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This paper focuses on the formative period of 'Italian design which, as documented subsequently by historians, readied its apogee in the early 1960s. It sets out to unpack the complex relationship between art, craft, artisanal production and design in these years concentrating on the role played by the third category in the early 1950s, especially as manifested in the exhibition 'Italy at Work'. It seeks to recontextualize what was referred to, at the time, as 'handicraft' or folk art' within the economic and ideological framework of the period and to show its important role both in providing a necessary continuity and in enabling innovation of a certain kind to take place. An emphasis is placed on the role of the USA in these years and of individual architect-designers, especially Gio Ponti and Ettore Sottsass, who positioned themselves within current debates. The paper argues that the mature sea-modern Italian design movement took on board some of the defining characteristics of handicraft, and that a respect for tradition was crucial in the formation of the new aesthetic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, several companies established themselves in Buenos Aires to sell furniture and decorative objects coming from the United Kingdom. This paper offers a brief history of the two most representative importing companies: the Thompson Company, and the branch of the Maple Furniture Company in the capital of Argentina. These two companies, which were closely related and had developed a tense commercial relationship, were the main reason for the consolidation of English taste in Buenos Aires. Combining direct imports from the UK with their own production, they both developed a very active decorating business for private homes, public places and official institutions. Although closely involved with the British population in the country, they also worked for a wide range of clients of the 'criollo' or creole and immigrant sector. They became so prestigious, and enjoyed such a high profile, that even today the lyrics of the famous tango 'Y todo a media luz' can still remind us of their importance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seat furniture design peculiar to the Victorian era may be broadly divided into patent and parlour seating. These two seat furniture forms reflected the many contradictions that were the reality of the Victorian period. Patent seating offered a multiplicity of supported postures to facilitate task and prevent spinal ill health. While patent seating accorded with medical concepts of the day, it was not designed by medical personnel, but by inventors using craft knowledge, science and mechanization. Patent seating pre-empted modern ergonomic seating by 120 years. The Victorians, however, failed to appreciate the ingenuity and health benefits of such seating. To those in the hub of Victorian society, progress was represented not by technological advances but by refined behaviour. Using a chair to assist posture was considered crass and acceptable only for the infirm or the aged. On the other hand, maintaining a dignified, immobile, upright posture on rigid, unsupportive and erect parlour seating offered the opportunity to demonstrate refinement, willpower and hence morality. In the Victorian era such traits represented sophistication and modernity. This paper discusses some of the tensions that existed in Victorian society, and how these tensions influenced the design arid selection of furniture and the preference for parlour furniture over patent furniture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reconsiders the success of Alvar Aalto in interwar Britain through the perspective of P. Morton Shand. As a journalist fluent in French and German, Shand introduced European Modernism to British architects. From 1930, he focused his efforts on Aalto, leading to the seminal exhibition of the Finnish designer's furniture in 1933. By viewing the exhibition through the lens of Shand, this article points to the role of critics as active participants in interwar design culture, leading the promotion of modern design and blurring the lines between journalism and commercialized propaganda. While historians are productively describing the roles of consumers, critics and other nondesigners in design history, Shand has remained unappreciated, despite operating at the heart of many interwar exchanges. With the use of an uncataloged collection of his correspondence, this article reveals his individual impact in popularizing the furniture of Aalto. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article lists several books received related to design including "Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France," by Leora Auslander, "Eighteenth-century Furniture," by Clive D. Edwards, and "Modernism," by Richard Weston.

