It is somewhat dumbfounding to realize how some persons rewrite reality, especially in Design History, which in many ways does not really matter. Design would always like to play a bigger role than all the other professions which aid us in making each day. Still, it is quite amusing to see documents full of little white errors.
An example:
The history of Unimark is now just a mystique. The only one that has put his stamp on that period is Vignelli, right or wrong, and with most of the founders gone and six feet under, whatever he has written about Unimark, true or not, is now enshrined at the RIT Design Archive, and will set the tone for posterity.
One never hears references to Fogelman or Larry Kline, who were involved in founding the design company Sometimes Eckerstrom is mentioned. Jay Doblin was a latecomer, when the group is already falling apart. Still, the professional media gives Doblin, a design talker/theorist more credit than the design doers/implementors/designers.
The MIT Example:
Meggs never understood, that the MIT design culture was not founded by an American designer, but by a wordsmith, a writer/editor, namely John I. Mattill, whose early vision of a Modernist approach to campus graphics and identities set the stage for the evolution of the publications arm of MIT.
Mattill imported for several seasons, to supplement staff members on leave or sabbaticals, a little less than a decade before I was hired, designers from Europe to design a long list of summer session announcements for the university (as I understand it, MIT was one of the first institutions to provide educational opportunities during summers, which were not remedial but equal to regular curricular components.
John Mattill was also very active on the CASE Council for Advancement and Support of Education, the result of a merger between the American Alumni Council and the American College Public Relations Association.
When I joined the group, I got to know some of the European designers – but not all of them. There was George Adams (Georg Adam Telscher), a former Bauhaus student, who, of course, brought with him the Bauhaus mystique. By introducing the MIT design staff to the Bauhaus, he transmitted some of the superb teaching techniques and theories. In addition, there was he, whom we called the “Bauhaus Kepes” (or Little Moholy) across the street and Walter Gropius’ architecture office just a stones throw across Cambridge. The mystique had feet, faces and voices. Walter Plata, a talented speaker of five languages brought interests in letterform and grammar.
Kurt Kranz, a former Bauhaus student in Dessau, was a major contributor as guest docent to the curriculum at Harvard University’s Carpenter Center in the late sixties – just down the street. Also Toshihiro Katayama, a Japanese designer, who came through the strong Swiss Geigy experience to teach at Harvard University’s Carpenter Center.
Then there was Paul Talmann (1932–1987), a wonderful Swiss Minimalist who worked with kinetic sculptures and modular paintings and constructions that could be arranged by a willing audience. Paul Talmann designed the same summer session programs as we all did; then and later.
But Paul also influenced Ralph Coburn’s work, that can be seen in the Boston MFA. Also, Ralph worked side by side with Ellsworth Kelly. He and Ellsworth had been friends from youth, and had amazing exchanges on visual and aesthetic sensibilities and attitudes, which one cannot trace back to design, but distinctly to minimal art.
Walter Plata was a well known German typographer, of Ralph’s and Jackie’s age, who worked very closely with the Bauer Type Foundry in Frankfurt, Germany. He was a gifted linguist and a spokesperson for “Bund für Deutsche Schrift und Sprache” (Association for the Preservation of German Writing and Language), an old organization, which tried to protect, maintain, promote as well as disseminate printing types like Gothic, Fraktur, Schwabacher and the German cursives; as well as traditional standards of the German language, which were seriously eroding and seriously threatened by artificial controls and impositions by the Nazis. It is my belief that Carl Zahn introduced Plata’s name to John Mattill. Plata had been invited to teach at RISD by Alexander Nesbitt, a Germanophile, and one of the first American type and letterform historians.
