Archive
The 1970s: Heyday?
Later, realization dawns and you think: ‘Was it really true? Has the world indeed never been a happier place than it was in the seventies?'
There was really quite a lot to rejoice at. It was a period of great challenges. We bought our homes, gardens and new cars. We travelled. Some positive sides of science fiction had come true.
The dreaded Chinese hadn't come west. The malicious Russians had invaded Hungary already in the fifties, and seemed to stop in Czechoslovakia. Bad enough, but...
Yet, this planet of ours has never been a place without its conflicts, confusions, conspiracies, cruelty, fights, hunger, betrayal and catastrophes. So when you only look a bit closer at the reality of those seemingly quiet 70s, you can't escape from the conclusion that, even in those years, ‘nothing to complain about' was once more just a shallow illusion. Maybe this decade was altogether another ‘ordinary' one.
Well okay, General de Gaulle died. So did the Egyptian president Nasser. Left-winger Salvador Allende became president of Chile, but was killed when Pinochet’s military junta attacked his palace.
Swiss women finally gained the right to vote. War broke out between India and Pakistan. The British joined the Common Market. Arab terrorists murdered 13 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games. After the dirty napalm war in Indochina spread to Laos and Cambodia, a ceasefire was finally achieved and later an end to the conflict in Vietnam. Israel, October 1973: the Yom Kippur War. An oil crisis quadrupled fuel prices. The Turkish invaded Northern Cyprus. King Feisal of Saudi Arabia was assassinated. Richard Nixon was re‑elected as US president, but was brought down by the long drawn-out Watergate scandal: impeachment. Juan Peron regained the presidency of Argentina in 1973 and died in 1974.
Bloody uprisings in Soweto, South Africa. Plane hijackings became the order of the day. Spain celebrated its first elections since 1936 and PM Adolfo Suárez came to power. In Camp David (USA) the Egyptian and Israeli leaders Sadat and Begin attempted to take the first steps towards peace. Pope John Paul I died only 33 days into his papacy; John Paul II was his successor. The Japanese premier Fukuda (now, where do we know that name from?) resigned. The Shah of Persia was forced to flee and was succeeded by Ayatollah Khomeini. Bhutto, the leader of Pakistan, was deposed and condemned to death. Israel and Egypt signed a peace treaty. Margaret Thatcher became the UK’s first woman prime minister. Bloody Sunday in Belfast; three storeys of London’s Post Office Tower blown up. Major disasters with full aeroplanes colliding. The Queen Elizabeth ocean liner burned out in Hong Kong. Pol Pot’s regime killed 3 million people in Cambodia: the Killing Fields. Peace was, alas, still no more than a perverse illusion.
The VIP list again contained numerous casualties: Pablo Casals, Coco Chanel, Ezra Pound, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, Louis Armstrong, Agatha Christie and Maurice Chevalier.
Theatres and cinemas were showing Jesus Christ Superstar and Liza Minnelli in Cabaret. Nobel prizes for the authors Heinrich Böll and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The Christos built their Valley Curtain project. Osaka held an Expo. Computer art made its entrance. Love Story, Last Tango in Paris and The Godfather appeared on the silver screen. Science-fiction escaped the boundaries of print and became visual ‘reality’. The immeasurable space in which sci-fi is often set was to know no peace. Americans and Russians stormed the Moon, Venus, Mars and Jupiter in manned and unmanned craft. Skylab was launched. Concorde became operational, for the fortunate few: supersonic travel in the stratosphere on board a long, slim cigar. Caviar and champagne. From Paris or London to the New World in three hours. The first test-tube baby entered the world in the UK, to be immortalized immediately with the new video camera. Some mothers were walking round in hot pants.
Architects were seeking greater and greater heights. Bruce Graham and the SOM agency build the highest skyscraper, the Sears Tower in Chicago. The Hancock Center, also in the windy city, was the highest apartment building so far (also by SOM, with F. Khan). Minoru Yamasaki designed the twin towers for the World Trade Center in Manhattan. Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano wrote architectural history with Paris’s Centre Pompidou. These were busy times for the architects of many governmental buildings, theatres and museums. The names of Ricardo Bofill, Louis Kahn, Frank O.Gehry, Hans Hollein, Philip Johnson, Lucien Kroll, Richard Meier, Oscar Niemeyer, Aldo Rossi, Robert Venturi and Frei Otto shine out amongst innumerable others who gave the urban landscape a new look in the 1970s.
It was a time of acceleration, expansion and ‘up and up’. Graphic design played along, becoming to a large extent the ‘visual mouthpiece’ of growing economies and the new affluence. Marketing gained increasing influence, often to the irritation of the designers. The day of strict corporate identities with their inevitable manuals had dawned. The West set up design agencies to meet the demand for this new, complex specialism. AGI continued to grow on the wave of the enormous demand for information and imagination.
The Swiss and International Styles still strongly predominated. Clarity, structure (grids) and simplicity were the key concepts. There is a lot of white to be seen on the pages and mostly primary colours, entirely sans serif typography with a certain touch of classicism. Akzidenz Grotesk, Adrian Frutiger and the late Giambattista Bodoni played the main roles. Frutiger’s Univers font programme did indeed conquer the universe, but remained in constant conflict with the Helveticas, like the rift between fans of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Designers gained increasing control of the pre-print processes.
In the meantime, it was not solely the modernistic principles of Swiss design that dominated the 1970s. Wolfgang Weingart, who lectured in Basel alongside none other than Armin Hofmann, was preaching a totally different approach to design and gaining an international following. In the UK, punk came on the scene. In Dutch design a ‘new wave’ emerged, which, aided by technological innovations, liberated form from its rigid constraints, although this was sometimes accompanied by a loss of accessibility to the information and a blurring of the borders with free art. In 1974, together with Jon Naar and author Norman Mailer, Mervyn Kurlansky published the book entitled Watching My Name Go By, which identified the tags of 800 early graffiti artists, who saw their names racing over the rails of the New York subway, from ‘A.G.’ (it’s only missing one letter...) to ‘Zip’. The visual world was being enriched with graffiti and was never again deprived of that beauty – or its inexorable excrescence.
Ben Bos, Amsterdam, 2006
Essay taken from 'AGI: Graphic Design Since 1950' by Ben & Elly Bos