on this date in Design…
Arne Jacobsen, Danish
architect & designer, birthday 11 February 1902
The French Chef, American
cooking show, premiere 11 February 1963
The Armory Show, 1st
avant-garde art show in the US, opening 17 February 1863
Luckily for us, Arne Jacobsen listened to his father and
opted for a more stable career of architecture than painting. The wonderful aspect about Arne’s design was he
was able to take Functionalism and translate it into products & spaces that
were anything but sterile and unwelcoming putting him at the forefront of the
Scandinavian design movement. Inspired
by Charles & Ray Eames, he worked with carpenter Fritz Hansen to develop the
Ant Chair: a simple bent plywood piece with three legs. This made it light weight, compact and
stackable, very similar to the concept of Alvar Aalto’s three-legged Stool 60.
Arne was commissioned for what could be
considered the world’s first “designer” hotel, the SAS Royal Hotel in
Copenhagen, designing everything from the furniture to the ashtrays. It was for this project that the Swan and Egg
Chairs were developed. The gentle curves
of the Swan Chair welcome the curves of the body and the envelope of the Egg
Chair creates a cozier wingchair for the new age. Both of these designs in addition to numerous
others are perfectly adapt to contemporary spaces.
It may seem out of place to have the premier of a televised
cooking show on the list. However, Julia
Child had a broad impact not just on the psyche of the American housewife. This and subsequent cooking shows have had an
enormous impact on the design of the American home. With Julia’s easy-going and effervescent
attitude she made expert gastronomy look easy by showing us at home it was OK
to make a few mistakes in the pursuit of perfection.
With “The French Chef”, PBS allowed Julia to
take intimidating recipes such as the meticulous 20 page recipe for French
bread and demonstrated how accessible delicious food could be. This lead to more and more equipment and
gadgets to be collected by the at-home-cook until the kitchen became the
enormous gourmet extravagance and center of the home it is today. No longer was the suburban kitchen a lonely
closed off room tucked away from formal spaces.
Now guest are encouraged to share the kitchen, indulge in a world of
flavors as their waistlines expanded as well.
Home design has come full circle to meet the needs of the modern family
lifestyle. Formal spaces have been
abandoned in favor of open floor plans which, good and bad, invite guests into
the bosom of the home.
100 years ago, America was
introduced to modern art at the Armory Show of 1913 in New York City. It may seem counter intuitive to call
something “modern” that is over a century old but it was the new way of thinking
that truly defines where we as a society are headed. In terms of social consciousness, identity,
global connectivity, we are still on the cusp of understanding of how we, as
humans, fit into a drastically different world than centuries past and thusly
how we communicate and express ourselves.
The debate “What is art?” still rages
today as Marcel Duchamp begged the question with his signed urinals hanging on
the wall. Abstraction and Expressionism
attempted to communicate the artist’s thoughts in non-traditional medium. No longer was Realism in the traditional
sense necessary, there was the photograph for that. However, how the photograph and realistic
painted imagery were used to communicate social and political ideas and thrust forward
to the viewer that same nagging question.
Americans were for the first time exposed to European masters such as
Manet, Munch, Rodin, Picasso and many, many more. At the same time, they discovered their own
home-grown modern artists such as Stella and Whistler that would pick up the
baton and make New York City a new hub of the artist community.
Links:
Arne Jacobsen at Design Within Reach
Arne Jacobsen & Fritz Hansen
Arne Jacobsen flatware at the MoMA Store, NYC
Arne Jacobsen at Knoll
Arne Jacobsen at the Danish Design Store
Radison Blue (S.A.S.) Royal Hotel, Copenhagen, Denmark
The Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy & the Culinary Arts, Santa Barbara, CA
Julia Child's kitchen at the Smithsonian Museum, Washington, D.C.
