Sudjic Deyan. B is for Bauhaus

Rizzoli International Publications, 2015. — 350 p. — ISBN-13: 978-0-8478-4552-1The book is far from dead. The tactile values of ink on paper, of carefully designed covers, of lavish typography and production quality retain their appeal in a world which is still charmed by the analogue, despite the triumph of the digital. But I am not so sure about the dictionary, which does indeed look as if its print format is moribund. Seven years ago, at just about the time I became the director of the Design Museum in London, I signed a contract with my current British publisher to do two books. The first, titled the Language of Things, came relatively easily. It gave me the chance to explore the various messages, from gender to politics, that design can express. Book two was more of a problem. The commission was to deliver a massive 250,000-word conventional dictionary of design.
It was daunting, and it took a while to get started – by hiring an assistant to get into the research. But a couple of years later my publisher’s managing director called me:
“People have stopped buying dictionaries,” he said. “There is this thing called Wikipedia. Of course you can keep the advance, and if you really want to, go ahead and do a dictionary. But really, you might think about something else.”
And there it was: the dictionary had become the first victim of the digital explosion in publishing.
B is for Bauhaus, Y is for YouTube is what finally emerged from that hiatus. And it isn’t a dictionary. The dictionary once gave the appearance of objectivity; but few dictionaries have been read for pleasure. B is for Bauhaus … takes the apparently banal format of an alphabetically ordered A-to-Z to structure a series of essays that explores what are, at least for me, some of the essential ideas that underpin the meanings of contemporary design and architecture.