Design Since1945 PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM ART i Design Since 1945 This book has received significant support from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Major funding has also been provided by COLLAB: The Contemporary Design Group for the Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Pew Memorial Trust; and the Design Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts, a Federal agency. Design Since 1945 Organized by Jack Lenor Larsen Kathryn B. Hiesinger Olivier Mourgue George Nelson Editors Carl Pott Kathryn B. Hiesinger Jens Quistgaard George H. Marcus Dieter Rams Paul Reilly Contributing Authors Philip Rosenthal Max Bill Timo Sarpaneva Achille Castiglioni Ettore Sottsass, Jr. Bruno Danese Hans J. Wegner Niels Diffrient Marco Zanuso Herbert J. Gans Philadelphia Museum of Art 1983 This book accompanies the exhibition "Design Since 1945" at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, October 16, 1983, through January 8, 1984. The exhibition has been supported by generous grants from Best Products Company, Inc., The Pew Memorial Trust, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Federal agency. ERRATA 10: p 228 Dieter Rams biography, line delete "(1-37)." second sentence p. 235 Remhold Weiss biography, should read mixer Mi40 (1-37) are His award-winning table fan (1-50) and hand advo- considered models of the austere design and scientific method themselves to cated by both Ulm and Braun, products that lent of interre- systematic mathematical analysis, ordered assemblages lated component parts, p 246 Index, should read. Rams, Dieter 1-34-36, 111-72 Weiss, Remhold 1-37, 50 c Copyright 1983 by the Composition by Folio Typographers, Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Philadelphia Museum of Art All Pennsauken, N.J. rights reserved No part of this Main entry under title publication may be reproduced, Printed in Great Britain by Balding Design since 1945 in stored a retrieval system, or - Mansell. Wisbech, Cambs. transmitted in any form or by any Catalog of the exhibition held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Oct means, electronic, mechanical, 16. 1983—Jan. 8. 1984. photocopying, recording, or Bibliography: p. otherwise, without prior Includes index permission, in writing, of the 1. Design, Industrial— I Exhibitions Hiesmger, Kathryn B , 1943— . II. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Marcus, George H III. Philadelphia Museum of Art T180.P47P473 1983 745.2 074 014811 83-17414 Contents vii Foreword 97 II Ceramics and Glass ix Introduction: Design Since 1945 Introduction by Timo Sarpaneva Kathryn B. Hiesinger 117 III Furniture 1 Design and Theory Introduction by Hans J. Wegner Max Bill 139 IV Lighting Ettore Sottsass, Jr. Introduction byAchille Castiglioni 5 The Design Process 151 V Metalwork George Nelson Introduction by Carl Pott 11 Design and Technology 165 VI Plastics Niels Diffrient Introduction by Bruno Danese 17 Design and Society 173 VII Textiles Marco Zanuso Introduction by Jack Lenor Larsen 23 Design, Invention, and Fantasy 197 VIII Wood Olivier Mourgue Introduction by Jens Quistgaard 27 Design for Market 203 Biographies of Designers Philip Rosenthal Kathryn B. Hiesinger 31 Design and the Consumer George H. Marcus Herbert J. Gans 238 Selected Bibliography 37 Design and Government 243 Acknowledgments Paul Reilly 245 Index of Designers and Manufactu 43 A Survey of Design Since 1945 81 I Appliances Introduction by Dieter Rams Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2014 https://archive.org/details/designsince194500hies It seems particularly appropriate that the Philadelphia Museum of Art attempt a survey of international design from the vantage point of 1983. The Museum owes its origins not only to the success of the great Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia, when works of fine and decorative arts from the United States were juxtaposed, without embarrassment, with the latest achievements of England and Europe, but also to the desire of its founders to establish a museum and school "with a special view to the development of the Art Industries of the State. The institution would be similar in its general features to that of the South Kensington Museum of London."' From its inception as the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art, the Museum has collected both the decorative arts of its own time and place as well as great examples from the past and from many other cul- tures, so that furniture of the French Renaissance and the Ming Dynasty shares visitors' attention with eighteenth-century Philadelphia silver, Penn- sylvania German pottery, and the simplified forms of Shaker benches and bentwood boxes. Given its broad mandate and varied collections, adher- ence to a single, even mildly polemical stance was rare in the Museum's program. Its first exhibition devoted to modern design was held within a year of exhibitions surveying rural Pennsylvania crafts and high Victoriana. In early 1932, four years after moving into its vast neoclassical building, this Museum