The man who changed the London skyline

 

An interesting and worthwhile monograph of this unfairly maligned architect. The book looks at the huge amount of work R Seifert & Partners undertook, especially in London with several hundred buildings. The Case Studies section of the book considers twelve of them in detail.

Seifert ran an extremely successful company that was always in demand by commercial property developers because he had a deep understanding of building regulations and local council planning departments took him seriously. A succession of high-rise buildings in the sixties and seventies established his style of a sculptural look to the window areas unlike the more conventional International Style upright matchbox look with flat front, back and curtain wall sides which Seifert avoided by frequently curving them so the building has no corners. 

His close relationship with the structural engineering company Pell Frischmann allowed buildings like Centre Point and the NatWest Tower to have their distinctive look and height. The precast sculpted concrete forms are so evident looking at the photos in the book of Space House, Park Tower Hotel and the International Press Centre (which was unfortunately demolished) plus making them even more distinctive Space House and Park Tower are circular structures.

The NatWest Tower is considered Seifert's finest achievement and, of course, it does look quite stunning. Completed in 1980 with forty-two floors though various other parts of the building (basement, podium, lobby, plant space, etc) actually make it fifty-two levels and the top was engineered to allow for a sway of seven inches. In later years the Tower is now part of a growing number of skyscrapers in this part of London.

The book is divided into two parts. Five illustrated essays come first (with an eight-page section of colored architectural renderings) followed by a detailed analysis of twelve Seifert buildings in Birmingham, Brighton, Croydon and London, these all have whole-page black and white photos. The back pages have a work chronology, bibliography and index.

The Vignelli Portfolio

1. 

This chunky, square book is an updated version of the 1990 edition, which seems to sell for excessive prices but is now redundant because the twelve essays from the first edition are included in this 2018 copy and it obviously includes work up to Vignelli's death in 2014.

Look through the 408 pages and it becomes clear that Lella and Massimo were a remarkable couple who could turn their creativity to any project and come up with a unique and practical solution that always seemed to work and what's more it was timeless, too. The chapter on their early work, from the fifties and sixties, has examples of print design that looks fresh today.  A chapter called 'The Vignelli process' reveals layout roughs for glassware, furniture, interior design, cutlery, logos and various bits of print that are shown as finished examples later in the book. I thought the chapter on corporate design particularly good with manuals and logos from a variety of companies like Knoll, New York Botanical Gardens, New York Transit Authority or the South African Woolworths. 'Furniture' has a range of chairs, office desks tables and sofas (actually some of these didn't look quite so comfortable to sit in). 'Product design' features a range of homewares, jewellery and a 1992 range of unisex casual clothing that follows body shape rather than fashion.

The book has several hundred illustrations in nicely laid out pages. My only criticism is that all the text is set in Garamond Italic (one of Massimo's twelve only typefaces he used) which gets rather annoying to read especially the first forty-six pages which have all the essays. I've noticed that copies of this 2018 edition, like the one from 1990, seem to vary in price so it's worth looking around the net for a reasonably priced copy. 

The helvetica rail look

In the illustrated intro to this book Otto Neurath is quoted as saying "Words divide, pictures unite" and this was the basis for Muller-Brockmann's Swiss railway station passenger information format. The book is not a comprehensive design manual similar to those published by the Dutch, Danish, British or New York Transit Authority rail companies where the logos and typography are carefully considered for every situation, MB's brief was to visually create an information system that was passenger focused and introduced in 1980. 

His idea was the pictogram and there are ninety-four shown in the book (and in later years another thirty-six were added) and they all work beautifully, even a quite complex idea for an amplification system for the hearing impaired. All of them in use are white on a dark blue background and a small number use red for danger or forbidden. The manual obviously has precise instructions for the creation and placing of these wordless signs.

In any design manual the corporate type face is important and MB chose Helvetica (no one will be surprise at that) and the manual refers to it as Helvetica Semi-Bold Corrected, apparently to separate it from Danish railways who used the same face but called it the DSB alfabet. The bulk of the manual pages show how Swiss rail's logo combined with type (always in upper and lower case) and pictograms was to be used throughout the network's stations.

The manual is printed on glossy paper and proceeded by sixty-four pages (on a different paper) with illustrated essays and including a nineteen page English translation of every German word in the manual.