Marcel Breuer was the first Bauhaus designer—and one of only a few—who was actively involved in reissuing his furniture designs. When Dino Gavina began working with Breuer to reissue his first tubular steel chair in November 1962, calling it 'Wassily', it was almost forty years old. In fact, the Wassily chair was not the first attempt to reissue the first tubular steel armchair of 1926. In 1960, Wohnbedarf in Zürich produced a limited edition, but sold only three pieces. Two years later, the first Wassily chair appeared at Gavina's showroom in Milan, thus securing it a 'career' as a timeless piece of design furniture. This contrasted with Breuer's earlier, unsuccessful attempts to launch and produce his designs during the 1940s and 1950s. This article investigates these first attempts, as well as the making of reissues and the reasons for their success. It also investigates several contradictions in the 'Wassily' reissue, beginning with the paradox that, in order to be recognized and succeed commercially, Bauhaus objects had to resemble those of the past and their designers were not asked to create up-to-date pieces of furniture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to give political meaning to the consumption habits of the Maharajas during the late Victorian and Edwardian eras and to engage with the identities this kind of cosumption created in a wider discourse of empire. It will explore how the Birmingham firm of F. & C. Osier, makers of luxury glass objects, developed its market in India during the nineteenth century. It will also outline, as a case study, the firm's advent into the Rajput princely state of Mewar, through a study of the specially commissioned furniture acquired by the Maharanas of Mewar, in order to link material culture and design history in the study of political identity in a post-colonial context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at the influence of German tubular steel furniture at the State Higher Art and Technical Workshops (VKhUTEMAS) in Moscow during the late 1920s. Tubular steel furniture was first introduced in 1925 at the Bauhaus and within a few years was perceived by progressive architects across Europe as the appropriate material for the modernist interior. While the Soviet Union sought to revive its industrial economy during the New Economic Policy (1921–28), VKhUTEMAS students and professors looked to Europe for technical and artistic guidance for the design of new furniture as the country became a socialist society. German design innovations reached Moscow through the dissemination of print material, international exhibitions, and travel, including student exchanges between the Bauhaus and VKhUTEMAS. Between 1927–30 VKhUTEMAS students Boris Zemliannitsyn and Alexandr Galaktionov designed new furniture that referenced German tubular steel furniture, while professors El Lissitzky and Moisei Ginzburg replicated German tubular steel designs in their models and renditions of standard proletariat dwellings. Although the Soviet economy could not support widespread steel manufacturing, the experimentation with tubular steel furniture at VKhUTEMAS highlighted the international influence of German modernism and exposed the derivative nature of Soviet socialist material culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines aspects of the lives and material culture of the Irish peasantry between 1880 and 1920. Within an interdisciplinary framework, based on a foundation of work on Irish vernacular furniture, it combines a variety of sources from art history, photography, ethnography and travel writing to postcards and poetry. The relative reliability of evidence from foreign visitors versus the native Irish is assessed. Areas of social and material culture, such as the 'stage Irishman', racism, why women didn't wear shoes, why boys were dressed as girls and the pre-arrangement of rural marriage, become touchstones for the analysis of myths and realities perpetuated through contemporary sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the ways in which gendered bodies and gendered ideas about labour were built into American office furniture by way of human factors from the 1960s through the early 1990s. Using an analysis of chairs and desks, including their forms and technical dimensions, the author argues that executive and secretarial furniture, in particular, encoded exaggerated and idealized gendered bodies in their design and excluded bodies that did not fit the expected gendered norms. The persistence of this convention, even in the design of ergonomic chairs which first appeared in the 1970s, reproduced sexism in organizational hierarchy and inscribed in furniture gendered assumptions of labour and gendered ideals of leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a comprehensive overview of the wood reliefs designed by Finnish architect Alvar Aalto to highlight their importance for both furniture and architecture. They are examined from three main perspectives: first, as experimental models, gradually increasing in complexity and related to different techniques for bending and forming wood for furniture design; second, as formal or sculptural material studies that further complemented Aalto's lectures and interest in rationalism and elastic standardization for both architecture and furniture; and finally, as straightforward exhibition pieces solely for promotional and advertising purposes, thereby reflecting the original manifesto of the Artek design company. Far beyond playful models, the reliefs were therefore critical to Aalto's furniture, architecture, and promotion as a prominent modern architect and designer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Tejo Remy's 1991 chest of drawers, You Can't Lay Down Your Memory, as a 'cultural event', a definitively mobile object, which must be understood as being constituted not as any given iteration of its multiple nature, but in the intersection of these multiplicities as it moves in the flows of culture. Consequently the discussion is centred upon a partial biography of Remy's piece that traces some examples of its incarnations: as a student project; as a part of the Droog collection; as an exemplar of the 'Dutch inflection' in design; and as a decoration for a casino in Las Vegas. In this way the intention is