Archive
The 1960s: Revolution in the Air
Fifteen years had passed since ‘Little Boy' exploded, the bomb that wiped Hiroshima from the map and brought an end to WW2. Years in which the world licked its wounds and worked flat out on reconstruction.
After all that suffering, the 1960s were welcomed as a new decade of optimism, of chances and change. But the world would not be the world if everything progressed smoothly and painlessly. It was still business as usual...
The bloodbath of Sharpeville, the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, of Congo’s Lumumba, of Malcolm X, of South Africa’s Verwoerd, of Martin Luther King; war (and protests against it) in and outside Vietnam, peace perhaps in Algeria, but war enough between Israel and Egypt. A religious civil war broke out in Northern Ireland. And there was the surprise attack on Czechoslovakia, which, in the true spirit of the sixties, was attempting, in vain, to celebrate the more liberated political atmosphere of Prague Spring.
Young people everywhere were protesting against the established order and authoritarian leaders. There were student uprisings in Paris and elsewhere in Europe. In Amsterdam there were ‘happenings’, with the Provos cleverly exposing and challenging the weaknesses of the authorities. Their protests were given their own graphic language, which could be read on the banners outside their squats.
More extreme were the German Baader-Meinhof group and the Italian Red Brigade. One word sums them up. Ruthless. Nor should we forget the astonishing behaviour of the young Chinese Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution (1966–69) orchestrated by Mao Tse Tung, whose actions were totally humiliating and destructive towards everyone and everything.
This was the decade of frequent partings. Nelson Mandela was ‘buried alive’ on Robben Island. The famous truly deceased included such politicians as Winston Churchill, Pandit Nehru, Konrad Adenauer, Dwight Eisenhower and Clement Attlee. Soviet leaders also came and went. And we said goodbye to Marilyn Monroe.
The Russian, Yuri Gagarin, followed the dog Laika into space as the first human cosmonaut, in Vostok I. The American Alan Shepard was hot on his heels. The space race became a prestigious political billion-dollar game. It was also the decade in which the astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the Moon, broadcasting television images and bringing back moon rocks. Men spacewalked on thin umbilical chords. Satellites criss-crossed the heavens by the dozen. The supersonic British/French Concorde took its first test flights.
At the same time, the Pope banned all forms of birth control. The South African Dr Christian Barnard performed the first heart transplant. And so a handful of mortals, in their own way, played God.
But how lively the 1960s were! Federico Fellini produced his Dolce Vita. Macho James Bond, Agent 007 appeared, with all his high-tech violence. On the other hand, you could opt for Alpine meadows with the sugary The Sound of Music and the tearjerker Bambi. Minimal Art, Conceptual Art and Op Art filled the galleries and museums: revolutions on canvas. The decade of The Beatles and The Stones: a rift in society that will only heal once the last witness has passed away. All You Need is Love and Satisfaction. Pop and hippies, keywords for the 1960s. Biba and Carnaby Street, Mary Quant, swinging London! Colourful facades, lots and lots of Union Jacks. Anything and everything went: mini skirts, flower power, and long hair, loads of long hair. Men in fur coats and too many rings. Even television, by now an accepted part of life, was suddenly in colour. And, in London’s Fulham Road, Terence Conran opened the first of his Habitat and Conran stores, which were later to spread worldwide; when he retired in 1990 he had an empire of 1,000 outlets.
Immediately prior to the beginning of this decade, Frank Lloyd Wright paid his last visit to the building site of his almost completed Guggenheim Museum next to Central Park in New York. Three weeks later, he was dead.
Alvar Aalto continued to build, enriching his Finnish fatherland. Marcel Breuer pulled out all the stops for the Whitney Museum in New York. Buckminster Fuller created his gigantic Dome for the Montreal Expo 67. Mies van der Rohe produced the National Gallery in Berlin. Charles and Ray Eames constructed the US Pavilion for the New York World Fair. The governments of India, Bangladesh and Brazil commissioned Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn and Oscar Niemeyer to create major government buildings. Eero Saarinen gave TWA its unique terminal at New York’s Kennedy Airport and repeated the performance for Dulles International in Washington. Kenzo Tange and Frei Otto provided the spectacular Olympic arenas in Tokyo and Munich. Jørn Utzon created the fabulous Sydney Opera House. The list is, naturally, far from complete: the world was anxious to show that the war was now really behind us. Good times were on the horizon.
