The King of Pointland

Modernism

Those of you who spent the 1980's in my family's New Jersey home will recognize this as the style of chair found haphazardly arranged around our kitchen table, and purchased at Sears, or perhaps Montgomery Ward. The great thing about these chairs was that if you absentmindedly picked at the woven cane with your finger, or perhaps a butter knife, you could ruin the seat in no time.

Would it blow your mind to learn that the chair you see in the picture was designed and manufactured not in 1982, but in 1928? In fact, this was the first of its kind, and Sandra and I were privileged to see it at the Corcoran Gallery's Modernism: Designing a New World 1914-1939, which closed yesterday. The chair, designed by Marcel Breuer, was revolutionary for its time. One of the lessons I drew from the exhibit was that a run-of-the-mill tea kettle purchased at Target, or an ordinary table lamp from Ikea, is essentially cloned from once groundbreaking Modernist designs. No longer avant-garde, these related styles now dictate the way we unconsciously expect an object to appear. According to this, versions of the Breuer chair are still in production today.

Another treat was an original 1933 London Underground map and sketch. Designed by Harry Beck in 1933, this was the first subway map freed from strict adherence to a scaled-down representation of the relative location of each stop. Beck felt that what mattered more was how the stations and lines were connected to each other. Our 21st Century Metro map uses a remarkably similar design:

Has there been as comprehensive and transformative a design movement in the time since the Modernist movement (really a set of related movements) ended? Clearly design did not stop evolving in 1939, but in 2075, when robot masters take their human pets to the hover-museum, what design movement from our time will be seen to have been as fundamental? This isn't entirely rhetorical. I'm woefully ignorant about these matters, so a little enlightenment would go a long way.

Posted by cradle at July 30, 2007 11:22 PM