Digital Guide

4
Designing with New Materials

Anni Albers wrote extensively about material and its centrality in the creative process. “For as material alone gives reality to art, we will, in forming it, come to know those forces which are at work in any creation.”

Albers was an objective observer of the world around her, looking for potential new materials in unexpected places. In 1934, she told an editor at Arts and Decoration how she had unravelled a hat in order to try its cellophane fibres in a new fabric she was designing. She made experimental textile samples over decades, testing out combinations of natural and synthetic fibres including straw, jute, cotton, silk, wool, chenille, metallic threads, plastic, and cellophane. In her novel constructions, she pushed opposing dynamics of rough-smooth, dull-shiny, hard-soft.

When designing fabrics for industry, Albers adopted strategies that emphasized visual tactility. The burnout fabrics she designed for Sunar and S-Collection, as well as the printed designs she made for Knoll, are rhythmic and multilayered. When she turned her attention to paper, as in the Mountainous series, it became a three-dimensional object in itself, rather than simply a support.

For Anni Albers, contact with material was at the heart of what it means to be human: “We touch things to assure ourselves of reality. We touch the objects of our love. We touch the things we form. Our tactile experiences are elemental.”

Reconstructions of the wall-covering textile for the auditorium of the Federal School of the General German Trade Union in Bernau

Anni Albers described her 1929 silver wall-covering textile as “an intriguing kind of textile engineering.” Three attempts to recreate this handwoven material based on surviving fragments capture the wall-covering’s original appearance and construction, and, at the same time, demonstrate the difficulty of remaking this textile, or any unique object, accurately.

Handwoven Experimental Samples

Like architecture, textiles are formed by a constructive process, built up from separate parts to create a whole, while retaining their identity. A rough natural fibre like jute contributes its stiff structural properties, while shiny metallic threads glitter under the shifting qualities of light. Together they resonate, both practical and ephemeral. Albers believed that design problems should be solved in the hands. She created multiple handwoven samples for any given project— whether wall coverings, display and clothing fabrics, or drapery and casement materials—searching for the most effective, and pleasing solutions.

In 1939, architect Marcel Breuer commissioned Anni Albers to create fabrics for a large home he and former Bauhaus director, Walter Gropius, were designing in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The clients, Robert and Cecelia Frank, selected Albers’s pink chenille and copper wall-covering material for the main bedroom. The fabric covered an entire wall behind the low bed, catching the light through the window and creating a warm and sparkling effect at all times of day and night.

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