FORM, FUNCTION, BEAUTY == GESTALT
INTRODUCTION
the bauhaus became for me the epicentre, with its overlapping of disciplines and its insistence that in everything we design we have a personal responsibility towards society or, as the later formulation had it, the whole environment created by us, from the spoon to the city, had to be brought into harmony with social conditions, which implied shaping those conditions too.11
Max Bill: Ulm stool, 1954. Courtesy max, binia and jakob bill foundation
Max Bill, ‘Patria’ typewriter, 1944. Courtesy max, binia and jakob bill foundation
8
Shuttling between Zurich and the art capital of Paris, where he spent the 1930s in the circle around Michel Seuphor and Theo van Doesburg, Bill began to pursue new paths, initially in painting and sculpture. The result of this was the formulation of the principles of konkrete gestaltung (concrete design), a term originating with van Doesburg; this art, Bill wrote in 1936, ‘arises out of its own means and laws, without these having to be derived or borrowed from external natural phenomena. the optical composition is based on colour, form, space, light, movement.’ 12 From there Bill began to reformulate the entire field of the modern visual arts, from painting through sculpture, architecture, graphic design and typography to the applied arts. In Bill’s educational schema each discipline was to be treated in accordance with its own laws and techniques. A blurring of boundaries, as practised by Le Corbusier, was decisively rejected. For Bill, each design task had to be resolved with respect to the character of the specific medium and the function that was to be fulfilled. This basic principle, almost of necessity, engenders a plurality of forms. But in Bill’s design practice one often finds the opposite: namely, formal themes are translated easily from one discipline into another and then back again. Bill was given the opportunity to put his ideals into practice in 1950, when the Geschwister Scholl Foundation commissioned him to design both the curriculum and the building for the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm. What he attempted there was not just an overlapping of disciplines, as at the Bauhaus, but an interplay within the framework of what he would eventually call ‘environmental design’. More than that: for Bill, the modern culture of
9