Haas' font foundry

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Building in Münchenstein

The Haas'sche type foundry was a type foundry in Basel and Münchenstein .

Company history

The company went back to Johann Jakob Genath the Elder , who owned a printing and type foundry in Basel. In the third generation under Johann Rudolf Genath , it was passed on to Johann Wilhelm Haas from Nuremberg in 1740, who joined the type foundry in 1718. In 1758 Johann Wilhelm Haas became a citizen of Basel.

His son Wilhelm Haas-Münch invented an improved hand press made of metal and expanded the company to include a printing shop. Thanks to the typographical innovations introduced by him and his son Wilhelm Haas-Decker and the targeted establishment of international business relationships, the company developed into the leading type foundry in what was then Switzerland and one of the most important in Europe. From 1786 the company was run under its own name. In 1852 the type foundry was sold by the sons of the younger Wilhelm, Georg Wilhelm Haas and Karl Eduard Haas.

In the 20th century, the Haas'sche Schriftgiesserei was significantly influenced by Eduard Hoffmann . He managed the business from 1937 - initially together with Max Krayer - until his retirement in 1965. In 1968 his son Albert Hoffmann took over the management of the company. In 1927 the company was converted into a stock corporation. The main shareholders were D. Stempel AG and H. Berthold AG . In 1954, Stempel took over part of the shares previously held by Berthold and became the majority shareholder. The main business of the Haas'sche type foundry was the design and production of typefaces for metal typesetting. Since the 1950s, however, font designs have increasingly been licensed for third parties . In its heyday in the 1960s, the company had around 120 employees.

Among the most successful created for the foundry designs is next to the Clarendon - font family , undoubtedly the 1956 as Neue Haas Grotesk published Helvetica . Other important typefaces are a Bodoni cut by Edmund Thiele , the Diethelm Antiqua by Wilhelm Diethelm , Bravo by Emil Neukomm , Graphique by Hermann Eidenbenz , ITC Novarese by Aldo Novarese and Unica by André Gürtler , Christian Mengelt and Erich Gschwind.

In 1989, Linotype took over the Haas'sche type foundry. Operations in Münchenstein were shut down. The Rudolf Steiner School in Münchenstein moved into the former foundry building .

architecture

The idiosyncratic factory building, which was built for the type foundry in Münchenstein in 1921, was designed by the architect Karl Gottlieb Koller , who had previously built a reputation for large hotel complexes in the Engadine . Characteristic are the roofs of individual houses lined up to form a hall, whose parabolic groin vaults rest on pillars. There are skylights in the spandrels of the roof to provide enough daylight for the writers to work.

literature

  • Albert Bruckner : Swiss die cutter and type caster. History of die cuts and handwriting in Basel and the rest of Switzerland from their beginnings to the present . Haas'sche Schriftgiesserei, Münchenstein 1943.
  • Heinrich Fleischhacker: 400 years of Haas'sche Schriftgiesserei AG. Review - present - outlook . In: Librarium . tape 27 , no. 1 , 1984, p. 49-68 ( e-periodica.ch ).
  • Arnold Schneider, Gustaf Adolf Wanner , Paul Göttin: 400 years of Haas 1580–1980 . Haas'sche Schriftgiesserei, Münchenstein 1980.
  • Brigitte Schuster: The Haas Typefoundry Ltd. in an International Environment. Changes and Developments in its Organization and Operation . In: Footnotes . FROM; 2016/2017, p. 38-47, 50-56 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Brigitte Schuster: The Haas Typefoundry Ltd. in an International Environment . In: Footnotes . FROM; 2016/2017, p. 38-47, 50-56 .
  2. ^ François Rappo : Swiss type design . In: Museum für Gestaltung Zürich (Ed.): 100 years of Swiss graphics . Lars Müller Publishers, Zurich 2014, ISBN 978-3-03778-352-8 , pp. 274-283, p. 277 .
  3. Our school. In: Rudolf Steiner School Münchenstein. Retrieved March 5, 2019 .
  4. Gutenbergstrasse 1. In: Basel-Landschaft: Cantonal inventory of protected cultural monuments. Retrieved March 5, 2019 .


Coordinates: 47 ° 30 '59.2 "  N , 7 ° 36' 39.4"  E ; CH1903:  612 980  /  262,869