Medical Device

For a graphic designer who accepted the Modernist principle of the unity of the arts—that graphic design and typography share the same theoretical base as architecture, that they arise from the same mindset and occupy the same visual landscape—the new architecture of lower Manhattan stumps me. At Ground Zero, the 7 World Trade Center corporate Tower #1 by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) has nearly topped out and has secured its first tenant; Tower #2, just announced, will be by British architect Norman Foster, designer of the controversial Swiss Re London tower shaped like a steel pickle, and Santiago Calatrava's soaring white glass bird for the WTC Transportation Hub, is set to fly by 2009. What is comparable to all this development in graphic design and typography? Is there a unity of the arts in the post-Post-Modern era?

Early Modern theorists stressed the oneness of style: Le Corbusier said in 1923, “Style is a unity of principles animating all the work of an epoch, the result of a state of mind that has its own special character. Our own epoch is determining, day by day, its own style." Gropius went further in recognizing, "the common citizenship of all forms of creative work and their logical interdependence on one another in the modern world." Alvin Lustig, whose early death deprived Yale of a serious design theorist, hoped for "the kind of relationship that existed in earlier periods between objects—the great symbolic spark that jumped between a candle stick, a Gothic cathedral, or a tapestry." So, today, where is that spark? Is there any resemblance, or any "interdependence," among designers of buildings and designers of pages and letterforms? In his 1928 manifesto of the modern spirit in typography, The New Typography, Jan Tschichold named Adolf Loos, Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier as architects expressing the spirit of modernism. In this interesting work, he advised German printers to achieve the modern spirit by rejecting “old style” faces and using the nondescript sans serifs in the type case, such as Venus. But the modern impulse stirred in designers, and new sans serifs appeared. The types of Jakob Erbar (Erbar type 1926), especially Paul Renner (Futura type 1927) and Rudolf Koch (Kabel type 1927) became widely popular from their first appearance.

the intrinsic elegance of materials, their refinement and proportions, to work.