by Ian Sansom
A bottle label: author’s private collection
Advertisement for the forerunner of today’s delicatessen, showing the use of glass and tin to increase the storage life of perishable foods
Advertising, then, may be the true curse of paper, its original sin, forever seeking redemption and renewal; the watermark the mark of Cain. As Elizabeth Eisenstein explains in her classic study The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979), it was printers who first used advertisements as we understand them today, in increasingly desperate attempts to outdo their rivals: “The art of puffery, the writing of blurbs and other familiar promotional devices were also exploited by early printers who worked aggressively to obtain public recognition for the authors and artists whose products they hoped to sell.” The history of paper is bound up in and emblazoned upon the goods and products and services that it packages and promotes. And just like those goods and products and services—unless saved for posterity in a real or an imaginary museum—it is destined, ultimately, for oblivion. In Posters: A Critical Study of the Development of Poster Design in Continental Europe, England and America (1913), Charles Matlack Price warns that “When a poster fails, its failure is utter and irretrievable, and its inevitable destiny is its consignment to the limbo of waste paper.” At best, perhaps, we can hope to act like King Chulalongkorn of Siam, who collected matchbox labels, and who during a famous visit to London in 1897 would scoop up matchboxes from the gutter, to add to his collection. King Chulalongkorn was what is called a phillumenist. We might prefer to label ourselves cartophilists (collectors of cigarette cards), deltiologists (collectors of postcards), notaphilists (collectors of banknotes), labologists (collectors of beer labels), or even tryroemiophilists (collectors of Camembert cheese labels), but in all cases it is worth bearing in mind this simple piece of advice: “The best way of removing labels from bottles or boxes is to soak them in warm water and wait for them to float off. Some assistance in peeling off the label may be necessary” (Robert Opie, The Art of the Label, 1987). Paper sticks.
7
CONSTRUCTIVE THINKING
Paper is usually pasted; instead of pasting it we try to tie it, to pin it, to sew it, to rivet it. In other words, we fasten it in a multitude of different ways . . . Our aim is not so much to work differently as to work without copying or repeating others. We try to experiment, to train ourselves in “constructive thinking.”
JOSEF ALBERS, quoted in
Herbert Bayer, Bauhaus Weimar 1919–1925 (1975)
Craft paper, as its name suggests, is tensile and strong
Homage to the Square
We join Josef Albers (1888–1976), artist, poet, philosopher, photographer, typographer, former elementary-school teacher, polymath, progressive educator and explorer of the possibilities of color and of the square, at the Staatliches Bauhaus, in Dessau, Germany. It is sometime in the late 1920s. Founded by Walter Gropius in 1919, the Bauhaus seeks to combine the teaching of fine arts with applied arts, and in Gropius’s words, “to create a new guild of craftsmen, without the class distinctions which raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist.” Albers is the perfect example of Gropius’s new breed. Himself educated at the Bauhaus, he is now teaching the school’s preliminary course, the Vorkurs. Classes take place four mornings a week, on the second floor in one of the new buildings of glass and steel designed by Gropius on the outskirts of the city (after 1932, the same buildings are used as a training school for members of the National Socialist Party, before being bombed, restored, repaired and declared a World Heritage Site, with tours and tour guides available).
Albers walks into the room with a bundle of newspapers under his arm. He is wearing a dark suit, white shirt, tie, tiepin, hair cut close with a high fringe—that characteristic modern take on the Ciceronian crop, accentuating both forehead and mad stare, favored also by Gropius and many of the other Bauhauslers, and which makes them in group photographs look scarily like the Addams family. Albers is thirtysomething years old. He is wearing steel-rimmed spectacles. He looks absolutely the part: he looks, in fact, like a Bauhaus architect, though he is not an architect and has never built a house. He is not even a “paper architect,” the pejorative term sometimes applied to architects whose work is never built, and adopted as a badge of honor by a group of Russian architects in the 1980s, who refused to produce the bland, gray, standardized Soviet buildings that were the degraded, degenerate offspring of the Bauhaus style. Albers is no paper architect: he is an architect of paper.
He introduces himself to the class and explains his ideas about the meaning of form and beauty and how “the complexity of the form is dependent upon the form with which we are working.” So far, so good. But now for the grand gesture. (Albers often compared teaching to acting, and would sometimes ask students lining up for classes if they had brought with them their tickets for the “show.”) He gives each of the students one of the newspapers he has brought with him. “I would now like you to take the newspaper you have just been given and make something out of it that is more than it is now. I would also like you to respect the material, to employ it in a meaningful way and thereby consider its characteristic qualities. If you can do so without the aid of knives, scissors or glue, so much the better. Good luck!”
Good luck, indeed. (Albers’s teaching methods tended to divide opinion: Robert Rauschenberg, a student who went on to become a great experimenter in paper and cardboard, described him as “a beautiful teacher and an impossible person.” Others thought the opposite.)