Later in 1973, Nesbitt invited me to direct the Graduate Program in Visual Design at the newly established university, SMU Southeastern Massachusetts University, where he was the founder of the Design Department. I don’t believe that Muriel of Plata before he was contracted. I also never met Plata, but life is always full of surprises. Through Dr. Heinrich ten Wolde, one of my in-laws, who was editor-in-chief from 1940–1941 and later from 1951–1959 of this association, I had some idea, who Plata was and what his expertise encompassed. I suspect that Plata brought with him a deep knowledge of letterform and type design and history, because Dr. Bauer of the Bauer Type Foundry authored one of the best histories of letterform “Aventur und Kunst” (Adventure and Art). Plata also was aware of all the trends in contemporary design of the post WW II era, as practiced in all European countries. He ran a gallery about contemporary design and became known for the quality of the work he presented and also his deep knowledge.
Then there is this amazing mystery woman of whom most Americans know so little: Thérèse Moll.
During the time, when I was a design student in Hamburg in the early fifties, Walter Herdeg, the publisher of Graphis, showed her work in his introduction of the Swiss avant-garde; later, in much greater detail through a lecture presentation, also in Hamburg, by Gottfried Honegger, who at that time was a well known Swiss Minimalist and designer, presented also the work of the young design group that founded the trilingual journal of the “Neue Grafik” (“New Graphic Design). Honegger and, I am not sure, but I think it was with his wife Warja Honegger (also a superb designer of purely graphic and visual narratives for books and exhibitions, like timelines of Swiss history without text) presented the underlying philosophical principles of Swiss Design. Honegger chose to discuss work by Karl Gerstner, Thérèse Moll, Gottfried Odermatt, Kurt Wirth, but also work by Aldo Calabresi, Franco Griniani and Bruno Munari as examples of international styled graphics. Moll was also introduced for her daring use of graphic photographs, a mode of designing that developed speed a few years later.
Thérèse Moll was a designer in Karl Gerstner’s studio and a close personal friend, around the time when John Mattill invited her to work in the MIT Publications Office, in 1958. She introduced the MIT Office of Publications staff to modular typography.
Muriel Cooper was on a leave. It was the reason for Moll to substitute for her. Muriel picked up the concepts of modular typography much later, when she began her work on the famous “Bauhaus Book” which becomes the cornerstone for her design efforts. Her work, before her assignment at the MIT Press is much more eclectic. It lacked the form discipline. She also was not a disciplined typographer. It is Carl Zahn who helps her over the hurdles.
Carl Zahn, a highly regarded and respected Boston designer, an expert in book design and head of the design office at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, was a very close friend of Muriel, Jackie and Ralph. Carl was not only superbly educated in the liberal arts but he had stretched his interests beyond the typical European “Swiss” design fad. He knew the people at the different type foundries of Haas, Berthold, Bauer and Stempel. Because he was also a close, personal friend of Hermann Zapf, when Zapf worked at Stempel shaping Optima. They shared issues of cultural history rather than surface trends. The MIT publications design staff, including me, consulted Carl Zahn for nearly everything – availability of special type faces, quality printing resources, paper stocks, paper pricing and especially when the quality of color separations needed to be addressed (up to eighty percent, most likely even more, of all MIT projects had low budgets that would not allow four color work; they were either black or black plus one additional ink). Carl is another unsung design hero, who, because he had no need for notoriety, was overlooked. Meanwhile he was one of the best book designers ever, in Boston. He did not have to inflate his resume. His work alone, spoke for him.
I don’t remember many designers of the sixties, who were able to deprogram or reprogram any odd typeface in such ways, so they were able to compete with newly cut faces…and that before the digital technology, at that time still produced through the matrix systems of Linotype, Intertype (much better than Linotype), Monotype (much more flexible than the former systems) or Ludlow (a process closest to Gutenberg’s, in which mats were hand set into a composing stick and then cast in metal).
When I traveled home for the first time to Germany in 1963, before my MIT appointment, Carl gave me introductions to his friends at Stempel, Bauer, the Klingspor Museum and other places. Hermann Zapf spent a whole day with me showing me the steps between the conception of a type face and the arduous implementation process leading to the final letterform for print production. At that time, he was finishing up Optima and his wife Gudrun was still working on refining a version of Diotima and various cuts of Palatino. Walter Plata was on leave. I missed meeting him.
