The isotype of Holland

[imomus]

Short visits are great for keywording and tagging impressions of what it is that makes the place you're visiting different from -- or similar to -- other places you know. Here are some tags I found myself using to structure my impressions of 48 hours in Utrecht, Holland: oriental, cerebrotonic, disinhibited, trad, Modernist.



Alongside Portugal, Holland is the most oriental-feeling of European nations. My first impressions to fit the tag "oriental" came at Schipol Airport, where I investigated a red-and-white checkered exhibition station showing photographs of checkered airport buildings in oriental places that used to be Dutch colonies: Padang in West Sumatra and Pekalongan in Central Java, Indonesia, for instance. I also noticed that the toilets at Schipol had a really temple-like smell -- they were burning incense in there.



In downtown Utrecht more impressions welcomed the "oriental" tag. First of all, this is a very dense city (Holland's population density is 393 people per square kilometer, Japan's is 339 -- average population density across Europe is 112, and in the US it's 31), and the scarcity of land makes for sights familiar in the far east. My friend Jip showed me a private house on a corner site with a tiny footprint, just a couple of square metres. Its microscale would have fitted Tokyo perfectly. Other parallels with east Asia: up to 25% of Holland is reclaimed from the sea, bringing parallels with Macau, Singapore, Tokyo Bay and Kansai Airport. 90% of its people live in cities (compared with 80% of Japanese). And the sheer density of zooming or parked bicycles makes you think of Vietnam or, again, Japan.



Something else that makes you think of East Asian countries is the enthusiastic co-existence of traditional and modern forms in Holland -- here, a love of the new and of the old is in no way contradictory. Just as in Japan, where you'll see people clopping down the street wearing wooden geta while video-chatting on a 3G phone, here in Holland some people really are wearing clogs for pleasure. The air is full of two sounds: ringing churchbells by day and skull-crushing gabber techno by night (I couldn't sleep on Saturday night because my very trad-looking street was boom-boom-booming until 5am).



The gabber is the "disinhibited" part. The cerebrotonic part is to do with the evident Dutch love of information -- cafes full of magazines and newspapers -- and the way the houses have such a big percentage of their surface dedicated to curtainless windows: they're "all air and nerve", cerebrotonic in the classic way described by William Sheldon (cerebrotonia is the personality type that develops when the ratio of skin to viscera and innards in skinny people makes what's outside predominate over what's inside: the cerebrotonic has "eyes wide open").



When they do Modern, though, the Dutch do it with brilliant primary colours, elegantly reduced forms, and real lab spirit. They do it in architecture (some brilliant use of layered brick) and in graphics, where there's an evident delight in sans serifs, aesthetic pragmatism ("the etiquette of public information display"), reduced forms.



I saw three really great graphic design shows on Sunday. First, at Casco, they had Forms of Inquiry, a show of "critical graphic design" featuring Dutch designers Experimental Jet Set amongst others.



Then there was the Dick Bruna house -- and Dick (an Utrechter) really is an information designer at heart, someone concerned to reduce (or do I mean "increase") empathy to its barest, clearest outlines. His Miffy isn't a sickly-sweet bunny, it's a objective isotype of pure empathy influenced, Bruna happily admits, by his love of Modernists like Matisse, Leger and Mondrian.



The genius of simplicity on display in the Bruna House dovetails perfectly with Lovely Language, the big exhibition of isotypes across the road in the Centraal Museum. "It is better," said designer Otto Neurath, "to remember simplified images than to forget exact figures." He and Gerd Arntz developed, in the 1930s, a visual dictionary of 4000 symbols or "isotypes" -- the direct ancestors of the logos and information graphics we have today. Visual tags, if you like.



In the isotypes show, each outline figure is the most economical, simple, accurate summary possible of a certain idea. Just like Miffy -- and what I've tried to do today with my idea of Holland itself. Tagging isotypical!

Comments

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Mr Said's work dates back to the era of the Euphemism Treadmill (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#The_.22Euphemism_Treadmill.22). We've since learned that it's a highly inefficient mode of transport.

lanGUAGE is IMPlanted in all of us . . . genetic cODE wise?

