Calyx Design

My last day in Berlin for the year, so I decide to drop by a museum that don’t know thing one about, save for its intriguingly all-encompassing name: Museum der Dinge, the Museum of Things.

Well. Aren’t they all?

Ye-es, technically correct, but the categories that museums typically set for themselves are very, very narrow. Things called “art”, for example. Sometimes just paint-on-canvas sorts of things. Or carved-from-marble sorts of things. Or vacuum cleaners.

So, what to expect from this thing-room tucked away three stories above the hectic, graffitied streets of Berlin’s multi-kulti Kreuzberg neighborhood?

A well-lit, high-ceilinged room with beautiful wooden floors … and a whole lotta shelves.

This museum concerns itself with presenting a sort of mute cultural-historical narrative of Germany’s entire 20th century, from its beginning up to the present day.

The aforementioned shelves are stuffed with a stunningly diverse collection of manufactured objects. Not objets d’art, not objects ‘appropriated’ by an artist, but the kind of innocent every-day objects that you are surrounded with at this very moment.

Your computer. Your pencil. Your coffee cup. Each of these objects captures decisions made by an individual craftsman/designer, a moment in the history of human-created environment, and simultaneously expresses the essence of every “thing” designed and created before it. Ever.

That’s a lot of weight for a coffee cup to handle.

But this museum has the philosophical chops (and history of its own) to make it work.

The Museum der Dinge is the descendant and official archive of the Deutscher Werkbund, pr “German Work Federation”.

The Werkbund, an association of artists, architects, designers, and industrialists, was formed in 1907 with the express intent of overhauling the entire German landscape of mass-produced objects, “from sofa cushions to the building of cities”.

The fundamental plan was to rethink everything from an aesthetic viewpoint that took function, the essence of materials, and modern industrial manufacturing techniques as its muse.

You know the essential slogan of the Werkbund already: “Form follows function”. And yes, the world famous and extraordinarily influential Bauhaus design school in Weimar grew from these very roots in the early 1920s.

The tension between intelligent, form-follows-function design and the kitsch favoured by mass culture provides a formal structure for the museum.

It’s divided into two major sections. First, a long, high row of shelves runs along one wall, packed to bursting with items selected to reflect the manufactured world as it actually was — and you could easily spend half an hour just gazing at a single shelf! It’s a meticulously arranged riot, and the tastes, prejudices, and technological influences of the era burst from every piece.

This “world of objects” is arranged in chronological order, then further divided into subsets such as “body shapes,” “material/aluminum,” “post-War era,” and “East German household”.

The second section is composed of a series of free-standing cases running down the center of the long room. These are also arranged chronologically, but this time the objects represent opposing sides in a century-old argument.

Half of each case is filled with objects catering to contemporary popular taste, tending towards decoration and kitsch — to which the other side responds with elegantly clean-lined solutions from industrial and graphic designers sympathetic to the Werkbund’s ideas and ambitions.

But the best part is that you don’t need to know a THING about design history to enjoy this exhibition; on a purely surface level it’s just the coolest, best-organized thrift store you have ever seen.

Conclusions aren’t necessarily drawn, and there’s no predetermined narrative. You can just let the colors, shapes, forms and textures wash over you … or let your brain go to work on the innumerable jarring, inspiring and thought-provoking juxtapositions.

it’s a wonderful experience.
 

The time-span covered by the collection runs right up to the present day, but the early half of the century attracted most of my attention — particularly the graphic design.

I was delighted to see that my hero Lucian Bernhard, ground-breaking developer of the sachplakat poster style and innovative type designer, is particularly well represented.

And because we’re in Berlin and talking about history, the subject of National Socialism is unavoidable … and here it is, expressed in a kind of embarrassing kitsch that apparently even made the monster on Voßstrasse squirm.

 
When I mentioned how much I’d enjoyed my couple of hours there, the first thing the smiling guy behind the counter said was “Great — would you mind mentioning it to other people?”

