Pioneers Of Modern Design

Richard Weston is professor at the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University. He has published extensively on twentieth-century architecture, including his book Materials, Form, and Architecture, published by Yale University Press.

New design experiment - Bauhaus - Art Deco - Studio Boggeri - Hendrik Werkman - Pop subversion and alternatives - Late modern and postmodernism - Design in the digital era.

Since it was first published in 1969, it has served as the standard guide to the impact of twentieth century avant-garde movements on graphic design and typography.

Hailed as the British counterparts to Charles and Ray Eames, Robin and Lucienne Day electrified the British design scene in the 1950s with their startling furniture and textile designs. Indeed, their influence over the next five decades has been so profound that their early products were recently reintroduced by Conran's Habitat. Lucienne Day pioneered the introduction of modern abstract pattern design in the textile industry. Her fabrics, which oscillate between bold geometric figures and more subtle abstract patterns, were produced by companies as diverse as Heal's and Liberty of London. Robin Day's influential furniture designs pioneered the use of materials such as plywood, steel, and plastic. His stacking polypropylene chair (right) is one of the best-selling chairs in the world. Robin and Lucienne Day, the first-ever full-length monograph on their designs, features never-before-seen archival material along with over 250 color images of the full range of their work, including furniture, ceramics, textiles, wallpaper, interiors, appliances, exhibit designs, and graphics. Spanning a half-century's creative output, no designer will fail to be awed by the genius seen in this book.

Beyond the Victorian/ Modernist Divide contributes to a new phase in the Victorian-modern debate of traditional periodization through the perspective lens of literature and the visual arts. Breaking away from conventionally fixed discourses and dichotomies, this book utilizes an interdisciplinary approach to examine the existence of overlaps and unexplored continuities between the Victorians, the post-Victorians and the modernists, including the fields of music, architecture, design, science, and social life. Furthermore, the book remaps the cultural history of two critical meta-narratives and their interdependence – the myth of "high modernism" and the myth of "Victorianism" – by building on recent scholarly work and addressing the question of the "turn of the century break theory" with a new set of arguments and contributions. The essays presented within acknowledge the existence of a break-theory in modernism, but question this theory by re-contextualising it while uncovering long-masked continuities between artists, genres and forms across the divide. The collection offers a new approach to modernism, Edwardianism, and Victorianism; utilizing the cross-fertilisation of interdisciplinary approaches, and by combining contributions that look forward from the Victorians with other contributions that look backward from the modernists. While literary modernism and its vexed relationships with the nineteenth century is a central subject of the book, further analysis includes artistic discourses and theories stemming from history, the visual arts, science, music and design. Each chapter offers a fresh interpretation of individual artists, navigating away from characteristic classifications of works, authors and cultural phenomena. Ultimately, the volume argues that though periodization and genre categories play substantial roles in this divide, it is also essential to be critically aware of the way cultural history has been, and continues to be, constructed.

"Illustrated with over 500 photographs, A Century of Design is unique in providing a designer-by designer review within a historical context, revealing the connections between designers and major design movements from around the world from Art Nouveau to Postmodernism and beyond. Each chapter explains the background and orgins of the century's most important style movements, period by period. The most influential internationally known designers of the 20th century are discussed, their major works are featured and their sources of inspiration outlined. A Century of Design covers everything from telephones to textiles, cutlery to computers."--BOOK JACKET.