first time at MIT, they also use the “complexity of... generally invisible gridded and ragged-right interior copy—a practice that would con- processes, carried out by a secretive and strange apparatus, which produce— tinue for years to come. They also resemble somewhat her work at almost as if by magic—materials which Geigy. However, they are not quite textbook “Swiss,” nor are they are not found in nature...” in the intro- the exact precedent for Casey and Coburn’s future work. Moll used duction to Hans Neuburg, ed., Chemie Futura Extra Bold instead of Akzidenz Grotesk (Helvetica’s precur- Werbung und Grafik, Publicité et gra- sor), showing that the importance of Swiss design was less about a phisme dans l’industrie chimique [Public- 33 ity and Graphic Design in the Chemical particular typeface than about a design methodology. Industry] (Zurich: ABC Verlag, 1967), 15.

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Casey and Coburn, equipped with Moll’s technique, produced outstanding work. Both brought a sense of play to what might seem a rigid approach in others’ hands. Casey’s work is typified by typographic precision and careful choices of photography; Coburn used his painter’s eye for form to great effect. As representatives of so-called Konkrete Kunst [Concrete Art], most of the major Swiss designers had an equally precise, often mathematically derived painting practice; they include Max Bill, Richard Paul Lohse, Carlo Vivarelli, and Karl Gerstner. As MIT gained wider recognition for its design, some of these designers/ artists would go on to visit the Institute’s design offices. With the arrival of Dietmar Winkler in 1965, the Office also benefited greatly from the expertise of a designer who had been technically (b) trained in typography and printing. The direction of design at MIT developed considerably after Moll’s brief visit. When Cooper, who had set up a freelance studio in her home after returning from Milan, designed a mark in 1963 for the newly independent MIT Press (previously The Technology Press), it bore a striking resemblance to the modernist basic design exercises taught in Basel, and to Moll’s student work in particular (see Figures 7a and 7b.) It was likewise a great departure from the more traditional directions Cooper had been considering (see Fig- ure 7c.) Moll’s exercises (as shown in Figure 3) had already been published in 1958, before they appeared in Hofmann’s Graphic Design Manual, and they may well have circulated around MIT with her application materials.34 Moll and Cooper are likely to have met as Cooper stayed apprised of her friends’ progress in the 35 (c) Office and was in Boston during Moll’s residency. Cooper’s tenure at the Press initiated a new chapter in design at MIT. A version of the Swiss style became a hallmark for Figure 7 Muriel Cooper, colophon designs for the the publisher by the mid-1960s, with books appearing in Helvetica MIT Press: (a) Detail of presentation boards or Adrian Frutiger’s typeface Univers, with clearly gridded covers for the colophon design, 1962–63; (b) Final and ragged right text blocks.36 This period culminated in Cooper’s colophon design with black bars, 1963; 1969 monument, The Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago—a (c) Final colophon design with white bars, revised and expanded translation of Hans Wingler’s exhaustive 1963. All images from the Muriel R. Cooper 37 Collection, Courtesy of Massachusetts collection of archival documents on the school of art and design. College of Art and Design Archives.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/desi_a_00495 by guest on 01 October 2021 Figure 8 Muriel Cooper, Learning from Las Vegas by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour (MIT Press, 1972). Image from the Muriel R. Cooper Collection, Courtesy of Massachusetts College of Art and Design Archives.

