2 February 2012 | spiked

All this carbon-cutting is a waste of energy

Neither Boris Johnson nor Ken Livingstone is willing to deliver the uninterrupted, cheap energy London needs

29 January 2012 | Design Principles and Practices journal

| Design Management Journal

25 January 2012 | Amadeus

17 January 2012 | spiked

Making a molehill out of a mountain

Clint Eastwood’s biopic of J Edgar Hoover is more about the man’s personal identity than his historical significance

29 December 2011 | Campaign, 16 September 1988

How design got High Streed cred

The British High Street began to swing in the 1960s. By 1988, the frothiest year of the Thatcher decade, it really hurtled

Last month, retail sales in Britain rose by two per cent. Two per cent! The figure doesn’t seem to mark an orgy of consumerism, but it promises to crowd this country’s prisons with more debtors than ever there were in the summer of 1968. Then, the High Street swung - a little, and mainly in London. Now it hurtles, and all over the country too. It took the whole of the Sixties for turnover in Britain’s shops to double. Over the past two decades, however, total retail sales in shops have shot up from less than £15 billion to well over £100 billion. Only in the 20 years gone by have the big chains crushed the corner shop.

Before 1968, ‘multiple’ establishments accounted for less than 40 per cent of retail business in the UK, and showed few signs of concentration. Since that date, they have come to take 70 per cent of shoppers’ money. Like the ‘independents’, their numbers have halved. But the 25,000 who remain are strong, while the nation’s 200,000 family owned stores, last outposts of the brown paper bag, have their doors open to a difficult future.

So folk memory of the 1960s, of one long hippie spending spree, colourful father to today’s boom in retail design, really won’t do.

Before 1968, the average British worker’s weekly wage was but £3. The Sixties were the age of Birmingham’s monstrous Bull Ring and the Elephant and Castle shopping centre; of thriving bingo halls and closed up cinemas; of pubs decked out in velvet and steak houses in deepest red; of mail order paid by installments, and of Green Shield stamps. There is little to connect the era with 1988.

It is true that Burton was around in 1968. Yet the Eighties, not the Sixties, were when Sir Ralph Halpern emerged to segment his markets and develop Top Shop, Top Man, Burton, Principles, Principles for Men, Harvey Nichols, Debenhams and Radius.

Likewise George Davies (Next, Next for Men, Next to Nothing, Next Too, Next Interiors, Next Accessories, Next Directory) is no child of the 1960s, but an 1980s phenomenon.

Even fashion survivors from the 1960s in fact date from earlier times. Michael Barrie, who has taken over Take Six (1966 87), first began trading in 1948. Mary Quant started Bazaar, on the King’s Road, way back in 1955. John Stephen set up on Carnaby Street in 1959. Theirs was a long haul, and one that only began to get easier by the 1970s.

Fashion was as pivotal to the High Street in 1968 as it is in 1988, but its role was quite different. Then, converging with music and with a large generation of youth that had - for the first time since the war - some money in its pockets, a mere 15,000 boutiques gave a few architects and graphic designers a chance to break the stranglehold which shopfitters had over shop environments.

Now, giants such as Burton and Next have not simply created a whole new and populous discipline known as retail design: much more importantly, they have helped develop a sensibility toward design among all age groups, in advertising, and among clients as influential and as varied as ASDA, British Rail, Granada, Midland Bank and Woolworth.

Before 1968, Britain’s uniquely powerful shopfitting industry, almost bereft of designers, decked out names that have vanished - United Drapery Stores (950 outlets), Pricerite (58). There was some work for architects Bronek, Katz and Vaughan and Yorke, Rosenberg and Marshall, and Design Research unit handled Peter Robinson. Otherwise, however, the main design entree was for US consultancies; and while Raymond Loewy’s organisation acquitted itself well with John Lewis, other companies could only offset a frequent relapse into Marie Antoinette aesthetics with unrivalled analysis of merchandise and marketing data.