Graphic design itself underwent turbulent developments. At the simple level of the studio and the drawing boards, designers switched from wet to dry photocopiers and dry transfer lettering. They sometimes even had a heading setter in their own darkroom. One gadget followed another. Letraset and Mécanorma were doing booming business. Dry transfer typography, having ‘escaped’ from the iron grip of the lead diktat, often had extremely narrow letterspacing and was an absolute abomination to the orthodox typographer. The vertical camera in the studio enabled designers to rapidly enlarge and reduce. Computers were still only used for the storage and organization of information. It was not until the late 1980s that they were to invade the profession as tools in the design and realization process.
Offset rapidly improved in quality and density in the 1960s, gaining ground at the expense of letterpress. Rotation presses were capable of churning out large numbers. (Colour) lithography started to oust the metal image carriers, the clichés. Screenprinting was often automated and produced increasingly higher quality, which greatly benefited poster designers. Generations of photosetting machines entered the fray against the established order in the ‘lead’ composing rooms. Enormous investments were made but, in the end, photosetting proved to be nothing more than a transitional phase. One example of the speed with which systems followed one after another was the essay that Wim Crouwel published in 1967 in one of the Kwadraatblad editions issued by publisher/designer Pieter Brattinga.
The booklet – now a desirable object amongst collectors – was entitled New Alphabet: An Introduction for a Programmed Typography. The alphabet in question aimed to provide a solution to the limited possibilities of the cathode ray tube in setting apparatus at that time. A lot has been published on that ‘new alphabet’ even as late as the 21st century but, in retrospect, this was primarily due to the daring, unorthodox nature of the letters and characters. Things progressed far more quickly in reality, and this speed was not uncommonly paired with a loss of quality, as was the case when enlarging letter images from too small an original.
The design profession itself was on the move, as a result of entirely new demands from governmental, commercial and organizational sectors, in particular. The profession split up into the individually exercised craft on one hand and, on the other, practices in which various designers worked together, sometimes supported by commercial advisors and managers. The rise of the design agencies was strongly stimulated by the call for identity programmes and other complex systems that were above the capabilities of the majority of individual designers. The soloists (sometimes assisted by an apprentice or a few work placement students) remained primarily active in poster, book and type design, in illustration and other specialisms demanding a strictly personal signature. Designers such as the Dutchman Dick Elffers talked of ‘the enemy’, as they felt their prospects were being threatened. The enemy, in other words, was the design agency! But those same ‘professionalized’ colleagues set developments in motion towards better rules and rates and towards a more mature working relationship with clients and governments.
Increasingly large agencies spread like oil stains throughout the graphic design sector. At the same time, the profession was starting to organize itself better. National professional organizations joined together under the umbrella of Icograda, the International Council of Graphic Design Associations, which held congresses annually and developed many educational programmes. In Ulm, the Hochschule für Gestaltung was set up and seen as the successor of the Bauhaus, which the Nazis had closed on 11 April 1933 for being ‘corrupt’.
This was the dawn of richly decorated annual reports, internal newsletters and company brochures. The arrival of ‘wide-body’ aircraft required architectural innovations to create increasingly larger airport buildings, which also demanded new systems for routing passenger flows. Benno Wissing ‘opened the dance’ with Schiphol Amsterdam in 1967, in collaboration with architect/designer Kho Liang Ie.
This approach was much emulated, all over the world. Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert enriched the UK with an innovative, extremely practical and legible signing system for the road network. The London agency Fletcher/Forbes/Gill quickly became Crosby/Fletcher/Forbes and then Pentagram: the beginning of a massively influential factor in international graphic, industrial and spatial design. And all this in one decade.
Ben Bos, Amsterdam, 2006
Essay taken from 'AGI: Graphic Design Since 1950' by Ben & Elly Bos