Here’s a terrific poster from France. It’s in a combination of styles – there’s a bit of art deco (the cinema style lettering at the bottom) and a bit of more modernist photo and information design (the engine and the route map).
It’s the kind of poster that could only have been produced in France, where issues of economy and rationalism in design are compromised by the desire for some kind of style.
You can date the image by the style of loco, the lettering and the use of photography.
Look at the locomotive carefully. It’s derived from a photograph and printed using a half-tone screen. In Germany, they would have retained the authenticity of the photograph. In Russia, they would have drawn the photograph by hand, to make a claim for realism. In France, they used photography and have manipulated it to provide a sensation of mass and speed. A kind of visual and poetic velocity…
You can easily imagine this as a proto-typical bit of photo-mechanical composition – all diagonals, machine-set type and a more generic sans face. Hat’s off to N (whoever that is) for these two posters.
It’s worth contrasting this poster with A M Cassandre’s more famous Nord Express poster from 1927.
I was just sorting some postcards this morning, and found this one of Rouen station in France. So, this is a post about the art nouveau railway station in France.
Anyone who has built a train set knows that, whatever its extent, the lay-out is built up of standard parts. You can get whole catalogues of this stuff and they’re quite interesting in themselves.
Big railway systems are made in the same way! The smaller stations are generic and have the standard buildings and the usual arrangements of platforms and track etc. Things get more interesting when the the train arrives at the larger provincial cities.
In France the railway was laid out at a slightly later time than in the UK. Accordingly, the style of architecture is from both a different tradition and from a different period of design history…
The bigger railway stations are significant civic buildings. Probably only second in importance to the town hall in the projection of civic identity. Whereas the town hall generally addresses itself to the inhabitants of the city; the railway station is aimed at impressing visitors.
The station at Rouen was designed by Adolphe Devaux and built between 1913 and 1928. The hiatus of the Great War 1914-1918 obviously interrupted and delayed proceedings. The building is interesting because, nothwithstanding its eccentric style, it was constructed of steel frame and reinforced concrete.
The use of reinforced concrete allowed the concourse area at Rouen to be placed above the platform and tracks. The foot-print of the station was, in consequence, greatly reduced. Implicit in the reduced foot-print of the building is the speed, convenience and efficiency of the system – for both railway and passengers. You can sense that time is money.
Rouen was a tentative kind of prototype of the vertically integrated stack stations of modernist imagination. The vertical integration of transport infrastructure was first proposed by the Italian Futurist architect, Antonio Sant’Elia in 1907.
You can read about these developments in Steven Parissien’s history of railway architecture Station to Station (1997).
What is art nouveau? Well, it’s an architectural and design style. It comes in the second half of the 19C. The style uses modern materials and engineering to push the limits of gothic style elongation. At the same time the style incorporates the sinuous forms of the organic. These are further exaggerated through the asymmetric arrangements of mass and decoration. The style was widely understood, in its extreme forms, as transgressive of the classical “norms” of architectural good taste…
Of course, the station at Rouen is a good deal later than the high-point of art nouveau. Accordingly, it’s representative of a style that’s been assimilated into the civic mainstream.
In London, the Horniman museum and the Whitechapel Gallery are representative of this style of building.
If you want to see what art nouveau station architecture looks like, go to Limoges or to Paris. In Paris, the metro station openings by Hector Guimard are the best example of this.
Guimard conceptualised an integrated system of glass, metal and typographic elements that could be assembled to provide consistent, but individual, stations.
You can see the same logic, but bigger, in the metal and glass canopy of the reading room of the Bibliotheque Nationale , Paris.
The most interesting contemporary example of vertical integration is in Berlin’s new main line railway station. The Berlin station combines the vertical arrangement of moderist proposals with the scale Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace, of 1851, and with the parabolic complexity of the Bibliotheque Nationale. A great contemporary synthesis.
Here is a photograph of a railway crossing. This is where two sets of track cross over each other. This is a bit unusual as there isn’t a junction in the cross-over. The result is that there the rails have a very pleasing, sharp, geometry. Also, this geometry gives the railway a sort of sparkle, or dazzle.