Today times are not so lean. Some shops change their look every three to five years, not every eight to ten. Britain’s only undergraduate course in retail design, run by Anthony Parsons at London’s College of Distributive Trades, has just finished its first year, and the largest design consultancies boast, belatedly, specialist retail marketing expertise. 

Design budgets, aided by much larger advertising budgets, have helped make retailers some of the best remembered brands Britain. Meanwhile, both UK retailers and UK retail designers have taken the fire back to the US: Sainsbury has acquired Shaw, in New England; Marks and Spencer has purchased Brooks Brothers; Fitch has merged with design consultants Richardson Smith.

Back in Britain, the benefits of post 1981 retailing to the consumer have been tangible. There are more chains, but more choice. There is greater merchandise specialisation, but greater product co ordination too.

For women at work and for Britain’s multiplying motorists, late night shopping and easy to park stores away from city centres are a boon. Some of the dark, gusty, concrete walls of the 1960s at least sport airy glass roofs and more wholesome catering; edge-of-town food superstores radiate hygiene and fresh produce; out-of-town DIY merchants make strenuous efforts to persuade their domestic suppliers to match foreign standards of product quality.

Building upwards in the tighter, comparison shopping urban context, and spreading outwards to provide convenience shopping, are the trends. They are symbolised by the escalator and by trolleys on tarmac, and show how much the High Street has changed since 1968. But the widely hyped decline of retailing in the inner city today is as nothing compared with the demise of neighbourhood shopping then. Indeed, in many ways, the High Street has been buoyed up by newly competitive service providers - banks, building societies and, very recently, utilities.

Above all, the British High Street has improved in terms of interiors. Gone, with the never ending ‘everything must go’ sales of the hyper inflationary 1970s, are the strips and strips of burning fluorescent lights, the acres of washable, scratchproof imitation wood laminates, the yards of groceries in cardboard boxes. Today’s stores, often under new management, persuade one audience with tiny, twinkling low-voltage lamps, another with terrazzo floors, another with jerseys stacked flat in burnished walnut shelves.

With all this modernity, nevertheless, it is fair to mourn the passing of the boutique, just as it is fair to celebrate the continuity of Habitat.

If today’s spatial dynamic in retailing is vertical and lateral, that of 1968 was basically cellular. Just as record shops had sound insulated booths to groove in (where are they now?), so the point of the 1960s boutique was to dive out of open air, High Street, bourgeois consumption into an altogether pokier, more exotic variety. Boutiques were about purple floors, chocolate brown walls and cast a-layer-off changing-rooms: there was an element of secrecy about them.

Architects Campbell, Zogolovitch and Gough did cave like boutiques. The Way In, a cell within Harrods, had deep purple carpets, purple ceilings and walls, and purple cafe stools in GRP. Nigel Waymarth’s Granny Takes a Trip, on the Portobello Road, was, beneath six or seven changes of fascia in the 1960s, a lush, dark world of feather fans and funny frock coats.

Boutiques did go in for bright display, of course. Mr Freedom, designed by Jon Weallans, and the mural on the Apple Shop, Baker Street designed by two 23 year-old Dutchwomen known as The Fool - were brassy enough. Again, the seminal radiused windows and corners of the Chelsea Drugstore, designed by King’s Road kings Garnett Cloughley Blakemore and Associates, oozed a breezy, astronautic sensuality. But the basic motifs in boutiques paralleled the saturnine clubs of the 1960s: the UFO, the Middle Earth, the Marquee and the Arts Lab.

As for Terence Conran’s Fulham Road emporium - founded in 1964 for £1.50 per square foot - it pioneered the whole business of targeting a particular lifestyle. Taking off from British toy shops (Play and Learn, James Galt) and French warehouses, Conran coordinated, piled his kitchen utensils high, and went on to set up next to Heal’s and in Manchester and Brighton too. Only by 1970, though, were his outlets really profitable.

In the 1980s we have lost the subterranean charms of Biba and the open optimism of 1960s petrol stations – the Esso sign means happy motoring, and all that. From the 1960s we have retained self-service, and, with it, the centrality of pack design. Yet, when we document the real past outside London, we miss little from the retailing of 1968. London impressed the media and the tourists; the provinces barely registered.

