odd to declare, but I find pleasure in layout, the more physical or spatial composition of thought. With a given document size, a margin, I can draft an idea the way I draft a plan for a landscape architectural design; by treating the paper space as model space. And just as hard and soft materials come together on the ground, text is, for me, only half the equation. It is in the play between image and text that I find meaning. Designing the cover graphics for Open Letters gave me this freedom: to treat text as both a formal organisation of thought and an aesthetic composition. Text, more than writing, obsesses me, because it isolates the compositional element, brings it down to the tiniest terms. In Zurich, there is no avoiding even the smallest elements of graphic design. The big, bold, sans-serif type developed in 1957 by Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann catches my eye at every corner. Of course, in Switzerland, its birthplace and namesake (the Swiss name for the country is Helvetia, or Confœderatio Helvetica), it is no surprise. Thanks to Chelsea’s good taste, we stuck with Benton Sans Condensed and Baskerville for a classic yet contemporary look. In addition to clean, readable typeface, the Swiss Style established uniformity through a mathematical grid. A standard procedure today, but in the 1920s the use of the grid – in the pursuit of minimalism, functionalism and simplicity – revolutionised graphic design in accordance with modernist ideals. I am not a graphic designer but I, too, recognise the grid as the most legible means for structuring information. Using this method, the structure precedes the content. Text is applied to a grid, snuggled into the predetermined order. Like Asawa’s textural drawing, which you saw hanging at the Fogg, communication relies on a composition of units – in our case, a system or grid of letters. The International Style cast designers not as artists but as conduits for disseminating information. The semicolon in me wants to say we are, in our different ways, both. The grid is my playing field; it has order, but it is infinite. (We set the frame.) And the reason, I think, for our affinity with Albers’s textiles is our approach to composition. We are writing with warp and weft: First we hold the ‘composition stick’ in our hands and put the lead type into order, and then we set the type into the press bed along with wooden ‘furniture’ (placeholders). Whether by hand, with a typewriter, or on a keyboard, I approach writing like I print text on an analog letterpress: The bed is the field. I am tempted to think that it has something to do with being a landscape architect, rather than an architect. Looser structures allow for visible threads and multiple meanings. Letters are our scale. They are the unit we prefer – because each letter can stand alone and yet it is enriched by a response. And a response could expand the grid in any direction. I am the full stop, but we know this conversation has no end. A bit homesick for American culture and lit., I am reminded of Emerson’s ‘Circles’ essay: “Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.” Don’t we write/solicit/edit/publish letters in order to grow, to redefine ourselves in terms of each other, in even greater contexts? Ultimately, I think our project embraced the openness of a letter, of inquiring without any guarantee for an answer, because we have learned to accept “do[ing] something without knowing how or why; in short, to draw a new circle”. The textual fabric has no boundaries of its own – we set and reset the frame. A collaborative editorial team is in constant exchange, sending verbal missives at full tilt. With that, nothing, not even me, is a full stop.
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Lara Mehling
Let the ruckus begin – Lara
9 ‘Kiel Moe writes to Open Systems’, Open Letters , issue 15, September 26, 2014 10 ‘Cali Pfaff writes to Dawn Redwood’, Open Letters , issue 05, December 06, 2013
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