Fractions

In 1941, the Austrian-born architect and engineer Bernard Rudofsky moved to New York City, and, without an American architecture license, he turned his attention to other avenues of design. In 1944, his famous exhibition Are Clothes Modern? opened at the Museum of Modern Art and in 1947, the catalogue for the exhibition included his extensive response to and musings on the title question. In the volume, Rudofsky went on at length about the ways in which clothes are indeed not modern, but rather “anachronistic, irrational and harmful.” Among his critiques of modern fashion was a criticism of the way in which fashion and tailoring abuse bodies as well as materials. To make this argument, he included a pattern from 1873, which, in an effort to maximize the paper on which it is printed, features a dizzying maze of lines differentiated through the use of different patterns made with standardized marks that include the letters “x” and “o” as well as the dash and asterisk. This overlapping confusion of intersecting symbols indicative of the irrationality of “the clothes we wear today” appears to have inspired Rudofsky to instantiate a sense of order, as he perceived it.

Two years later, in 1949, his designs for Schiffer Prints employed similar typographic symbols that regularly alternate to form a recognizable repeat. To produce these designs, Rudofsky relied on his trusty Olivetti typewriter, which he had purchased during a sojourn in Italy. Fractions features alternating rows of typewritten letters, numbers, and symbols. The subtle variations in the forms reinforce the discrepancies that occur when the metal slug of type at the end of the typewriter arm strikes the ribbon. In this way, Rudofsky reminds the viewer that the typewriter is an instrument for printing, fitting as he used it to make designs for printed textiles. His allusion to a fundamental method of manufacture fits within his larger philosophy, in which he proposed that nothing modern truly was as novel as it was made out to be. Moreover, as an advocate for individuality rather than conformity, these subtle differences surely appealed to his strongly held ideals.