Art 313 History of Design Roland dela Fuente
What is Design?
Design is making things better for people. The world define design as a purposeful, systematic , and creative activity. Purposeful process designers give form to products, interiors, and visual communications, and satisfy the functional, psychological, and aesthetic needs of users.
Design is systematic, as it involves the analysis of problems in our physical environment, and the transformation of findings into appropriate and usable solutions. Design is also creative, as designers must possess the expertise to create compelling visual forms for products, spaces, and information systems, and to advance applications of new technologies in our everyday lives. Design Process refers to the planning of routine steps of a process aside from the expected result. Processes are treated as a product of design, not the method of design.
The person designing is called a “Designer�, which is also a term used for people who work professionally in one of the various design areas, usually also specifying which area is being dealt with such as a fashion designer, concept designer or web designer. A designer’s sequence of activities is called a design process.
Designing often necessitates considering the aesthetic, functional, economic and sociopolitical dimensions of both the design object and design process. It may involve considerable research, thought, modeling, interactive adjustment, and re-design. Meanwhile, diverse kinds of objects may be designed, including clothing, graphical user interfaces, skyscrapers, corporate identities, business processes and even methods of designing.
Design and Art The boundaries between art and design are blurred, largely due to a range of applications both for the term ‘art’ and the term ‘design’. Applied arts has been used as an umbrella term to define fields of industrial design, graphic design, fashion design, etc. The term ‘decorative arts’ is a traditional term used in historical discourses to describe craft objects, and also sits within the umbrella of Applied arts. In graphic arts, 2D image making that ranges from photography to illustration, the distinction is often made between fine art and commercial art, based on the context within which the work is produced and how it is traded.
To a degree, some methods for creating work, such as employing intuition, are shared across the disciplines within the Applied arts and Fine art. The principles of design are “almost instinctive”, “builtin”, “natural”, and part of “our sense of ‘rightness’.” However, the intended application and context of the resulting works will vary greatly.
Victorian The Crystal Palace was a huge glass and iron structure originally built in 1851 for the Great Exhibition held in London’s Hyde Park. Prince Albert, head of the Society of Arts, had the idea of an exhibition to impress the world with Britain’s industrial achievements.
Countries including France, the United States, Russia, Turkey and Egypt all attended with exhibits falling into four main categories - Raw Materials, Machinery, Manufacturers and Fine Arts. The Palace was designed by Sir Joseph Paxton and after the Great Exhibition finished in October 1851 he had the idea of moving it to Penge Place Estate, Sydenham as a ‘Winter Park and Garden under Glass’. The site attracted 2 million visitors a year and was also home to displays, festivals, music shows and over one hundred thousand soldiers during the First World War.
Helen Beatrix Potter An English author, illustrator, mycologist and conservationist best known for children’s books featuring anthropomorphic characters such as in “The Tale of Peter Rabbit” which celebrated the British landscape and rural lifestyle. Born into a privileged household, Potter was educated by governesses and grew up isolated from other children. She had numerous pets and spent holidays in Scotland and the Lake District, developing a love of landscape, flora and fauna, all of which she closely observed and painted. Her parents discouraged her education, but her study and watercolors of fungi led to her being widely respected in the field of mycology. In her thirties, Potter published the highly successful children's book, The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Potter then began writing and illustrating children's books full time.
With proceeds from the books, she became financially independent and was eventually able to buy Hill Top Farm in the Lake District. She extended the property with other purchases over time. She was 47 when she married William Heelis, a local solicitor, became a sheep breeder and farmer while continuing to write and illustrate children’s books. She published twenty-three books.
Her books continue to sell well throughout the world, in multiple languages. Her stories have been retold in various formats including a ballet, films, and in animation.
The Madame de Pompadour was an accomplished woman with a good eye for Rococo interiors. She was responsible for the development of the manufactory of Sevres, which became one of the most famous porcelain manufacturers in Europe and which provided skilled jobs to the region. She had a keen interest in literature. She had known Voltaire before her ascendancy, and he apparently advised her in her courtly role. Her influence over Louis increased markedly through the 1750s, to the point where he allowed her considerable leeway in the determination of policy over a whole range of issues, from military matters to foreign affairs.
