Art 313 History of Design Roland dela Fuente
Art Deco Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes The Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (International Exposition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Arts) was a World’s fair held in Paris, France from April to October 1925. The term Art Deco was derived by shortening the words Arts Décoratifs in the title of this exposition. Artistic creation in the années folles in France is marked by this event, when on this occasion many ideas of the international avant-garde in the fields of architecture and applied arts were brought together. This major event of the 20s was located between the esplanade of Les Invalides and the entrances of the Grand Palais and Petit Palais. It received 4,000 guests at the inauguration on April 28, and thousands of visitors each of the following days. This exhibition generated the term Art Deco to describe designs in terms of a broad decoratively “modern” style, characterized by a streamlined classicism and facetted, crystalline structures, embellished with decorative references to sleek machinery, and recurrent motifs of stylized fountains, gazelles, lightning flashes, “Aztec” motifs and similar repertory, derived in part from Decorative Cubism.
The central body of exhibits seemed to present the fashionable products of the luxury market, a signal that, after the disasters of World War I, Paris still reigned supreme in the arts of design. At the same time, other examples such as the Esprit Nouveau pavilion and the Soviet pavilion were distinctly not decorative, they contained furnishings and paintings but these works, including the pavilions, were spare and modern. The modern architecture of Le Corbusier and Konstantin Melnikov attracted both criticism and admiration for its lack of ornamentation. Criticism focused on the ‘nakedness’ of these structures, compared to other pavilions at the exhibition, such as the Pavilion of the Collector by the ébéniste-decorator Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann. These modernist works were integral projects of their own specific movements, and the term Art Deco is used elsewhere, and for other works at the exposition with more accuracy.
Le Corbusier’s Esprit Nouveau pavilion attracted attention for reasons in addition to its modernism, such as his vast theoretical project that the pavilion embodied. L’Esprit Nouveau was the name of the Rive Gauche journal in which Le Corbusier first published excerpts of his book Vers une architecture, and within this pavilion he exhibited his Plan Voisin for Paris. The Plan Voisin, named for aviation pioneer Gabriel Voisin, was a series of identical 200 meter tall skyscrapers and lower rectangular apartments, that would replace a large section of central Paris in the Rive Droite. Although this was never built, the pavilion was and represented a single modular apartment within the broader urban theoretical project.
Emile Jacques Ruhlmann 1879-1933
Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann was born in Paris on August 26, 1879. Son and grandson of manufacturers and building painters, he was trained within the family business and joined a decorator painter upon turning 17.
Jacques Ruhlmann created his own style, restoring the essential virtues of masterpiece to furniture making. His style responded to new aesthetic conceptions of purity of line and harmony of volumes released from the excesses and floral complexities of the nineteenth century. By means of technical perfection, an elegance of forms, and the exquisite quality of his wood and ornaments, Ruhlmann proved himself an equal to the greatest nineteenthcentury cabinetmakers. Despite a taste for luxury, he had a sound instinct for moderation such that his furniture, chests, tables, dressers, dressing tables, pedestal tables and chairs combined the most delicate refinements with a judicious functionalism.
Ruhlmann’s furniture is designed to serve and satisfy both the requirements of the mind and the habits of the body. He combined a taste for choice materials with an unparalleled sense of purity: Kingwood, Amaranth, Macassar ebony, Amboyna burl, Rosewood from India, brightened strips and inlays of ivory, tortoise shell, Shagreen of bronze and gold or silver. Having himself created a new curve, whenever he employed curved profiles or sinuous lines, their rhythm seemed tempered by reason. He went to extremes to refine feet consisting of ivory or bronze hooves: their protrusion from the body of a piece of furniture ensured that the architecture and decor harmoniously compensated for their apparent fragility. Having created luxury furniture with aristocratic elegance, Ruhlmann's work reveals the authentic nature of a personalized style pursued in all domains of interior decorating. It marks a momentous, exemplary epoch in the history of the art of French cabinetry.
Poiret established his own house in 1903, and made his name with the controversial kimono coat. He designed flamboyant window displays and threw legendary parties to draw attention to his work, his instinct for marketing and branding was unmatched by any previous designer. Poiret’s house expanded to encompass furniture, decor, and fragrance in addition to clothing. In 1911, he introduced “Parfums de Rosine,� named after his daughter, becoming the first couturier to launch a signature fragrance linked to a design house.