33 Winkler explains that “she had to substitute another gothic typeface for Akzidenz Grotesk, because none of the type houses in Boston carried it, and New York houses dealing mostly with advertising agencies were too expensive and the mail-process too slow.” Winkler, “Helvetica, the Film and the Face in Context,” 376. 34 Armin Hofmann, “A Contribution to the Education of the Commercial Artist,” Graphis 80 (1958): 504–17. Reinhold Publishing contacted Hofmann after seeing this article and suggested that it be expanded “into a basic textbook on design.” Letter from Jean Koefoed (Sales and Promotion Manager, Art and Architectural Books, Reinhold Publishing Corporation) to Armin Hofmann, March In form, it showed Cooper’s debt to the Swiss style, as a direct 31, 1959. Courtesy of Armin and inheritor of modernist precepts at the Bauhaus; and in content, the Dorothea Hofmann. book documented the hands-on pedagogy and experiments in 35 Cooper’s presentation boards for the MIT Press logo show designs that are media and technology that defined Cooper’s own teaching to variously calligraphic and illustrative. come. Reflecting on the experience of designing the book, Cooper While some process of abstraction from recalled, “[t]he people and works of the Bauhaus were my concep- legible, monogrammatic directions is tual and spiritual ancestors, so I felt a particular bond with the evident, the finished product stands material. While the structure of the book evolved from the Swiss out among the rest. Muriel R. Cooper Collection, Massachusetts College of grid system, it was devised to be rich enough to encompass the 38 Art and Design Archives, box 12–257. complex panorama of the archival textual and visual material.” 36 Helvetica was released in Europe in 1957. Just three years after The Bauhaus, Cooper designed a tome Although some American designers went that corresponded to it in size and significance but that was dia- to great lengths to import the metal type metric, philosophically: Learning from Las Vegas (1972), by Robert and retrofit their equipment accordingly, only when the Mergenthaler Linotype Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. For this mani- company began to produce Helvetica festo of pop and postmodernism, Cooper tweaked and critiqued in standard Linotype matrices and as the conventions of modernist typography, and her engagement Linofilm fonts did the typeface surge with the project has been well documented in recent literature. But in popularity. This article is not about the authors considered the book too “Swiss,” and they revised and Helvetica, per se, but the availability of Helvetica in the United States by the end fully redesigned it in the paperback edition of 1977, which remains 39 of the 1960s did help make the Swiss the best-known version today. (See Figure 8.) style a sensation. (Matthew Carter and The decline of modernism and the rise of postmodernism, Frank Romano, e-mail messages to Eliza- often dated to the early 1970s, also seemed to mark the beginning beth Resnick, June 21, 2017. See also of the end for Swiss style typography.40 Although Winkler dates the Paul Shaw, Helvetica and the New York City Subway System: The True (Maybe) demise of the Swiss style in Switzerland to as early as the 1960s, Story (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/desi_a_00495 by guest on 01 October 2021 Figure 9 Muriel Cooper, Sylvia Steiner, and MIT Press Design Department. File Under Architecture by Herbert Muschamp (MIT Press, 1974). Image from the Muriel R. Cooper Collection, Courtesy of Massachusetts College of Art and Design Archives.

37 Hans Maria Wingler, ed., The Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969). Robin Kinross observes that Karl Gerstner’s 1974 Compendium for 38 Steven Heller, “Muriel Cooper” Literates (a book whose English edition Cooper brought to the (interview), in Graphic Design in Press) “seems to signal an end to Swiss typography as an interna- America: A Visual Language History 41 (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, tionally understood style.” Kinross explains one reason for the 1989), 97. decline of Swissness in design: 39 See Martino Stierli, Las Vegas in the The strong moral content of this vision of abstract art was Rearview Mirror: The City in Theory, clearest in Max Bill’s book Form of 1952: here “good form” Photography, and Film (Los Angeles: (abstract form) becomes the principle that might save Getty Research Institute, 2013); Aron Vinegar and Michael J. Golec, eds., civilization from the onslaughts of North American Relearning from Las Vegas (Minneapolis: streamlining and kitsch. Western civilization—or, at least, University of Minnesota Press, 2009); western capitalism—allowed Bill’s good form to develop and Aron Vinegar, I Am a Monument: in only a partial embodiment. This was the moment of On Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge: the Swiss ascendancy, in which (even as late as 1967), MIT Press, 2008). 40 Also in 1972 (the year Learning from typography could be serenely described as “an expression Las Vegas was published), the Pruitt- of technology, precision and good order” (Ruder, Typogra- Igoe Housing Project in St. Louis was phie, p. 14). But, with the years of crisis and recession in demolished. This event was considered the 1970s, the context changed. Technology was no longer a milestone by some in revealing an unambiguous blessing; order and precision were modernism’s failed promises, as for 42 example by Charles Jencks in The in doubt. Language of Post-Modern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1984), 9. Cooper’s books at the MIT Press in the 1970s took on a more do- 41 See Winkler, “Helvetica, the Film and it-yourself, cut-and-paste, rough-and-ready aesthetic, reflective of the Face in Context,” 374; and Kinross, her experimental production processes and “research and develop- Modern Typography, 156. See also Karl ment” unit at the Press. (See Figure 9.) Gerstner, Compendium for Literates. 42 Kinross, Modern Typography, 157.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/desi_a_00495 by guest on 01 October 2021 (a) (b)

