In Week 2 of the Grad. Cert. in “Motion Graphics and Emerging Media Design”, Catherine Gleeson gave a lecture entitled “The Evolution of the Grid”. Starting with the Egyptians, through the Industrial Revolution, William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement in England before moving to Modernism and the current Post-Modern landscape in which designers now find themselves.
The key principles of the lecture revolve around the inter-connection between architecture, industrial design and graphic design and how these relationships have influenced the evolution of design layouts in posters, books and interactive properties leading to the present day.
Along the way, Catherine examined William Morris’s Red House and the notion of “Fitness of Purpose”. How this flew in opposition to the prevailing Neo-Classical model, which dictated a box layout with a symmetrical façade. How this in turn inspired the Art Nouveau and Jugendstijl movements, which in turn influenced Frank Lloyd Wright and the “Glasgow Four” who explored new ideas around the architecture of “Space”. Following through to the birth of a number of movements inspired by the “Machine Age”, such as “Rationalism”, “Futurism”, “Constructivism”, “Cubism” (lots of other “isms”), and the search for a “Universal Culture”.
The birth of the famous Bauhaus – “State Home for Building” (“Staatliches Bauhaus”), in Weimar and the extraordinary collision of influences that came to bear upon the various incarnations of the School. By virtue of its development of an abstract sensibility, the Bauhaus came under attack from the Nazi’s in the 1930’s as “Degenerate” and was literally run out of town. Extraordinary how design itself could be the target for political attack – but not extraordinary if we look at the gamut of human history…
All this and much more is covered in greater detail in the password protected PDF which can be found under Week02 – “Emergence of the Grid”
Categories: abstracts
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