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Bruno Margreth

Awarded

Bruno Margreth

Several publications

Graphic Design

Jurybericht - Rapport du jury - Rapporto della giuria - Jury report

Monumental Monographs in Architecture
What does one ex­pect of a book that shows hun­dreds of pho­tographs of a town in the Can­ton of Zürich? Cross my heart! It is not likely to be a knock­out. Zürich graphic artist Bruno Mar­greth proves oth­er­wise in his pub­li­ca­tion Wädenswil 001-555. He de­lib­er­ately toys with a cer­tain of­fi­cial deco­rum by plac­ing Wädenswil's red and yel­low coat of arms on the cover, in the mid­dle, on a blue ground. But the num­bers in the title belie that im­pres­sion. Open the cover and in­side you will find 555 pho­tographs of a town on the left shore of Lake Zürich, word­lessly ar­rayed like a kind of col­lec­tive mem­ory. The text is en­tirely sep­a­rate. This un­usual di­vi­sion piques the reader's cu­rios­ity by sub­vert­ing the con­ven­tion of adding a cap­tion to each pic­ture. This is char­ac­ter­is­tic of Mar­greth's con­cep­tual ap­proach. Trained in ty­po­graphic de­sign in Bern, he has been teach­ing at the Zürich Uni­ver­sity of the Fine Arts for sev­eral years. The mono­graph on ar­chi­tect Va­le­rio Ol­giati demon­strates Mar­greth's skill in bring­ing ar­chi­tec­ture to life in book form. The thick, ob­ject-like book is strik­ing in sev­eral re­spects; just pick­ing it up re­quires phys­i­cal strength. The con­spic­u­ously flaw­less white slip­case, the use of one sin­gle type of paper, the 'naked' spine bear­ing the beau­ti­ful em­bell­ish­ment of the col­lat­ing marks: the book is like a built ob­ject, im­pres­sively ar­chi­tec­tural in its de­sign. Even with­out being fa­mil­iar with the work of Ol­giati, an ar­chi­tect from the Grisons, and with­out hav­ing read any of the texts, the book clearly com­mu­ni­cates the char­ac­ter of his build­ings. For a vol­ume of es­says by Elis­a­beth Bron­fen, a pro­fes­sor of Eng­lish and Amer­i­can stud­ies, Mar­greth de­cided to print all of the il­lus­tra­tions in black-and-white, thereby sub­or­di­nat­ing them to the text and em­pha­siz­ing the book as a work tool. The cover flap can be used as a book­mark. De­spite its sub­stan­tial 536 pages, the book is nei­ther un­wieldy nor too heavy.
Peter Stohler

Biography

Bruno Margreth
Born in
1973
Education
Typografischer Gestalter

Web

www.brunomargreth.ch

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