LATimes article about Julia Child & commercialism
The Armory Foundation, New York City, NY
"The New Spirit: American Art in the Armory Show" Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ
"The Armory Show at 100" New York Historical Society Museum & Library, New York City, NY
Thomas Chippendale,
British cabinet-maker & furniture designer, baptism 16 June 1718
M.C. Escher, Dutch
graphic artist, birthday 17 June 1898
Charles Eames, Jr.,
American designer, birthday 17 June 1907
In connection with the opening of NeoCon World’s Trade Fair
opening this week in Chicago it seems almost fitting that Thomas Chippendale is
highlighted. Today it is seemingly child’s
play to get one’s goods to market compared to two hundred or even one hundred years
ago. In this day and age a simple
internet connection can have one distributing one’s designs worldwide. And yet, events like NeoCon are still essential
to the design market by not just bringing all these innovative items together
into one space for comparison and collaboration but also for offering an
opportunity to figuratively take the temperature of the design waters to gain a
perspective of where the industry is going as only seeing these items all
together in person could offer. In the
time of Thomas Chippendale, things were a bit more complicated. It could be said that Chippendale is the
inventor of the design book with the publication of The Gentleman and Cabinet Maker’s Director.
When one sees what would be described as a “Chippendale”
chair, it does not mean that he actually built it, was built in his factory or
even really designed it. It just means
that the furniture maker used his catalogue of design as a guide with the
customer to create the piece; it is “in the style of” Chippendale. It was a brilliant communication method
between craftsman and customer. That’s
right, hard to believe but most furniture pieces before the Industrial
Revolution were made to order and the genius of Chippendale was that he didn't
even need to be present when it happened for his influence to be. This lead to other designers like Hepplewhite
and Sheraton to publish their own books.
Today the concept that you could have an item designed by someone in
Italy, manufactured in China and then delivered to the US within a matter of
weeks is commonplace. For Thomas
Chippendale, it was more lucrative to sell his book which was easier to ship
and established himself as the style of the era.
It would make sense when looking at his work that Maurits
Cornelis Escher started out studying architecture.
Soon, due to poor grades and an inclination for drawing rather than
building he switched his study to the decorative arts. After marveling at the intricate tessellation
patterns that adorned the Alhambra he settled in Italy for a time and eventually
the back in the Netherlands. The fascination
of the impossibility of Escher’s images is what attracts most to his work. Staircases go in circles, inhabitants defy
gravity, inanimate drawings become alive and then back again. His engineer father may have been
disappointed he was not successful in architecture but today his work does
more to influence not just architecture but mathematics and science than if he
had.
Another famous furniture
maker was Charles Eames. Along with his
wife Ray and their highly influential studio they essentially defined what
mid-century modern design is. It must be
said, with all the wonderful designs produced by this team, and most of which I
would like to own, there is just one that I never want to see in my house. That is the infamous lounge. I know most people disagree with me on this
but I just can’t stand the sight of the thing.
What is strange is that I don’t have this reaction to any other piece of
furniture. I marvel at the complexity of
their plywood manipulation. I adore the
Eiffel tower base. Who doesn’t want a
chair from the aluminum group in their office?
And the walnut stools…yes, I’ll take three. Not to mention, as a couple, they look like
they would be a hoot to hang with, just don’t ever ask me to sit in that awful
chair.
Charles was smart enough to employ
a great team of designers whose mark on design is far reaching, not just in
furniture design. They conceptualized
the pre-fab house and examined scale on a universal and microscopic level in
film. The manner in which the office
operated was groundbreaking as well.
Unlike most design firms of the time, gone were the straight rows of
drafting tables. It looked more like controlled
chaos with large worktables which encouraged collaboration among the team. The clear genius of Charles is evident to
this day. So, I guess I can forgive one
small chair.
Links:
Charles Voysey, English
architect and furniture & textile designer, birthday 28 May 1857
George Nelson, American
industrial designer, birthday 29 May 1908
Hagia Sophia, Istanbul,
Turkey, religious building, converted to mosque 29 May 1453
Charles Voysey is another extremely influential individual in
the Arts & Crafts era leading to modern architecture and design. There are clear influences of the Charles
Rene Mackintosh and William Morris in his rejection of academic tradition and
relying on the vernacular to influence design instead. Therefore, his designs were a comfortable
transition for the nouveau-riche emerging middle class as a result of the industrial
revolution, a group for which his designs were highly sought after. Before becoming the “superstar” designer of
his time, he wasn’t exactly the star pupil in college and so he went to work
with the architect George Dewey but when business slowed, Voysey opened his own
firm. A.H. Mackmurdo suggested he
experiment with domestic goods design of wallpaper and fabrics to supplement
his income. A smart idea as it wasn’t
until ten years later that he found success as an architect with the completion
of the tower house at Bedford Park.
