Description:

This edited volume explores the far-reaching influence of two 20th-century design icons: the Bauhaus art school and the furniture company IKEA. Through a carefully curated selection of essays and photography, Bauhaus × IKEA traces the profound but not always benign influence of these global design icons across history, politics, pedagogy, art and society.

Playing on some of the themes of the book, the systematic and pedagogical overlaps between the two, the design system for this book is ruggedly but playfully systematic. Its main logic is very simple: text on the recto, images on the verso. The recto pages have a smaller column for secondary information, and a larger one for the main text. Captions, references, footnotes and author bios all live in the secondary information column. The division of text and image in the book is absolute. Image/text. Except occasionally images require an exception to be made. These mostly-strictly-adhered-to rules make for an interesting and odd rhythm.

The typography is a two-part systematic/pedagogical mix. Part 1 is a type family called Walter, made from a tool used to teach students how to draw letterforms, designed by Swiss type educator Walter Käch in the mid-twentieth century. This is firmly in the school of Neue Haas Grotesk (Helvetica), but more generic, debased, un-heralded. Part 2 of the typographic mix is LL Excellent, based on a single-weight typewriter font called Excellent 47, originally developed for use on daisy wheel typewriters in the 1980s by Triumph-Adler, then published by Linotype in 1984 for use on their Linotronic phototypesetting systems. LL Excellent was redesigned by Stephan Müller and released by Lineto in 2004.

The book has a rich but understated material palette – the paper throughout is a matte coated. The cover is a smooth but richly-dyed thick folder card. The front, back and spine are foil-stamped.