Rene Knip: Ideas that can't wait

Graphis, May/Jun 2001 by Metz, Tracy

Rene Knip lives, thinks and designs in what he himself calls the second and a half dimension. This dimension has a physical manifestation, but perhaps even more important, it is also an attitude, a state of mind. The second and a half dimension is that intangible place where flatness and depth meet and merge. From this unknown place, products emerge-the designer calls them "typographic furniture," "spatial typography" or "architectural graphics." In this, everything relies on the relationship between the hole and the surrounding cardboard, or between the paper where there is ink and the paper where there is none. Enigmatic? Just wait.

"At art school I couldn't decide which direction to go in," says Knip (37) in his atelier, located at the rural northern edge of Amsterdam. The uncluttered double-height space has little furniture aside from a table, a mezzanine for the designer and his laptop, and a couple of astoundingly large, cumbersome, old-fashioned printing presses. "First I thought I wanted to be a painter, but halfway in my studies at the St. Joost Academy in Breda, and later at the Rijksacademie in Amsterdam, I discovered that I was actually more intrigued by graphics. Of course the 'free' artists regarded this as treason!" His love for signs and letters goes back further than he himself can remember. "My father saved my childhood sketchbooks, and you can see that even at three I was already fascinated by numbers and letters. The urge was always there." Knip moves through the world like a sponge, sketchbook and camera always at hand, bringing back inspiration from hand-stenciled signs from Java, tram's letterings, faded advertising slogans painted on a wall. "The street is the real library," he says.

At the academy, one of the teachers, the widely respected Dutch letter designer Chris Brands, had noticed his talent and offered to tutor him privately. Brands said, "First learn the craft, the artistry will come of its own accord. It's the same as in music, if you don't know what tonality is, you can't master atonality." Once a week Knip would go to Brands' studio, who would then mutter something like: "Too pretty," or, "Much too much, I can't see anything." He taught him abstraction, the power of the immaterial. Knip observes: "The philosopher Lao-Tse asked, `What is a vase? A vase is the space created for the water, for the flowers, but the vase itself is immaterial.' It's the same in architecture, you don't live in a wall, but in the space created with walls. Typography is just as much about the space between the letters as about the letters themselves."

Knip soon realized that traditional book typography, frozen as it is in two dimensions and with ink as its only material, would be too restrictive. "There are already so many dry Calvinist letters. I approach letters architecturally, poetically, I want them to keep, or to recover, their soul." For Hema, the Dutch household goods chain store, he designed an alphabet spelling out the names of traditional Dutch dishes on square blue or burnt orange tiles in a long line running all the way around the coffee shop. "This alphabet was designed with each letter equivalent in its square, the [I] fills the same space as the [W]. You can tell that this alphabet was made specifically for this purpose, not as a letter for headlines in the newspaper."

The same applies to a series of beautiful aluminum house numbers he made for the studio of Eveline Merckx to give away as gifts, one per box, together with a little foldout booklet. Their shape is reminiscent of the typography of the thirties; the sides of the numbers slant inwards, making it easier to remove them cleanly from the mold. "These numbers exist only in this material, in this size. They are not interchangeable with anything else." For a recent major commission, the yearbooks for the Dutch designers society BNO, he designed not one but many different alphabets, one for each discipline, and then a very straightforward phonebook-like register. The final result is extravagant, to say the least. Each of the six volumes has its own private riot of color and letters-letters that, we now know, are safely hidden away in Knip's laptop and will never be used elsewhere. Equally unique, in a totally different material for an entirely different function, is Knip's "Laundry Sans." He designed it for the large exhibition on Dutch graphic design "Mooi maar goed" ("Pretty but good") in 1999 at the Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum. The letters are made of thin bright green plastic with perforated tabs on the top, so that they can be hung by plastic envelope fasteners from a steel wire, evoking images of sheets flapping in the wind. "The Laundry Sans is perhaps the closest I have come yet to an immaterial alphabet: the letters are big and quite legible, but at the same time space can swirl through and around them." For another one-man exhibit that he hopes to do this summer in the Stedelijk he is going to print computer letters on the old press in his studio.