After serendipitously ducking into the architecture building
on the Yale campus during a rainstorm, George Nelson’s career as an architect
and icon of modernist furniture began. As
a writer for the magazine “Pencil Points”, Nelson interviewed and was
introduced to the work of the most prolific architects of the time which
formulated his passion for modernist design and became one of the movement’s
ardent defenders. When the chairman of
Herman Miller Furniture read Nelson and Henry Wright’s book Tomorrow’s House he offered Nelson a job
as director of design despite having no experience designing furniture. In the book, the revolutionary concepts of
the “family room” and “storage wall” were introduced; two ideas that are
commonplace in this day.
In his time at
Herman Miller he fostered some of the most iconic furniture designers of the 20th
century including the Eames’, Harry Bertoia and Isamu Noguchi. Unfortunately, both Bertoia and Noguchi
expressed regret for their time at Herman Miller and it has come to light that
some of the pieces for which he is most known were in fact designed by others
employed at his studio. Regardless of
the controversies, Nelson created an environment that pushed the boundaries of
what modern life was evolving into and nurtured those around him to adapt with
it as well. This is the quintessential
tenant of modern architecture and design.
The history of Hagia Sophia (Greek for “Holy Wisdom”) is complicated:
it started off as the Greek Patriarchal Cathedral of Constantinople and has
been converted to a Roman Catholic Church, Imperial Mosque and today it has been
secularize as a museum. To make matters
even more complicated, this building is actually the third building on the
site, two others had been destroyed by rioters.
As an excellent example of Byzantine architecture commissioned by
Emperor Justinian it then became the model for many other Ottoman mosques under
Sultan Mehmed II when he ordered it to be converted into a mosque in an act to establish domination over the
vanquished population, a common practice for any invading conqueror. Due to Islamic traditions on art, most of the
mosaics were plastered over but are today in the process of being restored. This is a fine example of a building’s ability
to survive centuries by adaptive reuse.
Luckily for us, Arne Jacobsen listened to his father and
opted for a more stable career of architecture than painting. The wonderful aspect about Arne’s design was he
was able to take Functionalism and translate it into products & spaces that
were anything but sterile and unwelcoming putting him at the forefront of the
Scandinavian design movement. Inspired
by Charles & Ray Eames, he worked with carpenter Fritz Hansen to develop the
Ant Chair: a simple bent plywood piece with three legs. This made it light weight, compact and
stackable, very similar to the concept of Alvar Aalto’s three-legged Stool 60. 
Arne was commissioned for what could be
considered the world’s first “designer” hotel, the SAS Royal Hotel in
Copenhagen, designing everything from the furniture to the ashtrays. It was for this project that the Swan and Egg
Chairs were developed. The gentle curves
of the Swan Chair welcome the curves of the body and the envelope of the Egg
Chair creates a cozier wingchair for the new age. Both of these designs in addition to numerous
others are perfectly adapt to contemporary spaces. 
It may seem out of place to have the premier of a televised
cooking show on the list. However, Julia
Child had a broad impact not just on the psyche of the American housewife. This and subsequent cooking shows have had an
enormous impact on the design of the American home. With Julia’s easy-going and effervescent
attitude she made expert gastronomy look easy by showing us at home it was OK
to make a few mistakes in the pursuit of perfection. 
With “The French Chef”, PBS allowed Julia to
take intimidating recipes such as the meticulous 20 page recipe for French
bread and demonstrated how accessible delicious food could be. This lead to more and more equipment and
gadgets to be collected by the at-home-cook until the kitchen became the
enormous gourmet extravagance and center of the home it is today. No longer was the suburban kitchen a lonely
closed off room tucked away from formal spaces.
Now guest are encouraged to share the kitchen, indulge in a world of
flavors as their waistlines expanded as well.
Home design has come full circle to meet the needs of the modern family
lifestyle. Formal spaces have been
abandoned in favor of open floor plans which, good and bad, invite guests into
the bosom of the home. 
100 years ago, America was
introduced to modern art at the Armory Show of 1913 in New York City. It may seem counter intuitive to call
something “modern” that is over a century old but it was the new way of thinking
that truly defines where we as a society are headed. In terms of social consciousness, identity,
global connectivity, we are still on the cusp of understanding of how we, as
humans, fit into a drastically different world than centuries past and thusly
how we communicate and express ourselves.