Figure 10 Jacqueline S. Casey, posters for MIT Design Services: (a) The President’s Ball, 1981 (18 x 27 inches, offset). Photographer: Ivan Massar. Client: MIT Corporation; (b) Mediums of Language, 1982 (24 x 30 inches, offset). Client: MIT Committee on the Visual Arts, Hayden Gallery; (c) Intimate Architecture: Contemporary Clothing Design, 1982 (23 x 29 inches, offset). Photograph: Robert Mapplethorpe. Client: MIT Committee on the Visual Arts Hayden Gallery. All images from the Jacqueline S. Casey Collection, Courtesy of Massachusetts College of Art (c) and Design Archives.

For example, the 1974 book, File Under Architecture, by Herbert Muschamp, was set in typewriter font and a smattering of other faces, using an IBM Selectric typewriter; printed on kraft paper; and bound with corrugated cardboard. That same year, she created the Visible Language Workshop in the Department of Architecture to teach printing and hands-on production and, even- tually, to guide research on computer graphics and interface design. Yet even as MIT books of the 1970s featured typewriter fonts or writing and illustration by hand, they were still often wrapped with Helvetica type. The Swiss style, for Cooper and her successors, still offered a ready kit of parts, sometimes to be deployed playfully or subversively. The “MIT style” then returned forcefully in the boom years of the 1980s. (See Figure 10.)

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/desi_a_00495 by guest on 01 October 2021 Casey remained at Design Services until her retirement in 1989, and she briefly served as a scholar-in-residence at the MIT Media Lab until her death in 1992; Coburn worked at MIT until his retirement in 1988; and Cooper worked at the Media Lab until her death in 1994. Through their tenures, each still built on the rudiments of Swiss style. In part, this remained a matter of differentiation. As Winkler notes, “[f]or several decades Helvetica became the identity of the university [MIT], because most other institutions mimicked the classical style of Harvard.”43 Yet the style was also appropriate to both the institution and its corporate audience. In the post-Vietnam era, MIT depended increasingly on research sponsored by corporations, and speaking the visual language of these sponsors seemed appropriate. The optimism of technological advancement was also a fitting expression for the Institute. Cooper was a founding faculty member of the MIT Media Lab, which opened officially in 1985. Her interest in computers, and in on-screen graphics and typography—as well as the union of the two in new kinds of interfaces and design tools—extended back to her early collaborations with the Architecture Machine Group, which had been led by Nicholas Negroponte since 1968. Making interfaces “user friendly,” and having typefaces render correctly on increasingly high resolution screens, were aims of this research, which produced major innovations, such as anti- aliasing, to smooth the appearance of jagged letterforms. Cooper and her colleagues and graduate students at the Visible Language Workshop also developed design software and layout tools throughout the 1980s, informed by the artificial intelligence research of her colleagues at the Institute. These tools would auto- mate the design processes Cooper had found overly laborious in the early days of her design career, creating systems to manage the coming deluge of data in the information age. These systems included artificial intelligence software programs that would auto- mate design tasks and “personalize” results by learning the users’ preferences. These programs’ rule-based systems were often informed by the standards of Swiss typography. Decades before Apple offered it as the default typeface for its operating system, Helvetica was the default for MIT demos. Cooper’s graduate students knew, paraphrasing Henry Ford, that you could use any typeface you wanted, so long as it was Helvetica.

Acknowledgements For their advice on research questions related to this article, the authors thank Muriel Gerstner, Armin Hofmann, Dorothea 43 Winkler, “Helvetica, the Film and the Hofmann, Kevin Keane, John Mattill, Katherine McCoy, Paul Face in Context,” 377. Shaw, Sylvia Steiner, Dietmar Winkler, and Ralph Coburn.

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