[santa-bookworm.livejournal.com]

Here's the thing. If you can't think like a normal person, you can't troll successfully. Here's what I think you're doing: You created FENGI (http://robby.livejournal.com/125399.html?replyto=539351) so that I would befriend him and fill him in on the details, in hopes you would find out what I know about Zedd. Your flaw was that you are the only person on lj who will make totally unsolicited comments in someone's journal that you have never met.

ref: http://bad-3d-unicorns.livejournal.com/40738.html?replyto=27938

additional tags: http://surprisesex.livejournal.com/19140.html?replyto=131012

[silkov.livejournal.com]

cool

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

I'm arguing on whether or not to show my dad this entry. The last picture you took is almost in the exact position he was in in one picture he took while on his mission in the 70's. He showed me his slides, and it looked like he missed it quite a lot. Knowing my dad, he never displays any outward emotion, no connectivity whatsoever to anything, but with Holland, it has a special place in his heart. Seeing that last picture, he might cry.

I was going to ask my dad if he ever visited Utrecht, seeing as how he mentioned you a few hours ago as "some 85 year old man [I] talk to". Maybe this entry will finally inspire my dad to really take my family to Holland after years of promising and manipulating (read all of the Book of Mormon and I will take all of us to Holland!).

In the meantime, I will enjoy pronouncing "gouda" the Dutch way, and eating it as well.

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

OH MY GOD

GORDON B. HINCKLEY IS DEAD

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Good lord, at 97 he was even older than me, according to your dad.

[count-vronsky.livejournal.com]

I am beginning to feel jealous that I live on the wrong side of the pond. But country life suits me now, after that long decade of excess. Besides, Twombly lives a few houses over with a garden-shed full of masterpieces, so it's not like there aren't adventures to be had.

But just whistle, and I'll come running. (http://mixotheque.com/blog/wordpress/?m=200604)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Japan goes Dutch (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n07/sayl01_.html), an article from the London Review of Books in 2001, gives some background to the connections between Holland (and Portugal) and the far East:

"When Spanish sea power went down with the Great Armada in 1588, the seven provinces of what were then the Spanish Netherlands were already preparing to expel Spanish soldiers, aristocrats and prelates. Netherlanders or, as I shall inaccurately call them, the Dutch, had long been bold seafarers and blue-water traders, exploiting their superb geographic position as a way station and entrepôt between the Mediterranean and the Baltic via the ocean route, the gateway to Germany via the Rhine, and the ideal place to land herring for trans-shipment to European Catholics foregoing meat on Fridays. The Dutch had already built ships big enough to preserve the catch at sea, had sold shares in the enterprise and through autonomous, locally elected town and village councils had pooled the cost of the dikes and dams that kept the North Sea out of their homes: here we see in embryo some of the characteristic devices of a market-based economy. So when the defeat of the Armada unlocked the trade routes of the world to the newly independent republic, open frontiers beckoned Dutch sailors from every corner of the seven seas. The Netherlands United East Indies Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC), founded in 1602, was the world’s first multinational, joint-stock, limited liability corporation – as well as its first government-backed trading cartel. Our own East India Company, founded in 1600, remained a coffee-house clique until 1657, when it, too, began selling shares, not in individual voyages, but in John Company itself, by which time its Dutch rival was by far the biggest commercial enterprise the world had known."

"Dutch capitalism got off to a flying start. Amsterdam was Europe’s wealthiest trading city, Dutch wages the highest in the world. Amsterdam’s Beurs was the first stock exchange to trade continuously; and in its first few decades, Dutch market punters pioneered short selling, option trading, debt-equity swaps, merchant banking, unit trusts and other speculative instruments, much as we now know them. With them came specialised offshoots – insurance, retirement funds and other orderly forms of investment – and the maladies of capitalism: the boom-bust cycle, the world’s first asset-inflation bubble, the tulip mania of 1636-37, and even, in 1607, history’s first bear raider, a canny shareholder named Isaac le Maire who dumped his VOC stock, forcing the price down, and then bought it back at a discount.
Where did the Dutch merchants get their money? The domestic products of the Dutch Republic were much what they are now: cheese, beer, bricks, pottery and various cottage crafts, sound but not sensational movers on an emerging world market. The action was out on the distant maritime frontier, where Dutch seamen were mopping up the remnants of the Portuguese Empire, particularly the islands where pepper, cloves, nutmeg and mace grew ready to pick. By 1621 the VOC had a base at Batavia (now Jakarta) and was eyeing the China trade. By 1624 jovial ‘Jan Compagnie’ had a trading post, Fort Zeelandia, on Taiwan. After 1641 the Shoguns allowed the VOC to trade (and reside) on a tiny artificial island in the harbour of Nagasaki, from which the last Portuguese had been expelled four years earlier for preaching Catholicism (‘We’re not Christians, we’re Hollanders!’ the newcomers are alleged to have shouted, when they arrived to set up shop)."