Paul Poiret 1879-1944 Poiret was born on 20 April 1879 to a cloth merchant in the poor neighborhood of Les Halles, Paris. His parents, in an effort to rid him of his natural pride, apprenticed him to an umbrella maker. There, he collected scraps of silk left over from the cutting of umbrella patterns, and fashioned clothes for a doll that one of his sisters had given him. While a teenager, Poiret took his sketches to Madeleine Cheruit, a prominent dressmaker, who purchased a dozen from him. Poiret continued to sell his drawings, eventually to major Parisian couture houses, until he was hired by Jacques Doucet in 1896. His first design, a red cloth cape, sold 400 copies. Poiret later moved to the House of Worth, where he was responsible for designing simple, practical dresses. The "brazen modernity of his designs," however, proved too much for Worth's conservative clientele.
Though perhaps best known for freeing women from corsets and for his startling inventions including hobble skirts, "harem" pantaloons, and "lampshade" tunics, Poiret's major contribution to fashion was his development of an approach to dressmaking centered on draping, a radical departure from the tailoring and pattern-making of the past. Poiret was influenced by antique and regional dress, and favored clothing cut along straight lines and constructed of rectangles. The structural simplicity of his clothing represented a "pivotal moment in the emergence of modernism" generally, and "effectively established the paradigm of modern fashion, irrevocably changing the direction of costume history.
Streamline Modern
Eileen Gray 1878-1976 Eileen Gray born to an aristocratic family of Irish-Scottish heritage, Gray studied at the Slade School of Fine Arts in London before moving to Paris in 1902 where she continued her studies and, in a revolt against prevailing art nouveau conventions, mastered lacquer work and established the Galerie Jean Désert, where she sold her avant-garde, luxury furniture pieces intended both to fulfill a function and to inspire the spirit. Gray was to “stand alone” throughout her career first as a lacquer artist, then a furniture designer and finally as an architect. Her design style was as distinctive as her way of working, and Gray developed an opulent, luxuriant take on the geometric forms and industrially produced materials used by the International Style designers, such as Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand and Mies Van Der Rohe, who shared many of her ideals.
Eileen Gray’s innovative Bibendum Chair was one of the 20th century’s most recognizable furniture designs. The chair is very much for lounging in and socializing. Its back/arm rest consists of two semi-circular, padded tubes encased in soft leather. The name that Gray chose for the chair, Bibendum, originates from the character created by Michelin to sell tires. The visible part of the frame of the Bibendum the legs, were made of a polished, chromium plated, stainless steel tube. The framing of the actual seat was made of beechwood and there was rubber webbing that was inter-woven across the base of the seat to provide added comfort. The seat, back and arm rests encased in soft, pale leather. Gray made a point of using plain coverings for this particular chair as well as another, the Serpent Chair which was simple, plain red. She also designed the Pirogue Boat Bed which was also completely plain.
She is now regarded as one of the most important furniture designers and architects of the early 20th century and the most influential woman in those fields. Her work inspired both modernism and Art Deco.
Raymond Loewy 1893-1996 Raymond Loewy was an industrial designer, and the first to be featured on the cover of Time Magazine, October 31, 1949. Born in France, he spent most of his professional career in the United States. Among his work were the Shell and former BP logos, the Greyhound bus, the Pennsylvania Railroad GG1 and S-1 locomotives, the Lucky Strike package, Coldspot refrigerators, the Studebaker Avanti and Champion, and the Air Force One livery. His career spanned seven decades. After a brief but promising career as a fashion illustrator, Raymond Loewy dedicated his talent to the field of industrial design. Loewy's creative genius was innate, and his effect on the industry was immediate. He literally revolutionized the industry, working as a consultant for more than 200 companies and creating product designs for everything from cigarette packs and refrigerators, to cars and spacecrafts. Loewy lived by his own famous MAYA principle - Most Advanced Yet Acceptable. He believed that, "The adult public's taste is not necessarily ready to accept the logical solutions to their requirements if the solution implies too vast a departure from what they have been conditioned into accepting as the norm."
Raymond Loewy launched his career in industrial design in 1929 when Sigmund Gestetner, a British manufacturer of duplicating machines, commissioned him to improve the appearance of a mimeograph machine. In three days 28-year-old Loewy designed the shell that was to encase Gestetner duplicators for the next 40 years. In the process, he helped launch a profession that has changed the look of America. The Gestetner duplicator was the first of countless items transformed by streamlining, a technique that Loewy is credited with originating. Calling the concept "beauty through function and simplification," Loewy spent over 50 years streamlining everything from postage stamps to spacecrafts. His more famous creations include the Lucky Strike cigarette package, the GG1 and S1 locomotives, the slenderized CocaCola bottle, the John F. Kennedy memorial postage stamp, the interior of Saturn I, Saturn V, and Skylab, the Greyhound bus and logo, the Shell International logo, the Exxon logo, the U.S. Postal Service emblem, a line of Frigidaire refrigerators, ranges, and freezers, and the Studebaker Avanti, Champion and Starliner.
