From inventing colours to designing the Olympic Games, we take a look at the extraordinary work of Otl Aicher

The close connection between the colour blue and the local colour of southern Germany reappeared 10 years later in another of Aicher’s projects. For the visual appearance of Munich Airport, Aicher and the architect and designer Eberhard Stauss, together with whom he had already worked during the 1972 Olympic Games, created a colour concept centred on the colour “airport blue light". As with the 1972 Olympic Games, which were conceived as the Games in the Green (i.e. in nature), Munich Airport was designed as an airport “in the green”. Aicher and Stauss once again derived the colours from the specific light and colour schemes of the Alpine foothills, with the radiant blue being characteristic of the “foehn-blown sky of Upper Bavaria”. This meant that the view from Munich was directed towards the south, towards the mountains – in other words, the landscape in which Aicher himself was living and working at the time. This light blue was complemented by a darker blue as well as white and silver. The arguments behind the colour choices were provided in short texts and sketches printed in the 1981 design guidelines for the airport, even before the actual colours were applied. Technology, landscape, culture and winter are named as “parameters” and described almost poetically. Here, the “parameter technology” is described as “Above white clouds, an aluminium-silver aggregate moves in exceedingly bright light”. And the “parameter winter” is presented as a "Silver light, white snow, blue distance already engender an inner liberation as a colour scheme”. How the interplay of colours changes with differing hues and tints, how silver and white increase the “appearance of blue” and “make it shine", is illustrated in the design guidelines through various combinations. The way in which the colours are arranged in individual horizontal bars, one below the other, had already been implemented by Aicher and his team in the print material for the 1972 Olympic Games. It is reminiscent of American colour field painting, for example the unbroken surfaces and flat fields of colour of the artist Mark Rothko. The panels for the exhibition Wilhelm von Ockham, which were created in 1985/86 and thus belong to Aicher’s late work, were also divided into horizontal stripes of differing colours; the pictorial space, as well as figurative and architectural motifs, were composed of colour fields. Aicher’s work was probably never more colourful than this.

Nevertheless, the intensive examination of the theme of colour can already be observed in Aicher’s early works. The posters he designed for the Ulm Volkshochschule in the 1950s and 1960s were characterised by an abundance of shapes and colours. During his time as a lecturer at the Ulm School of Design (Hochschule für Gestaltung, HfG), which he founded together with Inge Aicher-Scholl and the architect, designer and artist Max Bill in 1953, he dealt comprehensively and systematically with colour in individual projects. For BASF, Aicher and, above all, Hans ‘Nick’ Roericht created a collection of colour samples comprising several thousand colour combinations. In addition, in the early 1960s, Development Group 5 (E 5), led by Aicher and based at the HfG Ulm, undertook the celebrated re-design of the corporate identity of the airline Lufthansa. In the written documentation, it was suggested that the colour yellow be given more weight than the colour blue because – according to the assessment – “values such as speed, safety, freshness, vitality, activity, technology and flying are associated more with yellow than with blue”. Irrespective of this, the two “corporate colours" are the “most important element for the recognisability and identifiability of any company”, since they are “perceived most quickly and clearly”.

Aicher’s understanding of colour – despite the fact that he did not comment on this himself – was presumably influenced by his early years at the HfG. At Ulm, he came into contact on a theoretical and personal level with former members of the Bauhaus such as Josef Albers, Max Bill, Johannes Itten, Walter Peterhans and Helene Nonné-Schmidt. Albers in particular, whose name is inextricably linked with the phenomenon of colour, presumably had a great influence on him. Albers had led the preliminary course at the Bauhaus, emigrated to the United States in 1933 and returned to Germany twice to teach the foundation course at the HfG Ulm: from late 1953 to early 1954 and from June to August 1955. Although Aicher was already teaching at the HfG, he took part in the first foundation course under Albers together with the students. The course focused on visual and hands-on exercises devoted to drawing, design and colour. Amongst other things, the students were to develop a feeling for colour shades and tones, as well as for combinations of different colour – an aspect that runs through Aicher’s designs as a principal thread. Albers’s fascination with colour, its effects and interrelationships, finds expression in his well-known series Homage to the Square and culminated in the 1963 publication Interaction of Color. The text, excerpts of which were printed in the HfG journal ulm, provided a summary of the exercises he had developed over 40 years of teaching and contained a text section, chapters with didactic exercises on colour vision and numerous illustrations. Albers and Aicher were united not only by this fascination for colour but also by a special interest in the colour grey: Albers believed that he could set any shade of grey in motion, and Aicher, in his ongoing search for the ideal grey spectrum, amassed a comprehensive collection of the most diverse shades of grey. In addition to the connection to Albers, one can also draw a line, albeit more peripheral, from Aicher to Le Corbusier. Both were united by their belief in the associative power of colour. For example, the architect and artist Le Corbusier developed so-called colour keyboards for a wallpaper manufacturer, which allowed customers always to find suitable combinations of three to five colours with different hues and tones. The individual colour keyboards were each linked to keywords for the desired atmosphere of the respective space such as sky, sand, velvet, wall or landscape. For both Aicher and Le Corbusier, colour was an indispensable mediator between man and object or man and space. They both stand in a tradition of architects, designers and artists who, inspired by Goethe’s Theory of Colours published in 1810, dealt with colour classification systems and the emotions and moods that a colour or a tone can evoke. Goethe’s remarks on the “the sensual-moral effect of colour” in particular became the focus of attention in the early 20th Century. For example, he attributed to the colour yellow a “serene, gay, softly exciting character” and linked colours to nature when he explained that “the upper sky and distant mountains appear blue”.