DESKTOP

DAN FRIEDMAN,
RADICAL
MODERNIST
(39)
Dan Friedman
DESIGN
OBSERVER,
CHRIS
PULLMAN
Part 3
The dichotomy between
the rigid modernism of
Ulm and Weingart’s playful
experimentation at Basel
accompanied Dan to Yale
in 1969. These ideas were
reflected in the projects he
brought to the program:
problems that typically
involved the collision of two
overlapping systems—the
structured and the free; the
conceptual and the intuitive;
the modernist and the radical.
Dan was determined to create
a methodology that would be
seen as a foundation of, not
a replacement for, personal
expression. Typical of his
intense, directed process of
working, within a few years he
had published his pedagogy
and examples of his student
work in Visible Language,
one of the few critical design
journals in the US at the time.
Like Dan, April had been one
of Wolfgang’s star students,
and after graduation had