Plastics and its Uses in Architecture, Sports and Technology

Two colors or linoleum plates and a well thought-out design based on the chemical structure of polycarbonate – that’s all Richard Paul Lohse needed to design a poster for the exhibition on the use of plastics (which were comparatively new at the time) in technology, everyday life and architecture. Although, after all, it is precisely in simplification and abstraction that art lies. And this is what the Zurich commercial artists, constructivists and concrete artists such as Lohse, Carlo Vivarelli, Hans Neuburg, Josef Müller-Brockmann and Max Bill were known for. So well known and even influential (together with the somewhat more playful Baslers Armin Hofmann, Emil Ruder, Fridolin Müller, …) that their approach to design, with its emphasis on absolute precision and clarity and the elimination of any artistic attitude, began an international triumphal march as “Swiss Style” or “International Typographic Style”.

A very rare sheet and important witness of the “Swiss Style”, moreover excellently preserved; also exists with the text variant “Gewerbemuseum Winterthur”, where the exhibition was first shown at the end of 1958. Oddly enough, all copies of both versions were slightly smaller than the usual Swiss world format of about 128×90 cm