For reasons not immediately obvious, 2009 is shaping up to be the British Year of Le Corbusier. RIBA has launched a season of exhibitions, talks, debates and workshops, including the 1:1 scale reconstruction of Le Corbusier’s seaside retreat, the Cabanon. The lynchpin of all this activity is Le Corbusier: The Art of Architecture at the Barbican Centre, London; the restaging of the show created by Vitra that has previously appeared in Holland, Germany, Portugal and Liverpool. The London exhibition is a markedly different experience to its predecessors, however, and this is mainly down to the work of one of London’s most consistently interesting and ambitious graphic design companies, Bibliothèque. The east London studio has not only created a graphic identity that reflects Le Corbusier’s work and the monumental, concrete setting of the Barbican, but has moved further into three-dimensions by designing elements of the exhibition itself.

Creating a new identity for a pre-existing show about one of the giants of modernism is an intimidating challenge, but Bibliothèque took to the project with enthusiasm. ‘Luckily, the subject matter was rich with inspiration: using Le Corbusier’s vast body of work and the Barbican‘s thorough guidelines as our starting point, we then looked for a relevant visual hook,’ says Bibliothèque co-founder Jonathan Jeffrey. One of the central inspirations for the project was the discovery that Le Corbusier and his studio used the stencil typeface Charette for the cover of several books, as well as for titles and captioning of agency documents. ‘To this day, the metallic stencil frames sold to architects in the US are known as Corbu stencils,’ says Jeffrey.

Bringing the subject and the setting together, Bibliothèque has set the title, Le Corbusier, in a modified stencil version of the Barbican typeface, Futura.Concrete forms the project’s second vital motif, as the material most associated with Le Corbusier’s architectural work and, of course, especially relevant to the exhibition’s location at the Barbican. ‘Something that interested us was how Le Corbusier used concrete in different ways, creating different textures and effects through process,’ says Jeffrey. The studio was particularly taken by Le Corbusier’s casting of concrete to create relief illustrations, such as that of Modular Man at the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille. The stencil logo lent itself to this technique, and Bibliothèque cast it into concrete to create an identity that could be used across all marketing materials. This vocabulary has also been used throughout the exhibition design. ‘We really enjoy doing that when we can. It’s a 3D graphic, and I like the fact that it can translate into an environment, it works on many levels,’ says Jeffrey, who also sees the move into exhibition design as a natural extension of the studio’s graphic work. ‘Ultimately we embrace it and just have a go. You need to stretch out of your comfort zone, consult with people and then you find the points of reference you need to actually construct a 3D object,’ he says.
 

Photograph by Lyndon Douglas

For the project, Bibliotheque found ways to blend Vitra’s travelling show with the Barbican’s own graphics and the new marketing material. This included creating all the captioning, the blow-up imagery and key navigational sections which take the form of large-scale 3D graphics such as the title wall at beginning of the show, and boards throughout that announce the different sections. The project marks a further development of Bibliothèque’s first venture into exhibition design for the V&A’s Cold War Modern which ended in January this year. ‘There was a connection for us to get this job,’ says Jeffrey. ’We are very interested in post-war modernism and consider our work to be the continuation of that kind of thinking.’ For the design of the V&A exhibition, Bibliothèque worked with architectural practice Universal Design Studio. Among various inspired methods of display, they created a world map based on Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes. They also found an elegant solution to the problem of archive photography, which could often be crude and low-resolution, by converting it to a coarse dot screen. It established a consistent aesthetic for the exhibition, while at the same time reflecting the print-production processes of the era.

Founded five years ago by Jeffrey, Mason Wells and Tim Beard, Bibliothèque has already amassed an impressive portfolio of projects. Previous clients include Nike, Adidas, Tate Modern and the Design Council. Apart from the quality of the work, what makes Bibliothèque stand out is its tendency to work with creative clients and its engagement with a broad variety of subject matter. A particular example is its work with the London Sinfonietta, one of the country’s best classical and contemporary orchestras, for whom Bibliothèque created a logo and identity based around swirling lines of varying thickness. Jeffrey describes the orchestra as heroes and the studio turned directly to the music for graphic inspiration. ‘Its music can be very gentle and also very challenging and dense. So the symbol evokes this duality, with the lines stretching out at times and at others getting very close and dense. Without getting into an animated logo, we went with something which is implying movement, without having to change over the years,’ he says. This same technique of understanding the important elements of a client’s output has now been brought to bear on The Barbican and Le Corbusier, with characteristically bold and elegant results. Pictures of the exhibition can be seen below. 

Le Corbusier: The Art of Architecture  is on show at the Barbican Art Gallery, 19 February-24 May 
 

Photograph by Lyndon Douglas

Photograph by Lyndon Douglas

Photograph by Lyndon Douglas