At home with Max Bill

Swiss architect, designer, artist and politician Max Bill (1908-94) in his house (designed by himself in 1967), photographed for the magazine "du", issue of June 1976.

Schweizerische Polierzeitung

Some covers from the Swiss Construction Foreman Magazine.
Unfortunately the designer of this wonderful example of Swiss Typography remains uncredited. It was typeset and printed at Jacques Bollmann AG, Zurich.
We'll look inside in the next post. Here's a look at one of the backcover ads already:

Architecture for children

 

The sun is shining, take the kids to a playground - a modernist playground! Gabriela Burkhalter's Website Architektur für Kinder (architecture for children) is a wonderful ressource for playground projects by artists and architects between 1945 and 1975. Often with radically new concepts, they were not only modern in shape, but also mirroring modernist reform pedagogy with their combination of strict modernism and abstraction, playfulness, openness and variability (emphasis on creativity) and a sense for adventure.

From top to bottom:
1. from the magazine article: 400 terrains de jeux, vus et commentés par Jacques Simon
Aménagement des espaces libres, fascicule 4, in: revue Espaces verts (revue d'aménagement de l'espace rural et de loisirs), saint-michel-sur-orge, France, 1975
2. Michael Grossert's playground for the Aumatten schoolyard in Reinach, Switzerland (1967)
3. Group Ludic, Paris
4. Cover of the book: Alfred Ledermann, Alfred Trachsel: Spielplatz und Gemeinschaftszentrum (2nd edition 1968), Switzerland/Germany

Two magazine covers by Donald Brun

From the playful, humorous side of Swiss modernist graphic design: two covers for a recipe magazine, 1957 and 1960. The world of Donald Brun (1909-99), one of the most successful graphic designers and illustrators of his time, is full of smiling faces. Thinking of ladling soup from the blood red interior of granny's head does kind of confound me though.

Rolf Liebermann - Les Echanges

Rolf Liebermann composed this piece for the Swiss Expo (National exhibition) 1964. It was displayed as an installation in the pavillion for banking, trade, insurance, office-organisation etc. They wanted to "make the offices talk for themselves", as an "orchestra conducted by an electronic control unit". Liebermann worked for months with engineers. It included 16 typewriters, 18 calculator machines, 10 cash registers, 12 punching card machines, 8 telexes, 16 telephones, 1 fork lift and many other machines that were new at the time and are now obsolete.
It was also released on 7", including a "Jazzversion" on the b side, played by Daniel Humair (dr), Pierre Favre (dr) and George Gruntz (prepared piano).
The piece was also an important inspiration for the Swiss pioneer of electronic Jazz/Pop/Advertising music, Bruno Spoerri. He told me it was a motivation to seriously engage in electronic music.

constri

Plastic construction toy Made in Switzerland from a time when even small toy companies in Switzerland believed in the big modernist project.

The company and the toy still exist and they use the same logo, but in a very different package design.
But check their current ad for their party bombs: