Content © 2015 Gary Hustwit

This ebook © 2015 Versions Publishing

Oscar Niemeyer & Norman Foster in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist © 2013 The Authors

Courtesy of Ivorypress

–Edited by Gary Hustwit / hustwit.com

–Editing assistance by Katie Herman

–Additional editing by Mariam Aldhahi & Anne Quito

–Design by Build / wearebuild.com

–Ebook development by Versions Publishing / versionspublishing.com

–Typeface: Maison Neue / milieugrotesque.com

–Cover photo: the microphone used to record most of the interviews in the book

Thank you for purchasing this Versions ebook

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Helvetica

Massimo Vignelli (MV)

Michael Bierut (MB)

Matthew Carter (MC)

Stefan Sagmeister (SS)

Jonathan Hoefler (JH) &

Tobias Frere–Jones (TFJ)

Michael C. Place (MCP)

Experimental Jetset –

Danny van den Dungen (DVD)

Wim Crouwel (WC)

Erik Spiekermann (ES)

Bruno Steinert (BS) &

Otmar Hoefer (OH)

Hermann Zapf (HZ)

Dimitri Bruni (DB) &

Manuel Krebs (MK)

Neville Brody (NB)

Rick Poynor (RP)

Lars Müller (LM)

Alfred Hoffmann (AH)

Leslie Savan (LS)

Mike Parker (MP)

David Carson (DC)

Paula Scher (PS)

Objectified

Bill Moggridge (BM)

Tim Brown (TB)

David Kelley (DK)

Jane Fulton Suri (JFS)

Karim Rashid (KR)

Alice Rawsthorn (AR)

Marc Newson (MN)

Ronan Bouroullec (RB) &

Erwan Bouroullec (EB)

Hella Jongerius (HJ)

Jonathan Ive (JI)

Dieter Rams (DR)

Anthony Dunne (AD) &

Fiona Raby (FR)

Chris Bangle (CB)

Naoto Fukasawa (NF)

Davin Stowell (DS) &

Dan Formosa (DF)

Paola Antonelli (PA)

Andrew Blauvelt (AB)

Rob Walker (RW)

Urbanized

Alejandro Aravena (AA)

The High Line

– Robert Hammond (RH) &

Joshua David (JD)

– James Corner (JC)

– Ric Scofidio (RS)

Jan Gehl (JG)

Stuttgart 21

– Gangolf Stocker (GS)

– Udo Andriof (UA)

– Fritz Mielert (FM)

Ricky Burdett (RB)

Enrique Peñalosa (EP)

Grady Gammage, Jr (GG)

Rahul Mehrotra (RM)

Sheela Patel (SP)

Sir Norman Foster (NF)

Candy Chang (CC)

Grover Mouton (GM)

Michael Sorkin (MS)

Amanda Burden (AB)

Bruce Katz (BK)

Jon Bird (JB)

Oscar Niemeyer (ON)

Eduardo Paes (EP)

Noah Chasin (NC)

Mark Covington (MC)

VPUU

– Jacqueline James (JJ)

– Tarna Klitzner (TK)

– Kathryn Ewing (KE)

– Alastair Graham (AG)

Edgar Pieterse (EP)

Rem Koolhaas (RK)

Yung Ho Chang (YHC)

Ellen Dunham-Jones (EDJ)

Massimo Vignelli

(MV)/

March 29, 2006

New York

Massimo Vignelli was the first interview I did for Helvetica. I emailed Massimo first because, well, he was the easiest to contact; his email address was right there on his website: massimo@vignelli.com.

When our crew arrived at Massimo’s home studio for the interview, he brought us into his kitchen and made us all espressos served in cups he’d designed. Anyone who met him instantly felt his love for life and for design. We had a long conversation that day—though it was admittedly one-sided; it’s tough to get a word in when Massimo starts talking about type—and many more conversations in the years after.

Massimo passed away on May 27, 2014, as we were editing this book. The design world lost one of its most passionate practitioners and a true gentleman, and I lost a good friend. Ciao, Massimo.

—

Gary Hustwit — I wanted to initially talk about your beginnings. You told me you were studying to be an architect. How did you end up being exposed to graphic design?

Massimo Vignelli — Well, I started to be interested in architecture very early. When I was 16 years old, I was lucky enough to go to work as a freelance draftsman in the office of the Castiglioni brothers. The Castiglioni brothers were very, very good Italian architects in Milan, where I come from. Now, they were designing everything really—radios and furniture and exhibitions and buildings and houses. And I was mesmerized by the fact that an architect could do everything, and eventually I discovered that an architect was supposed to, really, design everything from a spoon to a city, as they say. So that was my beginning.

At the same time, I was exposed to some posters by Max Huber. Max Huber was a fantastic graphic designer from Switzerland who came to Milan. In 1946 he did a fabulous poster for a dance club; then in 1948 he did the poster for the Monza car races. You know, beautiful poster. You’ve probably seen it, with the arrows coming like cars, swoosh, passing each other. Eventually I met him, and he was looking for a place to live, and I had space in my house, so I said, “I can rent you some space. Why don’t you move in?” And that’s how I got exposed to graphic design, really, on an everyday basis, and I learned a lot from him. I learned about grids; I learned about colors; I learned about type; I learned about approach and so on.

In the meantime, I was working in the architectural offices. But I began to be more interested in graphic design and started to do some graphic-design work. Then I started to do some product-design work, like glass for Venini. I was doing graphics and glass and books and things like that, and then furniture, and then exhibits. And so it all came at the same time because of my interest in all these things, you know. I was fascinated by all these fields, and I wanted to do everything.

GH — Do you remember when you first encountered Helvetica?

MV — Since I was, I would say, an admirer of the work of Max Huber and the Swiss school, I eventually became familiar with the sans-serif typefaces that the Swiss were using, and at that time the most popular was Akzidenz-Grotesk. I worked with Akzidenz-Grotesk. You might know that type, in the old times, was made in lead. And so each letter had shoulders that determined the kerning, the letterspacing between one letter and another.

Now, we always liked type to be kerned tighter, so we were cutting the letters, cutting the spaces between, and destroying letters very often. The cutting was a tremendous amount of work. Eventually the Swiss developed a typeface that is now called Helvetica that had very, very tight shoulders on each individual letter, in the lead. So we could finally get the tight letterspacing that we liked, and then there was an explosion right away, because we were all ready for it. There was nothing else available besides Akzidenz-Grotesk in Europe and Standard over in the United States. At that time there weren’t as many weights as there are today. It was just Regular and Light in the beginning. Then, of course, Bold came about and then Extra Bold, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and Extra Thin. And now the range is very, very wide and even more appealing than ever from that point of view. But at the time when Helvetica came out, it was a sensation, because of the possibility of having very tight letterspacing.

The impact, the sense of modernity, that was a given. Of course in the thirties there was Futura—that was used by the Bauhaus very much—and also Akzidenz-Grotesk. But Helvetica had all the right connotations that we were looking for in a typeface, for anything that had to spell out, loud and clear, modern. If it had to be classic, then we would use Garamond or Bodoni. We always had the tendency to use very few typefaces. It’s not that we don’t believe in type; we believe that there are not that many good typefaces, you know. If I want to be really generous, there’s a dozen. Basically, I use no more than three, I guess. Yeah, in my life, most of the time, I’m very happy with Helvetica and Garamond and Bodoni, basically. Then, of course, I use Century Expanded, and I can use Univers; I can use Futura, Gill—it depends on the job.

But if I had to name one typeface by default it would be certainly Helvetica. And as a matter of fact, I can say that I’m probably the one responsible for bringing Helvetica to this country, because when I came, in 1965, there was no Helvetica. So I told the typesetter, “Get it,” and they got it. You know, right in ’65, ’66, before that, everybody was using Akzidenz-Grotesk, or Standard, as it was called. I got Helvetica. I had Knoll, the furniture company, as a client, so I could use a lot of it in the proper context because it’s modern furniture. And that is what we did, you know.

I was predicting back in 1966, ’67, I would say, “Oh, just be patient, and two or three years from now there will be no other typefaces. There will be only Helvetica.” Little did I know that I was so right. It almost, indeed, became the universal type in a sense. Well, we used it a lot. We used it very well, because we knew how to use contrast of size and proper spacing, all these details, which are the ABCs of typography. And therefore, since we were using it well, a lot of people started to imitate us and be fascinated by Helvetica. A lot of people, they just used it because it was a sans-serif type, and they didn’t know good from bad—they were just using it. And that’s it. And then the computer came around and made it even more popular.