Typographic education, is another myth that has to die. Unlike Basel, before the dawn of digital typography few professionals received a solid introduction or education in typography, therefore the majority had little understanding of the typesetting processes. One of the exceptions was Yale because of the very close connection between the design program and the Yale Press. (If one would look at Yale student portfolios under Ives and Thompson, one would become aware that Yalies used lots of superb images from the library archives and photography. But few “form conscious” designers graduated, who could handcraft complex graphic images. That came later through Armin Hofmann in the seventies.)
RIT Rochester Institute of Technology was most likely the only other program for superb introduction of technical typography, because this institution trained compositors for type houses, but not designers. Most other schools had very poor typography programs, and very few graphic designers graduated with a functioning knowledge of typography. Students knew more about the construction and rendering of Letterform. They could render headlines with brush and pencil, but had little experience with blocks or columns of type, quite different from students nowadays.
Neither Muriel (art education), Jackie (fashion illustration) nor Ralph (architecture) had been formally trained in type. But on their desks were Müller-Brockmann’s books, later Emil Ruder’s. The MIT team learned typography on the hoof, by trial and error, and with hefty punishment for mistakes, when the budget was exhausted early by mediocre decisions. Thérèse Moll was their indirect typography teacher. She helped to clean up their act.
When it comes to me, I always claim that I was very lucky: I had the right pedigree and more. I spoke with a Bauhaus accent, had a Minimalist portfolio and hand skills, arriving in the US at the right time and at the right place, MIT. In the same ways design curricula in the US were weak in typography, so was typography at my school in Hamburg. My true fortune in skills came through the fact that I entered the design profession before the onset of offset printing. I started in the letterpress era, and recall the fact that in Hamburg one of the very first offset presses was seen as a technical phenomenon in the mid fifties. However my very first professional appointment was 1957 with Chemie Grünenthal GmbH, a young pharmaceutical company (attached to the Dalli-Werke, a much older and larger soap manufacturing company, with a history as a 17th century copper smelting furnace). We were required to use the in-house type shop and letterpress printshop. I was forced to learn all operations as quickly as possible, otherwise my job assignment would have come to an early end.
I learned modular typography through being also partially responsible for and shared with other staff members a very complex packaging system, that was based on modular proportions of the various package sizes for ointments, pills, lozenges, powders, vaccination phials, bottles, cartons and bags for a variety of medication for men and beast. Each package was printed in one ink, a dark green. The proportion of the typographic field holding the corporate identity had to be considered in relationship to the various product sizes, as well as the individual identities of families of products. The task was to reduce the overall inventory that seemed like an explosion of products, sizes, and packages, to a minimum. At Grünenthal, we did not use Müller-Brockmann’s “grid” dividing the plane into equal units. Instead, we used something close, but not as sophisticated as Karl Gerstner’s dynamic proportional programming. The use of modular typographic systems, in our case, started with the packaging system. It was later expanded especially into the design of modular exhibition systems that could be downsized or upscaled for the various pharmaceutical congresses all over Europe, and then later to publications.
For me, this became the beginning of seeing and responding to the visual world through proportion, not through frozen geometry or the grid. To set up a geometric formula takes little time and effort, because the intentions are to press everything into the modules. Dynamic proportional programming, like Gerstner’s, requires careful assessment and considerations of all components not just text and image, but the tertiary structures/proportions that are embedded in the character of the letterform and the contents of the image. The proportion embedded within the image infer and instruct the development of the structure, which surrounds the image or the typographical blocks. To achieve an equilibrium, the process is not only arduous but so much more time consuming. The result, however, provides for a totally rewarding experience when the slowly evolving system accommodates every and all major components without force.
My design training and job experience, having had to practice typography in the real world rather than relying on theoretical interpretations from books or Swiss design examples, may have put me ahead for a moment, but both Jackie and Ralph caught up quite quickly, especially Ralph, who, because of his background in architectural design, he became very comfortable in experimenting with different typographic systems, which became more and more complex and interesting. Jackie, on the other hand, inferred her typographic structures from the organism within the most important component, letterform or image. When it came to complex text environments like books and pamphlets she used very simple geometric systems like Müller-Brockmann’s grid.
