
Bauhaus at 100: its legacy in five key designs - matt4077
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2019/jan/21/bauhaus-at-100-its-legacy-in-five-key-designs
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_Microft
Dieter Rams' design principles can be found in his Wikipedia article at
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieter_Rams#%22Good_design%22_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieter_Rams#%22Good_design%22_principles)
by the way. He worked for the company Braun and you will most likely recognize
some of the iconic designs when searching for it.

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dchest
There's also a recently released documentary about him:
[https://www.hustwit.com/rams/](https://www.hustwit.com/rams/)

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cpmsmith
Thanks, I didn't know about that. Gary Hustwit is the same person that
directed Helvetica, which is a classic design film IMO.

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arawde
There is also Objectified, about industrial and product design, which I
believe is his best. It has a small segment with Rams in it.

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drderidder
The first example being related to typography reminded me that Jan Tschichold
was one of those influential typographers who's book, The Form of the Book,
along with Raul Rosarivo's Divina Proporcion Tipographica, re-popularized the
"Secret Canon" of medieval incunabula and brought the Golden Ratio to bear on
book layout. Unfortunately we've lost a lot of that beautiful layout design
but it can still be found in a few places. For a while, MacBook screens very
closely approximated the Golden Rectangle.

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mattkevan
Tschichold was a design genius. His first book ‘The New Typography’ set out
the rules for modernist design, rejecting all old forms of design.

Some of the work he did at that time basically set the template for most
design we have now. My old design tutor, who’s father was one of the UK’s
leading modernist typographers and knew Tscichold, had a piece of his that she
said had almost every modern design cliche, though done for the first time
here.

Later, after a run-in with the nazis, he moved to the UK, rejected modernist
design ideology as a little too fascist and revived traditional book design.
He also designed the Penguin Classics book series - a major design achievement
itself.

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stuartd
You can download the original Bauhaus books as PDFs from
[https://monoskop.org/Bauhaus#Books](https://monoskop.org/Bauhaus#Books)

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sbr464
It's a small mention in the article, but there's a single zip file link[1] to
avoid downloading each.

[1]
[https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=0B2lHLEBLCofZ...](https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=0B2lHLEBLCofZQ2tuNVVYMjdHbVE)

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man-and-laptop
Regarding modern architecture, I'm not a fan. It's not like a painting which
you can hang up on your wall at your own leisure. No, these are buildings that
people _have_ to live in and around. I think London is worse off with the
Shard.

I can't comment on the rest.

[edit: removed a paragraph about a tangential topic]

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rwmj
Also those chairs are really uncomfortable.

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mrweasel
Sadly I can't remember where I heard it, it may have been in the documentary
"Objectified", but there's a designer that raises an interesting point. It's
something along the lines of: "Why are there still uncomfortable chairs? It's
a solved problem, we know how to design chairs."

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oh_sigh
Not all chairs should be comfortable. Really comfortable chairs in the subway
would be ridiculous.

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extrememacaroni
Why?

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bch
That kitchen _looks_ lovely in the still image, but is it functional? Its jars
look hard to reach and dust-prone (unless the idea is to keep a smaller
quantity of coffee in-reach and restock that every few days?) and the pull-out
drawers look to serve a (negative) dual role of being suboptimal themselves
(can only tall people look in them?) and make the over-cupboards slightly more
inaccessible.

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telesilla
Probably in comparison to what there was before: standalone cabinets with less
shelf space, stoves with legs, furniture that could move and didn't match,
more to clean around and under hence more dust, and not being efficient with
limited space. Given it's version 1.0 it seems pretty good considering what
came before!

~~~
bch
Good points. If it is a “v1.0”, this might be an example of the moment of
paradigm shift but not “polished” or tweaked to completely contemporary
expectations. I’m so used to seeing Bauhaus (esp knock-on or secondary
influences a la Dieter Rams) that are so awesome that finding apparent flaws
is jarring to me.

Perhaps the article could have done better than a work in progress prototype
(if that’s indeed what’s being observed), or I can get cool with Bauhaus not
introducing designs fully formed and perfect as like The Birth of Venus.

