Illustration: Bruno Paul. Rug design, c1909.
The two rug designs illustrating this article were produced by the German architect and designer Bruno Paul. They were executed within the first decade of the twentieth century and show an element of minimal pattern work which was still relatively unknown in Europe during this period.
Paul was a design and education reformer, who through the influence of Kaiser Wilhelm II who was said to have admired Paul's work at least architecturally, was enabled to become an important influence on the direction of contemporary design and decoration in Germany, particularly when considering the applied arts. He was a pivotal individual regarding the separation of designer and maker, a system that is still very much with us today, particularly within the educational system.
Paul actively encouraged the designer to concentrate on the dynamics of design without resorting to the workshop. When he taught at the Berlin School of Applied Arts to which he was appointed in 1907, he began the dismantling of the relationship between the design and the practical making of that design, a process that had often been taken through all of the steps by the same individual. Design studios and workshops became separated with different individuals taking different courses. Therefore the relationship between design studio and craft workshop, in some respects at least, became more tenuous and to a certain extent isolating.
Paul wanted the design student to see themselves as being much closer in affinity to that of a fine artist, producing sophisticated and professionally motivated work. They would use a vocabulary of design and decoration that was limited to that subject and that subject alone. The workshop on the other hand would be entirely devoted to the practical parameters of various disciplines but not be involved with any of the design stages, merely the construction as designated by the designer.
This does not mean that the designer would not have understood the practical parameters of their design work. Paul encouraged students to factor in any practical material necessities and they would have had to have understood the dynamics of practical construction, form and use of materials. However, they were not to take practicalities any further than technical notes for the maker. If they wished to use the workshops they could, but only in their own time, which is a form of discouragement.
Illustration: Bruno Paul. Rug design, c1909.
In many respects Paul delivered a system whereby the designer as artist became a de facto supplier of completed and therefore contained design work. The process of the designer became closed to any other form of influence. The dialogue between the mental capacity of design and the practical necessity of making was to be entirely separate. In many respects this is the system we work with today, certainly in education. The design studio may well have certain ideas as to the practical parameters of the product, but the design is paramount. Often practical necessities are worked out on a small and impractical level, with many new designers knowing little if anything about the industrial process.
In some respects, by encouraging the separation of design and industry on an educational level, the two parts of the process have become disjointed. Often the design studio is not seen as being an integral element of industry, but somehow a separate creative process more aligned to fine than industrial art. This is particularly so within the applied arts. While connections between education and industry are sometimes strong with both working hard to produce partnerships that can be creatively inspiring, others are lacklustre, unfocused and minimal. Many students are still taught entirely within the confines of educational establishments that are more art than design based. Some have little if any real fundamental links with industry and students are often isolated from the whole process and therefore are naively unaware of the world in which that they will be expected to supply design work to.
There has always been, since mass manufacturing began, a problem between the often fine art sensibilities of the designer and the basic practicalities of the industrial process. In Britain, design schools of the early nineteenth century were regularly criticised for producing designers with pretensions to become painters but with little or no practical skills for industry. Many industrialists thought it counterproductive in separating the designer from the process and therefore many were reluctant to send their design teams to design schools where they believed they would be encouraged to get ideas beyond the framework of the factory thus distorting the industrial process. In some respects, they were correct, by education creating the idea of the designer artist; a wedge was eventually driven between the design team and the industrial process, the designer seeing themselves as separate from the larger whole.
Although the relationship between designer and the industrial process does not always have to be as disconnected as it sometimes appears to be, there is still a tendency to see the designer, though perhaps less now than in the twentieth century, as the celebrity and the team involved in the industrial process as unknown, despite the fact that all are in fact one team within the process.
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