Engineering meets art, TU Dortmund

The exhibition Engineering meets art results from an interdisciplinary project led at the Technical University of Dortmund. It was organized on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Bio- and Chemical Engineering Faculty. This project aimed at creating works mixing arts and engineering and thus through the collaboration of students from different fields.

The exhibition booklet designed by KoeperHerfurth re-interprets the codes of technical drawings and schemes, sometimes out of pure aesthetics, while in other pages smartly transposing hierarchies associated to electrical circuits into texts. These codes are reinforced by the use of Kreuz from Production Type, a typeface directly inspired by the industrial world, which we find back in its faceted curves reminiscent of nuts and bolts. The black-and-white layout of the booklet also brings an austerity that we usually find in cheaply printed manuals, confirmed by the use of sober and direct Univers.

However, the few pages where the usual black type on white paper is reversed to show thin white lines on a black background, bring elegance and a somehow mysterious aspect that is often felt when we face scientific problems beyond our reach. The functional legibility of manuals gives place to cryptic maps, whose hidden significations we aren’t able to apprehend. The images of the artworks are at the same time an elucidation and a deeper mystery, as the strangeness of the shapes question even more the possibilities of science.