No one I know in Berlin seems to have heard of it, and worse, my explanations of its wonderfulness just haven’t seemed to penetrate: “Uh-huh, sounds interesting …” and then a change of subject.

I hope these photos are a little more effective.

If you’re in Berlin for a day or two, do yourself a favour. They’re open Friday - Monday from 12 -7pm, and it’ll cost you 4 € to get in. Guided tours are available if you’re lucky enough to speak German, but if not — no worries. These objects speak quite clearly on their own.

I’m not sure what attracts me to these metal box signs. Perhaps it’s their bulky physical presence, the seams, the dents, the peeling paint, the dirt — or the simple fact that they were crafted by hand. An internal backlash to years of staring at 2-dimensional representations of mathematical constructs?

Yeah, I think that might be it.

The stylish typefaces have a little something to do with it too, of course — but I think the bottom line is the odd klutzy gracefulness dictated by the limitations of tin and glass. These signs are firmly rooted in (to use a phrase I coined to communicate with my head-dwelling intellectual Lady Friend) “the World of Objects”.

I see them all over Berlin. Bookstores, flower shops, camera stores — they all seem to have been installed in the middle part of the last century, and since they appear on East and West sides of the city, perhaps they predate the Wall. Whether they’re a German or even European phenomenon I can’t say — being in a foreign country cranks up the brain’s Noticing Engine, so perhaps they’re all over the US, too.

Whatever. I’m enjoying it for its own sake … typography not only made flesh, but glowing!

Another generous helping from Berlin’s graffiti/street art scene, a kaleidoscope of ornamented walls from (at least) three eastern ‘hoods — Prenzlauerberg, Freidrichshain and Kreuzberg. The first Berlin graffiti post befindet sich hier.

One of my private Berlin pleasures … a quick currywurst at Curry 36 on Mehringdamm, and then a stroll through the graveyard at Hallesches Tor.

The contrast between the non-stop noise and action of the Kreuzberg street and the instant blanket of verdant silence that prevails in the cemetery could not be more vivid. Mature trees, marble crosses, gothic script … it’s a typical old northern European cemetery, I guess — established in 1735, in a spot just outside Berlin’s old city walls.

I just happen to like walking there more than most. Felix Mendelssohn is buried there, for one thing — I visited his grave today and softly whistled the theme to the Italian Symphony. The other thing I love is the number of grave markers from the early 1900s, many featuring the flowing visual elegance of the then au courant Jugendstil (think Art Nouveau).

The photos below show a couple of the loveliest pieces — at least, of those that are still in place. In recent years the cemetery has repeatedly been struck by art thieves, who’ve pried up, broken off, and carted away some of the most beautiful marble busts and medallions. *sigh*

Berlin is plastered with graffiti. And I love it.

Despite a recent crackdown, a decades-long history of (ahem) ‘public self-expression’ can be be read on walls all over the city, from ’80s wild-style to left-wing squatter provocations to the artsy paste-ups of the newly bohemian-chic Prenzlauerberg and Friedrichshain.

Though some of it would have been better off left inside the spray can, a few pieces are amazing — and the atmosphere created by the chaotic visual density of it all is (to me, anyway) extremely inspiring. I honestly can’t imagine a Berlin without it.

I’ll toss up a few snapshots in the coming week or two, and to start it off, here are a couple of beautifully textured samples from somewhere in the vicinity of the Simon-Dach-Strasse.

And there’s more … check out the second installment.

Spotted in a working-class neighborhood in a northern part of Berlin — the storefront of a ’50s-era architectural glass workshop, sheathed in gloriously ’50s style tiny glass mosaics.

The signage is even more beautiful … yeesh, need I write anything at all? Those colors, that texture, the Bauhaus-meets-the-Fifties vernacular letterforms … Just. So. Cool.

I spotted this sign on the side of a recently renovated building in Berlin’s hipster-cum-yuppie neighborhood “Mitte“. Every year more and more money pours into this area, and more of the gorgeous multi-story turn-of-the-century buildings here — fallen into terrible disrepair during the 60-odd years of Communist rule — are brought back to life.