During the sixties and seventies, paper houses and print shops began to standardize trim sizes, 8 1/2 x 11 inches, 6 x 9 inches, etc. There was a strong office rebellion against the arbitrary restrictions or impositions. If one were to measure exactly the actual trim sizes of publications one would clearly understand that there was no binding proportional system, no style book of “dos and don’ts”. There were discussions about standardization, but this concept were unanimously rejected. Ralph argued with Müller-Brockmann about standardization when he visited the MIT office. I decided that I preferred Gerstner’s approach. But what I learned from Brockmann that day was a true eye opener, namely Mondrian’s concern with the aggressive dynamics of diagonals, especially those that intersect with corners of canvases. I became aware that most of diagonals in Mondrian’s constructions organically stopped before and never intersected with the corner of the canvases. Since then, I believe, Mondrian was the only one, who was able to deal with diagonal, corners and the super dynamic world of intersections that each diagonal creates.
Another process that I brought to the office was to reverse the design sequence and start with the available press and paper sizes as well as the binding processes. The trim size determined the page size and margins, as well as efficient impositions, when budgets allowed for more than one ink, but not necessarily for all forms. At that time printers began to use computer estimates, which allowed for too narrow a range of possibilities, encouraging standardization of sizes. By being creatively involved in the selection of specific folding ways for single or multiple forms, “C” folds, “Z” folds or accordion folds, half folds, double parallel folds or gate folds , one was able to invent odd sizes, without wasting materials.
Frequently several designs were gained up on a single sheet, which reduced the printing costs. There was the trick to print two posters at the same time in split fountain; for an example, orange and green, and have one poster primarily in orange and the other in orange. We learned to use odd paper lots, which had been wrongly trimmed or had small defects to save budgets.
To the question of who floated the idea of bringing designers from overseas to work at MIT, all facts are not yet in. The information is just not conclusive. There is a lot of conjecture and circumstance. For instance, many of the MIT European professors went in and out of the Publication Office; people like Von Hippel, Lukas Täuber, etc.; many of them members of Boston’s Goethe Society, which was a haven for German speaking artists, musicians and writers. It was one of the organizations that Carl Zahn liked very much. I would not be surprised, if it turns out to be Carl or Charles Helmkin or Dorothy Williams. Carl, a devoted Germanophile, was a quite different designer. Carl was also a personal friend of the MIT gang. He and his second wife, Felicita, a German, visited my house several times in Middleborough on their way to their summer residence on the Cape. During one of the conversations, he talked about his friend Noel Martin, an internationally recognized graphic designer who revolutionized type and publication standards for American museums, and later was professor of Malcolm Grear at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. If I am not mistaken, Carl held a degree in social anthropology. He was a superb book designer, and in book design, the romance and discussions were always about exquisite letterform, availability, legibility and quality of kerning of text typefaces.
During the times Carl had arrived in Boston, in the early 1950s, journals like National Geographic or Scientific American as well as old and prestigious institutions prided themselves in creating a certain institutional image through the use of type fonts, cut exclusively for them. Every institution tried to follow suit to have a type identity. Example: the Harvard Business Review’s first controlled prototype was designed by Bradbury Thompson, using Trump Mediaeval, a font cut by Georg Trump, a German typographer and designer, for the Berthold Type Foundery which still today behaves like HBR’s corporate identity. It was Carl’s plan to find a typeface for the museum, not differently from MIT, choosing first Akzidenz Grotesk/Standard and later Helvetica. Carl knew many punch cutters personally and knew the work of Adrian Frutiger before nearly anybody else. Hermann Zapf was his personal friend. One can know Frutiger and not Basel.
