(…) If you want to know something else about beauty, what precisely it is, look at a history of art. You will see that every age has had its ideal Venus (or Apollo), and that all these Venuses or Apollos put together and compared out of the context of their periods are nothing less than a family of monsters.
(…) ‘The basic teaching error of the academy was that of directing its attention toward genius rather than the average.’ (Bauhaus)
(…) the designer is therefore the artist of today, not because he is a genius but because he works in such a way as to re-establish contact between art and the public, because he has the humility and ability to respond to whatever demand is made of him
by the society in which he lives, because he knows the job, and the ways and means of solving each problem of design. And finally because he responds to the human needs of his time, and helps people to solve certain problems without stylistic preconceptions or false notions of artistic dignity derived from the schism of the arts.
(…) Research design is concerned with experiments of both plastic and visual structures in two or more dimensions. It tries out the possibilities of combining two or more dimensions, attempts to clarify images and methods in the technological field, and carries out research into images on film.
(…) Design came into being in 1919, when Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus at Weimar. Part of the prospectus of this school reads:
‘ We know that only the technical means of artistic achievement can be taught, not art itself. The function of art has in the past been given a formal importance which has served it from our daily life; but art is always present when apeople lives sincerely and healthily
‘Our job is therefore to invent a new system of education that may lead — by wayof a new kinf od specialized teaching of science and technology — to a complete knowledge of human needs and a universal awareness of them
‘ Thus our task is to make a new kind of artist, a creator capable of understanding every kind of need: not because he is a prodigy, but because h eknows how to approach human needs according to a precise method. We wish to make him conscious of his creative power, not scared of new facts, and independent of formulas in his own work.’
(…) What Gropius wrote is still valid. This first school of design did tend to make a new kind of artist, an artist useful to society because he helps society to recover its balance, and not to lurch between a false world to live one’s material life in and an ideal world to takemoral refuge in.