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The history of modern design and architecture has seen many attempts to embrace and merge different art forms, and to bring art into the framing of everyday life and the organisation of modern society, in a process understood as total design or total architecture. These attempts were historically based on the romanticist idea of merging all art forms into a uniting and transgressing work of art, mostly associated with – but certainly not limited to – Richard Wagner’s theoretical writings and musical dramas. This utopian dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or Total Work of Art, was intended both to bring unity to the people and to bring art into the everyday life of their homes, as well as in...
Design culture foregrounds the relationships between the domains of design practice, design production and everyday life. Unlike design history and design studies, it is primarily concerned with contemporary design objects and the networks between the multiple actors engaged in their shaping, functioning and reproduction. It acknowledges the rise of design as both a key component and a key challenge of the modern world. Featuring an impressive range of international case studies, Design Culture interrogates what this emergent discipline is, its methodologies, its scope and its relationships with other fields of study. The volume's interdisciplinary approach brings fresh thinking to this fast-evolving field of study.
An original exploration of the role of aesthetics in contemporary design, uniquely combining philosophical aesthetics and cultural analysis of design. As a product of human ingenuity, design functions as an artificial interface through which we meet the world. While the ubiquity of design seems to render it imperceptible, when we truly reflect on design, we see that it is inextricably entwined with our experience of the world. In Design Aesthetics, Mads Nygaard Folkmann provides an engaging introduction to the field of design aesthetics and its role as a concept. Engaging with sensual, conceptual, and contextual considerations of design aesthetics, this book investigates design experience in...
Challenging the stereotypes of Scandinavian design, these essays explore design in Denmark, Norway and Sweden and assess the different roles that Finland and the wider Nordic region had in forming an image of Scandinavian design throughout the world. By examining the legacy of Nordic design and its global impact, editors Astrid Skjerven and Rachel Gotlieb shed light on the development of national and regional design identities and their historical associations. Authors investigate the transnational circulation of ideas throughout the later 20th century and consider the influences on design practices, production and consumerism. They look at how different countries negotiated and promoted Nor...
Blending architecture, design, and technology, a visual tour through futures past via the objects we have replaced, left behind, and forgotten. So-called extinct objects are those that were imagined but were never in use, or that existed but are now unused—superseded, unfashionable, or simply forgotten. Extinct gathers together an exceptional range of artists, curators, architects, critics, and academics, including Hal Foster, Barry Bergdoll, Deyan Sudjic, Tacita Dean, Emily Orr, Richard Wentworth, and many more. In eighty-five essays, contributors nominate “extinct” objects and address them in a series of short, vivid, sometimes personal accounts, speaking not only of obsolete technologies, but of other ways of thinking, making, and interacting with the world. Extinct is filled with curious, half-remembered objects, each one evoking a future that never came to pass. It is also a visual treat, full of interest and delight.
Revolutionary essays on design, aesthetics and materialism - from one of the great masters of modern architecture Adolf Loos, the great Viennese pioneer of modern architecture, was a hater of the fake, the fussy and the lavishly decorated, and a lover of stripped down, clean simplicity. He was also a writer of effervescent, caustic wit, as shown in this selection of essays on all aspects of design and aesthetics, from cities to glassware, furniture to footwear, architectural training to why 'the lack of ornament is a sign of intellectual power'. Translated by Shaun Whiteside With an epilogue by Joseph Masheck
Paul Engelmann was Adolf Loos’s favorite pupil, private secretary to Karl Kraus and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s most important interlocutor in the years between 1916 and 1928 as well as his partner in building the Stonborough House. Thus it was that the trenchant critique of modernity associated with Wittgenstein’s Vienna originated around Paul Engelmann. The present volume of essays from an international symposium in Aarhus, Denmark in 1999 offers an interdisciplinary perspective on issues bearing upon architecture, language and cultural criticism as they relate to the life’s work of Paul Engelmann.
What is design in modern China? And what are the ecological stakes in understanding how modern Chinese design encourages us to see? This book takes up these questions though exploration into the work of three famous designers who were actively engaged with the natural sciences in early twentieth-century Shanghai, Canton, and Beijing. The designed objects asking for heightened vision into interior and exterior worlds make their way across temporal and cultural boundaries. This book, then, is also about that movement, and the emotions of the eye which support it. Porcelain dishes, textiles, magazine covers, and paintings moved the people who lived with them a century ago in China to an awareness of their edges, rims, borders as boundary lines, and to see things through those in-between forms from a new point of view; to share pleasure in colour and pattern, perhaps, but also to connect to other deeply transformative feelings at the boundary. The book will be of interest to scholars working in design history, art history, and Chinese studies.
How ecological design emerged in Scandinavia during the 1960s and 1970s, building on both Scandinavia’s design culture and its environmental movement. Scandinavia is famous for its design culture, and for its pioneering efforts toward a sustainable future. In Ecological by Design, Kjetil Fallan shows how these two forces came together in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Scandinavian designers began to question the endless cycle in which designed objects are produced, consumed, discarded, and replaced in quick succession. The emergence of ecological design in Scandinavia at the height of the popular environmental movement, Fallan suggests, illuminates a little-known reciprocity between ...
Design History has become a complex and wide-ranging discipline. It now examines artefacts from conception to development, production, mediation, and consumption. Over the last few decades, the discipline has developed a diverse range of theories and methodologies for the analysis of objects. Design History presents the most comprehensive overview and guide to these developments. The book first traces the development of the discipline, explaining how it draws from Art History, Industrial Design, Cultural History and Material Culture Studies. The core of the book then analyses the seminal methodologies used in Design History today. The final section highlights the key issues concerning knowledge and meaning in Design. Throughout, the aim is to present a concise and accessible introduction to this complex field. A map to the intellectual landscape of Design History, the book will be an invaluable guide for students and a very useful reference for scholars.