CRANBROOK DESIGN: THE NEW DISCOURSE
Katherine and Michael McCoy (editors)

Katherine and Michael McCoy (editors): CRANBROOK DESIGN: THE NEW DISCOURSE. NYC: Rizzoli International, 1990. First edition. A fine hardcover book in a fine dust jacket. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print and uncommon.

8.75 x 11.25 hardcover book with 208 pages of work from Cranbrook between 1980 to 1990. Catalogue for the major exhibition, Cranbrook Design: The New Discourse, which traveled to New York and Tokyo in 1991, featuring posters and books by Katherine McCoy, as well as those by her students and alumni.

Contents:

  • Tradition and Vision by Roy Slade
  • Grounds for Discovery by Niels Diffrient
  • The New Discourse by Katherine and Michael McCoy
  • The Mannerists of Microelectronics by Hugh Aldersey-Williams
  • Life After Cranbrook: Furniture and Interior Design by Daralice Boles
  • Transgression and Delight: Graphic Design at Cranbrook by Lorraine Wild
  • Projects 1980- 1990
  • Index
  • Contributors

Excerpted from "Katherine McCoy: Expanding Boundaries" by Lorraine Wild: Katherine [McCoy] often has said that it was a visit to the Museum of Modern Art (on a family trip to the New York world¹s Fair in 1964) that made her realize she was most interested in the power of design. After majoring in industrial design at Michigan State University and graduating in 1967, she took a job in the Detroit offices of Unimark International, design consultants who produced some of the largest and most notable corporate identity projects of the period. The offices of Unimark, where she received her real typographic training, were famous for the strict, clean ³Swiss" Modernism of their designs, which at that time was still unique, almost exotic to corporate communications. Not only did Unimark sell their work to their clients, they also promoted a hyper-rational problem-solving approach to corporate communications, detached from advertising or marketing. The house journal, Dot Zero, published some of the earliest arguments in the United States in support of the Modern style. Immersed in the ideology of problem solving through ³objectivity" in form, she spent hours poring over the office copies of the ³Swiss Bibles," typographic books by Müller-Brockmann, Ruder, Gerstner, and Hofmann.

In 1971, Katherine and her husband, Michael, an industrial designer, were founding their partnership, McCoy & McCoy Associates, when they were asked by the Cranbrook Academy of Art to become co-chairs of the design department. Under the direction of Eliel Saarinen from the ¹30s to the ¹50s, Cranbrook¹s graduate-level design department had nurtured and produced several students who went on to become major forces in American architecture and design ‹ Harry Bertoia, Eero Saarinen, Florence Schust (Knoll), and Ray and Charles Eames, among others. But all schools go through cycles and not much had happened in design at Cranbrook after that. After some hesitation, Michael and Katherine accepted the position, walking into a department that had a great past but no present ‹ although it did have the incredible and subtly beautiful Saarinen-designed campus as a daily reminder of what could be accomplished in that place.

The McCoys were free to reinvent the programs in 2-D and 3-D design however they wanted. Katherine recalls that she combined the ³objective" typographic approach that she knew through professional practice with an interest in the social and cultural activism that was in the air in the late ¹60s. One early recruitment poster for the program features text that describes the goals of the design program in almost completely Utopian terms, combined with a collage that reproduces fragments of provocative design from both the professional and avant-garde design traditions of the twentieth century. The beginning of the McCoys¹ program at Cranbrook can be seen as part of a wave of activity in U.S. design programs that was directed toward more high-level experimental work. California Institute of the Arts, the Kansas City Art Institute, and the Rhode Island School of Design, among other schools, started to offer alternatives to the graduate program at Yale, one of the advanced programs in graphic design studies that not only trained people for professional practice, but encouraged them to work speculatively, beyond the professional model.

In 1991, the McCoys (with a large team of 2-D and 3-D students) produced the book Cranbrook Design: The New Discourse (Rizzoli International Publications). The book documented the high-octane visuals of the work that had been produced in the Cranbrook studios during the 1980s, and it probably sealed the reputation of the school as being a place where the visual quality of the work, sometimes generated by a highly creative interpretation of theory took precedent without regard to the "needs" of the profession. Again, the critique that often met the work represented in that book was often voiced without knowledge of the actual discourse of the studio critique, driven by the McCoys, that challenged the experimentation to be as real as possible, out of a dedication to realizing the Utopian ideal of design that informed, delighted, and somehow liberated its users.

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