Madame de Pompadour was a woman of verve and intelligence. She planned buildings like the Place de la Concorde and the Petit Trianon with her brother, the Marquis de Marigny. She employed the stylish marchands merciers, trendsetting shopkeepers who turned Chinese vases into ewers with gilt-bronze Rococo handles and mounted writing tables with the new Sevres porcelain plaques. Numerous other artisans, sculptors and portrait painters were employed.
Arts and Crafts Charles and Henry Greene Greene and Greene was an architectural firm established by brothers Charles Sumner Greene and Henry Mather Greene, influential early 20th Century American architects. Active primarily in California, their bungalow houses and larger-scale ultimate bungalows are prime exemplars of the American Arts and Crafts Movement. The Architectural firm of Greene and Greene was established in Pasadena in January 1894, eventually building toward the crescendo of their “ultimate bungalows�, such as the 1908 Gamble House in Pasadena, generally considered one of the finest examples of residential architecture in the United States.
The structure of the Greene & Greene house is essential not only to the immense feeling of security that such an overlysupported structure brings, but also accentuates the importance of the Arts & Crafts fundamentals in the Greene & Greene style. The visual importance of the aesthetic nature of the joints, pegs, and complex wood work symbolizes the structure of the house, and coincides with the principles taught in the Manual Training School of their youth. The structure of the house is externalized, or exploded, rather than hidden in decoration. Each element of the structure asserts itself. This extravagance of support takes its origins from the elaborate joinery and framing of traditional Japanese architecture.
Philip Webb is best known for his unconventional country houses that were unpretentious and informal. He was a pioneering figure in the English domestic revival movement and is often called the father of the Arts & Crafts movement. Although influenced by medieval styles and the Gothic revival movement championed by John Ruskin, his highly original, yet practical designs incorporated the use of contrasting materials such as white interior walls and bare brickwork. Philip Webb was a close friend of Pre-Raphaelite designer William Morris. They were among the founders of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Company in 1851, which specialized in stained glass, carving, furniture, wallpaper, carpets, and tapestries. Webb and Morris also founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in 1877. Webb’s first commission was the Red House, William Morris’s eclectic country house that became a gathering place for the Pre-Raphaelites.
Webb designed household furnishings and decorative accessories in metal, glass, wood and embroidery. He is particularly famous for his table glassware, stained glass, jewelry and his rustic adaptations of Stuart period furniture. Webb was the only Pre-Raphaelite to design a church, St. Martin’s Church in Brampton in 1878. The church includes a set of stained glass windows designed by Edward BurneJones and executed in the company’s studios.
William Morris was an English poet, artist, and socialist reformer, who rejected the opulence on the Victorian era and urged a return to medieval traditions of design, craftsmanship, and community. He established the Kelmscott Press in 1890 and using his own designs for the type and ornamental letters, he issued editions of the classics and of his own works notably The Kelmscott Chaucer in 1896. In his political writings, he attempted to correct the dehumanizing effects of the Industrial Revolution by proposing a form of society in which people could enjoy craftsmanship and simplicity of expression.
Spurred by the experience of furnishing his home, Red House, Morris set up a studio in 1861 with several associates, including architect Philip Webb. He pulled realistic designs from the nature around him as did the medieval tapestry artists before him. The traditional methods, often obtaining dyes from vegetables. He perfected the use of woodblocks for printing wallpaper and textiles. The idea of the house as a total work of art with all of the interior objects designed by the architect, emerged from this studio and remained standard practice throughout the Arts and Crafts movement.
Art Nouveau Louis Comfort Tiffany was an American artist and designer who worked in the decorative arts and is best known for his work in stained glass. He is the American artist most associated with the Art Nouveau and Aesthetic movements. Tiffany was affiliated with a prestigious collaborative of designers known as the Associated Artists. Tiffany designed stained glass windows, lamps, glass mosaics, blown glass, ceramics, jewelry, enamels and metalwork.
