Architectural Association School of Architecture

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Photo: Sebastian Schröder

Zak Kyes is the recipient of the 2010 INFORM Award, the annual accolade presented to graphic designers who develop a practice within the context of applied and contemporary art. Previous recipients include Laurent Benner (2007), Julia Born (2008) and Rebecca Stephany (2009). 

The award was marked by a one-person exhibition – ‘Zak Kyes Working With …’ – originating at the Museum for Contemporary Art Leipzig and travelling to the AA and the Graham Foundation, Chicago (14 June–22 September 2012). Curated in collaboration with Barbara Steiner, the exhibition brought together a range of works by Kyes, as well as new ones by a host of collaborators including architects, artists, writers, curators, editors and graphic designers, presenting contemporary graphic design as a practice that mediates, and is mediated by, its allied disciplines. 

A Swiss-American who lives and works in London, Kyes has developed a graphic design practice that includes publishing, editing and site-specific projects for and in collaboration with cultural institutions. In 2005 he founded the design studio Zak Group and in 2006 became Art Director of the AA. Under the auspices of the AA, he organised the touring exhibition ‘Forms of Inquiry: The Architecture of Critical Graphic Design’, and later co-founded Bedford Press, an imprint that seeks to develop new models for contemporary publishing. By broadening the highly specialised role of the designer, Kyes challenges and further develops today’s graphic design practice. 

Each invited contributor is assigned a role that addresses the different formats of an exhibition. Architect Jesko Fezer was invited to propose the exhibition architecture, while typographer Radim Peško will design a typeface for the show’s object labels and wall texts. Artist Jospeh Grigely will create the exhibition poster, and writers Shumon Basar and Charles Arsène-Henry will conceive the audio guide. Artist Can Altay will conduct a publishing workshop, and archivist and librarian Edward Bottoms will offer a historical lecture on architectural publishing. Architects Nikolaus Hirsch and Michel Müller will devise an archive structure, and graphic designer Wayne Daly will design an expanded exhibition catalogue published by Sternberg Press (June 2012) which will include contributions by Richard Birkett, Andrew Blauvelt, Edward Bottoms, Maria Lind, Markus Miessen, and Barbara Steiner, among others. 

‘Zak Kyes Working With ...’ was organised by The Museum for Contemporary Art Leipzig in collaboration of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago, and the AA. This project is also supported by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia. 

Award-winning Dutch photographer Bas Princen’s work has become increasingly familiar: images that blur the artificial and natural, where the real and imagined are hard to separate. Less known – and never previously exhibited – are the A5 booklets Princen makes, consisting of a series of reference images. The booklets are between 24 and 32 pages long and contain images downloaded by Princen from the internet of famous or completely unknown or already long-forgotten scenes and objects involving landscape and architecture, their low resolution disallowing reproduction any larger than 6 x 9 cm.

Simple and handmade, the booklets can be replaced quickly or adjusted by reprinting on standard A4 paper, folded and stapled. They also form dummies for new books Princen plans to make and act as placeholders for photographs still to be taken. These dummies – or maquettes – are used by Princen to test possible dialogues and formal arrangements of future photographs. The maquettes guide and direct his view, making it possible to compress compositions and subjects taken from several reference images into one new individual photograph. These maquettes are exhibited alongside Princen’s photographs, making manifest the process of thinking to making.

Eastern Promises: Incubator Galleries shows AA Intermediate Unit 7’s work in progress and engages with its evolving agenda, methods, processes and products. The exhibition reveals the unit’s general interest in design infrastructures as transfers between urban systems as well as its current focus on new hybrid typologies that exploit the clashes between culture and commerce in post-Soviet Moscow. Experimenting with pragmatic research and conceptual design, projects explore the convergence of markets and museums, shops and archives, expo-cities and pop-ups into catalytic ‘incubator galleries’. 

Diagrammatic diagnostics and graphic condensations are presented in the ‘Moscow Catalogue’, which suggests mediations for the city’s paradoxes, such as deconstruction/reconstruction, dispersal/concentration and concealment/revelation. Selected urban strategies and design prototypes include layered generic frameworks that organise specific cultural and commercial fragments; compressed megastructures that deploy as filing and display mechanisms; and thickened façade interfaces that collect surfaces, images and atmospheres. 

In line with the unit’s approach, Eastern Promises spans several methodological platforms – from research-driven provocations and diagrammatic models, to synthetic elements and infrastructures, to ‘plastic’ form-program prototypes, and finally to social and spatial effects. The logic of ‘loose control’ underlies curatorial operations at the levels of the city, building and content. The display includes interactive archives, expansive matrices and controlled highlights to juxtapose concepts and artefacts, narratives and drawings, diagrams and images.