Take, for example, Leeds. Compare the entries for that city, 1968 vs 1988, in the indispensable Retail Directories published by Newman Books, London. It is evident that, 20 nearby the main High Street, Briggate, there was a plurality of fashion and footwear stores and no fewer than nine jewellers. The boutiques, if they deserved the title, seemed confined to shops named ‘Amber’ and ‘Miss Janet’.

There were five furniture stores, with names daunting (Super Bargain Centre), or all too familiar today (Woodhouse; Cavendish). We may lament the passing of Attrills ironworkers, Coombes shoe repairers, Gigi’s coffee bar, the Ceylon Tea Centre and Kitchens’ musical instruments; but we hardly shed a tear for the demise of two motorbike parts dealers, thc2s bd shop (housewares) and the Locarno Dance Hall.

Today’s Leeds has lost only 10 per cent of its half million population since 1968. It has gained Marks and Spencer, Habitat, Virgin, Zodiac Toys, a lot of fast food places, several computer vendors, a Housing Information Office, a glazier, a baker and a club called Hollywood Days and Hollywood Nights. The mix, no doubt, is not to everybody’s taste. But the typical British High Street of 1988 is a vastly more stimulating place to be than the main drag of yesteryear.

24 December 2011 | Blueprint, 1987

The apostle of Cool

Interview with Dieter Rams, the crusading German designer of Braun products and much besides

Dieter Rams is restless. He gesticulates, interrupts, digresses, is emphatic. For a quarter of a century, he has been head of the product design department of Braun, Frankfurt. Rams says that the small, square black alarm clocks designed by his 16 strong team are now the market leaders in Japan. ‘Through design, not technology’, he waves. ‘I think our critics are wrong maybe they are all a little bit ill’.

Dieter Rams is on a crusade. In a world óf affected flamboyance, he is an old fashioned fanatic. When Rams goes for walks, they say, he picks up and later disposes of every single piece of litter he encounters. In products, he wants harmony, sparseness, lightness, compactness. He demands honesty, utilitarianism, simplicity. He insists on the democratic values of the Shakers, the purism of Japanese food arrangements and the longevity that only comes with formal aesthetic restraint. Yes, he is keen on environmental protection too. He is moral; he is rational. ‘The Second World War was short - but look how much bad was done! We don’t realise the chaos. Men were rats, they were underground… Us designers, and the magazines, and the handful of design orientated companies like Erco, Olivetti and Herman Miller - we’ve done a lot to get people out of that rat like existence’.

Rams reports directly to the chairman at Braun. The company, which is now a subsidiary of America’s Gillette, has sales of about £300m, with 75 per cent of revenues coming from abroad. Rams ensures that, though there are two layers of management between him and the top brass at Boston, the Braun look always stays modern yet, across 300 lines, retains an unwavering continuity with past tradition. His pocket calculator, with the coloured, circular, convex buttons, still seems fresh after a decade in production. It is trendy, but the link back to the classic years of the late 1950s and early 1960s is clear enough.

Building or design?

Born in 1933 in Wiesbaden, Rams trained in architecture and first worked with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill on the design of American consulates in Munich, Frankfurt and Bremen. At 22, he became an industrial designer at Braun. The company had been founded in 1921 by Max Braun, and had ended the 1930s with a distinctive logo, 1000 employees and a distinguished range of integrated radios and record¬ players. When a gawky and youthful Rams joined Braun, however, the firm had moved on. Max had died, but had left an inheritance of radiograms, electric shavers, Multimix kitchen mixers and two sons - Erwin and Artur. Competition in the industry was fierce. It was time for a change.

The result was the revolutionary radio/record player, the SK4, shown to rapturous acclaim at the Radio Exhibition, Düsseldorf, in 1955. Radio, hi-fi and speaker were all in one; the aesthetic was entirely novel, and in a move away from the sheet metal that was sometimes to get the better of him in the 1960s, Rams put a transparent plastic lid on the machine. Distantly, at least, he is responsible for smoked acrylic record player lids the world over. Even now, Braun runs a flourishing legal department, so rapid and frequent is the plagiarism that attends its new ideas.