Carl worked for a few years for the Institute of Contemporary Art, and became designer for the Museum of Fine Arts in 1951. There was not a Boston book designer worth her/his salt that did not seek his council. Carl, spoke German fluently, knew the history of type and printing and was connected with all the German and Swiss type foundries, as well as all the historical holding places of printed documents like the Klingspor Museum in Offenbach, for modern book production, typography. Quite differently is the story with György Kepes. He had little knowledge of the new Swiss design movement. Each Swiss pilgrim, looking at him as the last apostle of the Bauhaus era was given short shrift by him. He did not see them as colleagues and treated them rather shabbily, as was reported by Müller-Brockmann and Hofmannn, because he was consumed by a deadly competition with Nicholas Schöffer, a Hungarian-French modernist sculptor, who had taken advantage of Norbert Wiener’s research in cybernetics and applied some of the principles to his monumental sculptural work. He became known as the father of “cybernetic art,” while Kepes missed the boat, not seeing the importance of cybernetics, especially since the original research was done at MIT. It was staring at him from all directions: Jay Forrester at the Sloan School, who developed dynamic systems thinking, or John von Neumann, another Hungarian like Kepes, whose research was compared and was combined with that by Norbert Wiener or the work by Wiener’s collaborators like Gregory Bateson, the English cyberneticist, and his wife Margaret Mead, the famous anthropologist of the sixties. At the 1960 Art Festival, Kepes was still presenting himself still as a painter, fully influenced by modernist principles, but by 1965, when he inaugurates his MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies, he had abandoned painting and dealt only with art that evolved out of emerging technologies. He was no longer interested in anything traditional.
In 1960, at the Boston Arts Festival, Kepes was still presenting himself as a painter, fully influenced by modernist principles. By 1965, when Kepes opens the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies, he has abandoned painting and deals only with art that evolves out of emerging technologies. He is no longer interested in graphics.
Then there is still the MIT trauma of having missed out, as all of the original generation of Bauhaus faculty, but Moholy and Mies, who end up at IIT, are home at the ivy league academies, namely Princeton, Yale and Harvard, which in their tough Bauhaus rethoric they deplored as dilettantish…but only before they arrived at US shores. The second Bauhaus generation, the Chicago Bauhaus generation, that finally settlesd at MIT, included Kepes and Fillipowski.
The question most likely has to be filtered also through the pragmatics of these particular times. One should not forget that in the fifties, at most institutions, as narrow as this sounds, men were in charge of most institutional offices and the management style was quite rigid, administrated in top down hierarchical ways. It is also a time when disparate values are still attached to the work of wordsmiths and visualizers, some for very good reasons, because, what is still true today, many designers, and I am among them, have difficulties with grammar and spelling, while the editorial staffs, wherever one went or still goes, were always and are still highly trained in language etiquette, and most of the MIT writers and text editors came from the best of American humanities programs. One also must remember the innate competition between Harvard and MIT, with Harvard always claiming cultural dominance and sophistication. A minor spelling mistake in a MIT publication, according to them, would prove them right. The smallest mistake would have made everyone at MIT cringe and regret. The MIT writing and editing staff gave all publications consistency and clarity, and this support for quality was a great advantage. The benefit was shared by the design staff.
While John Mattill respected Jackie and Muriel, he always was and wanted to be recognized as boss (Matill one day yelled at me: “Dietmar, I want to make this clear, I don’t want this immediately. I want this now!” So I knew how power felt. Mattill was also able to speak in unusual metaphors, for example: “I have come to the end of a long brick wall, and don’t know how to get around it,” or “The faucet in the President’s Office is starting to drip,” metaphors that made us all laugh or cringe. Relentlessly we made fun of him, but only behind his back.), and it is quite obvious, that both Jackie and Muriel chafed under his leadership, especially Muriel, who from my vantage point, enjoyed chaos, breaking rules, breaking appointments, changing contracts, never on time (something she picked up from Kepes, who would always be listed on announcements for events, which he would cancel in the last moment; she showed up for a presentation at the Swain School, nearly an hour late, without excuse, while many in the audience were ready to leave), rarely admitting her carelessness or failure or having been mistaken. Muriel owned anything and everything. From a management standpoint, Muriel was not dependable, while in contrast, Jackie always lived up to her responsibilities, because she identified with MIT. For Jackie MIT was much From a management standpoint, Muriel was not dependable, while Jackie always lived up to her responsibilities, because she identified with MIT. For Jackie MIT was much more than a workplace. It was her identity and life, her home, especially after her husband died. My wife would always ask: “Why does Muriel get away with this and nobody else?” The answer was always: “Because Muriel gets away with things!”