to demonstrate how culture is now defined by the mobilities of its parts; how products such as Remy's strange chest of drawers can be understood as not simply things that are made and then mediated, but as objects that exist in the operation of their mediation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anyone with an interest in early and mid-twentieth century design will be familiar with the name John Gloag. An author of almost sixty books, with topics ranging from interiors to furniture history, from industrial design to the use of plastics, Gloag was a member of an elite design culture that was highly visible throughout the 1930s and 40s, and which included figures such as Noel Carrington, Gordon Russell, Frank Pick, and many others. Although an ardent reformist with links to a number of prestigious institutions, including the RIBA, the RSA, the DIA and the CoID, Gloag's contribution to design reform, and to an understanding of a national design tradition, has attracted little scholarly interest. This essay discusses several of Gloag's texts, covering the period 1934-1946, and examines the author's views on design identity and reform, furniture design, and modern design in England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Particular modernist issues around time and space-saving and organisation influenced wardrobe design. These ideas, initially developed for industry and the office, eventually reached the domestic in the kitchen and bedroom. Using the concepts of design evolution and redesign, the article considers how, during the early twentieth century, the planned wardrobe space gradually developed into a defined storage system for both male and female garments and accessories.Following a brief consideration of modernism, space and storage, and the evolutionary development of the wardrobe as a space-saving and organising space, this article examines the Compactom wardrobe range, to demonstrate how a piece of furniture reflects the contexts of the parts of society that used it. Designed for both men and women, it seemed to address a number of issues, including concerns about efficiency, loss of domestic staff, clothes maintenance and middle-class identity. Using a range of contemporary influences from time and motion studies to travel goods, the case study of the Compactom wardrobe between 1920 and the 1950s demonstrates how designers integrated ideas of methodical and rational use of space into a range of wardrobes to offer the supposed benefits of a tidy and orderly life in a period of rapid change. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the advent of twin beds as a common sleeping arrangement for English couples. Through an analysis of a range of sources from the late nineteenth to mid twentieth centuries—marketing materials, advertisements, domestic, decorative and marital advice books and novels and films—it argues that while twin beds were initially recommended by proponents of the domestic sanitation movement as part of a raft of hygiene measures, by the 1920s they had become a fashionable item of bedroom furniture for modern couples in ‘companionate’ marriages. It was in this context that Marie Stopes, in her popular marital advice books, railed against them as an ‘invention of the devil’, symptomatic of the evils of modernity, and endangering the happiness of the modern married couple. The article concludes that, despite these changing contexts of consumption, the significance of the history of twin beds needs to be understood through the intersecting discourses of domesticity, health and sexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the 1890s, a new market was created for the Orkney straw-backed chair, which hitherto had been a vernacular product used largely in the homes of its makers on the Orkney Islands in the north of Scotland. This article discusses the standardization of the Orkney chair and its rapid acceptance into the houses of the British aristocracy and middle classes through the agency of the Scottish Home Industries Association. Within eleven years of its first display at an international exhibition the Orkney chair had inspired close copies and brand-new related designs made in the Netherlands by the Dutch firm of John Uiterwijk and Chris Wegerif. Its social rise was thus followed by geographical diffusion. This article also analyses the roles of the maker and of the promoter of an unusual item of furniture which has provided work for craftspeople in Orkney for over 100 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The identity of crafts has been based on their material specificity, skills, and function designated by the terms used: ceramics/pottery, metalwork, textiles, jewellery, furniture, and engraving/calligraphy, to name a few. By the end of the twentieth century, however, this material essentialism could no longer be sustained as a defining indicator only within craft as a new concern with the semiotics of materials became evident in the fine arts and design. Rather than focusing on the collapse of genres as arising out of ideological positions, this article will explore materiality in order to expose the common ground between design, craft and art as material expressions, and consider the possible genesis of the attention to the symbolic capital of materials. Beginning with a discussion of the historically contingent meanings of materiality, the article will explore the shared theme of transience to be found in contemporary arts and crafts. The paradox of 'rubbish' becoming 'durable' in art and craft, and the transition to 'endurable' in the museum are also examined within the context of the conservation issues arising out of the preservation of transience in a memorial culture, as signalled by Andreas Huyssen. The article draws on the work of sociologist Michael Thompson, literary critic Jonathan Culler, and anthropologist Mary Douglas, and Freud's work on transience and loss to consider the meaning and significance of materiality expressed as transience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advice books in the first half of the nineteenth century offered homemakers instructions for creating the ideal home. The problem for the design historian is to ascertain with what results the homemaker mediated these instructions. This article suggests using lists of