Post-war economics

The SK4 was a result of a collaboration with the Hochschule für Gestaltung, Ulm, where Hans Gugelot, the man who in 1964 designed Kodak’s ubiquitous Carousel slide projector, plus the graphics and exhibition designer Otl Aichler, briefly established a post war Bauhaus in the ruins of the Third Reich. Along with the Skidmore team, the Brauns and a charismatic carpenter grandfather, Gugelot and Aichler were the major influences on Rams.

America was also an important factor. Rams had worked on American consulates. On the SK4 he listened to Dave Brubeck and Miles Davis; he played a bit of trumpet himself. ‘In design terms, the Second World War led to a big American presence: a strong dollar, thus big investments in Europe, and companies like Miller and Knoll International. There was Aalto and Saarinen, but Denmark and Switzerland had stood still. When Knoll opened an outlet in Stuttgart, it was a brave new world for me’.

Technical limitations

To a Germany devastated, divided, and occupied by GIs, America was the means by which Modernism was kept alive. Even the Hochschule, a private school which before its closure in 1968, was dedicated to wiping out all vestiges of Werkbund arts and craftiness from German products, raised half its initial funds from McCloy, the American High Commissioner for Germany, in 1948. It is important to note these points because they illustrate the limitations of the Federal Republic. In a Britain, where Vorsprung durch Technik is a cult joke and the Germans are widely admired for their Arbeitslust, we tend to neglect Germany’s industrial limitations and instead play up her ethnically seated strengths. But Rams’ achievement is to be one of the few post-war West German industrial designers to achieve international fame - through Prussian hard work, optimism, and a quality of being opinionated about things that is both irritating and endearing.

The significance of Rams’ early years for Braun are that they cover either side of 1958. They are the years of West Germany’s economic miracle, and that of Japan, and of Italy too.

Rams was and remains a one man band in the middle of an anonymous orchestra of German factories playing at full pelt. He appeals for calm, and seems conscious himself of his country’s limitations. Hitler was crazy, Speer played at being Caesar and Napoleon. Now the products West Germany sells to the Third World ‘are a crime’. While Braun has audaciously set up factories in Spain, Mexico and Ireland, West German banks and Helmut Kohl show no interest in industrial design. ‘Deutsche Bank, with those twin towers in Frankfurt, has a big corporate identity manual. I helped build them a system of walls and tables out of the best possible materials. Their paintings are worth millions of dollars. But they are not willing to take risks. They keep hold of their money. There is no good propaganda, no good magazines or exhibitions in support of design in Germany, and the government isn’t helping the banks wake up to it’.

Matt black, bright white

Rams is, anyway, misunderstood. It was not he, but other members of his design team, who did the excellent Braun hairdryer, electric toothbrush kit and that black alarm clock (generally, the choice of black for Rams’ later hi fi is to my eye not as clever as his earlier selection of white; but the blackness of the alarm clock is entirely appropriate). His most spectacular system - a variable cantilevered living room stand on which sat a rotatable white television, a white reel to reel tape recorder and a white compact radio hi-fi - was never manufactured in full. His T3 and T4 pocket radios (1958, 1969), the first of their kind in West Germany were, by the 1970s, destroyed by Japanese manufacturers such as Sony. The same thing happened to his commendable portable radios (1961, 1963). He admits that his radiograms were not profitable until the late 1960s. His cinecameras, to my taste, are unlikely ever to set the world on fire.

On the other hand, not nearly enough people know about Rams’ ‘Montage’. This is a modular storage system, complete with anodised aluminium frame and suitable for both office and residential use. Rams developed Montage at a breakneck pace between 1957 and 1959. It has been manufactured for 30 years by Vitsoe, a Frankfurt furniture company owned by Niels Vitsoe, a Danish born entrepreneur who had not a single product to his name until he met Rams.

