“flowing curves and simple elegance” — the cantilevered MR Chair (named for its designer Mies van der Rohe)

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, designer
German, 1886–1969
Manufactured by Bamberg Metallwerkstätten, Berlin, Neukölln
Armchair (MR20), designed in 1927, manufactured 1931
Nickel-plated steel, steel and cane seat
From the collection of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri
Photographs by versluis 2013

Although the tubular steel chair was perfected at the Bauhaus in the mid-1920s by the development of Marcel Breuer’s four-legged Club Chair. Equally impressive are Mies van der Rohe’s cantilever tubular steel chairs that were designed and manufactured from 1927–31 and inspired by technology as well as Dutch architect Mart Stam. The MR Chair was a collaboration with designer Lilly Reich. Miesian tubular steel furniture are perfect accents for his architecture, particularly for his residential interiors designed with Reich.

In their very fine biography titled Mies van der Rohe coauthors Franz Schulze and Edward Windhorst describe the MR Chair as having “flowing curves and simple elegance.”(1) The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art didactic for this piece explains the chair this way:

The architect and designer Mies van der Rohe asserted, “Form is not the aim of our work but only the result.” With the MR20 chair, Mies aimed to mass-produce inexpensive furniture from innovative materials such as tubular steel. The result was this curvilinear, lightweight chair that comfortably bends beneath the sitter’s weight while maintaining a sleek, elegant appearance. Mies stripped the traditional armchair of its bulk and relied on the light and flexible steel frame and cane seat to provide comfortable support. The fusion of handcrafted detail with modern technology embodies the ideals of the German design school, the Bauhaus (1919–1933). With his contemporaries, Mies the Bauhaus’ last director, brought the design principles of the Bauhaus to America [United States] in the late 1930s.

For further reading about the Bauhaus here is a wonderful reference piece from Archdaily: Infographic: The Bauhaus, Where Form Follows Function.

1. Schulze, Franz, and Edward Windhorst. Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography. revised ed. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012. 104-05. Print.

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Sullivan’s the Peoples Federal Savings and Loan Association Building (1917), Sidney, Ohio

Peoples Federal Savings and Loan Association Building was erected in 1917-18 in Sidney, Ohio. The Ohio Historical Marker for this landmark states, “One of the last works of Louis Henri Sullivan (1856–1924), the American architect whose original ideas of functional design and decorative ornament provided a basis for modern American architecture.” Photographs by versluis 2013.


The western facade with a framed bank of art glass windows reinforces the geometry of the building.


Terra-cotta ornament detail indicating a classical style handiwork with indigenous plants and leaves symbolizing a bountiful land of progress and prosperity. The photograph also shows Sullivan’s signature “jewel box” bank building material: tapestry brick.


Interior view of art glass windows by Art Institute of Chicago professor Louis Millet celebrates the exterior ornamentation and creates the emotive effect of natural light through green foliage.

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Sullivan’s the Farmers & Merchants Union Bank (1920), Columbus, Wisconsin: “a little bit of cathedral in it”

Interior view from just inside the entry doors of the Farmers and Merchants Union Bank.
Photograph by versluis, 2013

All of Louis Sullivan’s “Jewel Box” Bank buildings celebrate light with a wonderful sparkling emerald effect created with art glass. It seems that Sullivan  uses stained glass with a sprightly touch to create a spiritual clerestory wall of weightlessness. This metaphor of light contrasts beautifully with the solid masonry wall underneath.

Dordt College engineering professor Ethan Brue shares this quote from writer Samuel Florman with his students. The passage fits Sullivan very well:

Not only cathedrals, but every great engineering work is an expression of motivation and of purpose which cannot be divorced from religious implications. This truth provides the engineer with what many would assert to be the ultimate existential pleasure.
I do not want to get carried away with this point. The age of cathedral building is long past. And, as I have already said, less than one quarter of today’s engineers are engaged in construction activities of any sort. But every man-made structure, no matter how mundane has a little bit of cathedral in it, since man cannot help but transcend himself as soon as he begins to design and construct. (1)

This 1920s interior view is looking back towards the entry doors of the Farmers and Merchants Union Bank, which has the distinction of being one of Sullivan’s last architectural projects that was built.
Photograph by Clarance Fuerman (Fuermann, Henry, and Sons [Chicago])
Location: 159 W. James St., Columbus, Wisconsin
Image is from the Art Institute of Chicago, Archival Collection Name Historic Architecture and Landscape Image Collection. Image is copyrighted

1. Florman, Samuel C. The Existential Pleasures of Engineering. 2nd ed. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1996. 125. Print.