house contents, which survive in a variety of forms, and adopting a qualitative approach to their analysis. Evidence for a number of middle-class homes is used to explore the variations. The symbolic value of individual objects and their role within the material culture of the home is examined--in particular, the use of textiles to articulate the practical and symbolic functions of living rooms. Although all the examples followed the general tendencies of the period as described in advice books, they also showed distinct differences according to social status, age, sex and occupation. A qualitative approach to the evidence permits exploration of the differences between homes and the possible social and cultural meaning that they conveyed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of fashionable taste in interior decoration has often included historic revivals, but during this period the almost bewildering array of styles based on national, foreign and exotic sources required the investigative skills and influential arguments of design reformers and authors of advice manuals to guide consumers in the development of their personal taste at home. While museums and exhibitions offered visitors focused displays and other opportunities to increase their knowledge of historical or exotic styles, designers, manufacturers, dealers and retailers competed to attract customers with attractive catalogues and alluring collections of fashionable designs and products based on historic models, hoping to encourage greater commitment and therefore more investment from those eager to furnish their homes in the latest style. The consumer was thus educated, persuaded, influenced and finally manipulated into adopting whatever current style in home decorating and furnishing suited their income, practical considerations and personal inclinations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the nature and role of aluminium in twentieth-century furniture making. The connection between aluminium as a modern material and the representation of modernity is examined to establish how 'new' materials can rise from being a novelty to mainstream usage. The efforts of the aluminium industry, both in America and Europe, in developing furniture as an end-user marker for its products are also explored. The promotion of the material often meant that non-tradition makers entered the furniture market. The issues that are concerned with materials and their relation to design, especially in matters of imitation, are considered here. Aluminium was used to represent modernity, on he one hand, but in other cases was hidden within another style. Therefore in the course of this article I draw together business history, technology and design history to explore some of the interactions that are focused around materials use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research in historical and economic geography has documented an interactive ago-industrial dynamic in the American Midwest, which laid the basis for regional mass-production systems often characterized as Fordism. This study examines four Midwestern manufacturing cities during the 'second industrial revolution', reconstructing the pattern and trajectories of leading sectors in bulk, mixed and batch production formats, using detailed, disaggregated census data and other sources. Focusing an value added in manufacturing as a key indicator, the study suggests that Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland and Grand Rapids charted quite distinctive pathways to industrial advance and that the significance of non-Fordist, speciality manufacturing to their growth has been undervalued. The Midwestern cases are contrasted with that of Philadelphia, an eastern centre for batch industries, and the five cities' situations in 1990 are compared with their industrial positions in 1925. The findings indicate a greater diversity in urban industrial structures and histories than is usually appreciated, which limits the reach of both the agro-industrialization model (temporally) and of the Fordism concept more generally, yet opens new venues for research on regional industrialization and its structured variations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article outlines sonic of the problems encountered in evaluating the work of Charles and Ray Eames, the husband and wife design partnership flourishing in the USA from 1941 to 1978, including issues related to gender, crafts and Modernism. It focuses on two items of furniture and argues that both gender and pro-Modernist/anti-crafts biases are at work in the attitudes of design critics towards them. It goes an to examine the Eamese's attitudes towards time crafts, before and after they met in 1940, and considers the role played 'functioning decoration' (their decorative arrangements of objects which encouraged an interplay between craft and machine work) in the humanizing of Modernist design in the post-war years in the USA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the role of design in the British furniture industry between the period of 1939 and 1965. It states that the distinctive contrast in the period highlights the effects of severe restrictions imposed by the Utility scheme, rationing, and the regulation of furniture design by law. Accordingly, the furniture trade was the only sector of industry in the country to be subjected to design by dictate as part of the programme of rationalization introduced during the war, and for the longer-term planned modernization. It reveals that the stage in the history of furniture is described by higher awareness of design brought about by the interventions from the Board of Trade for a competitive market.

The article examines the architectural designs of the cantilever chairs made by Heinz Rasch. It relates that the separation of the angle between seat and back from the supporting construction and diagonal legs are the hallmarks of Rasch's furniture design. The authors note that these two aspects are all one since as Rasch understood, the application of pressure on the seat is absorbed by the diagonal cantilever construction. The authors add that based on the evidence of his furniture design, Rasch is close to the Frankfurt group of architects who were striving after modern and inexpensive popular furniture.