History of Modern Design

by Raizman, David

• ISBN13: 9780131830400
• ISBN10: 0131830406
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-01-01
• Publisher: Prentice Hall

Summary

The first book of its kind, Raizmans "History of Modern Design" offers a gorgeously illustrated survey of the applied arts and industrial design from the eighteenth century to present day, covering furniture, metal, glass, ceramics, fashion, appliances, transportation, and advertising.

Table of Contents

Supply, Demand, and Design, 1700-1850

Demand and Production

Entrepreneurial Efforts in England and Elsewhere

Growing Pains: Expanding Industry in the Early Nineteenth Century

Design, Society, and Standards

Arts, Crafts, and Machines, 1850-1914

The Equality of the Arts

The Joy of Work

Mechanization and Industry

After the Great War, 1918-1944: Moderne, Industry, and Utopias

Paris and L'art Moderne Before and After the Great War

The First Machine Age in Europe

Art, Design, and Industry in the United States

Humanism and Luxury: International Modernism and Mass Culture After World War II, 1945-1960

International Modernism: From Theory to Practice

Design and Mass Appeal: A Culture of Consumption

Progress, Protest, and Pluralism, 1960-2000

New Materials, New Products

Dimensions of Mass Culture

Politics, Pluralism, and Postmodernism

Design in Context: An Act of Balance Notes: Suggestions for Further Reading

Timeline

Bibliography

Index

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

The material and methodology for this book were developed over eight years of teaching a course entitledHistory of Modern Designin the College of Media Arts & Design at Drexel University, and almost twenty years of general undergraduate art history teaching experience. During these past eight years it has been rewarding to hear students reflect upon everyday objects in relation to the values and attitudes of their time, to consider the complex interplay of technological, commercial, social, and esthetic considerations that deepen our understanding of their beauty and the range of their meanings.One of the persistent difficulties in offering this course over the years has been the issue of a textbook. History of fine art courses are far more common than those in the history of design, and there is no shortage of art-history texts to provide images and narrative to accompany general and more specialized courses relating to a variety of periods and movements. Yet despite the many colleges and universities that educate professional industrial, interior, graphic, merchandising, textile, and fashion designers, I found in my teaching that no introductory text served the needs of a course that integrated material from a broad range of specialized design fields over the past three centuries. Rather than being limited to a single area like graphic design or industrial design, the present survey covers the history of these fields in relation to one another and the common themes they share, whether technology, production, consumption, or reform.At first I relied upon a list of reserve readings, and in time supplemented these with my own outlines for lecture notes available through the university's computing services center. Subsequently I received a grant from the university to create a website that allowed an appropriate format to be developed for the presentation of a combination of text links and images for study and student preparation. Putting these notes into book form has been for me a formidable task. The required reading, travel, and study took me far from my own original training in the art of medieval Spain, requiring substantial historical perspective to provide a context for studying the objects and a desire to follow through with combining perspectives from both consumption and production for each chapter. In the course of writing and re-writing, I tried to organize the material both chronologically and thematically. Briefly stated, the themes are: SPECIALIZATION AND THE TECHNOLOGY OF MATERIALS AND PRODUCTION REFORM AND THE ROLE OF STANDARDS FOR DESIGN THE EQUALITY OF THE ARTS DESIGN FOR MECHANIZED PRODUCTION "GOOD" DESIGN AND POPULAR CULTURE PLURALISM AND DESIGNIn preparing thisHistory of Modern DesignI have benefited from a number of previous studies, beginning with most students' (of my generation anyway) introduction to modern design history, Sir Nikolaus Pevsner'sPioneers of Modern Design,and including more recent titles such as Penny Sparke'sAn Introduction to Design and Culture in the Twentieth Century(1986), Adrian Forty'sObjects of Desire(1986), and Richard Woodham's Twentieth-Century Design (1997). There is also the excellent series of books by a range of specialists published by Oxford University Press. These include a number of volumes devoted to period styles (Arts and Crafts, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Bauhaus,for example), as well as John Heskett's excellent Industrial Design (i98o). Also, Phillip Meggs'sHistory of Graphic Designis a most informative survey of that material with a strong emphasis in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.As I began teaching the history, of modern design, I found myself drawn to the period room and decorative arts galleries of museums rather than to their Painting and sculpture galleries. As a result I've been pleased to observe, in my adopted