Architecture Words 5
MAX BILL
FORM, FUNCTION, BEAUTY == GESTALT FORM, FUNCTION, BEAUTY == GESTALT
PREFACE
Max Bill’s multi-dimensional pursuits (as typographer, graphic designer, advertiser, architect, sculptor, educator, even self-proclaimed jeweller) span the full spectrum of the twentieth-century’s expression of the world as design. His writings, like his career, embody the contradictions and challenges posed by this condition – in some of its purest, most extreme modern forms. And form, of course, is perhaps the central concept of contemporary life in this wonderful collection of essays, most of them translated into English for the first time. The deliberately broad selection gives the reader a meaningful, personal context in which to set Bill’s work – one that goes far beyond the slogans that have too often and too easily collapsed his vision to that of an inflexible Swiss functionalist. Also, and perhaps more importantly (given the rampant formalism that is propelling contemporary design forward so unconvincingly) form itself remains a topic deserving of much more critical, introspective reflection – the kind of thing that Bill himself was a master of. Perhaps, as Bill notes in the opening of an essay from 1949, the supposed timelessness of modern architecture and design ‘were never quite as functional as they were made out to be’.
Max Bill
Architectural Association London