Donald Deskey 1894 1989 Donald Deskey was a native of Blue Earth, Minnesota. He studied architecture at the University of California, but did not follow that profession, becoming instead an artist and a pioneer in the field of Industrial design. In Paris he attended the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, which influenced his approach to design. He established a design consulting firm in New York City, and later the firm of Deskey-Vollmer ,in partnership with Phillip Vollmer which specialized in furniture and textile design. His designs in this era progressed from Art Deco to Streamline Moderne.
He first gained note as a designer when he created window displays for the Franklin Simon Department Store in Manhattan in 1926. In the 1930s, he won the competition to design the interiors for Radio City Music Hall. In the 1940s he started the graphic design firm Donald Deskey Associates and made some of the most recognizable icons of the day. He designed the Crest toothpaste packaging, the Tide bullseye as well as a widely used New York City lamppost model. In 1940, he developed a decorative form of plywood which had a unique striated, or combed, look to it. It was produced under the name Weldtex and was very popular in the 1950s.
Deskey saw connections between all kinds of design, from exterior architecture to packaging. He said, “A storefront is a label,” and backed that statement up with groundbreaking building designs that branded the businesses housed inside. Quotes like this reproduced throughout the exhibition effectively sum up Deskey’s philosophies. Perhaps most revealing, and most inspirational to young designers, is the line, “There is no such thing as an invention; there’s just the stating of a problem and the engineering of a solution.”
Modern Charles Eames 1907-1978 Ray Eames 1912-1988 Charles Eames was born in St. Louis, Missouri, grew up in America's industrial heartland. As a young man he worked for engineers and manufacturers, anticipating his lifelong interest in mechanics and the complex working of things. Ray Kaiser Eames was born in Sacramento, California, demonstrated her fascination with the abstract qualities of ordinary objects early on. She spent her formative years in the orbit of New York's modern art movements and participated in the first wave of American-born abstract artists.
The Eames' work in architecture and modern furniture design. They pioneered innovative technologies, such as the fiberglass, plastic resin chairs and the wire mesh chairs designed for Herman Miller. Charles and Ray would soon channel their interest in photography and into the production of short films.
Charles Eames and Ray Eames gave shape to America's twentieth century. Their lives and work represented the nation's defining movements the West Coast's coming of age, the economy's shift from making goods to producing information, and the global expansion of American culture. The Eameses embraced the era's visionary concept of modern design as an agent of social change, elevating it to a national agenda. Their evolution from furniture designers to cultural ambassadors demonstrated their boundless talents and the overlap of their interests with those of their country. In a rare era of shared objectives, the Eameses partnered with the federal government and the country's top businesses to lead the charge to modernize postwar America.
Eero Saarinen 1910-1961 Eero Saarinen was a Finnish American architect and industrial designer of the 20th century famous for varying his style according to the demands of the project, simple, sweeping, arching structural curves or machine like rationalism. Saarinen was also a product designer, He designed furniture with curving, organic shapes. Saarinen said the objective of his furniture designs was to clear the “slum of legs” from home interiors.
Eero Saarinen's father, Eliel Saarinen, was a prominent architect. He studied under his father and befriended fellow students Charles and Ray Eames. Eero Saarinen began his career designing furniture in collaboration with Charles Eames. Their work was featured in the 1940 exhibition “Organic Design in Home Furnishings” at the The Museum of Modern Art in New York.
During his long association with Hans Knoll he designed many important pieces of furniture including the “Grasshopper” lounge chair and ottoman 1946, the “Womb” chair and ottoman 1948, the “Womb” settee 1950, side and arm chairs 1948-1950, and his most famous “Tulip” or “Pedestal” group 1956, which featured side and arm chairs, dining, coffee and side tables, as well as a stool. All of these designs were highly successful except for the “Grasshopper” lounge chair which although in production through 1965, was not a big success.
Eero Saarinen's early education was grounded in Art Nouveau, he was drawn to the streamlined International Style. Saarinen’s most famous works, are sweeping and expressive. Eero Saarinen is often cited as a master of Neoexpressionism.
Milton Glaser 1929-Present Milton Glaser born June 26, 1929, in New York City is a graphic designer, best known for the I Love New York logo, his "Bob Dylan" poster, the "DC bullet" logo used by DC Comics from 1977 to 2005, and the "Brooklyn Brewery" logo. He also founded New York Magazine with Clay Felker in 1968.