This sounds as if I disliked Muriel. Not at all! I knew who she was and what to respect and what to expect. I knew she would use me; the benefits were always on her side. But all of us forgave her easily. She brought irreverence to the otherwise stodgy and obedient process. She also was unattached, and
I for one, without any social connections in the US, could not take chances with my employment, having responsibilities to provide a home and security. Muriel was only loyal to herself. She was always in a search mode. She taught at Simmons for Dorothy Williams; she collaborated on projects for the Boston Redevelopment Authority with her friend William Bagnall, from whom she picked up odd studio habits, working like an architect but not like graphic designers. Her layouts were always on yellow paper, ripped off a role. The yellow paper held her scribbles, which were so loose that they had to interpreted. Mike Brotman of Typgraphic House would call me, wondering, if I could help him interpret her typography as he was too embarrassed to ask her. I wonder if these scribbles are part of any collection? (I also remember one of Muriel’s quirks of parking wherever she wanted, rarely in legal spaces, mostly illegally, in front of hydrants, right under no parking signs, in pedestrian walkways, etc. At one point she had accumulated several hundreds of fines. She would proudly display the tickets, hanging from her car’s rearview mirror…until one day, the “Denver boot” stopped her cold and she finally had to face the fines (+/– @ a thousand dollars), out of which she talked herself, at a reduction down to $200, at least this is how the story went. Muriel was a committed feminist, tied to nobody, running barefoot through MIT hallways, wearing paper dresses, and always in a mode of unpredictable behavior, some horrible, some truly lovable. We saw Muriel off to Europe running through Logan with two paper bags full of her stuff, late as always, nearly missing her flight, yelling: “Wait for me…wait for me…!” which became our mock office slogan.)
I never could understand the struggle between the wordsmiths and the image makers. I guess, part of the design arrogance came from Kepes’…an image is worth a thousand words…an erroneous insistence that in communication the image has primacy and is more efficient than text. Now research has shown and we know for a fact that this makes sense if all the stars are properly aligned, and under certain circumstances or in certain contexts both text or image alone can either inhibit or facilitate communication.
There is no question that John Mattill ranked high in the eyes of the administration. He was a confidant to all upper level administrators, and over time became one of the main institutional chroniclers for MIT. Isn’t it strange that neither Muriel nor Jackie would ever give him any credit? Meanwhile he survived and outlived them.
There is also no question that John Mattill founded the office on a writing and editing foundation. His writing skills ranked high in the eyes of the administration. He was a confidant to all upper level administrators, and over time became one of the main institutional chroniclers for MIT. Isn’t it strange that neither Muriel nor Jackie would give him any credit? What I have learned over time is, that this is due to an unfortunate territorial fight. Designers hate artists, especially commercial artists, marketers, advertising art directors, illustrators and especially writers. I have only one measure, which is part of my Bauhaus accent: If it is excellent…then what is the problem? Excellence will always break the back of mediocrity. What other measures are there?
