Navigating Bauhaus

My favourite graphic designer in the Bauhaus is László Moholy-Nagy. Graphic design was just one of many areas he was working in, and his layouts often seem a trifle inelegant and akward. But when it comes to translating ideas into graphic compositions, he is the boldest and the most inventive and engaging. He is trying to tell you something and he wants you to UNDERSTAND that something. That is because he could be your great-great-grandfather. He was born in 1895.

People often write about how contemporary and relevant the Bauhaus still is and how it’s cultural legacy can be found everywhere around us, which is probably correct, at least in the case of Germany. But while working on the graphic interface of the 90th anniversary Bauhaus Exhibition, I was more interested in pin-pointing the difference between now and 90 years ago.

Light-Space-Modulator by László Moholy-Nagy in the Modell Bauhaus Exhibition

One important difference I found, lies in the changed relationship between designer, content and audience. Whereas László Moholy-Nagy is one with his content and comes up real close to deliver his message into your face, the contemporary designer keeps a distance. He doesn´t shout, he doesn´t arrange his words for maximum impact, but to strict grammatical rules. He wants you to understand the underlying sentence structure first, the words second. He designs systems in which content is arranged, and then lets you draw your own conclusions.

The contemporary designer not only keeps a distance to the content and the audience, but also to his own work and the idea of authorship. The thing that appeals to him in using systems is the element of chance. Graphic systems can be programmed to generate an aesthetic almost by themselves. They work like a bit like a Graphic-Meaning-Modulator, you feed some parameters into it and out comes a visual surprise. Here are our parameters for the 23 panels guiding the visitor from the inner Central Hall of the Martin-Gropius Bau into the outer exhibition ring.

  • Every panel depicts a key object shown in the exhibition room the panel is guiding to, as a technical drawing.

 

  • A chromatic circle runs over all 17 panels. The background colour of each panel is determined by its position in the great hall.

 

  • All key objects occupy roughly the same size on the panel. The pixel ratio of the background is determined by the original size of the key object.

And now press start and see what happens:

 

Navigation System for the exhibition:
MODELL BAUHAUS | BAUHAUS. A CONCEPTUAL MODEL
Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, Klassik Stiftung Weimar
Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, 22.7. – 4.10.09
exhibition design and graphics by chezweitz & roseapple.
Photos of the exhibition by Volker Kreidler

More about the exhibition here: Modell Bauhaus

Archilab Europe – Strategic Architecture

The exhibition interrogates the effects of EU strategies on architecture, urban development and the political map.

ARCHILAB 2008 EUROPE – STRATEGIC ARCHITECTURE
FRAC Centre & Collégiale Saint-Pierre-Le-Puellier, Orléans, 24.10.–23.12.08 
Project Direction: Marie-Ange Brayer / ArchiLab and Ville d’Orléans
Curator: Omar Akbar
Visual identity, exhibition architecture and graphics, signage, printed matter, book design: chezweitz & roseapple

Publication on the Exhibition at FRAC Centre and Collégiale Saint-Pierre-Le-Puellier, Orléans: On the changing shape of Europe and the biological metaphors of curating, the colourful language of this book makes tangible a Europe in transition.

ARCHILAB 2008 EUROPE – STRATEGIC ARCHITECTURE
HYX Publishers, 2008, 183 pages, 96 colour plates, softcover (English and French editions) 
Editor: Omar Akbar, Director of Bauhaus Dessau
Graphic Concept, layout, typesetting: chezweitz & roseapple

Icon of Modernism – The Bauhaus Building Dessau

ICON OF MODERNISM – THE BAUHAUS BUILDING DESSAU
Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, 2.12.06–11.3.07
Curators: Walter Prigge with Wolfgang Thöner, Monika Markgraf
Visual identity, exhibition architecture and graphics, printed matter, cover design: chezweitz & roseapple

Allan Kaprow_Art as Life

An exhibition about the inventor of the happening, who understood the museum as a place of mediation, which should directly involve the visitor into action.

ALLAN KAPROW_ART AS LIFE
Haus der Kunst, Munich, 18.10.06-21.1.07
Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, 10.2.-22.4.07
Kunsthalle Bern, 2.6.-26.8.07
Villa Croce, Genoa, 30.11.07-10.2.08
Museum of Contemporary Art, L.A., 23.3.-30.6.08
Curators: Stephanie Rosenthal, Eva Meyer-Hermann
Exhibition architecture and graphics, media architecture, printed matter, website: chezweitz & roseapple

P.P.P. Pier Paolo Pasolini

P.P.P. – PIER PAOLO PASOLINI AND DEATH
Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, 16.11.05–5.2.06
Curators: Bernhart Schwenk, Michael Semff
Video installation. Detlef Weitz, Dominique Müller
Visual identity, exhibition architecture and graphics, printed matter, book design: chezweitz & roseapple

Publication on the occasion of the exhibition »P.P.P. – Pier Paolo Pasolini und der Tod«, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich: The book presents the Italian intellctual as author, filmmaker and graphic artist. The gallery of fictive cover pictures with the P.P.P. label point to Pasolini´s ambivalent relationship with the public.

P.P.P. – Pier Paolo Pasolini and Death
Hatje Cantz, 2005, 208 pages, 215 illustrations, 46 in colour, hardcover with book jacket (German and English editions)
Editors: Bernhart Schwenk, Michael Semff
Graphic Concept, layout, typesetting: chezweitz & roseapple

P0es1s. Digital Poetry

Media art exhibition of the literaturWERKstatt (Berlin) and the Stiftung Brückner-Kühner (Kassel) showing a wide range of works, that deal with text in digital media.

p0es1s. Digital Poetry
Kulturforum Potsdamer Platz, Berlin, 13.2.–4.4.04
Curators: Friedrich W. Block, Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer
Visual identity, exhibition architecture and graphics, media architecture, printed matter, website, book design: chezweitz & roseapple

Publication on the occasion of the exhibition at Kulturforum Potsdamer Platz: Black one, white zero: The book is numbered binary, so that each exhibit on a double page has its own barcode. This code links the exhibit to space and book.

p0es1s. Ästhetik digitaler Poesie / Aesthetics of digital poetry
Hatje Cantz, 2004, 64 pages, 25 illustrations, softcover, bilingual edition (German and English editions)
Editors: Friedrich W. Block, Christiane Heibach, Karin Wenz
Graphic Concept, layout, typesetting, cover design textbook: chezweitz & roseapple

Bauhaus Style

The exhibition presents the varied attempts to canonize the historic Bauhaus in a seemingly endless spatial structure.

BAUHAUS STYLE. BETWEEN INTERNATIONAL STYLE AND LIFESTYLE
Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, 23.5.03-30.5.04
Curator: Regina Bittner
Visual identity, architecture and exhibition graphics, printed matter: chezweitz & roseapple