Glaser was a founder, and president, of Push Pin Studios formed with several of his Cooper Union classmates. Glaser's work is characterized by directness, simplicity and originality. He uses any medium or style to solve the problem at hand. His style ranges wildly from primitive to avant garde in his countless book jackets, album covers, advertisements and direct mail pieces and magazine illustrations. He started his own studio, Milton Glaser, Inc, in 1974. This led to his involvement with an increasingly wide diversity of projects, ranging from the design of New York Magazine, of which he was a co-founder, to a 600-foot mural for the Federal Office Building in Indianapolis.
Throughout his career he has had a major impact on contemporary illustration and design. His work has won numerous awards from Art Directors Clubs, the American Institute of Graphic Arts, the Society of Illustrators and the Type Directors Club. In 1979 he was made Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and his work is included in the Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Israel Museum and the Musee de l'affiche in Paris. Glaser has taught at both the School of Visual Arts and at Cooper Union in New York City. He is a member of Alliance Graphique International.
Post Modern Ettore Sottsass 1917-2007 Ettore Sottsass was an Italian architect and designer of the late 20th century. His body of designs included furniture, jewellery, glass, lighting and office machine design. In 1959 Sottsass began working as a design consultant for Olivetti, designing office equipment, typewriters and furniture. There Sottsass made his name as a designer who, through colour, form and styling, managed to bring office equipment into the realm of popular culture. Sottsass traveled in the US and India and designed more products for Olivetti culminating in the bright red plastic portable Valentine typewriter in 1969, which became a fashion accessory. Sotsass described the Valentine as “a brio among typewriters.� Compared with the typical drab typewriters of the day, the Valentine was more of a design statement item than an office machine.
Continuing to design for Olivetti in the 1960s, Sottsass developed a range of objects which were expressions of his personal experiences traveling in the United States and India. These objects included large alter like ceramic sculptures and his "Superboxes", radical sculptural gestures presented within a context of consumer product, as conceptual statement. Covered in bold and colorful, simulated custom laminates, they were precursors to Memphis, a movement which came more than a decade later. Sottsass and an international group of young architects and designers, came together to form the Memphis Group. Memphis was launched with a collection of 40 pieces of furniture, ceramics, lighting, glass and textiles which featured fluorescent colors, slick surfaces, intentionally lop-sided shapes and squiggly laminate patterns. The group’s colourful, ironic pieces were considerably different from his earlier, more strictly modernist work, and that was hailed as one of the most characteristic examples of Post-modernism in design and the arts.
Robert Venturi 1925-Present Robert Charles Venturi Jr. is an American architect, founding principal of the firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, and one of the major figures in the architecture of the twentieth century. Together with his wife and partner, Denise Scott Brown, he helped to shape the way that architects, planners and students experience and think about architecture and the American built environment. Their buildings, planning, theoretical writings and teaching have contributed to the expansion of discourse. He is also known for coining the maxim “Less is a bore” as antidote to Mies van der Rohe’s famous modernist dictum “Less is more”.
The architecture of Robert Venturi helped redirect American architecture away from a widely practiced modernism in the 1960’s to a more exploratory, and ultimately eclectic, design approach that openly drew lessons from historic architecture and responded to the everyday context of the American city. Venturi’s buildings, architectural systems, elements aims to acknowledge the conflicts often inherent in a project or site. This “inclusive” approach contrasted with the typical modernist effort to resolve and unify all factors in a complete and rigidly structured--and possibly less functional and simplistic work of art. The diverse range of buildings of Venturi’s early career offered surprising alternatives to then current architectural practice, with “impure” forms apparently casual asymmetries and pop-style supergraphics and geometries.
Venturi's architecture has had world wide influence, beginning in the 1960s with the dissemination of the broken gable roof of the Vanna Venturi House and the segmentally arched window and interrupted string courses of Guild House. The playful variations on vernacular house types seen in the Trubeck and Wislocki Houses offered a new way to embrace, but transform, familiar forms. The facade patterning of the Oberlin Art Museum and the laboratory buildings demonstrated a treatment of the vertical surfaces of buildings that is both decorative (postmodern) and honest (modern).
