The Field of Vision: What Herbert Bayer Knew About Exhibitions in 1930

Bayer angled the exhibits to the visitor's eye. Many stands still hang everything flat on the wall.

In 1930 Herbert Bayer turned exhibits toward the visitor's eye instead of the wall. This essay traces his field of vision from Paris to New York and turns it into a seven-step section-drawing method for stands. It ends with an audit you can run at the build or on last year's photographs.

In 1930 Herbert Bayer drew a visitor as a giant eye. He tilted the exhibits above and below it, so each panel faced the eye and not the wall. His diagram of the field of vision is still the clearest way to design an exhibition surface. Many stands still do the opposite. The fix is ninety-six years old.

The eye in the diagram

That year the Deutscher Werkbund showed in Paris, inside the yearly salon of the Société des Artistes Décorateurs. Its German section, the Section allemande, was organized by Walter Gropius with Herbert Bayer and László Moholy-Nagy. It was the Werkbund's part of a French salon. It was not a Werkbund show of its own.

For the catalog, Bayer drew a diagram of a giant eye (IVAM record). Lines of sight ran out from it to panels tilted above and below eye level. In the room, photographs of modern buildings hung at angles from floor to ceiling. Each one was pitched toward a visitor standing below.

The diagram moved the design problem. The surface that mattered was no longer the wall. It was the cone of space in front of the visitor's eye.

From the wall to the field of vision

Bayer kept working on the idea. A drawing from 1935 stretches the field of vision to the floor and the ceiling as well as the walls. He set out the approach for American readers in "Fundamentals of Exhibition Design". It ran in PM magazine from December 1939 to January 1940.

The historian Robin Schuldenfrei calls this Bayer's expanded vision. It means design that works across the full range of the eye's angles. The rule it implies is simple. Place each surface by where the eye goes and how it moves. Do not place it just where the building happens to offer a wall.

Five years before the Paris diagram, Frederick Kiesler had already pulled the exhibit off the wall. Bayer turned it toward the eye.

Footprints on the floor

Bayer treated circulation as part of vision. He designed Bauhaus 1919-1928 for the Museum of Modern Art. It ran from 7 December 1938 to 30 January 1939, in temporary galleries with low ceilings. He painted footprints and graphics on the floor to set a route. He angled works off the walls and the floor. He raised objects on plinths into the line of sight.

A low ceiling would have flattened a normal hang. Here it became a reason to use the floor. Mary Anne Staniszewski's book The Power of Display (MIT Press, 1998) records the installation in detail.

A footprint is a sign people read without looking up. It tells them where to stand. That tells the designer where the eye will be.

A warning from 1942

Bayer used the same tools at MoMA in 1942 for Road to Victory. Edward Steichen directed the show, and Carl Sandburg wrote the text. Enlarged photographs stood at changing angles and heights along a set route. They were built to rally a public at war.

Schuldenfrei's lecture title names the shift. It speaks of the instrumentalizing of design in wartime. These techniques work on people. That is their value and their risk. It is also why a stand built to persuade owes its visitors an honest message.

How stands fail the eye

The common failures need no survey to spot. Graphics sit flat on the back wall, all at one height. Headers hang above the line of sight of someone walking the aisle. The key message shows only from inside the stand. Screens are hung for a seated viewer on a stand where everyone stands. Product sits at knee height. And nothing is aimed at the side most people come from.

If you want a figure for your own show, photograph every stand along one aisle. Then tally those failures. A stand has only the seconds it takes to walk past to say what it is. That is why what makes people stop at a booth starts with the approaching eye.

Bayer's method for a stand

Bayer's field of vision becomes a drawing method in seven steps.

1. Draw the stand in section, not only in plan. Put the visitor's eye in the aisle and on the stand. Take standing, seated and wheelchair eye heights from Panero and Zelnik's Human Dimension and Interior Space (1979), not from memory.
2. Find the main approach directions on the hall plan. Look for the nearest entrance, the cross-aisles and the café.
3. Angle panels and screens toward those approaches. A panel parallel to the aisle is seen edge-on by everyone walking toward it.
4. Put the one message where the approaching eye falls. Place it at the distance where it first becomes readable.
5. Use the floor to pull people in, as Bayer's footprints did. A change of floor finish works, or a line that starts at the stand edge.
6. Use overhead elements for distance. A hanging sign is for the visitor across the hall, not the one at the counter.
7. Check at eye height before print, with a render or a mock-up.

The method fits the wider sequence of exhibition design, between concept and drawings. It also decides where talk can happen on the stand.

The field-of-vision audit

Run this at the build, or on last year's stand from photographs.

1. Walk each approach to the stand.
2. Choose three distances and keep them for every show. For example, use the far end of the aisle, mid-aisle and the stand edge.
3. At each distance, take photographs at standing and at seated eye height.
4. On each photograph, mark what can be read.
5. List every surface the eye never reaches.
6. Re-angle or move content until the main message reads from the main approach.
7. Record the results in a sheet the team keeps for the next show.

• Main entrance side. Distance: Far. Eye height: Standing.
• Main entrance side. Distance: Far. Eye height: Seated.
• Cross-aisle. Distance: Mid. Eye height: Standing.
• Cross-aisle. Distance: Mid. Eye height: Seated.
• Stand edge. Distance: Near. Eye height: Standing.
• Stand edge. Distance: Near. Eye height: Seated.

Draw the eye first

Draw the eye before you draw the wall. Then walk every approach at eye height before anything is printed.

Bayer judged every panel against the eye before anything was built. Monet gives a team that chance today. It turns a layout into 3D renders and walkthrough videos in the real room, so the stand can be seen in space before anything is printed.