8 The Triumph of the International Style
 

Corporate Identity in Germany and America

During the 1950s, the profession of graphic designer finally came into its own. The International Style took hold in the United States after the Second World War, mainly because it found a group of willing corporate patrons who became convinced that it provided a politically neutral style that appeared efficient and pro­fessional. By the late 1940s, geometric abstraction had gained a new cachet because of the way it was suppressed by Hitler and Stalin, who had both embraced representational styles for their propaganda campaigns. To Americans, the realistic illustrations that had been the bedrock of the advertising industry began to look obsolete and also seemed somehow too close to the idealized fantasies promoted by fascist governments during the war. Because the International Style had been so thoroughly depoliticized by its Swiss practitioners, it ironically became the style of choice for large companies and corporations that wanted to promote their products "universally" without raising the specter of nationalism.

    For many scholars, the corporate identity logos that were devised starting in the 1950s—many of which are still in use today—represent the apotheosis of the International Style. Multinational corporations reinvented the "universal" ideology of Utopian Communism as expressed by geometric abstraction in order to convey the authority and stability of dominant capitalist enterprises. This period witnessed the golden age of the corporate logo, when designers such as Paul Rand (1914-1996) created some of the most familiar trademarks of the century. This section will concentrate on a group of examples of the corporate identity movement that demonstrate this reconfiguration of avantgarde art.

Design at Ulm

Of course the idea of corporate identity, meaning a unified look that encompasses everything from logo, to stationery, to architecture, did not first develop in the 1950s. Among its antecedents was the work in Germany for AEG that Peter Behrens performed during the 1910s. However, Behrens's work was essentially anomalous during the early part of the century, and it was only in the post-war period that the majority of large, multi­national corporations felt the need to present a unified design front to the consumer. In Germany, a center for post-war graphic design arose in the city of Ulm. There, Max Bill, Otl Aicher (1922-1991), and Inge Scholl (1917-1998) founded the Hochschule fur Gestaltung ("University of Design") in 1951. With a curriculum based largely on Bauhaus principles, the HfG represented a German corollary to the austere Swiss style as it was practiced in Zurich. Scholl brought anti-fascist credentials to the International Style, as her parents had been executed by the Nazis in 1943. Bill, the first Director of the school (1951-7), was of course himself Swiss and had played a large role in originating the Swiss style. Precisely measured axial grids, crisp geometric forms, sans serif type, and a minimal use of text characterized the products of the Ulm school.

    What truly separated the professors and students at the HfG from their contemporaries was their concern for the theoretical dimension of graphic design. At a time when many American designers, in contrast, were largely self-taught and gave very little thought to the intellectual structures behind their work, the faculty at Ulm was consistently bringing the most advanced sort of philosophical issues into the classroom. Aicher and Scholl pioneered the semiotic analysis of graphic design at a time when few outside the HfG were operating at such a high intellectual level. Semiotics, the academic study of signs and symbols that convey meaning—such as the words of a language or the abstract shapes of the International Style—focuses on how ideas are con­structed in society. Taking note of the way that language functions through a system of differences, so that the word "sofa," for exam­ple, partly derives its meaning by the fact that the speaker did not choose the word "couch," the professors at Ulm attempted to establish a credible academic theory for their design practice.

    As the industrial powerhouse of Europe got back on its feet, German graphic designers found numerous opportunities to design corporate logos. In 1969, Aicher devised a new logo for Lufthansa, the preeminent German airline (fig. 8.24). Aicher installed a new, softer version of the blue and yellow color scheme that had been developed in the 1920s, and devised a sleeker version of the crane that had been originally drawn by Otto Firle in 1918, circumscribing it in a circle in the Bauhaus manner. Aicher also made Helvetica the standard face for the airline's name. Provocatively, Aicher's redesigned livery is essentially indistinguishable from the work of less scholarly designers such as Paul Rand, bringing up the question of what role the theory of graphic design can play in the actual practice of the profession.