Somehow you are drawn back to those years. Vitsoe had a big effect on Rams, but, as with his other mentors, ‘there were no philosophical discussions, just talk about design details’. Bought beers by Rams, his engineering and technician colleagues at Braun became friends in a way, he hints, that the company’s marketing supremos of today are not. In 1957 and 1960, Braun won the Grand Prix at two successive Milan Triennales; in 1962, the year of its stock market flotation, the Compasso D’Oro; in 1964, a special exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Later Rams work for Braun - the cylindrical table lighter (1968), the flashguns of the early 1970s, the 601/ 602 chair system for Vitsoe - is brilliant, but it is to those miracle years that one returns. Every other kind of German product was chaotic and anonymous; Rams’ creations may have been anonymous, but at the same time they were brazenly unique.

Twiddling knobs

We had them in my house. The Atelier 1 radiogram, with the pearl white knobs you depressed, the winking white round circular dials you twiddled and the speakers with the wooden slats. The dials revealed little volume level numbers, black on white, through transparent windows. The top was not transparent, but opaque white. I played with that machine all through my youth.

We also had the H1 tangential fan heater (1959), in sheet metal with exquisite proportions, logo prominent, grey white and light grey. In those years West Germany had begun to put the era of punitive currency reform, Cold War, immigration and low wages behind it. Soon it was to turn to a veritable orgy of consumerism. Against all this, Rams stood out.

Rams is 55. He smokes strong cigarettes at a rapid rate, but one of his ambitions is to be healthy. Another is to spend more time with the college students he teaches and with his staff. In a country given to upheaval, he remains a beacon of fixed purpose.

Today, when America’s larger population demands its reflation, West Germany despairs: it has, after all, economic problems of its own. Is Rams, an ambassador from a country we British have all grown to respect, now on the losing end? He wants to fight television and advertising overkill, as well as the disorientating character of German council housing, with ‘emptiness’ in furniture: ‘neutrality’, he stresses, ‘says something’. He says that in fact there are plenty of other Dieter Rams practising design in Germany, but that they are unrecognised. ‘They need the help of entrepreneurs’, he exclaims with a sigh.

To hear this, of Germany, in 1987. It is all very sobering, and that is what Dieter Rams would like best.

| Management Today, January 1989

Winter of the wastemakers

High-tech consumer durables have a reputation for falling apart. But planned obsolescence does not account for the problems of repair

For three weeks this winter I have endured the most appalling agony. First, my middle-market Philips car stereo quite reasonably decides to chew up a rather battered old rock tape. Then I bring the machine in for mending, but that takes an age. I have to fight through London’s jammed but lonely streets for a full 20 days without music as a friend.

Rapid repair of defective consumer products, it appears, has become a dying art. For at just the moment that my car has turned from roving juke-box to mobile morgue, I gain an insatiable desire to get my Hitachi tape player at home fixed; and that operation, too, is beset by interminable delays. With my three year old piece of Philips in car entertainment, I only have what quaintly translated instruction manuals call ‘tape spaghetti’, complicated by the need for a trivial missing part that never arrives. By contrast, my Japanese ghetto blaster - black, aggressive, up market, manufactured around 1981 - has a faulty gas-operated tape loading mechanism, a dead power switch and a gnawed at microphone. Repair, I am told, will take two or three months.

Many Japanese consumer electronics companies do have rather poky after sales counters at their massive UK HQs near Slough. But Slough is too much of a trek to make just to get a ghetto blaster fixed; so I go, on Hitachi’s recommendation, to a dealer on London’s Tottenham Court Road. There two repairers are ill and on holiday. They will do an estimate and that alone will cost me whatever I decide to do. Late on a wet Friday night, I meekly agree.

The following Monday the Zanussi dishwasher collapses. ‘Can we send an engineer on Friday?’, Zanussi asks my wife on the phone. Only when she insists on Wednesday is that agreed.

