Forms of Inquiry, edited by Zak Kyes and Mark Owens, is based on a stunningly simple and beautiful concept: instead of seeking architects’ opinions regarding graphic design (isn’t there enough architectural opinion already these days?), it turns the tables and brings together some of the world’s most important critical voices in graphic design to ask them for their view of architecture. It’s a neat twist, with many useful lessons for both sides. Each participant in this collection has been asked to reflect not only upon architecture in relation to their own work, but also (and perhaps more importantly) upon the relation of both architecture and graphic design within (or as) larger forms of contemporary culture.
The surprising, delightful and sometimes utterly bewildering responses to this provocation give us a catalogue that is nearly schizophrenic in its form. Ostensibly, FOI is an invaluable compendium of graphic design talent (most especially for architects who lost track of the medium sometime around Max Bill, Otl Aicher or the invention of Helvetica). More unexpectedly, this book offers architects a subversive, contrary view of architecture culture.
One could easily subtitle this collection ‘Architecture as Seen by Graphic Designers’. And it’s a very strange view indeed, for the ways in which the various contributions uncover inspiration in some of the most unlikely episodes of modern and contemporary architecture.
In what other kind of (non-fiction) architectural book might we find not just links, but productive links, between Muriel Cooper’s use of a typewriter, Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language, conspiracy theories around the World Trade Center, Neufert diagrams, Louis Andriessen’s music, Pruitt-Igoe’s collapse, spraypaint, Le Corbusier’s early efforts in photo manipulation, choreographic notation, or typefaces derived from Sol LeWitt sculptures? The list reads like a Borges essay on creative one-upsmanship.
Thanks to the insights of this group of graphic designers (who have generously provided the content) as well as that of the AA’s Art Director Zak Kyes (who provided the invitation), co-editor Mark Owens and graphic designer Wayne Daly, Forms of Inquiry is a good deal more than a book about critical graphic design: it is a post-critical, post-disciplinary deconstruction of the all-too-serious solidity of architecture culture itself. That such a convincing effort to destabilise architecture would require the deadpan observations of a bunch of designers who spend their days arguing about obscurities like kerning, the relative importance of Jan Tschihold, signage systems, hyphenation (or is it hypen-ation?), paper weights and things like InDesign plug-ins — well, that already says more about the depth of convergence between architecture and graphic design cultures than any semi-serious introduction I could offer here reflecting upon modern architecture’s long (and well-known) dependence on modern media — upon Mies’s appropriation of commercial photography, Le Corbusier’s theft of collage and cubism, Eisenman’s axonometric-eccentricities, Kahn’s smudgy charcoal tracings, Niemeyer’s photogenic pencil sketches, OMA’s oblique narrative paintings, Zaha’s fluid calligraphy, etc., etc.).
Above all, this is a book that should inspire architects for the way it presents architecture and architectural knowledge as a live (and lively) medium for use, appropriation and reinvention. At the same time, it should help to break down contemporary graphic designers’ relative reluctance to critically inquire into the relationship between their distinctively paperand digital-based design realms (from the making of book pages to the design of graphic identities, billboards, signage and other form of communication) and the ways in which these creep into and through the domains of architectural and urban space in cities.
Paradoxically, all revolutions in architectural thinking begin with the initial discoveries made by architects in the graphic spaces of their own invention and imagination. It remains a truism that architects don’t actually make architectural space: they simply invent within the graphic space (of drawings, notations, animations and other media) through which their ideas are conceived, developed, recorded and communicated to a world — of clients, builders, inhabitants and, most especially, other engaged architects. Accordingly, it remains a mystery to me why so little attention is paid by architects to that singular discipline dedicated to the production of graphic space, namely, the world of contemporary graphic design. Whatever the reason, this book is an important corrective. I am proud we at the AA School can re-present the topic without having to look back to the ‘golden days’ of the 1960s, 1970s or any other decade (everyone has their favourite). Instead, this is a collection that only looks forward, featuring work done this season — and, in the case of some of our contributors, as recently as last week (graphic designers, like architects, live by the deadline). It’s a thrill to be able to bring the topic and debate back into architecture culture, and in a form like Forms of Inquiry, where it returns anew. I hope this book and the exhibition that accompanies it will carry the debate forward.
Forms of Inquiry is an all-toorare example of the positive benefits of juxtaposing parallel disciplines, not for the overt lessons architects imagine they can learn through appropriating or emulating something else, but simply for the strangeness of view that such a juxtaposition can offer the culture of architecture itself. Sometimes it is others who are best able to animate the walls (and not just boundaries) of a field of human knowledge as stable and serious as architecture. In its own modest and quiet way, this book charts a path forward into a world where architects might one day stop simply trying to act as if they were graphic designers and instead learn to learn from graphic design itself. To do so would be to bring the premise of Forms of Inquiry full circle, as an invaluable collection of razor-sharp, ambitious graphic designers who are able to convincingly demonstrate how much they have already gained by learning from architecture.
Brett Steele
Director, AA School
London, September 2007