He trademarked Favrile, from the old French word for handmade. He later used this word to apply to all of his glass, enamel and pottery. Tiffany’s first commercially produced lamps date from around 1895. Much of his company’s production was in making stained glass windows and Tiffany lamps, but his company designed a complete range of interior decorations. At its peak, his factory employed more than 300 artisans. A team of talented single women designers led by Clara Driscoll played a big role in designing many of the floral patterns on the famous Tiffany lamp as well as for other creations.
Alphonse Maria Mucha was born in the town of Ivancice, Moravia, today’s region of the Czech Republic. Alphonse Mucha produced a flurry of paintings, posters, advertisements, and book illustrations, as well as designs for jewelry, carpets, wallpaper, and theatre sets in what was initially called the Mucha Style but became known as Art Nouveau French for “New Art”. Mucha’s works frequently featured beautiful, strong young women in flowing vaguely Neoclassical looking robes often surrounded by lush flowers which sometimes formed halos behind women’s heads.
His Art Nouveau style was often imitated. The Art Nouveau style however was one that Mucha attempted to distance himself from throughout his life. He always insisted that rather than adhering to any fashionable stylistic form, his paintings came purely from within and Czech art. He declared that art existed only to communicate a spiritual message and nothing more, hence his frustration at the fame he gained through commercial art, when he most wanted to concentrate on more lofty projects that would ennoble art and his birthplace.
Antoni Gaudi was a Spanish architect who worked during the Modernisme, Art Nouveau period but became famous for his unique and highly individualistic architectural designs regarded as beyond the scope of Modernisme. Leading the Spanish Modernist movement, Antoni Gaudi has been classified with Gothicism sometimes called warped Gothicism, Art Nouveau, and Surrealism. He was also influenced by Oriental styles, nature, sculpture, and a desire to go beyond anything that had ever been done before. Defying labels, Antoni Gaudi’s work might be simple called, Gaudiism.
Gaudi, throughout his life, studied nature’s angles and curves and incorporated them into his designs and mosaics. Instead of relying on geometric shapes, he mimicked the way men stand upright. The hyperboloids and paraboloids he borrowed from nature were easily reinforced by steel rods and allowed his designs to resemble elements from the environment. The same expressive power of Gaudi’s monumental works exists in his oddly graceful chairs and tables. Gaudi’s architecture is a total integration of materials, processes and poetics. His approach to furniture design exceeded structural expression and continued with the overall architectural idea.
De Stijl Theo Van Doesburg was a Dutch artist, practicing in painting, writing, poetry and architecture. He is best known as the founder and leader of De Stijl movement. De Stijl was made up of many members, Van Doesburg was the ambassador of the movement, promoting it across Europe. He moved to Weimar in 1922, deciding to make an impression on the Bauhaus principal, Walter Gropius, in order to spread the influence of the movement. Van Doesburg made efforts in architecture, designing houses for artists.
Van Doesburg initially detested the avant-garde and pursued naturalism. In response to the ideas of Apollinaire and Kandinsky, his outlook altered, and by 1915 he was fully converted to abstraction. He became acquainted with many avant-garde Dutch artists over the following years including Mondrian. He taught for a short period at the Bauhaus, and collaborated on numerous architectural projects. His paintings share the rectilinearity of Mondrian’s, although he later advocated a theory of Elementarism which he considered a correction of Mondrian’s Neo-plasticism.
Piet Mondrian known as the father of geometric abstraction. He was a pivotal figure in the revolution of Modern Art that began with Cubism in the early 20th century. Mondrian is an abstract painter whose most famous compositions are made up of black lines and colored rectangles. Mondrian’s early works were naturalistic and impressionistic landscapes, but his discovery of cubism around 1910 put him on the path toward pure abstraction.