Hours later, Albers would return to find—as Tom Wolfe takes up the story in From Bauhaus to Our House (1981)—“Gothic castles made of newspaper, yachts made of newspaper, airplanes, busts, birds, train terminals, amazing things. But there would always be some student, a photographer or glassblower, who would simply have taken a piece of newspaper and folded it once and propped it up like a tent and let it go at that.” And that, the simple fold of the paper into a tent—not the birds, not the trains—was what Albers adored, and what Wolfe abhors. The whole point of Albers’s preliminary course was to teach the students about the integrity of materials. Wood, he thought, should not be ashamed to be wood, nor glass to be glass, nor concrete . . . well, to be concrete. As for paper, his favorite teaching material and medium:
paper, in handicraft and industry, is generally used lying flat; the edge is rarely utilized. For this reason we try paper standing upright, or even as a building material; we reinforce it by complicated folding; we use both sides; we emphasize the edge. Paper is usually pasted; instead of pasting it we try to tie it, to pin it, to sew it, to rivet it. In other words, we fasten it in a multitude of different ways. At the same time we learn by experience its properties of flexibility and rigidity, and its potentialities in tension and compression. Then, finally, after having tried all other methods of fastening we may, of course, paste it. Our aim is not so much to work differently as to work without copying or repeating others. We try to experiment, to train ourselves in “constructive thinking.”
Albers went on to teach at the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina, at Harvard and at Yale, and is now remembered, if at all, for his work on color theory and for his quaint series of paintings, Homage to the Square—the title indicates precisely the content—which occupied him for over twenty years. But it is for his pioneering work as a pedagogue, and in particular on the role of paper in teaching constructive thinking, or in constructing thinking, that he most deserves to be remembered.
If the product of architecture often resembles paper—and today, almost a hundred years after their first construction, the Bauhaus buildings still look like something you might have made yesterday with a glue stick, some cellophane, cereal boxes and a printing set—so too is paper essential to the architectural process. Traditionally, buildings are made on paper, and they look like paper. Take a sheet of A4 paper, for example, and go and stand in front of a house. Now step back and step back until you can hold up the sheet of paper
so that it covers the surface area of the house: the house fits the paper. Now step back a little farther. The windows are like sheets of paper, stuck on the sheet of paper. Hold the paper upright and you have the front door, and for the roof, just fold your piece of paper in half lengthways. Why should this be so?
Perhaps because planning and thinking and drawing are often inseparable, and take place on paper, with rulers and T-squares. “The plan is the generator,” according to Le Corbusier, who attempted to break away from old ways of thinking and who devised a new system of measurement and design, which he called the “modulor,” based on the dimensions of the human body. But even this system required the amassing and comparing of hundreds of detailed diagrams and sketches, a process that seems to have given him little pleasure. In Toward an Architecture (1923) he writes that “A plan is not a pretty thing to be drawn, like a Madonna face; it is an austere abstraction, it is nothing more than an algebrization and dry-looking thing.” If Le Corbusier found paper a constraint, Alfred Loos—another architect who wrote more than he built—viewed it as a form of tyranny: “Through architects the art of architecture has sunk to the level of a graphic art. It is not those who can build best that receive the most commissions but those whose work looks best on paper.”
Like it or not, architecture has been, for most of its history, a paper profession. When imagining a house, architects have traditionally done so on paper. When imagining a palace, they have traditionally done so on paper. And when imagining an entire city—they have done so on slightly larger sheets of paper. Robert Fludd’s seventeenth-century fortified city; Joseph Smith’s plan for an ideal Mormon city; pioneering socialist Robert Owen’s “A view and plan of the agricultural and manufacturing village of Unity and Mutual Co-operation”; eccentric self-taught stenographer Ebenezer Howard’s vision of the “garden city,” which he promoted throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with pamphlets, maps and diagrams, and by touring the country giving lectures illustrated with lantern slides; and of course Le Corbusier’s grand plans for a ville contemporaine, a contemporary city, presented in a hundred-square-meter diorama at the Paris Salon d’Automne in 1922, and which was eventually made real at least in part in his work on the Indian city of Chandigarh: all these places exist first and foremost on paper. As do the plans to erase and destroy whatever people or buildings existed there before. In Romania, in the early 1990s, I met an architect who told me a story about Nicolae Ceaus¸escu’s plans and designs for his palace, the House of the Republic, in the center of Bucharest: the self-styled “Genius of the Carpathians” apparently commissioned a vast cardboard architectural model of the existing city to be built in a gymnasium, with the strict requirement that none of it should be glued down. He then peremptorily swept away approximately a fifth of what had been made in model form, and set seven hundred architects to work on designing a vast building to fill the gap. In another strange and sinister republic, Plato’s Republic, Socrates says that artists “will not start work on a city nor on an individual (nor will they draw up laws) unless they are given a clean canvas, or have cleaned it themselves.” Clean canvas. New start. A nice fresh sheet of paper.
