Zwei Wohnhäuser von Le Corbusier und Pierre Jeanneret by Alfred Roth
This book showcases two houses designed by Le Corbusier together with his cousin Pierre Jeanneret, a single-family house and a semi-detached house. It was published in 1927 for the exhibition of the Weissenhof Estate organized by the Deutscher Werkbund in Stuttgart, and was authored by Swiss architect Alfred Roth (1903–1998) who at that time worked for Le Corbusier and Jeanneret. Zwei Wohnhäuser includes Le Corbusier’s “Five Points to a New Architecture” and a foreword by Hans Hildebrandt. It has 48 pages measuring 29.5×21 cm and was published by Akademischer Verlag Dr. Fr. Wedekind & Co., Stuttgart. For the fiftieth anniverary in 1977, Karl Krämer Verlag issued a facsimile edition, with a foreword by Roth (“Memories of the Construction of the Weissenhof Estate”).
For the typography of the cover and the title page, Willi Baumeister exclusively worked with Fette Venus-Grotesk, the extrabold weight of Bauer’s modernist sans serif. Note the double-story g in the publisher’s credit. This form was shown in a specimen from around 1915, alongside the single-story one that later became the default. None of the currently available digitizations of Venus includes the fett weight. The next best thing probably is Rod McDonald’s Classic Grotesque Bold, which offers an alternate form for a, but not for g, and Font Bureau’s Vonness.
Another detail you may note is Jeanneret’s name on the cover: it’s accidentally spelled with two a’s – an oopsie that neither Baumeister nor the publisher caught before going to print. The typo was fixed in a second printing from 1928.
The text typeface is Alt-Mediäval.
Title page
Photography by Dr. Lossen & Co., i.e. Otto Lossen (1875–1938)
Venus fett is used for headlines and page numbers, and Alt-Mediäval for the justified text, with outdents to mark the paragraph beginnings and increased letterspacing to highlight the keywords
Imprint with a closer look on Alt-Mediäval. Note the tightly spaced pairs for ch and ck, which were available as ligature sorts.
4 Comments on “Zwei Wohnhäuser von Le Corbusier und Pierre Jeanneret by Alfred Roth”
This undated (1910s) Bauer specimen suggests that the two forms for g in Venus fett maybe weren’t intended as stylistic alternates, but rather considered size-specific forms. On this page and throughout the booklet, the single-story form exclusively appears in smaller sizes, while the more complex double-story g exclusively features in larger ones.
The image of pp. 10–11 above clearly depicts the evolution of the design of the famous Aluminaire House by A. Lawrence Kocher & Albert Frey who was formerly in Corbusier’s atelier in the late 1920's. The Aluminaire, a home designed by Albert Frey, to be moved from NY to Palm Springs
Classic Grotesque does offer the alternate /g. It’s even in the MyFonts glyph table linked (a bug sometimes prevents the table from being loaded entirely—maybe that was the issue here). The Classic Grotesque /g is less expressive than the Venus one, though, with a closed loop and more restrained proportions.
Thanks for correcting my mistake, Johannes!
That might indeed have been the case – I specifically checked and linked to the glyphs tab. (At this point, the average indie foundry does a better job at providing reliable info about their fonts than Monotype.)
Anyway, Classic Grotesque is only indirectly related to Venus, as it rather follows Monotype Grotesque. And its double-story g doesn’t have the same vigor as the idiosyncratic form found in Venus.