This is exactly like the optical effects favoured by the Futurist and Vorticist artists at the beginning of the 20C.
Implicit in the low point-of-view is a visual reference to Cassandre’s famous poster.
The most famous cross-over in britain is just outside Newcastle station. here’s a postcard view
This is a post about art and trains. This is a post about Albert Brenet. He was a French artist who specialised in images of ships and trains and in a kind of graphic reportage throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Albert Brenet deserves to be better known.
I can just about recall these kinds of posters in France. The new overhead electric powered trains set new standards in post-war Europe for speed, comfort and sophistication…I even had a French model railway layout when I was small!
Painting railways is more complex than it seems. If you can draw engines, ships or planes, it is quite easy to make a decent living. Brenet did better than that. He travelled the world producing images that helped recast France as the global leader of sophistication. His images have just enough of Raoul Duffy in them…
You can contrast the style of his pictures with, say, the English artists Norman Wilkinson and Terrence Cuneo. There’s more light and colour for sure.
Just to show that Brenet was good at all sorts of things – here’s a cut-away of a steam engine.
Most of these images have a lovely typeface based on a woodblock type. I’ll get Phil to help me identify it precisely. It’s definitely pretty sophisticated in a French way.
It’s January, and we are beginning to plan our summer expedition. Karen and me only travel by train – no driving or flying…So, the choice is limited.
The plan, this year, is to go to Istanbul by train. Not on any fancy-dan service; but by using the main scheduled services. Basically, this will take us to Paris, Frankfurt, Vienna, Budapest, Bucharest and then down the Black Sea coast. We’ll have a few days in Turkey and then come back via Greece, the Adriatic, Italy and Switzerland…
Obviously, we will have to get off the train and sample the delights of each of these places. Otherwise we will just be doing miles. Each stop should have a decent restaurant and a lovely hotel for starters, If there’s a museum or old palace to visit, so much the better.
There’s a terrific website with all sorts of practical train information on it, here
http://www.seat61.com/Turkey.htm
The basic deal is to get an adult inter-rail ticket and to buy various up-grades for sleeper and high-speed services. The journey starts quick and gets slower as you near Istanbul. It will be an adventure.
Of course, part of the fun is planning all this and finding out what to see and do and where to eat.
This film-still shows Spencer Tracy by the tracks in the John Sturges film, Bad Day at Black Rock (1955). The film combines elements of the western and film noir genres. It’s got a terrific title sequence of the huge diesel-powered train thundering through the Arizona desert. You can watch the opening of the film, here
You can tell something bad is going to happen even as the title sequence begins. The train powers along and seems unstoppable. The townsfolk are clearly surprised as the train makes an unscheduled stop. A one-armed stranger gets off…
The film is shot in Cinemascope and processed in Eastmancolor, so it has a wide-angle aspect ratio that does justice to the huge landscapes of the American South West. The Eastmancolor has the distinctive colour palette of the 1950s.
This is a post that looks back to the first week of CSM’s School of Communication, Product and Spatial Design Bigger Picture unit. This is a cross-school element for all stage two students.
The unit kicked off with a series of lectures. During the week, there were a number of questions about the relationship between design and the future. Design is a 21C mechanism for managing the material surpluses of industrial capitalism. We can describe the development of the system in terms of a movement from subsistence to desire and from planned-obsolescence to design.
At the same time, the organisation of industrial capitalism requires concentrations of labour and materials. In the early days of the industrial revolution, people moved from the country to the cities because of improved earning power and opportunity. The early (pre-20C) limits on the size of cities was defined by the tendency for concentrations of people to result in widespread disease.
Improvements to water supply, sanitation, housing, transport and communications have each allowed cities to grow. The global economy will be defined, in the 21C, by various mega-cities as populations vote with their feet and move towards opportunity.
