Frédéric Bézian, Le Courant d’Art (The Art Current), Editions Soleil/Bezian, Paris/Toulon, France, 2016

A really sharply designed comics leporello with beautifully drawn illustrations by Bézian set within an engaging design and layout. The work is comprised of two separate stories about Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) and Oliver Byrne (1810-1880) which you can enter from either side of the publication. Of the book's theme one commentator remarked: 

"Nearly a century before Mondrian made geometrical red, yellow, and blue lines famous, 19th-century mathematician Oliver Byrne employed the color scheme for his 1847 edition of Euclid's mathematical and geometric treatise Elements. Byrne's idea was to use color to make learning easier and "diffuse permanent knowledge." The result has been described as one of the oddest and most beautiful books of the 19th century."

Naturally there is a lot to say about how Mondrian got to be using such a spare palette, as well as his friendship with Walter Gropius and his involvement with the Bauhaus. Both men are presented as vulnerable human beings with tangled romantic lives as well!

28 double-sided pages, individually 11.5" x 7.5" and when unfolded 17' 6".

This side of the book is about Oliver Byrne (1810-1880)

Corina Arrieta, Samt und seide cafe (Velvet and silk cafe), Arquitectura y fantasía, La Plata, Argentina, 2019, ed. 1000

front cover

This work by Arrieta comes about as a result of her larger project that she calls "Arquitectura y fantasía" (Architecture and Fantasy). In this case she's looking at a rather interesting collaboration between Mies van der Roeh and Lilly Reich for the 1927 Berlin Fair. The article below rounds out the story, however this work is also about positioning Lilly Reich as a key collaborator with Mies van der Roeh as well as an important designer of textiles, interiors and exhibition spaces, and an artist in her own right.

5 double-sided pages, individually 3.75" x 5.75" and unfolded 2' 4.5"

“Café Samt & Seide” by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich (1927)

Mariabruna Fabrizi, 2016

[source: https://socks-studio.com]

In 1927 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe together with his professional and personal partner, architect and designer Lilly Reich, was commissioned by the Association of German Silk manufacturers to create a stand for the German Silk industry in the context of the exhibition “Die Mode der Dame“ (Women’s Fashion). The result is the ‘Café Samt & Seide’ (Velvet and Silk Cafe) in Berlin, an exhibition stand which also worked as a café at the end of the main hall.

Mies had already started to work for two members of the association, Hermann Lange and Josef Esters to design their private houses, the Lange House and the Esters House, and he was the first choice to represent through design a group of open-minded entrepreneurs like those involved in the silk industry at that time.

In Mies and Reich’s project the exhibited elements become the ones which also defines space. The architects developed the project as a continuous space organized only by means of hanging silks and velvets of different colors (velvets were in black, orange and red and silks in gold, silver and yellow) placed at different heights. The 300 sq metres stand, which in plan appears like an abstract composition, was punctuated only by Mies cantilever chairs (MR Chairs) as furnitures.

photo of Mies and Reich's hanging curtains

The tissues hang from straights and curved steel pipes in a sequence which is very dissolved in the space. The lines densify around the centre on the right, almost composing a small cluster of rooms which then open up again in the exhibition hall.

The alternance of open curbed and straight lines in space somehow recalls the floorplan of Villa Tugendhat which Mies was developing in the same period.

back cover