Our Furniture—Ourselves?

 

While flipping through Modern Furniture: 150 Years of Design, I couldn't help but stop and smile at seeing the same monobloc chair sitting on my backyard deck sitting there on the pages of a proposed history of modern furniture design. When we think of modern furniture design, we too often think of wildly experimental and wildly expensive items found only in the homes of the rich and famous. However, as Andrea Mehlhose and Martin Wellner , founders of the design company Fremdkörper and editors of Modern Furniture, show, modern design is all around us in such a ubiquitous way that we barely notice. Recognizing the power of design to simplify and change our lives can help us recognize a great deal of our culture. Modern Furniture demonstrates that our furniture really tells us a lot about ourselves. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Our Furniture—Ourselves?"

[Image: 2008, Meltdown Chair PP Tube, Tom Price, © Christoph Bolton.]

[Many thanks to h.f. Ullmann for the image above and for a review copy of Modern Furniture: 150 Years of Design.]

Living in Style

I’ve always loved the Art Nouveau style, and few did it better than Charles Rennie Mackintosh, born on this date in 1868. Whether it was architecture, furniture, typography, or stained glass, Mackintosh helped create a total environment of beauty and elegance all around him. Hill House, one of Mackintosh’s finest buildings, appears above.

Unfortunately, you can fit the sum total of my knowledge of architecture and furniture design on the head of a pin, with plenty of dancing room for the angels. However, I do know what I like, and I love Mackintosh’s furniture designs, especially his chairs. In the examples shown above, the middle design is called a Hill House chair, after the Hill House itself at the top of this post. Mackintosh integrated every aspect of his designs into a cohesive, organic whole. The people living in Hill House truly lived in style—Mackintosh’s style.

Even typography came into Mackintosh’s scope, as seen by the typeface above that now carries his name. If you come across any book on Mackintosh’s life and work, I’d bet you that it will use at some point this very same typeface, which flows with the same fluid, clean lines running through all of his works.

Finally, I’d like to remark on Mackintosh’s use of stained glass, as in the example above. His vine-like lines and flowering curves create beautiful spaces for the pure color of the light shining behind them. I remember seeing the Art Nouveau, 1890-1914 exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC in 2000 and coming away with a better appreciation of how Mackintosh’s work differed from that of Louis Comfort Tiffany. Whereas Tiffany exploded with unrestrained line and color, mimicking the abundance of nature, Mackintosh’s work reflects the quieter, more restrained moments of the natural world. Each style has its place in this larger concept of making every inch of our environment a thing of grace and beauty. Perhaps one day our culture will again place a value on living life art-fully.

(BTW, the best place to go for all things Mackintosh and even make a Mackintosh pilgrimage to some of his architecture, as well as the Mackintosh Church, is the official web site of the Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society.)