Michael Graves 1934-Present Michael Graves is an American architect. Identified as one of The New York Five, Graves has become a household name with his designs for domestic products sold at Target stores in the United States. Drawing is central to Michael Graves's way of working on and thinking about architecture, and he is well known for his evocative sketches and drawings. In 1979, Michael Graves was one of the first architects currently practicing to be presented in a one man show in a commercial art gallery. The exhibition, held at the Max Protetch Gallery in New York, greatly advanced public interest in architectural drawings as works of art. Michael Graves’s prints and drawings are among the most collectible today. Graves has exhibited his drawings and models in over 150 exhibitions through-out the world and his work is in the collections of such notable institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, The Newark Museum, the Deutsches Architekturmuseum, the Berlin Museum, and the Canadien Centre of Architecture.
Michael Graves's own work has evolved dramatically, relative both to his use of color and to his interest in a figurative architecture that incorporates traditional elements along with the lessons of modernism. Michael Graves was referred to as "the man who is rewriting the language of color". As a colorist, Michael Graves uses what he terms representational colors, colors that are derived primarily from nature and materials, for example, terra cotta, representing the earth, is usually seen near the base of his structures. Blue used as a metaphor for the sky, is often chosen for the ceiling.
Deconstructivism and Blobitecture Frank Gehry 1929-Present Frank Owen Gehry is a Canadian American Pritzker Prize-winning architect based in Los Angeles, California. Much of Gehry's work falls within the style of Deconstructivism, which is often referred to as post-structuralist in nature for its ability to go beyond current modalities of structural definition. In architecture, its application tends to depart from modernism in its inherent criticism of culturally inherited givens such as societal goals and functional necessity. Because of this, unlike early modernist structures, Deconstructivist structures are not required to reflect specific social or universal ideas, such as speed or universality of form, and they do not reflect a belief that form follows function. Gehry's own Santa Monica residence is a commonly cited example of deconstructivist architecture, as it was so drastically divorced from its original context, and in such a manner as to subvert its original spatial intention.
Gehry’s style at times seems unfinished or even crude, but his work is consistent with the California ‘funk’ art movement in the 1960s and early 1970s, which featured the use of inexpensive found objects and non-traditional media such as clay to make serious art. Gehry has been called "the apostle of chain-link fencing and corrugated metal siding".However, a retrospective exhibit at New York's Whitney Museum in 1988 revealed that he is also a sophisticated classical artist, who knows European art history and contemporary sculpture and painting.
Rem Koolhaas 1944-Present A prime example of Koolhaas's mixture of beautiful and bizarre is the Seattle Central Library, located in Washington and completed in 2004. Some consider it to be a revolutionary structure that taps into Seattle's urban energy; others call it a blight on the city skyline. Regardless, it is the largest U.S. Koolhaas project to date, and it marks the clear beginning of his American phase. And, despite his critics, there is no doubt that the breakthrough designer is changing the face of contemporary architecture. Rem Koolhaas is a Dutch architect known for buildings and writings that embrace the energy of modernity. Koolhaas worked as a journalist before becoming an architect.Rem Koolhaas is considered by his many followers to be the coolest, hippest, and most cutting edge architect on the planet. Like all things cutting edge, Koolhaas is difficult to classify.
Since the late 1970s the Dutch designer has earned acclaim as an author, a theorist, an urban planner, a cultural researcher, and a professor at Harvard. He has amassed an array of projects ranging in size from small, The Bordeaux House (1998) to large, the CCTV Headquarters in Beijing, China (begun 2004) to extra large, the Euralille complex, located in Lille, France (1994). Although his projects are viewed as visionary by most, they are also unusual and frequently constructed using inexpensive, everyday materials. As a result they have been described as inspired, weird, or downright ugly.
Bruce Mau 1959-Present Bruce Mau is a Canadian designer. Mau is the creative director of Bruce Mau Design, and the founder of the Institute without Boundaries.
Mau was born in Sudbury, Ontario. He studied at the Ontario College of Art & Design in Toronto, but left prior to graduation in order to join the Fifty Fingers design group in 1980. He stayed there for two years before crossing the ocean for a brief sojourn at Pentagram in the UK. Returning to Toronto a year later, he became part of the founding triumvirate of Public Good Design and Communications. Soon after the opportunity to design Zone 1/2 presented itself and he left to establish his own studio, Bruce Mau Design. Mau remained the design director of Zone Books until 2004, to which he has added duties as co-editor of Swerve Editions, a Zone imprint. From 1991-93, he also served as creative director of I.D. magazine.
From 1996-99 he was the associate cullinan professor at Rice University School of Architecture in Houston. He has also been a thesis advisor at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Architecture, Landscape & Design, artist in residence at California Institute of the Arts, and a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. He has lectured widely across North America and Europe, and currently serves on the International Advisory Committee of the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio.
As of 2007, Mau was in residence at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in the Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Design Objects Department.
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