Modern Living Accessories: 100 Years of Design by Martin Wellner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This amazing survey walks backwards into the 19th century. Year by year, you see how contemporary design evolved into its basic constituents. Modern works reflect a refinement in the use of materials, such that the deformation of familiar objects at first, geometric and blocky become expressive with a higher resolution in material agency. While many contemporary objects start to break the grey areas of design, where form suggests not only novel movements adhering to a singular force (such as Bauhaus design, where form matches function) but today into postmodern ambivalence where a singular object suggests multiple uses that are sometimes more clever than useful but at other times, far more ingenious as to dissolve the logical categories by which we classify what an object is.
Given in full page color, the short captions, and the short articles give us a brief introductory taste as to the mechanisms of design, the influence of the visions of designers and the continual mastery of material.
With the final works of the industrial revolution having established its conquest of human materialism in production, we have the beginnings of middle class wealth, to support a need for mass export of finished products. Art Deco and Art Nouveau come to the scene with its whimsical forms, to introduce a new level of finish, where product production shares no seams as to its origins. Here we have the advent of a new consumerism, the full split of producer from consumer so that only expert craftsmen and finally engineers and scientists are the gate keepers for designers. For in areas of such refinement, only the knowledge of specialized processes and the abstractness of a designers breaking out of the box lay the condition for the deformation of our modernist categories of contemporary appliances.
One thinks in the near future the inclusion of smart devices will reach a further deterritorialisation of what objects can be, do and coexist with us, further anticipating human need and modifying further the trajectory of how we can be (and have agency) in an environment.