Mondrian explored abstract forms and formulating an approach he called neo plasticism. After the war, he made what may be his most famous painting, consists of Red, Yellow and Blue, a composition of primary colors in rectangles on a grid of black lines. He discarded “non-essentials” and restrict his works to “basic forms of beauty.” Influenced by the philosophical approach of theosophy, Mondrian believed painting to be a two-dimensional interpretation of nature that is guided by the artist’s intuition.
Gerrit Rietveld Dutch minimalist architect and designer he was a member of the De Stijl movement. Significant for his work is how he pared his design down to basic cubist elements and often used primary colours to emphasise the different planes. Most of his furniture was designed and manufactured to accompany his architectural commissions.
His first attempts in search of his own artistic line, were influenced by the Amsterdam School. Rietveld re-invented the structure of chairs and other objects and built them as constructivist sculptures. In 1918 he designed an early version of his legendary Red and Blue Chair. It was published in the De Stijl Magazine, the magazine of the movement of which he became a member in 1919. In this way Rietveld came in contact with various architects associated with the modern Dutch movement. They were all looking for a way to purify their work, to remove all remnants of past styles and influences. As the fame of De Stijl rapidly spread, Rietveld’s reputation grew from that of a local craftsman to an architect recognized in avant garde circles across Europe.
Bauhaus Walter Gropius was a German architect and art educator who founded the Bauhaus school of design, which became a dominant force in architecture and the applied arts in the 20th century. Walter Gropius believed that all design should be functional as well as aesthetically pleasing. His Bauhaus school pioneered a functional severely simple architectural style featuring the elimination of surface decoration and extensive use of glass. The Bauhaus school attracted many artists including painters Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, graphic artist Kathe Kollwitz and expressionist art groups such as Die Brucke and Der Blaue Reiter.
Marcel Breuer one of the greatest architects and furniture designers of the 20th century . He used new technologies and new materials in order to develop his “International Style� of work.
Breuer was inspired by the shape and form of a bicycle handlebars when he created one of his most famous pieces, the Wassily Chair No B3 in 1925. It was designed and made for Wassily Kandinsky. The frame of the chair was made from polished, bent, nickelled tubular steel, which later became chrome plated. The seat came in canvas, fabric or leather in black section. This chair has been widely copied.
Breuer designed a whole range of tubular metal furniture including chairs, tables, stools and cupboards. Tubular steel has lots of qualities; it is affordable for the masses, hygienic and provides comfort without the need for springs to be introduced. Breuer considered all of his designs to be essential for modern living.
Oskar Schlemmer, a German painter, sculptor, designer and choreographer associated with the Bauhaus school. In 1923 he was hired as Master of Form at the Bauhaus theatre workshop, after working some time at the workshop of sculpture. His most famous work is “Triadisches Ballett,” in which the actors are transfigured from the normal to geometrical shapes. In Slat Dance and Treppenwitz, the performers’ costumes make them into living sculpture as if part of the scenery.
Schlemmer’s ideas on art were complex and challenging even for the progressive Bauhaus movement. His work was a rejection of pure abstraction, instead retaining a sense of the human, though not in the emotional sense but in view of the physical structure of the human, he represented bodies as architectural forms, reducing the figure to a rhythmic play between convex, concave and flat surfaces. Not just of its form, he was fascinated by every movement the body could make, trying to capture it in his work.
References / Work Cited BBC.CO.UK/london/content/historyfeature/ Architecture.about.com/greatarchitects/ Huntington.org/huntingtonlibrary/exhibitions/ Gamblehouse.org/architects/ Arts and Crafts Movement anc.gray-cells.com/ Jrank arts.jrank.org/ Modernity modernity.se/Designer/ Design Technology design-technology.org/ Didatour.it didatour.it/Dettaglio.asp/
De Stijl, New York Museum of Modern Art De Stijl, 1917-1931, Visions of Utopia The Bauhaus, Masters and Students, Whitford BAUHAUS 1919.1933, Workshops for Modernity, MOMA, Bergdoll, Dickerman Bauhaus a conceptual model, Hatje Cantz ART NOUVEAU, Klaus, Jurgen, Sembach -Taschen-