This is a contest we win, for Zanussi does indeed show up on the appointed day, and rehabilitates our machine within minutes by removing an errant part from the pump. Nevertheless, I am nervous. The Christmas before last, I had to play the ‘I am a journalist and I demand to speak to the marketing director’ card to AEG. That was over our washing machine. The company told me then that it had had to recruit extra service engineers to deal with Yuletide demand. It was hard to raise an answer from AEG on the phone and our youngest’s dirty clothes soon assumed mountainous proportions.

Though all our household’s basic life support systems once again appear near a Challenger style ‘major malfunction’, we decide to buy an AEG gas oven. But just then our 14-inch Panasonic Quintrix television gets white lines running over it like the running track at the Seoul Olympics. This time we use Yellow Pages: a local man and his son come round and manage to right it, in our home, for £22, then take it away when it goes wrong, and finally bring it back perfect. For a further £10, they fix everything and, in a now highly unfamiliar symbol of personal service, attach the plug to the telly by doing the necessary high exertion wire-chasing behind our bookcase. Total bill: £33.

According to our TV repairers. today’s video cassette recorders, hifi sets and the like last longer than in the past. But when they do go en panne, the properly working part replacing the defective part now has too many integrated circuits on it to be inexpensive any more. Worse, the rate of new product development in manufacturing is now so rapid that spare parts, even for popular products, can fall out of stock within as little as 18 months. What’s really happening, the repairers argue, is that manufacturers are delibrately making their wares impervious to resuscitation. The reason: this way, they hope to encourage more replacement sales in the future.

These hassles surrounding professional surgery on consumer goods are of some moment. As consumer expenditure slows under Chancellor Lawson’s squeeze, more and more people will find themselves unable to swap kit that’s kaput for the working variety. There will be more attempts by the lay public to patch up appliances at home, and thus, we may conjecture, more living room electrocutions, soldering iron burns, fingers frazzled in fan belts. Men, it is true, may go on buying Motorola car phones, Sanyo twin-speed VCRs, Hitachi computer speed controlled shavers with rhodium foils, Philips picture in-picture Grandstand. But even they will find breakdowns hard to reverse. As for women vacuuming, cooking and washing with’ products in the home - Britain’s enormous, unseen, unpaid economy of women doing housework - their lives may gradually grind to a halt.

At this point you might well ask, nimbly: ‘Doesn’t all this hassle with product repairs amount to just a new form of planned obsolescence?’. Can’t the techno economic unmendability of objects, like the tendency for their aesthetics to ‘go out of style - can’t these things be laid at the door of the modem day design consultant, conspiring with manufacturers to rip all his innocent manager consumers off?

Perhaps. But after 12 years in design, I’ve yet to find such a conspiracy. Designers are usually too prressed for time, too idealistic to have a confab with their clients about when the pro¬ducts of their labour at the drawing-board or CAD screen should fall to bits.

Consider a little history. The term ‘planned obsolescence’ was first popularised by the American muck-raking journalist Vance Packard in his hilarious book The Waste Makers (1960). Packard stressed that planned obsolescence was essential for high consumption that, in turn, was essential if America’s heavily automated factories and offices were to keep up demand for their wares. In a US of booming productivity, the recession of 1957-58, the worst of three since the war, served to remind everyone of the pivotal role of consumer expenditure, as inventories soared, overcapacity mounted and unemployment became ‘worrisome’. Planned obsolescence, Packard argued, was a response to this.

The significance of Waste Makers is that today’s consumer products operate in a completely different environment They last longer, are becoming cheaper and - in contrast to what Packard criticised in the products of 1960 - often contain some genuine feature innovations. More importantly, British consumers today are not recovering from a mini recession in the midst of a successful production economy. On the contrary, we are entering a renewed recession. The context for today’s irreparable products is, therefore, much bleaker than that surrounding the gleaming finned Cadillacs of General Motors’ chief stylist Harley Earl, a major enthusiast for what he called ‘dynamic obsolescence’.