John Mattill was also very much connected to the outside world. He was a very revered member of two institutional organizations, namely the American College Public Relations Association and the American Alumni Council. These groups were trying to improved the quality of university publications, very much like Noel Martin for the museums. There were competitions and conferences. For decades, one of the key persons was Charles Helmken, who was closely connected with all the best American and international designers. If anything, Helmken and/or also Dorothy Williams at Simmons, may have been persons that put the Swiss bee into Mattill’s bonnet. Dorothy and John were comparing notes constantly. Design mythology gives Muriel undue credit, because when one compares her work of the fifties with the work when she is the book designer at the MIT Press, there is too wide a dichotomy and one can question her supposedly early interests in Swiss design. From my experience she was always much more interested in new gadgetry; cameras, film cameras, video cameras, oscilloscopes, sound recorders, walkman, etc. Sometimes in the late sixties or so, with the technical help from Fred Brink of Boston’s Envision Corporation, I staged what we considered one of the first animated slide and sound shows for one of Muriel’s classes at Mass Art.
I am sure we never got credit for it, nor did she ever pay for anything. One needs to talk to RISDs Chris Lenk about Muriel and he will provide an ear full. We were so used to her, that we did not care. I guess we all liked the rebel in her. Even carl one day goy so angry, because she had scheduled him for a presentation in Muriel’s summer course, and had cancelled the clas for a field trip without contacting him. He arrived and the class had left already much earlier.
John claims, he does not remember who put the idea of international designers working in the office for discussion.
When John Mattill asked me to join MIT, James R. Killian was chairman of the MIT Corporation. Killian always championed the causes of the Technology Review, and he was instrumental in the selection of John Mattill as editor-in-chief for the Technology Review in late 1965 or early 1966. Killian had been assistant managing editor, then managing editor and later editor in chief for nine years of the Tech Review, before he was appointed executive vice president and then tenth MIT president of the university. Killian also helped found the “Technology Press,” today’s “MIT Press”.
Killian took keen interests in design, was very knowledgable in the aesthetics and mechanics of movable letters and letterpress as well as gravure printing processes. He considered design an important tool for shaping an institutional image and therefore was willing to spend lots of time with the office design team. Before I was appointed, I had a two and a half hour interview with Dr. Killian, something of which one would not hear again today. He took great care in looking at my work. But the conversation was about the emerging internal style, which he considered in line with the interests of the university. He had observed that it fit the language of scientists; unmistaken in being clear, unambiguous, sharp, and seemingly timeless. To a certain degree he was right. I had brought three portfolios; my design work from the Hamburg school, my professional work for Chemie Grünenthal, a German pharmaceutical corporation, and my personal work. He was interested in everything, but specifically in a series of magazine advertisements, which I designed for Harold Edgerton’s company, when I worked on the account of Edgerton, Germershausen and Grear at a Boston agency. I believe, Killian was critically involved in my selection to the staff; also John Mattill reported directly to him.
This amazing spirit spread to other administrators, like Howard Johnson, who was inaugurated president in 1966, however by the late seventies the administrative priorities had shifted under President Gray and the bond had slowly dissolved, as MIT was facing for the first time financial droughts, due to end of the Vietnam war, and the retrenchment of research for military purposes. After the eighties, the close relationships between CEO or board chairs and MIT Office of Publications or Design Services fade and do no longer exist. Actually at the end there was a growing animosity between administration and staff, when communication became pedantic on one side and defensive on the other. All of this may have had something to do with the shocking expense to make the office compatible for the emerging digital technology, which nobody could foreshadow.
In 1965, the president’s office, board office, and publication office were not only in very close vicinity, they were next door from each other. Almost on a daily basis would corporate officers come to the Office of Publications. For some occasions, our office was used as a depository and sometimes cultural treasures were displayed there like an original copy of Gutenberg’s “Forty-two line Bible”. The MIT president and board chairman would invite philanthropists like Mr. Underwood, president of the Underwood Ham company, to have a look at these treasures. (If this original copy was on loan or property of the university, I don’t recall.) This relationship grew into a trust, and the efforts encouraged, what was clear then and is even more clear today, the work of a very committed design team.
I remember, when we complained that most posters were being stolen long before many cultural events and lectures had taken place, President Johnson encouraged departments to increase the print quantity. He thought that these thefts were a positive sign, because the posters and announcements would end up in offices, dormitories and other informal places.