Max Bill's View of Things

The special exhibition Die gute Form, put on by the Swiss Werkbund (SWB) at the Basel trade fair in 1949, was an event that caused a furor far beyond Switzerland's borders. The renowned architect, designer, and graphic artist Max Bill was the mastermind behind the idea and personally selected the exhibits and designed their setting. Eighty exhibition panels showed consumer objects of exemplary design, from a teacup to the jet plane. Bill recognized the emerging, American-style com- modity aesthetic that was making inroads into Switzerland and postwar Europe and sought to confront it with a specifically "Swiss" aesthetic shaped by a desire to create long-lasting forms. This publication documents Bill's initiative by presenting the original exhibition panels and Ernst Scheidegger's photographs of the installation, places this famous design show in a theoretical and design-historical context, examines its background, and creates a link to the publishing house's first publication from 1983.