    Anton Stankowski, who taught at the HfG during the 1950s, designed a new corporate identity for Deutsche Bank in 1974 (fig. 8.25). This slash and square emblem displays the formal rigor of 1920s Constructivism, and successfully resists any obvious display of contemporary "trendiness." Rather, it attempts to create an abstract vision of timeless strength and security. Like many designers of corporate identity, Stankowski needed to devise new colors for Deutsche Bank, eventually leading to the development of "Deutsche Bank Blue." During the post-war era, financial insti­tutions largely turned away from the Neoclassical styles that had been their design mainstay for centuries, styles that had suggested permanence and stability. Instead, banks invoked the "new time­less," the International Style.

Both Stankowski and Aicher played important roles in the design of the 1972 Munich Olympics. Stankowski worked mainly as an administrator, serving as Chair of the Committee for Visual Design that oversaw every aspect of the extravaganza. Aicher, in turn, made his most significant contribution in the area of infor­mation design, creating a system of pictograms that were intended to be understandable despite the polyglot nature of the athletes and guests at the games. Aicher approached this project with the 1920s work of Otto Neurath (1882-1945) as a precedent. Neurath, an Austrian sociologist, had developed the visual classification system he called the "Isotype," an acronym for "International System of Typographic Picture Education." With the help of the illustrator Gerd Arntz (1901-1988), Neurath had invented a set of bold symbols that conveyed simple, factual information without resorting to text. Like Neurath's prototypes, Aicher's Olympic symbols were made up of simple lines and circles superimposed on a grid. The resulting icons are easily identifiable: swimming, cycling, and soccer (fig. 8.26). These symbols work even better than a common verbal language, as witnessed by the soccer/football confusion possible in English. Putting the universal themes of avant-garde modernism into practice, Aicher's signage proved clear and effective, and set a precedent for the creation of universal symbols that are now widespread around the world.

8.24 Otl Aicher, Lufthansa Logo, 1969.

8.25 Anton Stankowski. Deutsche Bank Logo, 1974

8.26 Otl Aicher, Munich Olympics Pictograms, 1972.

Container Corporation of America    

In the United States, the original visionary behind the corporate identity movement was the owner of Container Corporation of America (CCA), Walter Paepcke (1896-1960). In 1934, Paepcke realized that CCA, which made cardboard boxes on a vast indus­trial scale, could benefit from a redesign of its packaging and promotional materials, Paepcke hired Egbert Jacobson (b. 1890) to formulate the new look for the company. Jacobson devised a modernist solution for CCA, placing the company's initials in a grotesque face inside an elongated hexagon (fig. 8.27). Paepcke's embrace of an overall corporate identity program, at the core of which was a new logo, established a precedent that would be widely embraced in the 1950s and 1960s.

The most daring move made by Paepcke at CCA came after 1936, when he was convinced by Charles Coiner, art director of his account at the N.W. Ayer agency, to initiate the Great Ideas advertising campaign. Between 1936 and 1960, CCA commis­sioned progressive European and American artists and designers to create posters that related to famous quotes from the Western tradition. In this manner, the posters seemed to transcend the vulgar economic messages of most advertising, and instead prom­ulgated the idea of CCA as a patron of culture. Viewers were not supposed to think of the product, cardboard boxes, when they viewed these ads, but to see the company as a responsible corpo­ate citizen; in the post-war era, corporations soon recognized the value of creating an "individual" personality for their company, one that consumers could relate to on a more personal level. This advertising trend paralleled developments in the American legal system, whereby corporations more and more were treated like individual citizens, complete with "inalienable rights" to property, expression, and the like.

The Swiss designer Josef Muller-Brockmann was one of many partisans of the International Style who created a poster for the Great Ideas campaign in the 1950s (fig. 8.28). Like all the com­missioned artists, he was given a quote and asked to base his image on it without dramatically referencing CCA. It is not clear how the quote from the British philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), which advocates freedom of speech for individuals, bears any explicit relationship to Muller-Brockmann's design. Nor need it; by the 1950s, modern abstract art, such as the De Stijlinfluenced blocks of primary color located on an asymmetri­cal orthogonal grid used by Muller-Brockmann, itself represented resistance to tyranny and the primacy of individual expression in a broad sense. This interpretation was harnessed by institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, which made a determined effort to explain the significance of abstraction to the mainstream public in the 1940s and 1950s—in a way, this became the museum's core mission. In contrast to most commercial design, the Great Ideas posters all featured the artist's name or signature, in order to capitalize on their reputation. The corporate identity of the patron of this poster, CCA, is only barely indicated, appearing in the lower left corner along with a small cardboard box logo.

