The Bauhaus

The Bauhaus where very keen industrialists who believed that design was for everyone. However even though they wanted to bring design to the masses they still had a very sexist approach to who should be designing, for example there was only one female Bauhaus master and the rest where men and the few woman that where allowed to attend the Bauhaus school where limited to work in certain subject areas as such textiles and colour as it was deemed the “girly” thing to do.

“Let us therefore create a new guild of craftsmen without the class-distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsmen and artists”- Walter Gropius. This quote I found very interesting as Walter Gropius talks about creating a place to drop the barriers between being an artist and being a craftsman which I think is a really interesting way at looking at the problems of the time. However he fails to acknowledge that woman could being just as good a craft man as the men of that time and is therefore contradicting himself as there is now a new barrier no longer depending of if you’re a artist of a craftsman but depending on your sex which I think is a very demeaning towards women.

The Bauhaus masters believed that the building was just as important as the subject they where teaching, 

“The ultimate aim of all creative activity is a building.”And due to this they derived a system to work around the building with each student having to work on an introduction stage first where they would learn the basics and key skills, after this they would start to choose the specialized area in which to work.

Below is the crystal tower which was designed by a student from the Bauhaus in 1921, as you can see the idea was to have a building made of steal and glass which was a clash from the dust and the filth which was around at the time and the design is still very modern, as you can see parallels with the building next to it. The Urbis building is found in Manchester, again it uses glass and steel and looks like it is rising out of the ground.

Pentagram

Pentagram is a design studio which was founded by Alan Fletcher, Theo Crosby, Colin Forbes, Kenneth Grange and Mervyn Kurlansky in 1972 in west London since then they have opened offices in America and Berlin. The foundation of the company was that everyone was to be equal to everyone else because of this premise there are no executive officers or CEOs, everyone has a say and they believe this to be the best way of generating ideas and keeping there ideas fresh and up to date. As well as working in graphic design the firm also work with companies to produce an identity, companies such as citibank and united airlines, they have also worked on areas to do with architecture, interior design and product design, including product design for Tesco, Boots and Nike. Pentagram have also worked with the co-operative brand and this lead to them winning a silver award at the design business association. I like how they do not just focus on graphics and that they have branched out to go into architecture and interior design as both of these where fields I wanted to go into when I was studying at college and knowing that there is a company that does everything I’m interested in means that I could in the future be a graphic designer who works on briefs which include an element of interior design and architecture.

 

More of there work http://www.pentagram.com/work/#/all/all/newest/2835/