Designing as Visual Organization
Excerpts from Chapter 10 of the book On Weaving, by Anni Albers, 1965
It is safe, I suppose, to assume that today most if not all of us have had the experience of looking down from an airplane onto this earth. What we see is a free flow of forms intersected here and there by straight lines, rectangles, circles, and evenly drawn curves; that is, by shapes of great regularity. Here we have, then, natural and man-made forms in contradistinction. And here before us we can recognize the essence of designing a visually comprehensible, simplified organization of forms that is distinct from nature’s secretive and complex working.
Or on a beach, we may find a button, a bottle, a plank of wood, immediately recognizable as “our” doing, belonging to our world of forms and not to that which made the shells, the seaweed, and the undulated tracings of waves on sand. Also we can observe the counterplay of the forming forces: the sea slowly grinding an evenly walled piece of glass, foreign to it in shape and substance, into a multiform body suitable for adoption into its own orbit of figuration. On the other hand, we see the waves controlled, where dams and dikes draw a rigid line between land and water.
“…when the matter of usefulness is involved, we plainly and without qualification use our characteristics: forms that, however far they may deviate in their final development, are intrinsically geometric.”
To turn from “looking at” to action: we grow cabbages in straight rows and are not tempted by nature’s fanciful way of planting to scatter them freely about. We may argue that sometimes we follow her method and plant a bush here and another there, but even then we “clear” the ground. Always, though sometimes in a way that is roundabout and apparent only as an underlying scheme of composition, it is clarity that we seek. But when the matter of usefulness is involved, we plainly and without qualification use our characteristics: forms that, however far they may deviate in their final development, are intrinsically geometric.
If, then, it appears that our stamp is or should be an immediate or implicit lucidity, a considered position, a reduction to the comprehensible by reason or intuition in whatever we touch (confusion always gets a negative rating), we have established a basis for designing — designing in any field. From city-planning to the planning of a house or road, from the composing of music to the formulation of a law, the weaving of a fabric, or the painting of a picture — behind the endless list of things shaped is a work of clarification, of controlled formulation.
“Culture, surely, is measured by art, which sets the standard of quality toward which broad production slowly moves or should move.”
By using the term “designing” for all these varied ways of pre-establishing form, we are, of course, doing some violence to the word. “Designing” usually means “giving shape to a useful object.” We do not speak of designing a picture or a concerto, but of designing a house, a city, a bowl, a fabric. But surely these can all be, like a painting or music, works of art. Usefulness does not prevent a thing, anything, from being art. We must conclude, then, that it is the thoughtfulness and care and sensitivity in regard to form that makes a house turn into art, and that it is this degree of thoughtfulness, care, and sensitivity that we should try to attain. Culture, surely, is measured by art, which sets the standard of quality toward which broad production slowly moves or should move.
For we certainly realize that there are no exclusive materials reserved for art, though we are often told otherwise. Neither preciousness nor durability of material are prerequisites. A work of art, we know, can be made of sand or sound, of features or flowers, as much as of marble or gold. Any material, any working procedure, and any method of production, manual or industrial, can serve an end that may be art. It is interesting to see how today’s artists, for example our sculptors, are exploring new media and are thereby fundamentally changing the sculptural process from the traditional method of cutting away to one of joining. They are giving us, instead of massive contour, exposed structure; instead of opaqueness, transmission of light. Obviously, then, regardless of the material and the method of working it, designing is or should be methodical planning, whether of simple or intricately organized forms; and if done imaginatively and sensitively, designing can become art….
Today, we should try to counteract habits that only rarely leave us time to collect ourselves. Every hour on the hour we seem to need the latest and, as it turns out, usually the most unsettling and gloomy report, often, when seen in retrospect, of non-essentials. Yesterday’s paper is waste paper. Wisdom and insight hardly make headlines. Nevertheless, we are seldom found — on train or plane, on bus or boat, or in any given moment of imposed restraint of action — without a bundle of distractions in our hand in the form of papers or magazines.
“Nevertheless, we are seldom found — on train or plane, on bus or boat, or in any given moment of imposed restraint of action — without a bundle of distractions in our hand….”
And though it may appear that we are straying from our line of thought, it is on the contrary here on the ground of philosophy and morals that attitudes and convictions, the starting points of our actions, are formed. Two matters here may be of special concern to the conscientious designer and may make him stop and think or, perhaps, think and stop. The first is that with his help another object will be added to the many that are already taking our attention and our care, another object to distract us. (Our households contain hundreds of objects.) The second is that by trying to give this object its best possible shape, by trying to make it as timeless as possible — that is, not dictated by short-lived fashion — and by finding for it a form as anonymous as possible — that is, a form unburdened by the dominantly individual traits of the planner — the designer finds himself in direct conflict with the economic pattern of our time.
For the economy of today is built largely upon change, and the “successful” designer, a term I have not used before, will have to consider the matter of “calculated obsolescence.” We are urged today to want more and more things, and we are subjected to a vigorous campaigning for always newer things, things that are not necessarily newer in performance. We are asked to shift from red to blue or from this bit of trimming to that for the questionable reason or unreason of fashion. It is evident, I think, that the designer who takes the longer view is by no means identical with the “successful” designer….
“…the designer who takes the longer view is by no means identical with the ‘successful’ designer.”
As you will have noticed, I have made no distinction between the craftsman designer, the industrial designer, and the artist — because the fundamental, if not the specific, considerations are the same, I believe, for those who work with the conscience and apperception of the artist. With surprise and reassurance I recently came across a statement by the painter Lionel Feininger, who speaks of one of his pictures as having “painted itself.”
At the beginning we spoke here of the comprehensible orderliness which underlies all our doing and whose ultimate form is also that of art. Material form becomes meaningful form through design, that is, through considered relationships. And this meaningful form can become the carrier of a meaning that takes us beyond what we think of as immediate reality. But an orderliness that is too obvious cannot become meaningful in this superior sense that is art. The organization of forms, their relatedness, their proportions, must have that quality of mystery that we know in nature. Nature, however, shows herself to us only in part. The whole of nature, though we always seek it, remains hidden from us. To reassure us, art tries, I believe, to show us a wholeness that we can comprehend.
About the Author
Anni Albers was a very bright artist, designer, printmaker, and educator. She harbored a collection of graphic wall hangings, weavings, and designs that were extremely influential to the 20th century. Born in Berlin, Anna studied weaving at Bauhaus and joined their company in 1929. Her textiles in this period combined weaving with geometric abstractions, the first for this time. During her time at Bauhaus, she developed a specialized curriculum that integrated weaving and industrial design and rediscovered and taught long forgotten techniques that she discovered through her in depth studying of the materials.
Albers took great inspiration from pre-Columbian art and textiles that she discovered on her trips to Mexico while she was teaching at Black Mountain College between 1933-1949. These trips are where she was able to repurpose techniques in weaving and bring them back to teach to others. Around this time she began to collect pre-Columbian art and textiles. After 1963, she began to weave less and shift more of her focus on print making and design.