8.27 Egbert Jacobson, CCA Logo, 1937

8.28 Josef-Muler Brockmann,
Container Corporation of America (CCA), 1957. Poster.

Paul Rand

The graphic designer whose name most became equated with cor­porate identity and the International Style in the United States was Paul Rand. Trained in New York City at the Pratt Institute, Rand became the art director of Esquire magazine in 1935. While there was little in the way of formal training in modern graphic design styles available at that time in New York—oddly enough, Rand once took a class in the 1930s with the Dada artist and German emigre George Grosz—Rand later related that he scoured the pages of European journals such as Gebrauchsgrapbik for information about the newest styles. He became a part of the circle centered on the Composing Room, and served as guest artist for three issues of PM Magazine between 1938 and 1941.

The February/March 1941 issue of PM Magazine featured a prominent article on Rand written by none other than Laszlo Moholy-Nagy In the piece, Moholy-Nagy wrote that he and other young Europeans had envisioned the United States as a technological Utopia, an icon of the modern world, when they worked on devising the Constructivist style in the 1920s. He went on to write that he had been bewildered by the "old-fash­ioned advertising" that he discovered when he moved to Chicago in 1937. "I was greatly surprised to find that we Europeans were, to a certain extent, more American than the Americans." The country that had inspired Constructivism in many ways had failed to live up to his expectations. The short article is matched with ten pages illustrating Rand's designs for everything from furniture to posters.

     The insert in PM Magazine on Rand that included Moholy-Magy's essay was, according to the editor's custom, designed by Rand himself. In deference to the Bauhaus style of typography, Rand set his own name in lowercase type, while Moholy-Nagy's signature is reproduced much larger. This element effectively proj­ects a spirit of humility on Rand's part, as he cleverly deemphasizcs himself in favor of the celebrity, Moholy-Nagy, who had founded the "NewBauhaus" in Chicago in 1937 and was at that time directing the Chicago School of Design founded by Walter Paepcke. The blank space at the top of the page is broken only on the right margin, where a cropped photo of a few fingers points at the title and text below. The large space after the colon in the title as well as the ragged word "The," which breaks up the block of otherwise justified text, both seem out of sync, as if Rand was experimenting with the International Style without fully converting to it.

     In 1949, the Museum of Modern Art produced an exhibition accompanied by a catalog designed by Rand, called Modern Art in Your Life. In an attempt to contest the idea that abstraction was politically radical and visually obtuse, MoMA sought to redefine modern art as something respectable and safe. One of the ways in which the museum sought to show that abstract art played a role in mainstream culture was by convincing the American public that abstract an played an important role in mass culture. Along these lines, juxtapositions in the catalog matched abstract fine art with commercial works. This type of comparison cut both ways, of course, because it also served to bestow the cachet of a Pablo Picasso or a Joan Miro on the design arts.

     The cover of the catalog itself demonstrated this strategy, as Rand gestured toward a number of different abstract styles in creating his design (fig. 8.29). While orthogonals dictate the composition, the smeared areas of color and "faux childlike" drawing of objects contest the rigid structure of the grid. The quirky symbolism of the dinner setting with the plate replaced by an artist's palette shows how well Rand understood the importance of making designs that translated ideas into visual terms, rather than simply decorating a surface. His cover conveys the message that abstract art is as friendly as a meal at home with simplified precision akin to that employed by Bass in his film posters.

During the post-war era in the United States, even the revolutionary art of the Dadaists was domesticated, its political message deflated in favor of a newfound concern with its formal, fine an characteristics. Another book design by Rand in 1951 indicates this reevaluation, although in this instance the message is somewhat inadvertent. Rand's cover for Robert Motherwell's anthology The Dada Painters and Poets is made up only of typography; an extremely narrow bold grotesque repeats the word "Dada" twice on the page (fig. 8.30). While there is overprinting and the letters seem to bounce kinetically, two elements drawn from Dada itself, the overall simplicity and respect for the grid go against everything anarchic and chaotic that the Dada movement stood for. Rand has created a look that perfectly encapsulates the new, safe Dada—more about bouncy fun than revolutionary politics.
 

