iBauhaus

Since its launch in 2007, the iPhone has brought out a series of new models. To date, it keeps getting slightly larger—like a child growing up (in this case slowly). Like a true classic, for all its advances within, on the surface it remains essentially the same—in its sleek sheath, with the overall covering remaining simply a new variation of itself. This is true to the Bauhaus mentality: if a form has been carefully developed, and succeeds, one should stick to it.

In honor of its own thirtieth birthday, this glossy eatery purportedly used Josef Albers’s stencil lettering for outdoor signage and throughout a cookbook. One might have assumed that this was simply a borrowing of Albers’s beautiful alphabet, of which the original glass letters are at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and which have been reproduced and exhibited in numerous places as the Bauhaus masterpiece they are. The River Café, however, did not simply adapt an idea; they claim, in the cookbook, that this is indeed Josef’s lettering. The main offense is not that they failed to obtain the requisite permission to do this. The travesty is that they changed the proportions of each of the letters so as to render them illegible. Josef’s alphabet is a model of careful dimensions based on perfect squares and circles, and parts or combinations thereof. Josef kept these underlying units meticulous and exact, and organized them so that the resultant letters are perfectly readable. The River Café has taken this alphabet and compressed and elongated or widened and fattened the forms, so that what should be perfect half circles are now like half circles in a funhouse mirror. They have changed the dimensions of the openings between elements, widening them so that the end results are almost impossible to read.

To be true to the Bauhaus is not to follow a “style.” It is to maintain impeccable standards, consider every nuance, and make successful functioning the priority. In 1974, Josef Albers told me that he had never been satisfied with the z of the alphabet he made in 1930. He had tried a mirror image of the s, but it did not read clearly. He had then worked and reworked triangles (that were precise half squares) and semicircles, but still the z was not sufficiently legible. Saying this to me, Josef handed over a photograph of his alphabet—the version in milk glass owned by the Museum of Modern Art. He had penciled in a z—there is none in MoMA’s version—following the y. The pencil on a glossy photo was faint but clear.
“At last, Nick! I have only now figured out the z! And you are the keeper of the z.”

Gropius ostensibly wanted to develop new buildings, but in fact there was never an architecture workshop at the school. The felicitous design of small objects was the true quarry of the school in both Weimar and Dessau.