'I would advise young people to look at everything they encounter in a critical light . . . Then I would urge them at all times to be self-critical' - Josef Müller-Brockmann
A conversation with Josef Müller-Brockmann by Yvonne Schwemer-Scheddin
Josef Müller-Brockmann was born in Rapperswil, Switzerland in 1914 and studied architecture, design and history of art at the University of Zurich and at the city's Kunstegewerbeschule.
He began his career as an apprentice to the designer and advertising consultant Walter Diggelman before, in 1936, establishing his own Zurich studio specialising in graphics, exhibition design and photography.
By the 1950s he was established as the leading practitioner and theorist of the Swiss Style, which sought a universal graphic expression through a grid-based design purged of extraneous illustration and subjective feeling.
His 'Musica viva' poster series for the Zurich Tonhalle drew on the language of Constructivism to create a visual correlative to the structural harmonies of the music.
Müller-Brockmann was founder and, from 1958 to 1965, co-editor of the trilingual journal Neue Grafik (New Graphic Design) which spread the principles of Swiss design internationally.
He was professor of graphic design at the Kunstgewerbeschule, Zurich from 1957 to 1960 and the Hochschule für Gestaltung, Ulm from 1963.
From 1967 he was European design consultant for IBM.
He is the author of The Graphic Artist and his Design Problems (1961), History of Visual Communication (1981).
He has contributed to many symposiums and has held one-man exhibitions in Zurich, Bern, Hamburg, Munich, Stuttgart, Berlin, Paris, New York, Chicago, Tokyo, Osaka, Caracas and Zagreb.
In 1987 he was awarded a gold medal for his cultural contribution by the State of Zurich. read more...
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