[(Anonymous)]

"Where did the Dutch merchants get their money? "

The Dutch, like the English, used privateers - "official pirates" - extensively. They were given authorization to attack Spanish shipping provided they split their booty with the crown. Where the English had Drake and Hawkins, the Dutch had Piet Pieterszoon Hein. In one raid in 1628, working for the Dutch West India Company, he grabbed 12 million guilders. "the money funded the Dutch army for eight months...and the shareholders enjoyed a cash dividend of 50% for that year."

[imomus.livejournal.com]

You know, people shout "Pirate!" wherever I go, but in Holland they seemed to be doing it more. Perhaps they thought I was a privateer!

*insert boring comment on the VOC here*

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

That stylised Nazi is the weirdest freaking thing I´ve ever seen. NATIVE COUNTRY
I didn´t notice at the time but you managed to slip Hitler into our conversation Saturday. lol you win!

You should come to The Hague, that´s the home of the Indonesian-Dutch community.

argh fail

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

I mean, NATIVE COUNRTY >:( !

Re: argh fail

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yes, it's hilarious, that one, the way the framing makes it look like the Nazi is reflexively saluting the moose (which looks kind of startled).

Did I really slip Nazis into the conversation? I don't remember that at all... But I look a bit wandered, so it's not too surprising:

where is the disable loo?

[petit-paradis.livejournal.com]

pictures of the performance here

http://flickr.com/photos/98274113@N00/

Re: where is the disable loo?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'm glad someone captured the moment when I put the wig on top of the curtain!



I was more excited by your pictures of Fosco Maraini's book, though (here (http://flickr.com/photos/98274113@N00/2194229311/) and here (http://flickr.com/photos/98274113@N00/2195017880/)).

Re:

[petit-paradis.livejournal.com]

I've put some more pictures and tables from that book.

it makes you long for ozu movies and enka songs.........

http://flickr.com/photos/98274113@N00/

tag

[jip.livejournal.com]

More tags and wiebelende konijntjes;
lastfm:event=429711 (http://www.last.fm/event/429711), upcoming:event=327733 (http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/327733/),

Holland itself

[pay-option07.livejournal.com]

If you found better living arrangements in Holland would you consider moving there or prefer your Deutsche situation?

Re: Holland itself

[(Anonymous)]

Holland itself has a number of daily routes that forge through my deepest knockers.

Re: Holland itself

[imomus.livejournal.com]

If you found better living arrangements in Holland would you consider moving there or prefer your Deutsche situation?

I could possibly live in Holland, but I do prefer Berlin for the time being.

Re: Holland itself

[newironshapes (from livejournal.com)]

I read through an article on prenzlauer berg yesterday and it turns out the whole affair was a deliberate "creative neighborhood" development strategy on the part of the city government!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

By the way, Steve Heller has an interesting article in Design Observer (http://www.designobserver.com/archives/031648.html) on other German isotype pioneers:

"In the 1920s members of the Bauhaus and the Ring Neuer Werbegestalter (circle of new advertising designers) were given credit for inventing the reductive trademark, but this modern method actually began well over a decade earlier. Official German government registry books from the early 1900s were full of trademarks, Schutzmarken, by Peter Behrens (the father of corporate design for AEG), Lucian Bernhard, F.H. Ehmcke, Konrad Jochheim, Carl Schulpig and Valetin Zietara. Each created pictograms and graphic trade-characters that prefigured today’s international sign symbols. One of the most prolific of these mark makers is barely recognized in design histories today, except for the occasional footnote. His name is Wilhelm F. Deffke, cofounder with Carl Ernst Hinkefuss of Wilhelmwerk in Berlin."

[bsmask.livejournal.com]

very nice!

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