Eye Magazine

When the Schule für Gestaltung Basel (Basel School of Design) first announced its First Summer Program ‘Basics in Design and Typography’, three weeks of workshops for graphic designers, students and educators, it emphasised the fact that the course would be conducted by Wolfgang Weingart and would ‘re-open a dialogue’ with the legendary Advanced Class of Graphic Design, closed since 1999.

Pilgrims came from Brazil, Colombia, France, Mexico, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the US. There was a mix of students, tutors and practitioners, aged between 20 and 40, from a wide range of backgrounds. What they shared was a knowledge and appreciation of the Basel School of Design philosophy, mostly gained from contact with graduates of the Advanced Class of Graphic Design. One attendee from Ohio said: ‘I really do not know what to expect, except that it will ultimately change who I am as a designer forever.‘

When Steven Heller asked Weingart what he was coming ‘out of retirement’ to teach, he got this reply: ‘The pillar for us is basics. We’ll rediscover the need of basics as the first step in the beginning of each [student’s] design education. No other school of design offers a deeper or more serious basic program.’

Instead of the experimentation of Weingart’s Advanced Class, the First Summer Program would deliver elements from the ‘Vorkurs’, the one-year program that had provided a foundation for the Advanced Class.

Ellen Lupton commented: ‘The most exciting things happen in design education when we look at the so-called basic level and truly analyse design as a language. The critical, open-ended exploration of the basic language of design is what got lost in the 1990s, when technology started dominating design education. The challenge . . . is to recover those basics from the fresh perspective of our own time.’

Although not immediately associated with teaching basic design himself, Weingart had put together a strong team to deliver the workshops: Peter Olpe, head of the Advanced Class from 1990-99, and head of the Basic Design Program since 2000; Stephan Primus, visiting lecturer on the Basic Design Program; Dorothea Flury, head of the Basic Design Program from 1993-2000, and director of the Basel School of Design since 2001. This core team was supported by a host of students, colleagues and friends, including Peter von Arx, Karl Gerstner, Dorothea Hofmann, Peter Fierz, Beat Keusch, Lars Müller and Peter Vetter, who delivered a series of lectures and guided tours.

An essential feature of the experience was the city of Basel itself, conspicuously affluent and with a rich cultural heritage displayed in its fine blend of medieval and contemporary architecture. The course emphasised its location within the medieval city, and encouraged students to take different routes to and from the school every day. Not that there was much time for exploration – the course provided a wide-ranging programme of extra-curricular activity that occupied every evening and weekend.

Highlights of the tour of Basel and its environs included: Freiburg cathedral; Zaha Hadid’s fire station and Tadao Ando’s seminar house at Vitra; Karl Gerstner’s private house and workshop at Hippoltskirch; Herzog & de Meuron’s Schaulager art gallery and storage facility; the Swiss Poster Collection; Le Corbusier’s chapel at Ronchamp; Lars Müller’s publishing house at Wettingen; the Basel Museum of Printing; Stephan Primus’s private house for the Bernoullis; Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece at the Musée d’Unterlinden at Colmar; Dieter Roth’s studio; the Basel Museum of Music; Herzog & de Meuron’s FC Basel football stadium; the Basel School of Design; Renzo Piano’s Zentrum Paul Klee art gallery at Bern; Wolfgang Weingart’s studio and archive.

The course was delivered in a series of huge, clean white rooms, previously used as exhibition spaces within the Gewerbemuseum (trade museum) building. On the floor above was the Basel School of Design library; on the floor below was the Swiss Poster Collection. Each student was given their own enormous working space for the course. At the start of each class, all the equipment and materials were to be found ready and waiting in a neat pile on each desk. However, by far the most noticeable feature of the studio was the complete absence of computers.

Within this spartan working environment everything was created by hand, in a coherent series of carefully prepared and explained basic design exercises: drawing from nature, paper engineering, colour selection, and typographic composition.

For example, Peter Olpe’s drawing workshop focused on a series of progressively interlinking structures, building from a leaf on day one, to the structure of branches within a single tree on day four – the process being analogous to working with letterforms, words, sentences and paragraphs.

In Stephan Primus’ form workshop, 80mm squares of white paper were cut, scored, creased, folded, bent and twisted to create a library of new three-dimensional forms, from which larger forms were then created. In the colour workshop, Dorothea Flury worked on the instinctive selection of colours (and deliberately avoided any references to any formal colour theories), while Weingart’s typography workshop used black and white photocopies of prepared typesetting to make the point that the exercise concerned essentially abstract forms.

A factor in the success of these exercises was the teachers’ modest manner: they considered themselves simply as guides, not gurus. Primus explained that their job was simply ‘to provide a starting point’ by delivering sufficient information about materials and methods, which would ‘allow each student to go on their own journey of discovery’. It was essential that there was no set destination and each student decided their own course.

The studio programme consisted of three weeks of intensive work from 8.30am-5pm, Monday to Saturday. This was effectively a 45-hour working week, without including the whirlwind of extra-curricular activity. Over the course of the three weeks, several thousand pieces of work were created and analysed. All the studio activity took place under the guidance of the core team of teachers, who provided a continuous stream of personal feedback to every student. The four teachers each had different personalities and teaching styles, but all shared an infectious enthusiasm and were obviously enjoying themselves, constantly delighted with the discoveries the students were making.

An ever-present studio assistant recorded the studio activity, borrowing examples of each exercise from each student. The best of these were photocopied or photographed, and collated into a set of books and CDs, copies of which were presented to each student at the end of the course.

For the students, the consensus of opinion was that the course had been ‘a life-changing experience’, ‘totally awesome’, the equivalent of ‘three months on other courses’. Although they had each paid $2500 for the privilege (on top of travel and living expenses), it was considered great value for money.

As for myself, it was not so much life-changing as life-affirming. After studying graphic design for five years and working as a professional designer and teacher for another fifteen, it was refreshing to have such an intensive experience. I also realised that this form of teaching, using these types of basic exercises, is one of the few things in design that is truly sustainable.

For the teaching team, the success of the course appeared to lie in the freedom it had given them to make a political statement about how design education should be done. Weingart in particular was extremely unhappy with the university system which had recently been imposed on Swiss design education, the operational restrictions of which had resulted in the termination of his Advanced Class.

The objective of the First Summer Program was to challenge contemporary design education’s obsession with new technology, highlight the necessity of the teaching the fundamental principles of design, and to restore belief in learning by practice and not just theory. Dissatisfied with the misrepresentation of its philosophy in the design media (particularly by graduates), and in the absence of any definitive documentation of its methodology, the best advertisement for the Basel course continues to be its own delivery.

Rupert Bassett, graphic designer, Wiltshire

First published in Eye no. 58 vol. 15, 2005