The creative years

 

After the Nazi closure of the Bauhaus Laszlo Moholy-Nagy lived in London for just over twenty-five or so months but in that time he packed in a quite remarkable amount of creativity which is revealed in this interesting book. MN was one of those rare artists who could work in various mediums like photography, typography, shop design, film, posters, graphics and publication design. He is best known for his interest in photography either taking pictures or its theoretical aspect. The book has several photos from two books 'Eton portraits' 1937, An Oxford University Chest 1938 and some from a 1936 commission for the Architectural Review about the English seaside.

Graphic design work includes brochures for Isokon furniture, three posters for London Transport, a brochure for Imperial Airways, and an ad for Venesta plywood. With his ex-Bauhaus friends, Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer NM designed retail window displays and an aviation exhibition for Simpson's of Piccadilly. Pages thirty-eight and nine have a photo of a small plane from the exhibition held on the store's top floor, there were three planes on show. Other retail work included an electrical showroom in London. When Walter Gropius left for Harvard in 1937 a dinner was arranged for 136 guests and MN designed an interesting six-page fold-out menu (printed by Lund Humphries, the publisher of this title).

The book, with lots of photos and printed ephemera (letters, invoices, invitations, magazine cuttings, etc) reveals what MN did in Britain and it also captures the feel of those extraordinary times in the late Thirties when architects like Gropius, Breuer, Fry, Chermayeff, Lubetkin, the MARS group and Tecton were working on cutting edge buildings in this country.

　

 

　

The reality of the myths revealed

 

The Big Wide West myths of cowboys, cattle and stampedes, Indians, six-guns, outlaws, the small town sheriff and his posse (heading the rustlers off at Big Rock Gulch) were very much created by Hollywood and decades before that with stories in newspapers and popular fiction. All that remains, as they always have, are huge open spaces of prairies and mountains set in stunning landscapes. Joan Myers wanted to find and photograph the people who still live in these out of the way places in the Rocky Mountain and Plains states.

So many of these interesting photos reveal that the locals still rely on the myths to earn a living. Many pictures show amateur lettering to attract the tourists and paintings on large signs or walls of cowboys, cattle, Indians, the empty landscape maybe with a buffalo or two. Wigwams pop up here and there as shops or campgrounds, abandoned gas stations and trading posts litter the wide open spaces to confirm that away from cities and suburbs life isn't easy for the locals. To make the point Myers has ended the book with three photos of Helena and Livingston, Montana and Wendover, Nevada, all large towns with their commercial strips full of slick professional signage and no derelict buildings.

I enjoyed Myers contemporary view of the New West, she has an eye for capturing a scene with plenty of visual detail that makes the 102 photos well worth repeat viewing. Damiani did their usual excellent print job (in Italy during July this year) with a two hundred screen on a silky matt art paper. 

Waste management

 

Sewers aren't things most of us think about or are even aware of (until they overflow, of course) but how did this really important part of any cities infrastructure develop. Stephen Halliday's fascinating book reveals in words and illustrations how the heroes of Victorian engineering and architecture created the groundwork for what is still in use today under our streets.

The fear of cholera and the smell of cities was the driving force behind the idea of putting egg shaped conduits below ground to carry waste away. Joseph Bazalgette was the engineer who solved the problem for London and by 1868 the city had sewers north and south of the Thames and all for about £21 million. Paris, like London, had a river flowing through the city and regarded by many as a convenient sewer until George Haussmann and Eugene Belgrand were commissioned to design something to solve the problem. Their sewers were unique because they became a tourist attraction, page eighty-two has a picture of ladies and gentlemen sitting in a boat pulled along by sewermen. Unique because the sewers only collected water and debris from streets and didn't handle human waste. In 1883 it was estimated that 25,000 Parisian wells were polluted during heavy rain.

The author considers the history of underground sewers in several cities around the world like New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Tokyo, Melbourne, Prague, Hamburg, Berlin all illustrated with historical photos, diagrams and maps (almost five hundred in all). Chicago, in 1855, had a problem because the city was a just a few feet above Lake Michigan and lacked the gravity to take wastewater into the Lake. The solution was to raise the level of streets nearest the Lake. George Pullman (who created sleeping car trains) installed six thousand jacks under buildings and raised them slowly each day until there was enough space below to put in pipes to the Lake at a steeper angle.

The book's last section 'Revolutions of purity' brings the story up to date by examining contemporary sewage works and what to expect in the future. In London the sixteen mile Thames Tideway Tunnel will collect the overflows from thirty-four outfalls that currently go into the Thames after heavy rain. New York has a sixty mile 'Tunnel No.3' to improve the cities water supply, vacuum sewers are in use in Norway and Sweden and Japan was a rather expensive Toto Toilet with a heated seat and warm water to use instead of paper.