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New Work: AIGA South Dakota’s QUOTE THIS! art gallery show — Tis the season for graduation cakes.

This is Versluis’s piece for AIGA South Dakota’s QUOTE THIS! art gallery show. The QUOTE THIS! group exhibition features handmade typographic renderings of one’s favorite design quote. The show is now on view at the Sioux Falls Design Center from May–July 2013. Versluis’s piece is a photograph of a custom-ordered, hand-lettered graduation cake that honors a quote by designer Morton Goldsholl who once stated, “Bad Design is Useless and a Sham.”

About a year ago while spending Sabbatical time at Thirst (3st) I found this wonderful quote by Morton Goldsholl while studying one of Rick Valicenti’s fabulous sketchbooks. Valicenti had heard Mort make this statement:

And speaking more about Rick’s connection with Morton Goldsholl — here’s a recent designboom interview in which Valicenti responds to a question:

What is the best piece of advice you have ever been given? 

Something that I always remember was told to me by Morton Goldsholl, a Chicago design legend and student of Moholy Nagy’s first class at the New Bauhaus: on a rainy night some 30 years ago I drove to Mort’s office to meet the man with a friend, Michael Glass, and together we stood soaked, knocking at his front door. When he answered, we were both completely tongue tied. Out of panic, I asked, ‘If you could share any wisdom with two young designers what would it be?’ Mort answered with, ‘I have three words for you both – take a risk.’ Then he closed the door, and we left! (1)

1.  “Rick Valicenti (3st) Interview.” designboom. designboom.com, 29 Jan. 2013. Web. 2 May 2013.

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Prairie flora ornamentation: portraying early 20th century modernism and the wonderful photography of Clarence Fuermann

Louis H. Sullivan, Architect
Merchants National Bank, Grinnell, Iowa
NW corner of Fourth Ave. and Broad St., Grinnell, Iowa, U.S.A.
1913-1914
Exterior detail / front entrance
Photographer: Henry Fuermann and Sons [Chicago]
Image is from the Art Institute of Chicago, Historic Architecture and Landscape Image Collection. Copyright, © Ryerson & Burnham Archives, All rights reserved. (1)

This is a wonderful photograph depicting the architectural façade of one of Louis Sullivan’s jewel box bank buildings. This documentary image shows photographer Clarence Fuermann’s interest in the literal flatness of the picture plane and is indicative of twentieth century modernism.

1. Fuermann, Henry, and Sons,. Merchants National Bank (Grinnell, Iowa). Ryerson & Burnham Archives, Historic Architecture and Landscape Image Collection, Chicago. Web. 28 Apr. 2013.

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An interesting history of design changes—the Vernon S. Watson residence of Oak Park, Illinois

Current view of the Vernon S. Watson residence (east elevation)
643 N. Fair Oaks Ave. Oak Park, Illinois, U.S.A.
Photograph by versluis, 2013


View looking northwest—this architectural rendering of the Watson house was made in c.1906 (1)


The initial elevation and section drawings of the Vernon S. Watson House, Oak Park, Illinois, 1904 (2)

These series of images shown above, which pictorialize the Watson House in Oak Park, Illinois, are interesting when you compare the original preliminary drawings to the actual built structure. Architectural historian, Richard Guy Wilson gives a general description of Watson’s house:

Watson’s own house exemplifies a type of house design, the so-called “four-square” that became the ideogram of the Prairie School. The origins of this essentially boxy and rectilinear form lay in the middle-class houses illustrated almost continuously in house pattern books from the mid-1800s onward. Frequently cubical or square in both plan and mass, the “four-square” was the standard housing stock used—and repeated ad infinitum—across the United States. (3)

Wilson further adds:

In this case, Watson imparted a horizontal emphasis to the form with the low hipped roof, the high clapboard basement, the heavy stringcourses [horizontal bands], and the banking of the windows on the south and east elevations. The entrance is on center, [south side entrance] and the rectilinear character is emphasized through trim and broad flat surfaces. (4)

1. Vernon S. Watson residence. 1906. Art Institute of Chicago / Chicago Architectural Sketch Club Collection, Chicago., n.d. Web.
2. Watson, Vernon S. Elevation and Sections of the Vernon Watson House, Oak Park, Illinois. 1904. Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. “Prairie School Works in the Department of Architecture at the Art Institute of Chicago.” The Prairie School: Design Vision for the Midwest. By Richard Guy Wilson. Art Institute of Chicago: Museum Studies, 1995. 101. Print.
3. Wilson, Richard Guy. “Prairie School Works in the Department of Architecture at the Art Institute of Chicago.” The Prairie School: Design Vision for the Midwest. Ed. Michael Sittenfeld. First ed. Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1995. 100. Print.
4. Ibid. 102.

