Not a knob more than what you need. A TV designed by Dieter Rams. Image via Life as an Architect.
“Weniger, aber besser” — less, but better.
Industrial designer Dieter Rams, born in Germany in 1932 (and still alive), was concerned with the chaos going on in the world around him: chaos as a result of the Wars, the Great Depression, and later, the more subtle, but also pernicious chaos of disposable design and planned obsolescence that was the purview of his trade.
Arne Jacobsen was a designer of everything. A trained architect, he designed the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen. It was the city’s first skyscraper, a vision in sea-green glass and steel. He also designed dorm rooms, the tables and chairs of a cafeteria, amoeba-shaped doorknobs that nestled into the palm, and flatware that looked like speeding droplets of stainless steel ending in a (somewhat) functional eating tool. Jacobsen designed the past’s vision of the future, but his present hardly agreed with him. His skyscraper was long-considered the ugliest building in Copenhagen, and his flatware was widely hated for offering up too little food with each bite.
Gas Station by Arne Jacobsen, 1937
Gino Sarfatti was in awe of light, but obsessed with the light bulb. Through the designer’s long line of innovations, from the slender aluminum floor lamps of 1956 to the bowl-shaped wall sconces of 1970, this obsession holds sway. Even in his most whimsical designs, like the 1953 Lollipop Chandelier that has a palette worthy of a Calder mobile, each feature defers to the light source. “The most important element is the shape of the bulb itself,” Sarfatti told Jean-François Grunfeld in 1984, in the last interview he gave before his death.
No. 556, 1956, Table Lamp, height 48 cm
By the end of his nearly century-spanning career, Alexander Calder (1898–1976) had worked in virtually every artistic medium, but metal was undoubtedly his muse. Raised by artist parents, Calder was encouraged to be creative from an early age, producing his first sculptures at age 11.
Calder, Untitled (Mobile), 1959, Courtesy of The JPMorgan Chase Art Collection
Alvar Aalto certainly earned his title of “father of modern Finnish design” but Tapio Wirkkala (1915-1985) deserves credit for raising it up right. His designs celebrated nature and spoke to the inherent rugged beauty its forms. He championed a type of design that was “democratic” because he was, creating soulful, well-crafted, usable objects that never sacrificed functionality for beauty.
Pipe Models "Meerschaum" ("Sea Foam") and Nylon, 1974-1976
It’s hard to believe that an architecture style can be dominant for 100s of years, especially one that was based on the ideas of Classic Rome. But this was the case with Palladian Neo-Classicism. Named for Italian architect Andrea Palladio (1508-1580), and characterized by symmetrical monumentality with Classic detailing. This is what architecture was, and this is how it was taught to Giò Ponti (1891-1979) at Milan Polytechnic in the early 1900’s. Lucky for us tides were about to turn and Gio Ponti was a true original.
Giò Ponti, Courtesy of Life Magazine (Click to Enlarge)
It is taken for granted today that the design of everyday objects is an art form, but in 1919 this was a radical notion. The Bauhaus succeeded in breaking down hierarchal notions of art disciplines, and believed that there was no difference between the artist and the craftsmen.
Johannes Itten, Die Farbe (The Color), 1944
In the late nineties, one of modernism’s great works of architecture was discovered abandoned and in wild disrepair. Known as the “E-1027 House“, Irish architect and furniture designer Eileen Gray had built the stark, rectilinear, Bauhaus-inspired home overlooking the rich Mediterranean azure in Southern France in 1926. Jutting from the craggy cliffside like an eighties drug-den from Miami Vice, the house gave many powerful impressions. Warmth was not one of them. That was until French newspapers began publishing pictures of the house after it had been vandalized and lived in by local street punks.
Josef Albers, Hinnerk Scheper, Georg Muche, László Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer, Joost Schmidt, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Gunta Stozl and Oskar Schlemmer on the Roof of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Circa 1920
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Eileen Gray
Visible from the sky. Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici's counter-modernist love palace.
“The biggest secret of E.1027 is that it offers spaces for secrets, having layers of interiors within its interiors.” –Katarina Bonnevier
Eileen Gray designed E.1027 for herself and her then lover, art critic Jean Badovici. She chose an isolated spot on the French Riviera right on the water, and made a house where the sun and sea would be visible from almost every room. The sea and sky floats into E.1027 through giant windows and balconies. She blurred the boundaries of inside/outside, and also upside/downside: the pattern of the floor creeps up to the walls and ceiling. One distinction she made clear is the one between public and private — the building is almost invisible to passersby. E.1027 is perched on a cliff over the Mediterranean without any direct roads leading to it. Born to a wealthy Scottish-Irish family in 1878, Eileen Gray lived well outside societal expectations, and she designed for the different kind of life she lived.
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