Paul Rand, Posters.

Paul Rand and IBM

After thirteen years working for the Weintraub Advertising Agency, in 1955 Rand embarked on a freelance career. Over the next four decades he established himself as the top purveyor of corporate identity in the United States, with his initial success concentrated around the year 1960. Rand's new focus on corpo­rate logos began when he was employed in 1956 by Eliot Noyes (1910-1977) to work as a consultant for International Business Machines (IBM), the makers of typewriter and, later, computer systems. Executives at the company had become aware that their sprawling business lacked a consistent style, and, spurred on by the dramatic modernist work of Leo Lionni (1910-1999) for a competitor, Italy's Olivetti Corporation, they decided to pay more attention to IBM's visual identity. This new project did not involve only graphic design, as Noyes hired Marcel Breuer, formerly of the Bauhaus, to work on the firm's architecture, and the industrial designer Charles Eames (1907-1978) to help with some product designs.

     While corporate identity comprises the overall design of packaging, stationery, architecture, and printed ephemera, design­ers have always seen the logo as the heart of the enterprise. A logo needs to distill the identity of a corporation while at the same time remaining flexible in its different applications. In designing the logo for IBM, Rand used only typography, and relied some­what on the existing acronym, which was then rendered in a condensed Beton Bold that had a slight An Deco flair. He also based the new type on nineteenth-century "Egyptian" letters, which featured heavy slab serifs, while at the same time referenc­ing George Trump's City Medium grotesque face. (Trump had replaced Paul Renner at the Munich Meisterschule fur Deutschlands Buchdrucker after Renner was arrested by the Nazis, and later went on to design a Schaftstiefelgrotesk called Trump Deutsch in 1935.) The resulting logo was similar to but much crisper-looking than the older one, with more elegantly proportioned lettering (fig, 8.31). Shortly afterwards. Rand reconfigured his original logo, adding an outline version in two weights. The problem with the original logo was that it appeared too heavy in a visual sense, unbalancing some documents, for example, while also appearing "heavy-handed' in an ideological sense. In 1962, Rand added the "8 bar" and "13 bar" versions, which split the type into horizontal bands of even weight. Rand also introduced the German idea of the "design manual" at IBM, including the aptly named 1990 pamphlet Use of the Logo/Abuse of the Logo. These sourcebooks directed employees worldwide how and when to use IBM's corporate identity. In Europe, Josef Miller-Brockmann was hired as a consultant in order to oversee the use of the logo on the continent.

Rand's work at IBM led to several subsequent high profile commissions, including those for Westinghouse, the American Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), and United Parcel Service (UPS). At Westinghouse, a multinational maker of electrical products that employed Noyes as a design consultant beginning in 1959, Rand again relied on elements from a previous design, in this case a "W" with a line underscoring it, to create a new logo (fig. 8.32). This logo featured the letter "W" made up of three dots and four lines that form a letter with the suggestion of the format of an electrical circuit board. It is notable that the logo, which seems rather unadventurous when compared to its contem­poraries—especially with the holdover lozenge under the letter W—was deemed too strikingly abstract by many Westinghouse executives, and almost never made it into production. Regardless of the variations in letterforms in examples such as IBM and Westinghouse, throughout Rand's work, the simplified clarity, sans serif lettering, and bold geometric shapes of the International Style reign supreme.

    In 1968, Rand redesigned the packaging for Westinghouse's Lamp Division, mainly by taking an "addition through subtrac­tion" approach and eliminating a lot of unnecessary graphics (fig. 8.34). He used a Helvetica-like grotesque, called simply Westinghouse Gothic, to fashion numbers that for the first time told the consumer the wattage of the bulbs. The design creates a contrapuntal rhythm between the circular Westinghouse logo and the diagonal blocks of text. This type of effective design, which is much clearer than the older packaging and which also highlights the salient fact of the wattage in large numerals, lends sans serif lettering the aura of "functionalism" even though the design would be just as legible if seriffed letters were used. Also, an orange and "Westinghouse electric blue" juxtaposition of complementary colors added a slightly decorative element to the design.