Early architects may have provided some scale drawings on papyrus or parchment or vellum, but most of the actual design of buildings seems to have taken place on site, being sketched onto a skim of plaster, or carved onto stone, with master masons acting as draftsmen. But as paper evolved, so too did the profession of architecture: paperwork became the foundation for building work, and drawing became an essential skill. Alberti, in On the Art of Building in Ten Books (1452), the first major treatise on architecture of the Renaissance, claimed that ideas formed in the mind could only be perfected through drawing, echoing Vitruvius’s instructions in the Ten Books on Architecture that an architect must be “educated, skilful with the pencil, instructed in geometry, know much history, have followed the philosophers with attention, understand music, have some knowledge of medicine, know the opinions of the jurists, and be acquainted with astronomy and the theory of the heavens.” From being just one attribute among many, pencil skills became a defining characteristic of the profession. One biographer of Christopher Wren goes so far as to suggest that he became an architect merely because he had “a taste for drawing and a preference for visible results.” And until recently, most architects have shared Wren’s taste.
From initial sketches, to more detailed plans and designs, to even more complex project plans and site plans—the work of an architect has taken place in a blizzard of blueprints, whiteprints, tracing paper and photocopies. Indeed, one of the closest things to an actual paper shrine is perhaps the Alvar Aalto Foundation, at no. 20 Tiilimäki, Munkkiniemi, Helsinki, where architecture students are welcome to come and see where the great Finnish architect worked, with his trusty 6B pencils, from 1955 to his death in 1976. The building looks from the outside like a white-card architectural model. Inside is the same. According to Aalto, “The Creator created paper to draw architecture on. Everything else is, at least as far as I see it, a misuse of paper.” (The Japanese architect Shigeru Ban—whose paper log houses and emergency paper shelters have been used in numerous disaster relief projects—began his work using discarded industrial paper tubes as a building material when designing an Alvar Aalto exhibition at Tokyo’s Axis Gallery in 1986.) Aalto would often work on napkins at a local restaurant, and would also sketch ideas on the back of the packets of his favorite cigarettes, Turkish Klubi 77 Klubb. Every morning his secretary would lay out on his desk sheets of thin, Finnish sketch paper—tervakoski luonnospaperi—cut to lengths of exactly 30 cm., and he would line up his pencils in order of length and begin work. Between them, Aalto and his staff would make up to five thousand sketches for any particular project: they were literally growing buildings from paper.
What’s true of a great Aalto is true also of the humblest abode. The export of portable, prefabricated buildings, for example—barns, cottages, customs houses, churches and cast-iron arcades—during the nineteenth century relied not only on the manufacture of standardized parts, but on the production of clear, cheap plans, catalogues and detailed assembly instructions. One of the most successful producers and exporters of prefabricated iron parts and buildings during the nineteenth century was Walter MacFarlane & Co., “Architectural ironfounders and sanitary engineers” of Glasgow. Their beautiful illustrated catalogues, which run to almost two thousand pages, display a vast range of “business premises, shop fronts, arcades, and every conceivable outdoor structure for recreation, shelter, rest, shade and ornament,” which could be exported and erected anywhere. In America, similarly, Sears Roebuck was selling prefab houses by 1908: all you had to do was check the catalogue, fill in an order, and your house would be delivered to you by rail, ready for a quick barn-raising-style assembly. Examples of MacFarlane & Co.’s iron foundry work can still be found today in Africa and Australia, while Downers Grove in Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, boasts the largest number of still-standing Sears Modern Homes. For the triumph of architectural standardization, modularization, industrial production, distribution—and thus, latterly, for IKEA—we can thank paper.
The disadvantage of doing architecture on paper, of course, is that paper allows architects to design by drawing, rather than by doing, and thus removes them from actual buildings on actual building sites. The kind of new forms of housing and urban space proposed by Le Corbusier, for example, may have looked fantastic on paper, but were often disastrous to live in. The obvious problem with paper as a design tool is that although it might be able to indicate the proportionate width, length and height of structural elements, and their relation to one another, it cannot—in flatland, in 2D, on the horizontal plane—indicate the mass and shape of the built space itself. Traditionally, this is where architectural models have come in—those scale models submitted for architectural competitions, or for display to clients, or for mad Romanian dictators to plan their mad palaces, and usually made from paper, or car
d, or polystyrene, or plastic, or plywood, or epoxy resin cast in silicone molds, and which give a useful sense of the size and scope of the proposed building. The gap remains, however, between the design and the building: what we might call the paper gap, or the gap made by paper. This gap is fast being closed by computerized 3D modeling.
