In 1947, the “father of Modern Aspen” Walter Paepcke commissioned artist Herbert Bayer to design an atlas.
This was two years after World War II, and two years before Paepcke founded the Aspen Institute, which Bayer helped design.
The book was supposed to be a promotional gift, marking the 25th anniversary of Paepcke’s cardboard box company, the Container Corporation of America.
But by the time the atlas was released in 1953 — two years after the anniversary deadline — Bayer’s final “World Geo-Graphic Atlas” proved to be far more than a marketing tool.
Like any atlas, it has maps and charts about geography. But it’s also a 368-page monument of graphic design that promotes environmental conservation and international collaboration while reflecting the Bauhaus style that shaped Bayer’s work.
“One of the real legacies of the atlas is the way in which Bayer tries out all different types of strategies to make complex information accessible and engaging and exciting for general audiences,” said Benjamin Benus, the author of “Herbert Bayer's World Geo-Graphic Atlas and Information Design at Midcentury.”
This summer, the atlas is the inspiration for an exhibition across multiple buildings on the Aspen Institute campus, including a deep dive at the Resnick Center for Herbert Bayer Studies titled “Concept of a Visualist: Herbert Bayer’s World Geo-Graphic Atlas.” Benus curated the show with Bernard Jazzar, a Bayer expert and curator of the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Collection.
An interactive exhibit about the atlas is also on view at the Institute’s Doerr-Hosier Center. “Charting Space: Herbert Bayer’s World Geo-Graphic Atlas at 70” is curated by the Resnick Center’s Penner Manager of Educational Programming Andrew Travers; it’s intended for all ages but is particularly suitable for K-12 students. The installation includes an 8-foot, walk-in recreation of Bayer’s “Outside-In Globe” that encourages people to make connections between seemingly distant places.
“Concept of a Visualist” officially opened on June 20. Kaya Williams spoke with Benus about the atlas and what it says about the past and present.
Benjamin Benus: It's very much a historical document that reflects certain attitudes of the period. It comes out in the early years of the Cold War.
And so while Herbert Bayer stated that his aim was to present a picture of the world as one, to present a kind of global picture of the world, it's still very much framed in Cold War terms — that, you know, it's a kind of competition between these two models of human civilization, that in the Atlas is described as the the free world or the Soviet model. And so in that way, it really reflects attitudes of the period.
But there are also other ways in which it's quite exceptional. And I think its emphasis on looming environmental crises, and its provocation to the readers to think about the kinds of actions and measures that they can take in response to crises like the depletion of natural resources, or overpopulation — in that way, it's quite exceptional as an atlas.
Williams: It strikes me, another theme here is this intersection of art and science. You've mentioned environmental crises that are reflected here. What role does art play in science and vice versa today that we might have seen reflected in this atlas, then?
Benus: Yeah, I think one of the lessons of this exhibition is that audiences’ views of the world — the way they understand geography, the way they understand fields like meteorology — are largely shaped or mediated by artists and designers, that they are a key component in the communication between experts who do the research and have the raw data and audiences who consume that data.
And it's really up to designers and artists to figure out how to deliver that. And I think the exhibition asks audiences to think about that. And I think the atlas itself in lots of ways — one of its aims was to kind of cultivate, sort of ,information literacy and get audiences to think about the role of the designer in presenting information.
Williams: Lots of conversation about information literacy today and media literacy today. Do you think that there's lessons that we stand to learn from this?
Benus: For me, one of the most important lessons — and I think it's a lesson that Bayer himself learned in the process of working on the Atlas — is the importance of the designer cultivating a certain appreciation and understanding for the material, the information that they're tasked to present to the public.
Obviously, the designer is not going to become an expert, but to the extent possible, [they need] to really understand the material, and that it's important for experts to understand what designers are doing, the design process, and to think about how the material that they want to present to the public might translate into a design.
Williams: Would you say this book contains any calls to action, so to speak?
Benus: Very much so. And in fact, Bayer’s very specific in listing a whole series of ideas about measures that people could take, or that governments could take in response to depletion of resources, different methods of farming, switching to different forms of energy, utilizing hydroelectric power.
He has a kind of a whole bulleted list at the end of the Atlas in the section that deals with environmental crises. But I think one really important point he makes is that it's a global issue and that it's got to be solved collectively. And I think that was something that was quite original and new for the time and really distinguished the Atlas from its counterparts: this idea that the call to action would have to be a collective one.