In his logo for ABC, Rand refashioned a combination of Renner's Futura and Herbert Bayer's Universal into a new gothic. He also borrowed Bayer's predilection for lower-case letters to make an acronym that is enclosed, like many similar Bauhaus designs, by a perfect circle. ABC had been forced, like many media companies, to refine its visual identity after the success of the in-house work done by William Golden (1911-1959) at the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) in the 1950s (fig. 8.33). In 1951, Golden had invented CBS's "eye" logo, which quickly established itself as a versatile emblem that resonated with the eye of the television camera. Of course, this celebration of the "Kino-Eye" harks back to the anti-capitalist film projects of the Russian Constructivists, who glorified the objective eye of the camera as a symbol of Communism's fair and balanced social policies. While the eye logo was sometimes embellished with the CBS acronym in grotesque letters, Golden also established the redrawn version of a modern roman face, Didot Bodoni, as the house typeface for the network.

    Rand's use of Universal for ABC's logo represents perhaps the best example of this unexpected culmination of the International Style in the service of corporate design. Bayer's typeface was named Universal for a reason: his belief, formed at the Bauhaus, that simplified geometric forms could serve as the visual basis for a new style that would unite all people in a Utopian future. Of course, this unification came about in a perverse way in that the mass media, of which ABC is a prominent member, have become "universal' in global culture, but a culture that is relentlessly commercialized, in which ABC unifies people by selling to them. When ABC was sold in the late 1980s, the new owners planned to update Rand's design but were unable to decide on a suitable replacement.

    Rand's reinvention of the UPS logo in 1961 paired unstressed bold sans serif lettering with a holdover device from the old logo, a shield (fig. 8.35). Above the shield he added a whimsical touch, a schematic rendering of a wrapped gift. Rand was never as austere in his designs as were his Swiss and German colleagues, and while he adopted many of the stylistic precepts of European design he never absorbed the complicated terminology or the theoretical dimension of design that were paramount in Ulm and Zurich.

    A key aspect of corporate logos is their proposed longevity versus other more ephemeral types of graphic design. Because companies strongly desire to establish a mark that will last for generations, most designers of corporate identity projects strive to avoid short-lived trends. This factor was important in the adop­tion of avant-garde modernism by post-war graphic designers. The "universal" nature of simple geometric designs makes them much more adaptable and able to function over several decades without looking obsolete. When a modern design has been retired, it has often been the case that a whimsical touch, such as the UPS gift-wrapped present, has begun to look "dated" even though the overall abstraction is still sound.

    In 2003, Rand's UPS logo was updated with a new look by the corporate design firm FutureBrand (fig. 8.36). The twenty-first-century UPS logo has jettisoned the gift-wrapped box while maintaining the look of a shield. The new logo has been criticized for combining three cliches of contemporary corporate identity: first, faux three-dimensionality created by shading, the antithesis of modernism's "honest" two-dimensional aesthetic; second, a "swoosh" of sorts, a device that has become ubiquitous ever since its invention for Nike by a graphic design student at Portland State University named Caroline Davidson; and, third, a redrawn version of Hans Reichel's FF Dax typeface, which fea­tures a stylized transition between the vertical and curved strokes of the letters U and the P. On the other hand, Rand him­self had often quibbled over his UPS logo, and it is arguable whether the new update fulfills his oft-quoted principles, "The ideal logo is simple, elegant, economical, flexible, practical, and unforgettable."

    One of the most important graphic design programs in the United States was established at Yale University in 1951. At that point, Yale's art department was chaired by the Bauhaus profes­sor and German emigre Josef Albers. Albers played a pivotal role in making Yale into an institution where the International Style would thrive in the fine arts, including architecture, as well as in the design areas. Along with Herbert Bayer, Walter Gropius, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Marcel Breuer, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, all of whom were employed by American universities in the 1950s, Albers was an influential proponent of the "Bauhaus approach to problem solving." This concept collapsed and depoliticized the different currents that made up the Bauhaus into one rational, logical stream that could provide efficient "solutions" for American industry. Rand was perhaps the most influential professor of graphic design at Yale University, where he taught from 1956 until 1993 while also contributing to Yale's summer program in Brissago, Switzerland, beginning in 1977. While Rand was mainly self-taught—he once remarked about his class with George Grosz, "You wondered what he was driving at. I am still wondering"— he played an important role in instituting study of the International Style that dominated the graphic design curriculum at Yale for many years. Rand contributed the logo for Yale University Press in 1985, stitching together the serifs of the letters to form a web of linear elements (fig. 8.37). Other Yale professors in the 1950s and 1960s included Lustig, the Swiss emigre Herbert Matter, Leo Lionni, Alexey Brodovitch, Bradbury Thompson (1911-1995), and Armin Hofmann.

