Word: designer
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Much of 20th century American design seems to have been animated by two competing impulses. One is a kind of mannered childishness, a sometimes arch toymaker's instinct that produced the streamlined gadgetry of late art deco, the Day-Glo plastics of Pop, the high-tech doodads and joke furniture of today. The other is a reformist urge. When not fashioning playthings, designers turn grave, producing furniture and other objects that are neo- Puritan, high-minded. The severe geometries of Frank Lloyd Wright's turn- of- the-century interiors and Steven Holl's beautiful side chair (1984), for example...
Some of the shapes, materials and images that resulted are currently on display in an exhibition at New York City's Whitney Museum, "High Styles: Twentieth-Century American Design." The show, which includes 300 pieces of furniture, craftworks, tableware and household appliances, was assembled by six different curators and seems more the rough outline of a museum exhibit than a finished show. Indeed, in a gallery that is like the vast attic of some anonymous and impossibly trendy old American family--interesting, to be sure, but incoherent--the recurrent evocation of the future is one of the few themes reaffirmed...
...futurist sensibility took hold, mainstream designers showed some transitional ambivalence: a goofy "electric candle" (1929) on view at the Whitney is unsure if it is supposed to look like a rocket or an actual candle or a tiny fluted Doric column. But the black-paneled Atwater Kent radio from the same period has a machine-age spareness that is, like Fred Astaire, both suave and ingenuous. It is an American synthesis that product design has only lately been recapturing, as in Apple's nubile Macintosh computer...
...three decades, a kind of time-traveling giddiness suffused design; the leading and trailing edges were marked by the 1939 and 1964 New York world's fairs. The '39 fair was the work of the country's first and last great generation of designer-promoters. The son et lumiere theatrics were unabashed. Raymond Loewy designed an exhibit called "Rocketport of the Future," and Norman Bel Geddes' "Futurama," the most popular exhibit, was a scale model of a perfect, antiseptic cityscape. "Strange? Fantastic? Unbelievable?" asked the Futurama narrator. "Remember--this is the world...
...1960s it was back to the future. Indeed, the future was now, and adults were encouraged to behave like children. The two strains of American design thus converged again, spectacularly, and this time the self-conscious sci-fi playfulness had a hysterical go-go edge. Just as children's toys had become plastic, throwaway items after World War II, grownups' furniture became overtly disposable. Frank Gehry's democratic cardboard-and-pressed- fiber chairs (1972) are delightful, but did anyone outside of an Antonioni film ever enjoy sitting on an inflatable plastic couch or wearing a paper dress? American designers today...