Designblog

Helvetica is a feature-length independent film by Gary Hewitt, about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which is celebrating its 50th birthday this year) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives. (http://www.helveticafilm.com/) Helvetica introduces type as more than common. A specialized design discipline.

A lecture by Henk Groenendijk on experiments in type design, related to ‘developping cultural and economical progress in the 1950-’70, gave more insight in the context that proved so fertile for Helvetica’s rise to stardom.

Time and space is a given phenomenon in education at the Rietveld Academie, where things constantly present themselves in past and contemporary creative projects. As an almost casual gesture, some 2nd year students from the graphic design department dropped by to present their recent type designs in progress.

Finally research material was edited down to A4 sized guided tours into selected subjects. All subjects presented in this list are also available as hard copy research prints at the ResearchFolders available at the Rietveld library.

As usual we selected subjects with a direct connection to the context of the presented material in this classbloc. In this case Helvetica the Movie” and its content, was researched through subjects like the Corporate Alphabet, Wim Crouwel, Laurenz Brunner, Experimental Jetset, Norm type design and their publication “TheThing” or Letterpress.

The lecture gave a much broader perspective from which researches like de Stijl fonts, Buro Destruct, Zaph Dingbats, the Univers Font, Systemfonts, Swiss Style/Modernisme, Guy Rombout‘s AZart and Edward Fella were initiated. Widening the discussion towards the Helvetica subject by adding links to the actuality, some more subjects were added, Jonathan Barnbrook. Richard Niessen, Type Radio, Emigre‘s Zuzana Licko, Jonathan Puckey‘s Type Tool, the mysterious typebased posters of Michel Schuurman and ultimately the concept of Dead Type by Hansjakob Fehr

When you drive through the Vijzelstraat, you might have glanced in amazement at the huge block-size buiding that you pass between Keizers- and Herengracht. This building is called “De Bazel” named after the architekt K.P.C. de Bazel. It was built between 1919 and 1926 and served as headquarters of the Dutch Trading Company. Since a year it houses the new City Archive (Gemeente Archief). If you go inside you can walk through this amazing building and enjoy the detailed interior design and visit exhibits organized in the huge bank vault in the basement. more …. (posting 299)

[poster by Anton Beeke

as a hommage to Premsela in the year of his death]

At this moment –until April 26th– The Gemeente Archive presents an exhibit on one of the prominent dutch designers of the 2nd half of the 20th century. Benno Premsela [1920-1997]. He was active in interiour-, and exhibition design as well as the design of shopwindows (Bijenkorf) and several interiour products. He also designed stages for the Dutch Ballet. As designer, advisor and organiser he manifrested himself in the foreground aswell as the background of the design community. Premsela was not someone to hide his private- from his professional life, which was most prominent in his manifest role in the homo emancipation movement.

The Premsela Institute is –in good dutch tradition– named after him. This institute promotes design national as wel as international. Platform 21 is is closely connected to this Institute

Our Design Program consists of 7 different classes. All focusing on an aspect of the design spectrum. In one of these 4-week classes Carla Boomkens creates a laboratory in which the students get access to the visual language of shapes in large format/scale, through small-scale researches on the essentials of spaces and what they can express: spatial-/architectonic design. (links to: Allan Wexler, Eero Saarinen, Zaha Hadid, Paul Gehry, Rudi Riciotti

All projects have a start at the buildings of Gerrit Rietveld (1888 – 1964), the architect of the main-building of this academy. Sometimes the academy-building itself is taken as a research-location, in other cases a building is selected by the student out of his whole body of built works. In doing so, the student studies and gets acquainted with his approach to spaces and his choices to making them fit for particular needs and functions, in relation to it’s environment. (links to: Luis Barragán, Peter Callesen,

Departing from ‘the lessons we can learn from Gerrit’, which the student can easily use as a hand-grip in learning technique and working method, the student can freely develop her/his own expression of sculptural quality, choreography and a personal research for exciting spaces. As you can see, we work in scale-models. The student is asked to develop an authentic visual language in this field as well. (links to bookshops Architectura & Natura [dangerous grounds] or publisher Lars Muller

The assignments may appear similar to each group/project, but they never deal with the same subject – this guarantees a fresh start for each session with a new group. (link to: Gerrit Rietveld, Barbara Visser [Maison Grégoire or Transformation House])

posting prepared by Carla Boomkens