Rotis: a type of place

Timm Raubert took the seventy-two photos in this book between 1972 and 1991. Rotis was the name Aicher gave to a group of six buildings that was his home, studio and offices. 2022 would have been the hundredth anniversary of his birth in 1922 (but unfortunately he died in 1991) so the book is a homage to this very creative designer. The Rotis compound was a rather self-contained location with its own water and energy supply, gardens supplied some of the food that the staff cooked in a large kitchen. Raubert's photos capture the feel of this interesting place with shots of Aicher and others at work and relaxing. 

Rotis is also the name of the only typeface Aicher designed.  Dan Reynolds writes a chapter about its development and reception and I found it interesting that other type designers quoted in the text were not particularly keen on the type. The face has two distinctive lower-case letters: c and e. The bottom of both letters end on the baseline and the e has its horizontal crossbar quite high up. Oddly, the book doesn't show complete alphabets of the various Rotis fonts though every bit of text in the book is set in the typeface.

The book is in German and English (with German on all the left-hand pages). Each of the four chapters is followed by a portfolio of Raubert's photos. I thought the book provided an interesting overview of this famous graphic designer.

Looking backwards with photobooks

This is an alternative cover.

I bought this book because photo historian Manfred Heiting part edited it. The format for his photobooks is to show the page or spread from a book, rather than just the photo. As a publication designer, I'm interested in the typography and layout of a book as well as the photos.

The 250 books featured in 'Imagining paradise' are all from the Richard and Ronay Menschel Library, which is part of the famous George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. All the books have a photographic connection -- maybe a book of travel photos, Egypt and Palestine (1858) portraits of society elites, 'Men and women of the day' (1888) agriculture, 'Pictures of East Anglican life' (1886) medicine, 'Spinal disease and spinal curvature' (1886) industry, 'Men at work: Photographic studies of modern men and machines' (1932) and obviously photo techniques, 'Agfa kine handbook (1935). All the selected books have generously sized reproductions of covers, some pages and long, well-researched details about the author, photographer, publisher, date et cetera.

There are twenty-eight essays covering various aspects of the 250 considered books, placing them in their historical perspective. The last few pages bring the history of Eastman House up to date (at least until 2007 when this book was published) with references to conservation, movies, publications. Pages 274 and 275 has a list of photographers and their work held by Eastman House and it reads like photographers Who's Who, for example: Alvin Langdon Coburn 18,090 prints, Lewis Hine 10,403, Harold Edgerton 1,077, Margaret Bourke-White 358, Alfred Stieglitz 174, Henri Cartier-Bresson 86, Esther Bubley 19.

This is a handsome-looking book with its large page size and designed by Heiting, published by Steidl with their usual customary care regarding paper choice and printing. Anyone interested in historical photobooks will find it fascinating. 

 

This is the right one for you

 

This is an expensive book but you need only buy it once and you will have readable plans and details of more than 470 Wright buildings. I love his work and have several books about the great man but I find that plans in other books are sometimes unreadable because of the reduction to fit on the page.  William Storrer has redrawn them all and taken nearly all the black and white photos.  These are to Wright's specification: exterior shots to be in a natural context and include foliage, interiors should be taken with natural light and from a seated position and as Storrer says, this last condition excludes most contemporary color photography of his work. Also included is a ZIP code index of the buildings if you want to visit and see the outside, lucky Illinois and Wisconsin have the most.

Brilliant though this book is I really wanted to see Wright's work in color and I can recommend 'The Vision of Frank Lloyd Wright' by Thomas A Heinz, an inexpensive 448-page book with a color photo of every building.

Both authors are experts on Wright and if you have these two books (and a table to support their weight) you will hardly need to buy any other books on America's greatest architect, then again I liked Doreen Ehrlich's 'Frank Lloyd Wright Glass' and Carla Lind's 'The Wright Style: the interiors of Frank Lloyd Wright' and......!