modern design

Charlotte Perriand

March 9, 2009

The French designer and architect Charlotte Perriand (1903 – 1999) produced some very beautiful furniture and buildings, but she is probably not as well known as she should be, even despite the comprehensive retrospective show of her work at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2005.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

Eileen Gray’s Satellite Hanging Lamp

January 27, 2009

On occasion, the women of 20th C design do get a certain amount of recognition. This rare aluminum pendant lamp by Eileen Gray, previously owned by Yves St Laurent, is up for auction at Christie’s and is estimated at US$1 million.

Categories: architect, design, furniture, Uncategorised

The ladies of 20th century furniture design were offered to pose on fur rugs or ponies, which is why, we suppose, that photo was never to be.

January 20, 2009

Left to Right: George Nelson, Edward Wormley, Eero Saarinen, Harry Bertoia, Charles Eames and Jens Risom

Photo from a 1961 Playboy article on 20th C “masters of design,” who are here dressed either as accountants or architects, it’s hard to tell which, but it’s a lot of zippers.

Categories: architect, design, furniture, humour, politics, Uncategorised

Egle Amaldi’s bookshelf & modernist Cado shelving

January 17, 2009

These staggered, airy midcentury modern arrangements are so much less chichi than the many fancified contemporary bookshelves you see around.

I love this simple, balanced living room belonging to Italian architect Egle Amaldi in the 1960s.

Categories: architect, book, design, DIY, furniture, interiors, Uncategorised

This blog is a long, somewhat messy photo essay on the history and politics of design. Design's socio-historical context—that is, the constraints and influences on the way we make objects, dwellings and cities—seems too often ignored. We no longer know where our styles, tastes or objects really come from, and this damages our creativity and sense of meaning. Historical knowledge is so fugitive in the New World, with everything so decontextualized in the rapid flow of commodities and images. Don't even get me started on tumblr and pinterest. As Fran Lebowitz said, "Designers now, they all have these things called mood boards. I suppose they think a sense of discovery equals invention. It would be as if every writer had a board with paragraphs of other writers—'Oh, I'll take a little bit of this, and that, he was really good.' Yes, he was really good! And that is not a mood board, it is a stealing board." As for the sort of design I'm personally interested in, full disclaimer.....read more ____________________________________

To read about my book project on Vancouver's UN-Habitat Forum event of 1976 concerning just and sustainable urban settlements, click here. Few know that Buckminster Fuller, Margaret Mead, Mother Teresa, Paolo Soleri and Maggie & Pierre Trudeau, along with many thousands of others, came to Vancouver in 1976 to talk about better, safer, fairer and greener cities worldwide. In fact it was the founding conference of UN Habitat, an agency built around a foundational document called The Vancouver Declaration. My book is about what happened that year and is a snapshot not just of Vancouver but of how people around the world began to view cities and themselves differently in the wake of, among other things, the first oil crisis. ____________________________________

modern design

Charlotte Perriand

Eileen Gray’s Satellite Hanging Lamp

The ladies of 20th century furniture design were offered to pose on fur rugs or ponies, which is why, we suppose, that photo was never to be.

Egle Amaldi’s bookshelf & modernist Cado shelving

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