Nicholas Fox Weber

"This is a Borzoi book published by Alfred A. Knopf."

The Iphone As the Embodiment of Bauhaus Ideals and Design

Ibauhaus

Celine Nguyen ✿

You: designer, design-interested, have heard of the Bauhaus or are already obsessed with the Bauhaus, dream of going to the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin when COVID-19 is 'over', on your fifth iPhone, refuse to text your friends on Android. This book: on the surface, a promising discussion of the history of the Bauhaus and how its ethos has influenced contemporary design and technology—and specifically, how it's influenced the iPhone.

Unfortunately, I really can't recommend this book. Despite my interest in the Bauhaus and Apple's industrial and interaction design, I found the book is vaguely structured and intent on drawing awkward, forced connections between the work of the Bauhaus—people like Josef and Anni Albers, Paul Klee, Mies van der Rohe—and the design and aesthetics of the iPhone. 

The beginning of the book has a brief history of the Bauhaus art school in the early 20th century, its approach to art and design, and some of its most notable figures, especially Josef and Anni Albers. Nicholas Fox Weber has delightful small stories about how the Albers thought about everyday living; how they furnished their home; the kinds of designs they cherished and admired in their later years. 

The central theme of the book is about drawing parallels between the Bauhaus's approach to design (combining aesthetics with functionality, integrating theory and craft) and the design of the iPhone, which Nicholas Fox Weber asserts is a nearly-ideal articulation of Bauhaus values. But Weber's method of drawing parallels is consistently clumsy. An example:

The iPhone, like Anni Albers's open-weave textiles and Paul Klee's paintings, has a weightlessness as the lack of encumbrance with which Jobs and the Bauhauslers lived. And it shares the same spark of invention.
These forced connections do a disservice to the reader's appreciation of Albers and Klee, as well as the work of the many, many designers and engineers behind the iPhone. Here's another shaky connection:

The words that Ive used for what he wanted when the display appeared on the screen were "magical" and "surprising". "Magical" is the adjective Josef Albers used for both color interaction and the imaginative configurations of straight lines. "Surprising" was a favorite of Anni Albers…
If the connection between the Bauhaus and the iPhone rests on different individuals using the same extremely common adjectives to describe their work, maybe the connection is too thin to justify a 250 page book?

The prose, too, is consistently overworked. When Weber explores the apple as a symbol in art and design, before returning to the logo for Apple as a company:

The Apple logo insinuates itself into your field of consciousness, time and again, as if it considers itself God's gift to earth. This, too, is upsetting. Real apples are miraculous, but the abstract form of the fruit, with a bite missing, is altogether different. Entirely flat, lacking color or mass, it has none of the life of the fruit it represents. It has been grown in a design lab, rather than on a tree, and that smirking little leaf on its top is insufferable. Yet the impact of the apple is remarkable.
Remarkable indeed. The iPhone is a defining design object of our time, and has produced a generation of Apple obsessives. This book is (probably) meant for them. But there's very little new information in this book (although it does sketch out the history of Apple and pick some particularly fun anecdotes). If you're an Apple fan, just read the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson. If you want to learn about the Bauhaus…maybe read the first half of this book and quit. Or find a different one.

Thank you Netgalley and Knopf Doubleday for the review copy.

Ibauhaus The Iphone As the Embodiment of Bauhaus Ideals and Design

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