Because Berlin’s consciousness of its history is a bit on the hit-or-miss side, I’m ambivalent about this. Through ignorance or with deliberate intent, some of this renovation serves to erase the past, both the parts the city ought to be proud of and the more, well, “problematic” bits.

This sign for Holz Kohlen (Charcoal) is an example of the former; the owners of the building deliberately allowed this small patch of ancient paint to remain undisturbed while the remainder of the facade was completely updated. It’s a small gesture of appreciation and respect for those who lived here before.

Two-bit philosophizing aside, the real reason I snapped this shot was the rough charm of the ca. 1930s letterforms, and the contrast with the stunning texture of the wall. The sturdy weight of the verticals, the sprightly capital K, that jaunty little Z with just the suggestion of a crossbar … ain’t typography wonderful?

Leaving for Berlin in a couple of days!

Even though I’ll be hanging out on the eastern side of the city (P-berg, X-berg, Friedrichshain, Mitte), after arduous days of cafe-sitting and strolling along the Spree I’ll be laying my head in the slightly more fancypants western neighborhood of Charlottenburg.

How fancypants? I dug up a couple of random doorway snapshots to help tell that story …

No, no, no, not rhino leather — it’s a rhino on leather.

See, a CD package I created for Albino! features a badass rhino on the cover. A friend of the band was so taken by the illustration that he carved it into a leather guitar strap.

He’s pretty new in the world of leatherwork, but I think it turned out great.

Entering competitions isn’t really my cup of tea strong-ass coffee, but I’ve just discovered the massive coolness that is Threadless.com. Whoa.

I knew I’d found a home for my recently-excavated Kung Fu Girl illustration the second I arrived. Some judicious editing, new color selection, and the girl is online with a brand new name: “Can I Kick It?”

Here’s how it works:

People submit designs. Other people rate them. At the end of a week, the highest-rating designs win. Winning means the T-shirt gets printed, and the lucky designer gets a small pile of cash and a slightly larger pile of glory.

I am hoping, dear reader, not only to live this lovely scenario, but that you’ll get the chance to actually wear this T-shirt.

Please click the graphic below, and (if so moved), give me a FIVE!

UPDATE: Dang. She didn’t quite make the cut, but that won’t keep me from dragging out the silk screens one of these days. Thanks to everyone who helped out with a vote!

In anticipation of my annual journey to Germany, an alluring photo of a partially obscured green and white S-Bahn sign — these ubiquitous, illuminated typographic symbols beckon Berliners towards the over/underground network which (along with the U-Bahn) connects the re-unified metropolis with shining, singing rails.

o … sometimes my train of thought leaves from an unusual station.

During my morning perambulations a car cruised past, blasting bass-heavy tunes from enormous speakers. The sub-sonic frequencies made the vehicle’s bodywork vibrate so loudly that the music itself was completely drowned out.

You probably hear this particular kind of sonic sandwich all the time. In fact, this combination — loud, heavy bass combined with an even louder rattling trunk — is ubiquitous: cars just aren’t constructed for this low-frequency assault; a couple of pieces of bodywork are always going to protest by making some extra noise.

The funny thing is, I’ve actually begun to associate the two sounds. Can it be that this awful rattling — a seemingly undesirable side effect — is developing its own positive aesthetic associations? Maybe I’m wrong about the inevitablity of rattling, and people have begun to make it happen as a conscious choice!

It wouldn’t be the first time that technology has influenced cultural aesthetics.

Rock …

Consider the guitar. Prior to electrically-aided amplification, clarity of tone was the norm. Early vacuum-tube driven amplifiers overloaded easily, though, and over time the distorted sound of those over-driven tubes became an essential component of blues (‘Muddy Waters invented electricity’), rockabilly, and the juggernaut of rock and roll.

