When reading the three short texts from architects/designers associated with the Bauhaus movement, I realized that there is a great emphasis on photography, typography, and language on how it can be used as a way to communicate with people through art and design and to make it easier to communicate with another, with the exception of Walter Gropius’s essay. At least from my understanding.

For example in Herbert Bayer’s On Typography, there is a section where he talks about the creation of the Universal type font. In that font he eliminated serifs and capital letters, making it more legible and straightforward. He even eliminated capital letters in his text, with the exception of sub-titles. His goal was to have something ubiquitous that would bridge the gap between languages. On the other hand it seemed like her considered verbal language as a hindrance to universal communication. I say that because he starts his paragraph with “for a long time to come we will accept the existence of the different languages now in use. this will continue to pose barriers to communication, even after improved (possibly phonetic) writing methods have been adopted within all the languages.”

In László Moholy-Nagy’s Typofoto he talks about the possibility of new technology emerging, like the typography. In the essay he mentions how simply having having photo and text strips aways any individual interpretation away. But with typophoto, it creates something ambiguous, subjective in an “optically valid form.” As he would put it, “Typophoto is the visually most exact rendering of communication.”

When it came to Walter Gropius’s The Theory and Organization of the Bauhaus, it was hard to understand. I may be wrong here but I did not see too much of an emphasis on communication well at least not between person and design. The essay was more about how art is not a profession and no amount schooling will be enough to make someone an artist. He also goes on to say that ‘the academy’ have or had a grip on art, making it stagnate. Which is understandable because in my opinion, every art and design movement was a rebelling against academic/the fine arts. And how academic training brought great art-proletariat that were destined to social misery.