In Packard’s account, evil waste-makers like Earl joined furniture designer George Nelson and the marketing guru Theodore Levitt in upholding the merits of a throwaway culture. But the old hack’s case was always less sensational than he made out. Earl had, with his boss Alfred Sloan, been pioneering ‘planned obsolescence’ since the late 1920s - through GM’s policy of annual model changes. Moreover, in retrospect we can now see that Packard’s American was never as automated and thus plagued with overproduction as he made out. Last, even if some designers were at fault, Packard had to admit that giants like Raymond Loewy, Walter Dorwin Teague and Cordon Lippincott all said no to planned obsolescence.

Today, we may be certain, there is still little planned obsolescence. It is just that products go wrong, and that our expectations are high. Still, something needs to be done: for a start, we could do with more experimentation in the realm of ‘self diagnostic’ fault displays on products, clearer guides to owner repair, and so on.

Why does something need to be done? Because Packard wrote at a time when America was reaching her sunny peak. Because here in gloomy winter Britain, we have designers but no repairers - so that when your car radio or dishwasher gives up the ghost, you really suffer.

7 December 2011 | spiked

The forgotten history of Pearl Harbor

Japan’s attack on the US 70 years ago was not a surprise, but rather the culmination of imperial rivalry

17 November 2011 | BBC Radio 3

Manias about change

Just because your email Inbox is brimming doesn't mean that the real pace of change is accelerating. Panel discussion

11 October 2011 | The Independent

The end is nigh: is survival all we can hope for?

In their policies for energy and for the economy, British politicians hold up continued existence as the maximum goal we should strive for

10 October 2011 | spiked

Is Britain drowning in too much packaging?

The wrapping that our food, mod-cons and medications come in is not 'evil' - it is a product of civilisation

7 September 2011 | Design Week, 20 April 1990

Straddling both art and design: an interview with Milton Glaser

Milt Glaser put Bob Dylan in silhouette on a memorable poster (1967), and designed the red-hearted I Love NY logo (1975). Now the subject of a Sky Arts documentary, I talked to him 20 years ago

Over 11 years, Milton Glaser designed 200 food supermarkets across America. He did exteriors, interiors, signs, fixtures – including a giant glass fibre pear, succulent and green, suspended off a store facade as a piece of community art. He did no fewer than 2000 separate items of packaging. Name of the chain: Grand Union, since defunct in the welter of leveraged buyouts that has swept the US retail business. Client, in a blue, open-necked, short-sleeved shirt: the infamous Anglo-French multimillionaire, Jimmy Goldsmith.

Glaser had got to know Goldsmith when he redesigned Goldsmith’s L’Express. Goldsmith called him about Grand Union: Glaser said he knew a bit about food but not that much about supermarkets; Goldsmith said that a new model for supermarkets was what he wanted.

Says Glaser: “I had a sense of the dietary changes America was going through. Supermarkets, by contrast, tend to think margins or refrigeration. Also, I had a sense of the shopping experience. Through our work redesigning New York magazine, we learned how to get on the reader’s side”.

He clarifies the link between supermarkets and magazines: “It’s always struck me that what the French call les magasins are similar to magazines. Both are collections of random elements.
“The problem is to get people to move from front to back, so they don’t just dot around. In a supermarket you have to change the space and the lighting, just like you alter the rhythm of a magazine. Above all, the lighting”.

At a sell-out lecture held at London’s Design Museum last month, Glaser said nothing of all this. Leaning towards etymology, he explained that lustrare - to shed light – is the root of the word “illustration”. He showed a wonderful, distinctively Russian kind of natural light in the cover he has illustrated for a book on Gogol, and gave a rich, scholarly, moving and succinct art historian’s account of light from the Renaissance to Impressionism.

From the mid 1970s to the mid 1980s, Glaser was chiefly engaged in rolling out a massive and terrifically commercial supermarket chain. Yet at the Design Museum, he told an admiring audience of the elasticity of oil paints, of frescoes, and of his preference for doing caricatures of people, not likenesses of them.

It is odd. In an interview, Glaser will tell you that he likes to draw, but does not consider himself an illustrator; that he is mostly interested in communicating ideas as a designer, even though he would still rather execute the final images himself. Yet at the lecture he did not dwell long on the umbrella shaped light fittings that he has designed, or on the ceiling and table lights he has done for Aurora, a restaurant. His main focus, rather, was illustration.