presented an exhibition called "Design for the Machine," whose purpose was set forth succinctly by Joseph Downs in the Museum's Bulletin : "To point the way to the logical use of machinery for that large mass of utilitarian and decorative objects embraced in the industrial arts—the utensils and furnishings of our everyday life." 2 Half a century later, the present exhibition seeks to review the wealth of developments in that field during the years following World War II, to discover what has become of that "logical use" of the machine, and to assess the extent to which the machine (and, by extension, myriad new technologies) and the human being (designer and, of course, consumer) have reached that state of har- mony anticipated by the prewar generation. The conception and organization of this exhibition are due to the scholarship and energy of Kathryn B. Hiesinger, the Museum's Curator of European Decorative Arts after 1700, and it was initiated with the encour- agement and support of Jean Sutherland Boggs, previous Director of the Museum. Working with a distinguished international group of designers, who both served as consultants for the selection of objects and contributed essays for this publication, Mrs. Hiesinger has assembled over four hundred works to represent four decades of intensely prolific design activity. It should be noted that one important premise of the exhibition is that every- thing in it was, or continues to be, in production. The temptation to include prototypes, however provocative, has been avoided in favor of objects actually available to the public. Our gratitude to the designers and other specialists listed as the authors of this book is heartfelt, and special thanks are owed to Jack Lenor Larsen and Herbert Gans for their good advice, and to George Nelson, who provided a thoughtful and exciting design for the exhibition installation. The realization of an exhibition and publication on such a scale, of necessity, draws upon the skills, resources, and hard work of large numbers of the Museum staff. George H. Marcus, Head of Publications, served as co-editor of this volume and author of many biographies included, and is responsible for seeing this complex book through production. The chal- lenge of designing the book as well as coordinating exhibition graphics was handsomely met by Laurence Channing. Donna Corbin, assistant in the Department of European Decorative Arts after 1700, coordinated the myriad arrangements for loans, photography, catalogue captions, and many other details with speed and grace. To the lenders to the exhibition, many of whom graciously parted with an impressive number of objects, go our warmest thanks. Gifts from many designers and firms have significantly strengthened the Museum's perma- nent collections, and we are most grateful to those lenders who contrib- uted shipping costs as well. The Sony Corporation kindly provided video equipment for the exhibition installation. The exhibition would not have been possible without generous grants from Best Products Company, Inc., The Pew Memorial Trust, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Federal agency. Special and essential funding for this catalogue was pro- vided by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts as well as the Design Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts, a Federal agency, The Pew Memorial Trust, and COLLAB, The Contemporary Design Group for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, whose support for this project has been both generous and enthusiastic, as it has been for every effort in the field of modern design with which this Museum has been involved since the founding of COLLAB in 1970. Anne d'Harnoncourt The George D. Widener Director 1 Charter of the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art (Feb. 25. 1876). 2. 7"he Pennsylvania Museum Bulle- tin, vol. 27 (Mar. 1932), p. 115. VIII Introduction: Design Since 1945 Kathryn B Hiesinger Kathryn B. Hiesinger is Curator of European Decorative Arts after 1 700 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where in 1974 she organized the exhibition "British Contemporary Design" and in 1978 served as co- organizer of "The Second Empire: Art in France under Napoleon III." ^ ™ The triumph of functionalism as the universal modern aesthetic in the 1950s—and the ways in which the vacuum left by its decline and col- lapse has been filled— is to a large extent the history of design since 1945. Functionalism, the theory that beauty in useful objects is defined by their utility and honesty to materials and structure, was rooted in the mid- nineteenth-century idea of "art in industry," an idea born in the calm and optimistic certainty that aesthetic judgments could be made about objects according to settled and widely held standards, and that the exercise of these standards would improve design while both educating the public and bringing commercial profit to their manufacturers. Progressive Victorians found aesthetic value in utilitarian form and emphasized the relationship of form to function.