8.31 Paul Rand, IBM Logos, 1956-90.
Reproduced by permission of IBM Corporation.

8.32 Paul Rand, Westinghouse Logo, 1956. Yale University Library.
8.33 William Golden, CBS Logo, 1951.

8.34 Paul Rand, Westinghouse Light-Bulbs, 1968. Yale University Archives.

The Golden Age of Logos

In the 1960s, both Lester Beall and Saul Bass joined the rush to create new modern corporate logos. Beall created a new corporate identity for the International Paper company. The new logo both referenced the source of IP's products, trees, while also acting as an homage to Moholy-Nagy's design for the Bauhaus Press of 1923 (fig. 8.38). The equilateral triangle ensconced within a circle is typical of the type of reductive geometry that is the mainstay of most contemporary corporate design. Like Beall's logo, Bass's 1969 logo for Bell Telephone circumscribes his design, in this case an abstract bell that relates to the older logo, inside a pure circle (fig. 8.39).

A firm that claimed a large role in the booming corporate identity movement of the 1960s, Brownjohn, Chermayeff & Geismar, was first established in New York in 1957, soon after the latter two partners had graduated from the graphic design pro­gram at Yale. Robert Brownjohn (1929-1970) had left the firm and moved in 1960 to London, where he had a significant impact on British graphic design. Building on the reputation established by its work for Chase Manhattan Bank of 1959, the renamed firm of Chermayeff & Geismar took on a number of high-profile clients in the 1960s.

    The redesign by Tom Geismar (b. 1931) of the logo of Mobil Oil, a collaboration with Eliot Noycs, made use of a customized version of Futura, the perfect circle of the "O" now representing petroleum products (fig. 8.40). In discussing the logo, Geismar does not relate the use of the perfect "O" from Futura to the his­tory of the avant-garde. "The idea of the red O came about partly to reinforce a design concept to use circular canopies, circular pumps, circular display elements, etc. for a distinctive look." Noyes, in turn, designed the famous cylindrical pump for Mobil's retail outlets. It is clear from this unified design program how corporate identity projects are in a way the impoverished descendents of the Gesamtkunstwerk that captured so many artists' imaginations in earlier decades. Futura remains a reliable standard that is still widely used by graphic designers in the corporate realm. For example, when Lindon Leader (b. 1950) of Landor Associates in San Francisco invented the new Fedex logo in 1994, he used a customized combination of Univers 67 (bold condensed) and Futura (fig. 8.41). In order to fit an arrow into the design of the logo, Leader customized his lettering with a higher x-height and ligatures. The resulting arrow, which is formed by the negative space in between the "e" and the "x," is often over­looked by viewers and users, so that it operates almost on a subliminal level.

8.35 Paul Rand, UPS Logo, 1961. Reproduced by permission of UPS.
8.36 FutureBrand, UPS Logo, 2003. Reproduced by permission of UPS.
8.37 Paul Rand, Yale Logo, Yale University Press, 1985.
8.38 Lester Beall, International Paper Logo, 1972.
8.39 Saul Bass, Bell Telephone Logo, 1969. Reproduced by permission of Bell South.
8.40 Tom Geismar and Eliot Noyes, Mobil Logo, 1965.
8.41 Lindon Leader and Landor Associates, FedEx Logo, 1994.

Bauhaus Masters at American Universities

Having left Germany for England in 1934, Walter Gropius later set­tled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1937, where he became a professor at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, later Chair of the Department of Architecture. Gropius retired in 1952 but continued to work in private practice. Curiously, despite his accomplishments during his pre-war career, Gropius had less impact in the United States, even though his stature as an icon of modern style subtly influenced American architecture and design culture.

Gropius was joined at Harvard in 1937 by his Bauhaus colleague Marcel Breuer, who remained at the university until 1946; the two men often collaborated on projects. Breuer's students included a number of people who would have a profound effect on American architecture in the ensuing decades, including Philip Johnson, I.M. Pei, and Paul Rudolph.