We see his excellent new set of book covers for the works of Hermann Hesse. We revel in the different styles of his poster portraits of Bach and Mozart, done for concerts at New York’s Lincoln Center. We are reminded that much of his work is inspired by music: by performances and records, whether classical or rock. But we see nothing of the Glaser that is animated by food - nothing of Grand Union’s stores, or the ice cream cones he did for Sammontana Gelati All Italiana of Tuscany. Nor is there time to touch on Sesame Place, two children’s education and-entertainment facilities in Pennsylvania and Texas which Glaser designed for Anheuser Busch.

Milton Glaser is indeed a learned and witty man. Born in 1929, of imposing height, he still teaches every Wednesday night in Room 202 of the School of Visual Arts in New York. He’s been doing that for 29 years, and arranges his European flights so he can get back in time.

And, both through Milton Glaser Inc and through WBMG, a group shared with his distinguished graphic design colleague Walter Bernard, Glaser still runs a sizeable consultancy operation. Altogether, he helps oversee 25 people - 10 fewer than he had at the height of Grand Union days, but a total which, he believes, is “still too large”.

The team has just redesigned La Vanguardia Barcelona, and there is still consultancy work with Time. Glaser is also working on a cultural daily newspaper for Paris. But he prefers to talk about the 20 or 30 drawings and paintings he’s been asked to do for the 500th anniversary celebrations of the death of one of his heroes, the Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca. He enthuses, too, about the design of the complete sets and costumes for the opera, Falstaff, which is due to open in New York in January 1992.

Which way does Glaser turn? In his lecture, he mounts a persuasive defence of design against the slings and arrows of fine art. Of his years with Seymour Chwast and Ed Sorel in Push Pin Studios, he observes: “The idea was always that you didn’t separate design from illustration”.

But Glaser’s touch, though its breezy, colourful approach is readily identifiable in the world of supermarkets or ice cream cones, seems to me more assured in the world of illustration and of relatively pure forms of graphic design. At the Design Museum, his speech stuck to what he is best at.

It’s a sensible move, but, since the publication of his wonderful compendium Graphic design in 1973, we have little record of what Glaser has been doing for nearly 20 years. He says he wants to find the time to do another piece of paperback access, but for the moment most of us will have to make do with the Mahalia Jackson poster, the series of Shakespeare covers for Signet Classics, and the Dylan poster. The history of US graphics show which is shortly to open at the Design Museum, for instance, contains only two pieces in which Glaser had a hand.

The show has been controversial. Mildred “Mickey” Friedman, of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, selected 800 pieces. Michael Bierut, head of graphics at Vignelli Associates, describes the show as “what Mickey likes of what Mickey knows”.

Whatever the verdict, it is, as Glaser observes, peculiar that Push Pin Studios, which in the 1960s and 1970s used to fill up nearly a third of every annual published by the American Institute of Graphic Arts, is barely represented in the show.

“I feel I’ve been edited out, Stalin-style,” says Glaser, amused. “Clearly, today’s ideology shapes the way we see history - but ain’t it always the way?”.

In fact, Glaser remains a towering figure in American illustration, graphics and, yes, commercial design. He is up there with Paul Rand and Saul Bass. “I’m fundamentally against big corporate identity programmes,” he tells you, right after mentioning, rather absently, that he is doing a corporate identity programme for the Italian railways.

British graphic designers, and especially those graphics students who will lead the profession in the next century, could do with a lot more of Glaser’s philosophical disquisitions on the defects of Modernism in typography and elsewhere.

These disquisitions, unlike most, are erudite. They are also illustrated, if the verb may be forgiven, by practical examples that joyfully communicate a sense of the alternative. “I don’t think strategically”, says Glaser. “Even though I’ve been approached by a big agency, I’ve always been out of the industrial charmed circle. I’ve always been an outsider”.

30 August 2011 | spiked

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