NKF: N.V. Nederlandsche Kabelfabriek Delft
Piet Zwart Dutch
Piet Zwart’s corporate catalogue for the cable producer NKF models a new visual language—one of propulsive, synthetic looking, facilitated by industry itself. In its pages, photographs are arrayed like parts for assembly, then splintered and reassembled in exacting montage. Sweeping factory vistas appear alongside close-range views of sockets and wire, to visualize an economy of energy conveyance whose component parts are rarely seen. Graphic interventions instruct the novice viewer, and modulations of scale draw them through the circuitous course of factory production. To the delight of NKF executives and avant-gardists alike, Zwart’s formal invention served functional ends, selling the seductive allure of that strangely irresistible industrial product: the insulated high-voltage electric cable.
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