Abstract
Otto Neurath: The Language of the Global Polis, while focusing on the work of a single individual, sheds light on an important strand of modernist urban planning, museum practice and visual communication. Nader Vossoughian’s book, initially a hardback catalogue published in 2008 to accompany an exhibition and workshops entitled “After Neurath: The Global Polis” at the Hague in the Netherlands, reflects a growing interest in Neurath’s work in community activism, museum policy and graphic design.
Neurath is well known as a key member of the Vienna Circle of logical positivists, but his work as the director of the Viennese Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum (Museum of Society and Economy) and a leader in the Austrian community planning and garden movement has received less attention. Vossoughian argues that Neurath’s experiments in self-help urbanism, collaborations with the Congrés Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) and especially his invention of an international symbolic graphic language (International System of Typographic Picture Education or ISOTYPE) are of growing relevance to contemporary spatial and cultural discourse. Four other scholarly publications in English in the past five years focusing on Neurath’s contributions to community planning and visual communication support Vossoughian’s claims.
The book’s three chapters, entitled Community, Democracy and Globalism, explore Neurath’s main political, social and aesthetic preoccupations. The first examines his ideas about the modern metropolis and communal economy (Gemeinwirtschaft); the second examines his creation of a ‘mass-produced’ museum and the emergence of the ISOTYPE as a form of global visual communication; and the third follows the internationalisation of his urban and visual strategies through collaborations with Paul Otlet on his Cité Mondiale project and CIAM on its Functional City conference.
The first chapter charts the efforts of Neurath and his colleagues to sustain a self-help Viennese urban economy in the ‘Red Vienna’ period after the First World War. In his role as a Viennese housing administrator and co-founder of several urban settlement organisations, Neurath adapted Ferdinand Tönnies’ concepts of Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society) to integrate grass-roots barter economies within the formal bureaucracies of the modern city. His participatory ‘gypsy urbanism’ [sic] adopted industrial methods of mass production, mass publication, exhibition and educational programming to share information and expand citizen participation in urban settlements, but the low-cost, mass-produced housing and semi-autonomous communities that emerged were not sustainable when the Austrian market economy revived.
The second chapter follows Neurath’s career after he refocused his energies on mass communication, museum education and exhibition. As Director of the Museum of Society and Economy in Vienna, Neurath encouraged the public to understand design, architecture and urban planning not through aesthetics or style but through social and material forces. He believed that museums could help construct Gemeinschaft by providing a visual vocabulary—a system of metaphors—through which a community could come to understand itself. The Museum’s Department of Transformation created a system of graphic symbols called ISOTYPE (International System of Typographic Picture Education) to present research (data) as printed visual material to a broad public. Neurath’s adoption of mass production and publication in exhibition design allowed the Museum’s exhibits to be transported to multiple physical settings and “copied everywhere without loss of value” (p. 79). ISOTYPE examples are richly present in this chapter, but unfortunately neither the role of Gerd Arntz, who created literally thousands of ISOTYPE signs, nor the broader history of modernist graphic design and visual communication are examined in detail.
Beginning with an ISOTYPE image of men in colonial khaki uniform and indigenous costume, the third chapter examines the internationalisation of the Museum of Economy and Society and ISOTYPE through two Neurath collaborations—with Paul Otlet on the Cité Mondiale (Global City) and with CIAM on its Functional City conference. The Otlet collaboration also involved Neurath working with Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret on the Mundaneum, a proposal for a city as repository of global information representing the ‘state of the world’, including a ziggurat-shaped World Museum. Creative differences between Otlet and Neurath (who also disliked Le Corbusier) and the stock market crash ended the collaboration but led Neurath to open, at the Museum for Economy and Society, a Vienna Mundaneum responsible for the Museum’s international exhibitions programme. It in turn influenced the creation of the Isostat Institute in Moscow where Neurath worked and whose graphic charts are included among the book’s illustrations; Neurath by then had forged institutional links across Europe and North America.
The Isostat and Mundaneum projects connected Neurath with CIAM, and specifically with Cornelius van Eesteren, who shared Neurath’s interest in visual communication and standardisation of graphic information as collaborative tool. Neurath advised the 1933 CIAM conference in Athens on graphic communication standards, particularly relating to urban planning. However, his adaptation for publication of materials submitted to the CIAM conference did not materialise; further collaborations with CIAM were beset with tensions stemming from political differences between Neurath and CIAM leaders like Siegfried Giedion and Walter Gropius. Although by the 1940s Jose Luis Sert cited the Museum of Economy and Society as an important CIAM influence, Neurath’s frictions with CIAM stemmed from his commitment to participatory communication that was at odds with a growing disenchantment by Le Corbusier, Gropius and others with positivism, as well as with their growing anxiety—during the rise of Nazism—about CIAM and political activity.
As one would expect of an exhibition catalogue, Otto Neurath: The Language of the Global Polis is well produced and richly illustrated. Written for the general reader, it is accessible but its broad historical and theoretical interpretations are limited. Vossoughian does refer to Peter Bürger’s writings on the autonomy of the avant-garde (Bürger, 1984), Benjamin Buchloh’s essays on faktura and factography (Buchloh, 1984), Walter Benjamin’s distracted reception of photography and film (Benjamin, 1968) and Benedict Anderson’s work on imagined communities (Anderson, 1983) to situate Neurath the urbanist and curator within the modernist tradition of critique of the autonomy of culture. As Vossoughian argues, although Neurath’s urban initiatives and museum exhibits were not cutting edge artistically, they were radical in their serial reproducibility, providing a social critique of both the city and the museum as institutions. Arguing that the Museum for Society and Economy “used the language of mass advertising to promote the project of social and political Enlightenment” (p. 145), Vossoughian identifies Neurath’s urban, political and cultural engagement through mass communication as a model for urban planners, architects, artists and curators today. He proposes that Neurath’s ideas about participatory democracy and visual communication resonate with the explosive growth of digital media, pervasiveness of visual imagery and expansion of the knowledge economy, presenting us with important communication tools for community building and urban planning.