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
“Too much of anything is bad, but too much Champagne is just right.” — Mark Twain
At 16, a late bloomer by some standards, two friends and I admitted we’d never really been drunk. Wanting a quick remedy, my friend had just the fix in his mother’s garage: “Her last boss gave her a case of some French Champagne when she left last year, I think it’s getting pretty old now anyway.” Drinking premier cru champagne from coffee mugs, we spent several hours perusing our favorite periodicals and commenting on the finer aspects of this new favorite beverage. The next morning, the pile of Playboys and empty ’85 Mumm Grand Cordon bottles attested to one simple truth: people should drink more Champagne.
Marilyn Monroe holding a Coupe Glass
In the days before ripe Chilean tomatoes in the snowiest of winters, year-round beets, and the never-ending zucchini season, if you had a hankering for a summer vegetable in the middle of January, you had to wait six months. That is until 1810, when canning was invented and along with it, the possibility of anticipating your winter desires two seasons ahead.
Image by Nina Lee, 1952, Courtesy of LIFE Magazine
Glassware designer and sculptor Isabel Antonia Giampietro died March 30, 2010 in New York at the age of 92. Her most prolific years were in the 1950s, a time when very few women worked in design. Her pieces were unique; The New York Times describes her glassworks as being “as graceful as they are innovative”. She developed a technique to make the stem of a drinking glass from one piece creating extremely strong glassware that was more efficient to produce. She also designed goblets, where the stem doubles as another glass.
Narcisso Glasses, 1958, by Isabel Antonia Giampietro
Humans started making glass about 5000 years ago, which makes it one of the oldest manufactured materials in the world. However, major scientific breakthroughs in regards to glass didn’t come until the 19th century. In the 1880s, the German scientist Otto Schott (1851–1935) invented borosilicate glass, a new, much stronger variety of the material. He started selling it in 1893 under the name “Duran.” Schott still sells it under this name today. In the United States, borosilicate glass was first manufactured by Corning Glass Works in 1915, and sold under the name Pyrex.
Borosilicate Glass Beaker
Spawned from the unlikely mind of an expat German scientist — the Chemex coffeemaker is a brilliant melding of design and convenience, a thermal carafe drip-system consisting of lab grade borosilicate beaker glass and a filtration system using laboratory filter paper.
Peter J. Schlumbohm, Ph.D, moved to New York City in the mid-1930s and was desperately searching for a great cup of coffee amid the city’s stale automats and late night diners.
Peter Schlumbohm (Check Out his Cigarette Holder) / LIFE Magazine 1949
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Mirror, Mirror
Checking yourself in the mirror is something we all do several times a day. We trust mirrors to give us an accurate reflection. They tell us if there’s spinach in our teeth, or if our shirts look bad with our shoes. Mirrors are also made to flatter and distort, with convex shapes to make us look taller and thinner or tints to reflect warm tones and give our skin a healthy rosy hue. It took humanity thousands of years to go from catching a glimpse of themselves in a bowl of water to that first perfect mirror, but we’ve been playing with our reflection ever since.
Body Sculptures by Hans Breder, Found at I'M Revolting
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