This particular tube-distorted, once-unbearable sound has become beautiful. It’s now so essential to music that modern amplifiers strive to digitally emulate the sound of archaic tube technology, and vintage amps sell for a fortune on eBay.

…and Harder Rock.

Which led me, naturally enough, right to thinking about typography.

Serifs, the tiny “feet” that appear on many familiar typefaces, are another example of a technological necessity that evolved into an aesthetic standard. These little flourishes were born from the difficulties Roman stonecutters ran into chiseling letterforms into marble. Incising letters involved cutting a V-shaped channel along the length of a stroke, and finishing with a perpendicular cut to square off the end. Making those three planes intersect perfectly was really hard, so these artisans worked out a little trick: just extend the triangular shape past those corners, making any imperfection impossible to notice (an antique example of “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature”).

So. Carving in stone was difficult, and the unintended consequence was that “serifs” have became embedded in aesthetic culture; it’s the way we think type oughtta look. And after centuries of technological repetition, from wood type to metal, to — well, chances are you’re reading this very post in serif type, on a digital display. These pixels are a long way from the stonecutter’s chisel, but here they are — a cultural transmission from Emperor Trajan’s time beamed right into your modern eyeballs.

Blackletter Blues

So here’s the final stop on the barely-sequitur train: since I’m thinking about typefaces, what about Blackletter?

Call it “Gothic” or “Old English”, split the family into textura, fraktur, bastarda and rotunda… the baroque curlicues, spiky facets, plunging verticality, the chiaroscuro effected by its thickest thicks and thinnest thins, the larger-than-life operatic drama of it all … these are the results of technology too. Those angled strokes, thicks and thins, and all the rest of it stem directly from the calligraphic scratching of a medieval scribe’s sharpened quill. Blackletter is the middle-ages, still redolent of parchment, candle-black ink and time a-plenty.

And I just love the face. There, I said it.

I know, I know … most of the planet still despises it. I ran across a gratuitous attack just yesterday — Steven Heller sideswiped it as “ugly and graceless” in one of his historical graphic design collections. It’s hard to read. It has fascist connotations. And worst of all, it’s … ugly.

HARD TO READ: Bah! As Emigre founder and typographer Zuzana Licko succinctly put it, “we read best what we read most”. The first newspaper was set in blackletter, as was the first printed Bible. It’s only difficult to read because it’s gone out of fashion, and our eyeballs don’t know what to make of its spiky, faceted forms. Practice makes perfect, as has been empirically demonstrated, so let’s just toss that one out.

FASCIST: It’s long been damned by association with Hitler and the Nazi regime. And of course they used it, and so did the Bolsheviks, along with everybody else in Germany. It is, of course, an essentially German creation.

What few know, thought, is this: the Third Reich itself banned the typeface as grotesque and decadent, going so far as to issue a official order to use roman type only in all official communications. Ironically, this document itself featured a blackletter headline (stupid Nazis).

UGLY: I’ve think I’ve probably already made my feelings clear on that point.

The Pendulum Swings…

So. Is the resuscitation of blackletter (my fondest hope) actually possible? It’s still way out of fashion, except in the vernacular ghettos of heavy-metal band names, newspaper mastheads and skateboard graphics.

As a teensy glimmer of hope, though, there’s a movement to rehabilitate the maligned typeface already underway in Germany. In Berlin last fall I noticed a good half dozen fancy-pants design books devoted to the subject, with more on the way. I’ve also started to see it popping up in both high-end fashion magazines and in graffiti (the bleeding edge of design gentrification). So I believe it’s about to make a comeback. Of course, I also believe that one day, the San Francisco Giants will win the World Series.

More to the point, if human ears can learn to perceive the sound of a rattling car trunk as aural bliss, anything is possible.

The work of some smarty-pants at the Alberta Street Co-op — intended to quell the fears of the squeamish, or quash the hopes of vampires straying into the produce department?

Can’t say for sure, but it succeeded in inducing an involuntary chuckle from me.