While several former Bauhaus professors worked on the East coast, two others, Ldszlo Moholy-Nagy and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, eventually settled in the midwestern city of Chicago. Moholy-Nagy was committed to continuing the educational mission of the former German art school, as evidenced by his choice of the name "New Bauhaus" for the institution he led in Chicago, beginning in 1937 under the aegis of the American Association of Arts and Industries. The New Bauhaus quickly ran into financial difficulties, as Moholy-Nagy's original supporters, a conservative trade group, found themselves uncomfortable with its progressive goals and withdrew their financial support. Moholy-Nagy persevered by reopening the newly renamed Chicago School of Design in 1939 with a commitment to the same ideals he had espoused in the 1920s, including functionalist design and a machine aesthetic. The school was renamed yet again in 1944 as the Institute of Design. Moholy-Nagy died in 1946. The Institute of Design was absorbed by the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1949.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who as the last Director of the Bauhaus had presided over its closure in 1933, emigrated to Chicago in 1938 where he took a position as Director of the Department of Architecture at the Armour Institute, an engineering college. In 1940 the institute merged with another technical college to form the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). As Director of the College of Architecture, Planning, and Design at IIT, Mies van der Rohe gained both a forum for his views on architecture and major commissions. In the 1940s and 1950s he designed a series of buildings as well as a master plan for the university's campus.

Mies van der Rohe believed strongly that architecture must both respect universal aesthetic laws of harmonious proportion and respond to the cultural epoch from whence it derived, and his convictions earned him legions of followers across the country. In a collaborative effort with the developer Herbert Greenwald, Mies van der Rohe transferred his architectural vision to the design of skyscrapers, where his leadership was so ubiquitous as to become almost invisible. Headquartered in his adopted city of Chicago, the architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill—home to many architects who trained under Mies van der Rohe—has spread a Miesian aesthetic throughout the world.

The International Style in Corporate Architecture

The field of architecture presented an important parallel to the International Style in graphic design. During the time when the International Style of design and typography rose to the top, the same abstract design principles were also applied to corporate architecture in the United States. Of course, the term "International Style" was originally applied to architecture; it had first been employed by Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock for their 1932 exhibition of avant-garde architecture at the Museum of Modern Art. Bauhaus architects including Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Breuer had all settled in the United States during the 1930s, and after the war they popular­ized the reductive geometric style. In 1947, Johnson curatcd an exhibition of Mies's work titled "The Architecture of Mies van der Rohe," which brought great public renown to the German architect. As was the case with graphic design, the employment of avant-garde architecture for corporate headquarters buildings constituted a process whereby formerly radical, Utopian—even Communist—styles were remade into a visual signifier of triumphant capitalism.

    During the 1950s, Mies van der Rohe became the preeminent skyscraper architect in the United States, basing his work on the principles of the International Style that had been formulated at the Bauhaus in the 1920s. Mies van der Rohe, director of the Bauhaus from 1930 until 1933, lived in Chicago beginning in 1938, when he became director of the Architecture Department of the Armour Institute, which was later absorbed into the Illinois Institute of Technology. Built in collaboration with Johnson, Mies van der Rohe's first high-profile skyscraper was the Seagram Building on Park Avenue in New York City (fig. 8.42). This corporate headquarters was to become an iconic example of how companies and their architects reinterpreted the revolutionary geometric abstractions of the 1920s as language that spoke of stability, efficiency, power, and sophistication—all qualities that companies wanted to project to the public. This thirty-nine-story tower shimmers in shades of brass and brown, standing as if on a pedestal because of the pylons that separate the main volume from the plaza under it. The "glass box" structure seems to be a pure Neoplatonist solid, a universal shape of harmony and bal­ance. Of course, this type of building conveys the functionalism of the International Style, its undecorated steel and glass form enclosing open interior spaces that could be easily altered to fit the changing needs of workers. Notably, Mies van der Rohe him­self was not fond of the concept that his buildings were purely "functional," and he resisted that nomenclature, preferring to >ee his buildings as elegant design solutions that transcended simple functionality.

