C.O.P Lecture - Design and Modernism

C.O.P Lecture Design and Modernism 

-Modernism emerges out of subjective responses of artists/designers to, MODERNITY
- Modernism - embracing modern techniques/making images that respond to the sensations.
- It's about the way in which the modern wolrd helps us understand ourselves.
- Attempt to order chaos.
- Structure to the sensory overload that is the modern world.
- The modern world is contradictory.
- Designers responding to the qualities of the modern world.

Modernism in Design 

- Anti-historicism - the power of the new, inventing new things.
- Truth to materials - looking to the new ways of making visual communication. Modernists embrace the new world and all of its trappings, including new materials to work with e.g. concrete, new gadgets like cameras. Modernism starts to celebrate these materials - modern.
- Modern Film making explores the beauty of shutter speed and light effects, modern artists/painters will show the paint, not try to create an illusion.
- Form follows function - it puts functionality before aesthetics and the appearance. Solving a problem with your work, the thing created will have beauty if it has solved a problem. 
- Technology - product and celebration of new technologies.
- Internationalism - neutral but universal cultural language. 
- One of the criticisms of modernists making is that if you try to make your work superficially stylish, your work is going to look outdated as fashions come and go so fast. 
- Modernist design has created a timeless design so that things will not go out of fashion years later.

- Anti-historicism - no need to look backward to older styles. "ornament is crime" - Adolf Loos (1908)
- Truth to materials - simple geometric forms appropriate to the material being used.
- Seagram Building, New York - one of the best examples of modernist design. Designed using rational solutions. 

-Bauhaus - inter discipline art school. Reinvented how art and design was taught. 
- A diffusion of art into everyday life.

Internationalism:
- A language of design that could be recognised and understood with international basis.
- HArry Beck's underground map - piece of rational design.
- Understanding London at a glance.
- Style has been replicated in every major city in the world.
- Modernists get rid of decorative features (Serif typefaces)
- Example: Herberts Bayer's san serif typeface.
- Modernist photography - exploring shadows created from light sources and objects on to photo sensitive paper.

Russian Revolution (1917)
- Followed by cultural revolution.
- Overthrow communist kings present regime - established socialist country - idea that workers take over and everything is equally distributed. 
- Needed new style - became most culturally exciting and progressive country in the world - hyper modernism.