|
2007 AIGA MEDAL
It was a dark and stormy night, in the figurative sense. A
sleepless Bruce Mau, having decided that he had ruined what was, at
that point, the second most important job of his career, phoned his
client across five time zones from Toronto to Paris, to confess.
“Michel,” he said, “I've just done a terrible thing.”
The client was Michel Feher, editor of Zone Books, and the year
was 1989. The project was Zone 3/4/5: Fragments for a History
of the Human Body, the series that followed Mau's most
important job to date—1985's Zone 1/2: The Contemporary
City, a complex compendium of critical thinking about urbanism
from philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze and Paul Virilio,
architects Rem Koolhaas and Christopher Alexander, and edited by
Feher and Sanford Kwinter. “That book was the breakthrough; it set
the tone for everything that followed,” says Mau, who founded Bruce
Mau Design studio that same year. Featuring graphic elements such
as densely saturated landscapes of color and textured images,
landmarked by bold figure-ground moments of typographic punch and
void, that tome would become the first in a series of epochal—and
very big—books.
Kwinter recalls, “In those—pre-computer—days I was working with
half a dozen designers trying to work up a program that broke with
the sterile rationalism of post-1960s design—in the same way as did
the philosophers and artists that we were wishing to publish. Mau
at first had no idea what I was talking about, but his first
maquette for Zone 1/2 had more ideas in it than some other
designers' entire careers.”
Mau aimed “to do an object that wasn't an illustration of the
content, but a model—something that performed and behaved like the
city itself. As if you're holding the city in your hands and
experiencing the city through the book over time.” It marked the
beginning of a body of work that would become “a map of . . . public
time and space,” as the Village Voice said in its review
of Zone 1/2 at the time.
But designing Zone 3/4/5 proved
problematic—specifically, the covers. Mau's rich, colorful details
of enlarged paintings had looked so brilliant on the light box, but
now, fresh off the presses, seemed a muddy mess. “We just didn't
have time to remake the film or anything else—we'd already
manufactured our own inks, our own paper,” says Mau. With the clock
ticking away, “we realized we could just reassign ink colors to
different plates on the press: red, blue and purple, to get a
different kind of complexity. I called Michel. I threw away the
truckload we'd already printed. I started over. It was a huge
success.” The lesson, Mau says, was about, “being willing to allow
creative work to keep going past the usual boundary, after
everything had already been settled.”
The inspiration for changing plates—for making changes, whether
small or massive, and for not settling—goes back to the very
beginning of the printing process and to the start of Mau's own
education. Born in 1959, Mau grew up in northern Ontario. “I
thought I was going to be a scientist. I like to say I didn't hear
the word 'design' until I went to art school,” he says. His
introduction to art education was a yearlong program in Special
Arts at Sudbury Secondary School. Mau's first assignment had little
to do with design. “I had to restore and refurbish a one-color
offset press,” an already vintage, 12 x 18 sheet-size Heidelberg.
“You'd be surprised at how difficult that is,” he says. And he had
to make four-color prints on the one-color press. “For every color,
every time, I had to take it apart and put it back together.”
That taste for unconventional processes led Mau to the Ontario
College of Art and Design, where he studied advertising under Terry
Isles. Before graduating, he joined Toronto design firm Fifty
Fingers, and two years later moved to Pentagram in London, where he
worked with David Hillman and Herman Lelie. It was at Pentagram, in
turbulent Thatcher-era Britain, “that I was really introduced to
the political life of form,” says Mau. He was also introduced to
the virtues of deeply interdisciplinary practice, how graphics
could participate in other systems. “I learned that people like
[Lelie], for example, had whole other lives as artists, and
collaborators like John Cage,” he says, “[and] how design and
culture converge around literacy, equity, society.” Mau brought
that lesson back to Canada, where he co-founded the design practice
Public Good Design and Communications before splitting off to form
Bruce Mau Design. There, finally, is where he would balance print
design work—for Zone Books and I.D. magazine, for which he
served as creative director in the early 1990s—with more boundless
pursuits.
Mau's studio has worked especially closely with architectural
practice—both through environmental graphics and wayfinding systems
as at Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, as
well as through collaborative monograph and documentation projects
such as 1996's mammoth S,M,L,XL, the 1,376-page
blockbuster prospectus for Rem Koolhaas's Office for Metropolitan
Architecture. “That really was a turning point,” says Mau. “Rem
insisted that I become an author.” As a result, “people recognized
that the design itself was actually a critical work, and was itself
content.” He recalls, “This was the first of what I call 'context
projects,' articulating the changing context within which design is
located,” he says. In 2000, Mau's own monograph, Life
Style, advanced that agenda.
Other context projects include Tree City, set in Toronto's
Downsview Park, which recontextualized urban-scale design work
within graphic practice. (Mau and collaborators Koolhaas, David
Oleson and Petra Blaisse won a 2001 competition to create that
landscape, and Bruce Mau Design now oversees its 10-year
development.) And “Massive Change: The Future of Global
Design”—originally a 2004 exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery but
now a book, website and an ongoing initiative with the stated goal
of “exploring the legacy and potential, the promise and power of
design in improving the welfare of humanity”—is the culmination of
such interdisciplinary thinking. With its visionary approach to
ecology, economy and everything in between, the project relies on
research by students at the Institute without Boundaries, a
post-graduate, interdisciplinary design program that Bruce Mau
Design developed in 2003 with George Brown-Toronto City College,
and is now also associated with the Art Institute of Chicago, a
city in which Mau's practice is increasingly based.
Mau's idea for “Massive Change” was to talk to 100 technicians
and thinkers, craftspeople and laypeople who were changing the
world, whether they knew it or not. “They're all designers
according to us,” he says. “Some of them didn't think they were
designers, but they use the word 'design' more intelligently,
colloquially, than we do as designers ourselves.” With work
transcending traditional professional boundaries, “they just blew
all those categories away,” he continues. The outcome is “design
simply as a critical methodology for solving problems.” That's the
approach of those whom Mau cites as powerfully pairing visual
discourse with big ideas, as well as the ambition to bend or mend
the world. Eames, Nelson, McLuhan, Duchamp, Hamilton, Fuller, he
proffers.
But does Mau aspire to join that list? “Nah,” he demurs. “Well,
maybe late at night.”
|