In the 21C, the limits to growth are more likely to come from transport issues rather than from anywhere else – the healthcare and communication issues are more-or-less sorted. Accordingly, the mega-city will be shaped by both population density and transport infrastructure.
Generally, transport links will be positioned in a corridor and this will tend to attract development along its length. So, the shape of big cities is likely to become more elongated – we can call this the linear city.
In the UK, the high speed railway between London and East Kent is the first go at trying to recreate the motorway corridors that powered the economies of the late 20C. In East Kent, the time taken to travel to London has more-or-less halved to just under an hour. That’s like picking up Folkestone and putting it where Tonbridge is. In practical terms and over the next few years, the experience of living in Folkestone will become much less isolated and will become more like living in London. That’s if you define living in London as being within an hour of central London.
Obviously, there are many places to look for glimpses of the future. It’s all around us, amongst the architectural and design avant-garde and in science fiction. Vienna, Paris, Chicago and Milton Keynes can all lay claim, at various moments in history, to be representations of the future. Further back there are shining-cities-on-hills and model-communities – diggers and levellers.
If you’re interested in all this, there’s an exhibition at the Royal Academy about efforts to build something different in the USSR.
Remember, the point of design is to change the world.
I’ve already posted about the idea of safety on the trains and how dangerous they seem to be. Now, I want to consider why we are so fascinated by accidents. They’re always on the news, and it’s almost impossible to resist the temptation to rubber-knech when we see wreckage!
My own guess is that our interest in accidents devolves from our understanding of modern society as a consistent and standard environment. An accident is, whatever the frequency of its occurrence, a non-standard event. Therefore, we are intrigued by it and want to stop it happening in the future.
In part, this interest comes from the trade off between the systemic regularity of modern society, with the associated feelings of safety, and our own feeing that the system forces a kind of regularity, or consistency, of behavior upon us. The accident reminds us of what happens when we misbehave.
A sort of modernist reworking of keeping to the straight and narrow…
The Folkestone Model Engineering Society held their annual exhibition at the week-end. It was their 40th birthday and they pulled out all the stops…
The show comprises lots of stands with people selling books, models and tools. In the centre of the room there are show lay-outs from all over the country. Prizes are given for best-in-show and so on.
Quite apart from the trains, there are several interesting things to see at this kind of event. My special interest is in the trees. There is a whole sub-branch of the railway model scene which is about trees.
The reason for this is that many people like to make a lay-out of some country branch line, or junction. Obviously, in the context of rural Britain, there is is plenty of scope for trees.
The level of detail in the show lay-out can only be described as “exquisite.”
I would say that model railways are probably where fine art was in about 1850! The show acts as a kind of salon where only certain kinds of lay-out are allowed. At the moment the quality of the work and the forms of realism are of a “classical” kind. Digital sound effects are just beginning to make an impact, but there is no point-of-view interaction and no film effects.
I think the absence of “cinema” effects is really surprising. Particularly since, as I’ve posted before, there is a long and glorious association between cinema and railways.
Anyway, you can see various groups trying to move their lay-oiuts to a new level of realism. This usually involves extending the scope of the lay-out so that the surrounding area is also rendered in detail. The thinking is that more detail is necessarily better…It’s as though detail is an absolute measure of quality.
But this is nonsense. Think about literature for a moment. It is as if the writing of descriptive passages was thought of as more significant than the writing of character or plot. By attending to the detail, the models miss out on the feelings that are associated with the experience of the railway. Accordingly, the level of realism is actually diminished.
It took years for painting to resolve the traumas associated with realism. This was especially the case after photography case on the scene and hi-jacked the claims to realism that had been implicit in fine art.
If you want to find out about the history of art and the 19C development of realism, look at Linda Nochlin’s book.
Here’s a terrific poster from France. It’s in a combination of styles – there’s a bit of art deco (the cinema style lettering at the bottom) and a bit of more modernist photo and information design (the engine and the route map).
You can easily imagine this as a proto-typical bit of photo-mechanical composition – all diagonals, machine-set type and a more generic sans face. Hat’s off to N (whoever that is) for these two posters.
