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

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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 cita- tion 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 pro- gram 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 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/desi_a_00495 by guest on 01 October 2021 (a) (b) 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. DesignIssues: Volume 34, Number 3 Summer 2018 29 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 publica- tions, including the Catalogue, official announcements, and mate- rial 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. 30 DesignIssues: Volume 34, Number 3 Summer 2018 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/desi_a_00495 by guest on 01 October 2021 (a) (b) (c) (d) 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.
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