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Essay / Impact of the Bauhaus style on typography
The Bauhaus was founded in 1919 by an architect named Walter Gropius. Gropius emerged from the Werkbund movement, which sought to integrate art and economics and add an element of engineering to art. The Werkbund movement failed to achieve this integration, but the Bauhaus foundation found the solution that had been neglected before. The Bauhaus was founded by the merger of the Weimar Academy of Fine Arts and the Weimar School of Arts and Crafts. Students at this new school were trained by both an artist and a master craftsman, fulfilling Gropius's desire to familiarize "modern artists with science and economics, [which] began to unite the creative imagination with a practical knowledge of craftsmanship, and thus to develop a new sense of functional design. "Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essay The school had three goals at its inception that have remained fundamentally the same throughout the life of the Bauhaus, although the direction of the school changed considerably and several times. The first aim of the school was to "rescue all the arts from the isolation in which everyone then found themselves", to encourage. artisans and craftsmen to work cooperatively and combine all their skills Secondly, the school focused on raising the status of crafts, chairs, lamps, teapots, etc., to the same level as that. fine arts, painting, sculpture, etc. The third objective was to maintain contact with leaders of industry and crafts with the aim of eventually gaining independence from government support by selling models to the industry. It is on this basis that the Bauhaus began and has enormously influenced our lives in ways that most people probably take for granted. Since the school attempted to combine art with engineering and craftsmanship, innovation has spread throughout the Bauhaus, leading to a multitude of advancements affecting the most fundamental aspects of life. “Everyone who sits in a chair with a tubular steel frame, uses an adjustable reading lamp or lives in a house partially or entirely built from prefabricated elements is benefiting from a design revolution largely brought about by Bauhaus; » (Whitford p.10) As I stand up from this chair and look at the lamp on my desk, and the dry wall in front of me, I feel a new respect for the work of the Bauhaus. The practical innovations developed by the Bauhaus profoundly altered the designs favored by industry, as evidenced by the desks and chairs that fill offices, lobbies, and living rooms across America, not to mention the portable classrooms that today seem privileged, delivered on trucks, supported by supports. assembled, bolted and filled with those ubiquitous tubular steel and plastic chairs. The effects of Bauhaus extend beyond our furniture and lighting, into the realms of architecture, theater and typography. where Bauhaus designs and style are still spoken about today. Typography The work of other areas of the Bauhaus to progress toward a level of clarity in design and production that had not often been achieved also directly affected their views on typography. The Bauhaus favored the use of sans-serif fonts, which was greatly frowned upon by most of Germany, who preferred a heavier, more complex Gothic font. This older, more formal-looking font was traditionally used in German printing, but it was difficult to read, a trait thatsome Bauhaus teachers didn't like it. This led a teacher, Laszlo Moholy Nagy, to create a design and theory of fonts and formatting that was published in the Bauhaus book Staatlices Bauhaus Weimar 1919-1923, a book on Bauhaus composition and typography. Below is an overview of Moholy's views as expressed in the book: Typography is an instrument of communication. It must communicate clearly in the most urgent form. Clarity must be emphasized because, compared to prehistoric pictograms, it is the very essence of scenario. Our intellectual attitude towards the world is individually precise (this individual precision is transformed today into collective precision), as opposed to the old amorphous forms individually and then collectively. So above all, unambiguous clarity in all typography. The readability of communication must never suffer from an aesthetic code adopted in advance. It was this thinking that inspired the simpler, less formal and imposing typefaces of the Bauhaus, and those that irritated most of Germany. However, the German public responded even less favorably to the ideas of Herbert Bayer, a Bauhaus student and later professor who had even more radical views on typography, none of which were viewed favorably by much of the public. 'Germany, although some of its ideas make a lot of sense. Bayer did not like the use of serifs, the small lines that extend over the letters, as in the Times or Times New Roman font, he found them unnecessary and unnecessary. Germany of the time favored serifs and more complicated Gothic fonts. Bayer used these sans serif fonts in his work for the Bauhaus and his outside commissions, but the Bauhaus using this font type was not new, nor was it solely supported by Bayer, but some of his other ideas caused more problems: Why should we write and print in two alphabets? A large sign and a small sign are not necessary to identify a single sound. We don't speak with a capital A and a small a. a single alphabet gives us practically the same result as a mixture of upper and lower case letters, and at the same time it represents a lesser burden for everyone who writes. He argued that once everyone was accustomed to using a single case, things would be easier; typing would be easier to master and quicker to do since there would be no need to use the Shift key, therefore typewriters would be easier and cheaper to manufacture since only one case would be needed . He also raised the possibility that commercial printing would also be cheaper since typesetters would only have to worry about one format, and things would take up less space, saving paper and money. In 1925, the Bauhaus stopped using capital letters in its printing. On some levels these arguments make sense, and if people could start learning to read/write without capitals things would eventually be simplified, but the amount of change that would require is enormous, just try to breaking the habits of people who had already learned to write would take an enormous amount of time and energy and would face strong opposition from almost everyone. I described what would happen in the United States if someone tried to convert the masses to this new way of writing. In Germany, things would be worse. The German public and German officials disliked the Bauhaus's use of sans-serif fonts, seeing it as yet another break with the.