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.
January 23, 2009
See all Joo Youn Paek’s inventions here. Yes, they’re functional: as art.
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.
January 18, 2009
The textile company Anek Taanka, which means “infinite stitches,” was founded by Indian textile designer Varsha Sharma. She has said that “my challenge is to create pieces of textile that could inspire spaces to be designed around them rather than the other way around.” That’s a bold ambition but this pillow makes you think she could actually do it.
January 16, 2009
Fantastic 1970s geometric supergraphic textile by German designer Elsbeth Kupferoth, who deserves to be much better known. Interesting short essay on her work and more photos at The Textile Blog.
January 15, 2009
There’s something compelling about Ray Eames’ desk area, papered with work and photographs. Many people seem to have a fierce aversion to clutter these days (driven no doubt by the storage furniture industry) but artists like to have materials and visual stimulation at hand in their studios and there’s some evidence that this supports the creative process.
December 24, 2008
In the late 1920s, the modernist designer and architect Eileen Gray designed and built a landmark piece of modernist architecture in the form of a seaside house.
December 23, 2008
Eileen Gray (1878-1976) produced some iconic pieces of early modernist design in a profession and an era hardly designed for women. Raised in Ireland, she trained in London and Paris and worked most of her life in France.
December 20, 2008
Nanna Ditzel is considered the “first lady of Danish design,” which is one of those informative yet cringe-worthy labels that just highlights the whole problem of accidentally ghettoizing designers who happen to be women by the very act of celebrating the fact that they’re women designers.
December 11, 2008
Cynthia Maxwell, who is not only a mechanical engineer who has just finished a PhD on “Sound Synthesis from Shape-Changing Geometric Models” at Berkeley and has been part of the audio group at Apple and has worked for NASA, she also has a great eye and a sense of humour.
