Twentieth Century DesignThe most famous designs of the twentieth century are not those in museums, but in the marketplace. The Coca-Cola bottle and the McDonald's logo are known all over the world, and designs like the modernistic `Frankfurt Kitchen' of 1926, or the 1954 streamlined and tail-finned Oldsmobile, or `Blow', the inflatable chair ubiquitous in the late sixties, tell us more about our culture than a narrowly-defined canon of classics. Drawing on the most up-to-date scholarship (not only in design history but also in social anthropology and women's history), Jonathan Woodham takes a fresh look at the wider issues of design and industrial culture throughout Europe, Scandinavia, North America, and the Far East. He explores themes such as national identity, the `Americanisation' of ideology and business methods, the rise of the multi-nationals, Pop and Postmodernism, and contemporary ideas of nostalgia and heritage, and sets the proliferation of everyday design against the writing of critics as different as Nikolaus Pevsner, the champion of Modernism, and Vance Packard, author of The Hidden Persuaders. In the history which emerges design is clearly seen for what it is: the powerful and complex expression of aesthetic, social, economic, political, and technological forces. |
Contents
Introduction | 7 |
Towards the Twentieth Century | 11 |
Design and Modernism | 29 |
Commerce Consumerism and Design | 65 |
Design and National Identity | 87 |
Reconstruction and Affluence III | 111 |
Multinational Corporations and Global Products | 141 |
Design Promotion Profession and Management | 165 |
Nostalgia Heritage and Design | 205 |
Design and Social Responsibility | 221 |
Notes | 240 |
List of Illustrations | 252 |
Bibliographic Essay | 258 |
Timeline | 274 |
282 | |
Oxford History of Art Series | 288 |
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Common terms and phrases
advertising aesthetic Alvar Aalto American Applied Arts Architecture Art Deco artistic Arts and Crafts aspects associated automobile avant-garde Bauhaus Berlin Britain British design catalogue Centre chair COID consumer consumption contemporary corporate identity Crabtree & Evelyn cultural Deco decorative Design Council Design History design profession Deutscher Werkbund developments display domestic early economic essays established Ettore Sottsass everyday exhibition forms founded Frankfurt Kitchen furniture Germany Gio Ponti Gropius heritage historians history of design House important increasingly Industrial Design interior interwar Italian design Italy Japan Japanese Journal of Design kitchen late London magazine manufacturers mass-production materials Memphis Milan modern design modernist MOMA Motors Museum Neville Brody Olivetti organization outlook Paris particularly political postwar promote published Raymond Loewy Second World seen significant social Society Sottsass standards symbols textile Thames & Hudson tion traditional twentieth century United University Press Walter Gropius wider York