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Robert Motherwell’s “A la Pintura” — art of the epic dimension: a collaboration of painter, poet, printmaker, and publisher

Robert Motherwell, (American, 1915–1991)
Frontpiece – from A la Pintura, 1971, published 1972
Color aquatint from one copper plate and letterpress on white wove paper
121 x 197 mm (image/plate); 647 x 965 mm (sheet)
Belknap 82 artist's proof; Sparks 15 artist's proof
Prints are from the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. Photographs by versluis are for educational purposes.

Motherwell’s “A la Pintura” is being shown as part of a wonderful exhibition titled, The Artist and the Poet at the Art Institute of Chicago, Galleries 124–127, through Sunday, June 2, 2013.

Other credits for A la Pintura include:

Written by Rafael Alberti (Spanish, 1902–1999) and translated by Ben Belitt (American, 1911–2003). Printed by Donn Steward (American, 1921–1986); typography by Juda Rosenberg and Esther Pullman. Published by Universal Limited Art Editions (American, founded 1955).

A la Pintura is a book/portfolio of loose-leaf prints by painter Robert Motherwell, which combines and contrasts the linear expression of typography with painterly emotionality. “A la Pintura” comprises sensitive graphic images thoughtfully printed on the rag paper surface. The impact is shared with an equally masterful orchestration of positive and negative space for the effect of an epically dimensional composition.

In writing about this piece Judith Goldman comments:

A la Pintura, illustrating Rafael Alberti’s cycle of poems in homage to painting is Motherwell’s major graphic work. The grand book’s brilliance stems from the visual and literary collaboration and from a more essential one between the painter and bookman. In A la Pintura, the sensibility of the painter, editor, translator and man who knows type, work together. Motherwell designed the book, laid out the type, and determined the placement of each image on the unlikely sized, hand-torn loose sheets of J. B. Green paper. He had the original Spanish verse printed in color, keyed the poem’s subject (the English translation appears in black) to unite word and image. Alberti’s poem travels a gallery of art and colors and evokes in words what Valázquez, Brueghel and Bosch [and others] could only say with paint. (1)

Robert Motherwell (American, 1915-1991)
Red – from A la Pintura, 1971, published 1972
Color aquatint and lift-ground etching from two copper plates, with letterpress, on white wove paper
140 x 254 mm (image/plate); 647 x 965 mm (sheet)
Belknap 93 artist's proof; Sparks 27 artist's proof


Robert Motherwell (American, 1915-1991)
To the Paintbrush – from A la Pintura, 1969, published in 1972
Color soft-ground etching with aquatint from one copper plate, with letterpress, on white wove paper
254 x 406 mm (image/plate); 647 x 965 mm (sheet)
Belknap 101 artist's proof; Sparks 35 artist's proof

For further insight this text is from the The Artist and the Poet exhibition label:

According to John McKendry, former curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, if nothing else survived of Robert Motherwell’s oeuvre save his A la Pintura, he “would still be seen as a major artist of the twentieth century.” Motherwell’s book of 24 unbound pages, with 21 mixed intaglio prints, “illuminates the poetry” of Raphael Alberti. After Robert Motherwell discovered Ben Belitt’s translation of Raphael Alberti’s A la Pintura (On Painting), Motherwell recalled, “I had found the text for a livre d’artiste, a text whose every line set into motion my innermost painterly feelings. . . . This poetry is made for painters, and this livre was made for the poetry. I meant the two to be wedded, as in a medieval psalter, but with my own sense of the modern.” Just as Motherwell was inspired by poetry, Alberti found constant source material in the visual arts. A la Pintura was his homage to the collection of master paintings in the Prado Museum in Madrid and was dedicated to his friend and fellow Spaniard Pablo Picasso. (2)

1. Goldman, Judith. American Prints: Process & Proofs. First ed. New York: Whitney Museum of Art / Harper & Row, 1981. 114-23. Print.
2. Collections: About This Artwork. Art Institute of Chicago, n.d. Web. 13 Apr. 2013. 

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