2:PENNY Typography: Josef Albers and the Bauhaus

Staatliches Bauhaus, more commonly known as Bauhaus, was the influential art and architecture school founded in Germany in 1919. Bauhaus became most influential on schools of thought in regard to typography, modern design, art, architecture and interior design.
With the belief that artistic forms should be united, practise crafts should be promoted, and all should contribute to a utopian whole.
Typography played a large role in the Bauhaus movement, with many important and famous typefaces finding their roots there: Kombinationsschrift (Joseph Albers), Futura (Paul Renner), Super Grotesk (Arno Drescher) and Universal (Herbert Bayer).

Bauhaus Master Instructors, 1926: From left, Josef Albers, Hinnerk Scheper, Georg Muche, László Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer, Joost Schmidt, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Vassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Gunta Stölzl and Oskar Schlemmer.

Bauhaus typography was typically unadorned and clean; san-serif types and strong horizontal
and vertical rules were characteristic. They believed: “Typography is an instrument of communication. It must present precise information in a suggestive form… For legibility, the message must never suffer from a priori aesthetics.”

The Architype Albers typeface, designed by Freda Sack and David Quay, is a revival of the typographic experimentation of Bauhaus Professor Josef Albers.
Albers produced sketches for geometrically constructed, universal, sans-serif, stencil typefaces the “Kombinationschrift” alphabets.

He used 10 basic shapes drawn on a grid in a size ratio of 1:3. It consisted of the perfect harmony of circles, squares and rectangles and their combinations, to write any letters or numbers. The system was simple, easy to learn, efficient, cheap for production and expressed purity, regularity and simplicity. The typeface was designed for use on posters and in large scale signs; it was never intended to be used for text.

Albers followed the theory of Die Neue Typographie, or "New Typography". Brought to the Bauhaus by László Moholy-Nagy and put to print by Jan Tschichold in his design manifesto; "New Typography" considered typography to be a medium for communication, and was concerned with the "clarity of the message in its most emphatic form". Albers also followed Herbert Bayer in his hypothesis; since speech does not recognize upper-case letters, they are unnecessary in type.





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1:PENNY Josef Albers

“In design sometimes one plus one equals three.”

• Albers was born in Bottrop, Westphalia (Germany).
• Initially, a teacher, he taught general elementary school in his hometown of Bottrop, in the north western industrial Ruhr region of Germany between 1908 and 1913
• He studied art in Essen and Munich and was certified as an art teacher after attending the Königliche Kunstschule in Berlin from 1913 to 1915
• Enrolled as a student at the prestigious Weimar Bauhaus in 1920
• Albers independently studied stained glass. He also designed furniture, household objects, a typeface, and developed a keen eye as a photographer.
• Was appointed “journeyman” and placed in charge of the Bauhaus glass workshop
• In 1923 he began teaching in the Preliminary Course in material and design teaching furniture design, drawing, and calligraphy

• On May 9, 1925 he married Anni Albers who was also a student at the Bauhaus
• He was promoted to Professor (Master) in 1925, the year the Bauhaus moved to Dessau. His work at this time included furniture design and work in stained and sandblasted glass, first making glass assemblages from debris he found at the Weimar town dump, then sandblasting glass constructions and designing large stained-glass windows for buildings.
• Funding was withdrawn from the Bauhaus in 1932 and the school moved to Berlin
• In 1933 due to Nazi pressure, the faculty members officially closed the Bauhaus
• Albers immigrated to the United States and joined the faculty of Black Mountain College, North Carolina, an experimental school operating with the principle that fine art integrated all learning.
• Albers ran the painting program until he resigned from Black Mountain 1949

• In the series ‘Homage to the Square’, begun in 1949, Albers explored the interactions of flat coloured squares arranged concentrically. He often made notes recording colours, paints and varnishes as well as the spatial proportions and the mathematical schemes used, on the back of his works, as he wanted people to understand his approach to art.
• From 1950 to 1958 Albers held the position of Chair at the Department of Design at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut

• Until his death in 1976, Albers had many exhibitions, guest taught and lectured in various universities, was granted fellowships, grants, awards and numerous honorary degrees. He continued to paint and write, including the design of abstract album covers. staying in New Haven with his wife, textile artist Anni Albers
• The Josef Albers Museum was opened in 1983 in Bottrop by his wife Anni Albers


http://www.albersfoundation.org/Home.php

http://www.answers.com/topic/josef-albers

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Albers

http://www.articons.co.uk/albers.htm

http://www.albers-josef.com/