IBM's corporate architecture program represents an example where the stylistic and ideological impact of architectural, indus­trial, and graphic design styles can be investigated side by side. Eliot Noyes, the director of design and all-around corporate iden­tity guru at IBM starting in the 1950s, was trained as an architect, and was a former student of Breucr, who had taught in the archi­tecture program at Harvard University between 1937 and 1947. During the 1960s, Noyes and Breuer each designed multiple buildings for IBM, which was in the middle of an era of expan­sion. Perhaps the most stunning IBM building from this era was in fact designed by Mies van der Rohe, who was hired to design a skyscraper to house the corporation's Chicago headquarters (fig. 8.43). Not completed until 1971, two years after Mies van der Rohe's death, the Chicago IBM building displays all of the imposing grandeur of his other works. A glass box of black steel and tinted windows, it arises at a bend of the Chicago River, dominating a notable vista of the city. Like the IBM logo designed by Rand, the building projects logic and rationality, its crisp geometric form not simply functional but beautiful as well. The question brought up by Mies vander Rohe's architecture as well as Rand's logos is: was the International Style in the post-war age reduced to just that, a style, or does it still manage to convey some of the universal moral philosophy that was a part of its birth?

In 1971, the year in which Mies van der Rohe's classic Chicago IBM building was completed, Noyes introduced his redesign of one the company's key products, the Selectric II typewriter. The advertisement shown here features the new design, which involved establishing a sleeker shape and smoothly contoured body for the machine (fig. 8.44). The Selectric II also boasted new functional elements, especially the ability to switch between ten- and twelve-point type at the pull of a lever. The modern style of this manual integrates the cropped photo of the typewriter with Rand's 8-bar logo. The underlying grid, asymmetry, and prodigious negative space all reflect the updated corporate identity program overseen by Noyes.

 

8.44 Anonymous, IBM Selectric II Typewriter, 1971. Manual cover.

The Tilted E

In a sort of cosmic irony, the last corporate logo designed by Paul Rand before his death in 1996 was for the Enron Corporation of Houston, Texas. Originally called the "multicolored, tilted E," Rand's logo took the form of a square balanced on one corner at a 45-degree angle (fig. 8.45). Simple and bold, like so much of Rand's work, the logo presents a successful design solution, combining the company's name with a huge sans serif "E" that has a high visual impact. At a 1997 party to unveil the new corporate identity, Kenneth Lay (1942 - 2006), Chairman and CEO of Enron, said "This new advertising campaign and logo will begin to inform people around the world of who Enron is, and how we can help them make decisions to improve their businesses and their lives." After the 2002 collapse of the company under the weight of its fraudulent business practices, Rand's "E" took on a whole new meaning; rechristened the "crooked E," it inadvertently became the most powerful anti-logo of its time. No parodist of corporate identity could have devised a more startling outcome.

The Enron debacle created much soul-searching among the graphic design community, as artists pondered the ethical dimensions of their power to shape people's perceptions. A few years ago Milton Glaser (b. 1929), a prominent postmodern graphic designer discussed in the next chapter, devised a list of hypothetical dilemmas that could arise in the career of a contemporary graphic designer:

1.  Designing a package to look bigger on the shelf.

2. Designing an ad for a slow, boring film to make it seem like
a light-hearted comedy.

3.  Designing a crest for a new vineyard to suggest that it has
been in business for a long time.

4.  Designing a jacket for a book whose sexual content you
find personally repellent.

5. Designing a medal using steel from the World Trade Centex
to be sold as a profit-making souvenir of September 11.

6. Designing an advertising campaign for a company with
a history of known discrimination in minority hiring.

7. Designing a package for children whose contents you know
are low in nutrition value and high in sugar content.

8.  Designing a line of T-shirts for a manufacturer that employs
child labor.

9. Designing a promotion for a diet product that you know
doesn't work.

10. Designing an ad for a political candidate whose policies
you believe would be harmful to the general public.

11. Designing a brochure for an SUV that turned over
frequently in emergency conditions and was known to
have killed 150 people.

12. Designing an ad for a product whose frequent use could
result in the user's death.

While corporate identity based on the International Style continues to thrive, from the 1960s a number of new styles and design philosophies arose that contested its dominant position.

8.45 Paul Rand, Enron Logo_r 1996. Yale University Library.