What is it to be Modern in the 21st Century? (Part 2)

Ellen Lupton's essay on Willi Kuntz, - first published in the AIGA, 1988 - has been truly an eye opener for me and my blury questions (see Part 1) on modernism. While I was trying to put my finger on that stream of design thinking, and hoping to find a connection between Swiss [1] and American graphic design [2], I found this essay that suddenly made it all too clear to me.

Here are some excerpts of this brillant essay:

01
Marshall McLuhan's famous slogan “The medium is the message” provides an ironic theme for Willi Kunz's monumental book Typographical Interpretations, an object whose “medium” is an old-fashioned craft technology (letterpress) and whose style was once invested with hope for a universal visual culture (modernism). Kunz produced this meticulously crafted, rigorously conceived book in 1973-4, during the period when the "New Typography" was emerging in Switzerland and was beginning to transform design theory and practice in the United States.


02
Kunz's limited palette of "elements'' belongs to a design tradition variously referred to as "modernism," "functionalism," "Swiss design," or "the International Style." This methodology, which developed out of Constructivism, de Stijl, and the Bauhaus, initially was fueled by the belief that cultural differences and historical change could be transcended by a supposedly "universal'' language of geometric grids, systematic typography, simplified drawings, and objective photographs. As modernism became an official corporate and institutional style in the 1950's and 1960's, many architects and graphic designers questioned its aesthetic and philosophical principles. What had begun as a radically democratic methodology came to be seen as elitist, anti-individualistic, and overly abstract. In the late 1970's and early 1980's, Kunz was associated with other young Swiss-trained designers, including Dan Friedman and April Greiman, who employed the supposedly neutral and "universal" vocabulary of modernism to produce distinctive personal styles. Kunz remained more committed than Friedman or Greiman to the minimalist, systematic simplicity of the earlier Swiss tradition.


[1] Wolfgang Wiengart, Karl Gerstner, Emil Ruder, Armin Hoffmann.

[2] Method, MetaDesign for example.

(to be continued...)