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BRITISH | JOHN & SILVIA REID | JAMES LEONARD: | ||||
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The aim of The 20th Century Design Collection is to celebrate the best of British in the contemporary period. Of all eras, this is still by far the most opaque era when it comes to the identity of designers' work, and the quality of manufacturing in the 'non-traditional' materials used. It is still the most difficult to source, compared with periods hundreds of years ago which were named after the dynastic Houses of England's monarchs. Naturally, the further each epoch, or period, recedes in time, the more it is venerated, therefore esteemed. Great age carries with it pedigree. Although such provenance is all too rarely proof: since the older furniture becomes, the more it is the 'heirloom' of gifting in the family, if not the unrecorded act of sale by auction, or, plain hand-me-down. So pedigree -- which the big auction houses transform into additional value by asserting "beyond reasonable doubt", its provenance -- has great appeal, and is greedily yearned for as personal symbol of veneration. Venerate the old piece of brown furniture . . . and you must venerate its owner. So it must be bid for in the salerooms. The greater the age, the more it is deemed, scarce. Then the 'deemed', becomes esteemed . . . translating into roomfuls of bidders, supposedly competing with other bidders to buy the age-status of an object's ancestry, but which is really a process of competing, not with under-bidders, but with themselves . . . In effect, their capacity to over-reach estimated values in order to prove that they have accorded the item even greater value by paying still more for it than anyone else -- who was there, or on the phone, that day -- was willing to pay. Supporting this axiom, is the notion that the older something is, regardless as to any value it may have in the way it was put together, the more esoteric the knowledge needed by which to assess and appreciate. Axioms or no, nothing could be further from 'appreciation' than that pre-occupation. An informed response needed to understand, and convey, isn't the prerogative of the longevity of a product, otherwise elevated to a designation beyond compare: that of a venerated object of great workmanship, and even greater patina, which stands in such greatness because it has survived century after century against the odds. Cultural interpretation has to accept tolerance as the arbiter of propositional debate. Advocacy for the pre-eminence of one furniture era over that of another during one Monarch's reign -- or out of it -- would beg of special pleading. As elsewhere, in cultural terms, knowledge is indivisible when it comes to specifying the way excellence in design succeeds, but which, nevertheless, became many times over, the outmoded throwaway of cultural evolution. Furniture has always been demoted after being devalued . . . before being re-appreciated, and then re-valued. What applies as significant interpretation about furniture designers over the last 50 years, is no less 'down on the totem pole' than knowing about the conditions that, say, began as a process which by-produced black oak furniture 600 years ago. And that was because inadequate knowledge of the function of up-drafting in the chimney-flues of Britain, (of both King and commoner,) in most houses, took belching smoke in frequent down-drafts, whenever the wind blew across the chimney. Thus, choking humans, along with co-mingled livestock. Over hundreds of years, this bilious smoke swirled downwards to leave its carbonized imprimature over everything and begin the process of inadvertent fumigation of oak coffers and such, of Middle England, throughout the Middle Ages up to the 18th century, (apologies to US visitors to this site, but the British have never been accustomed to, "in the eighteen hundreds",) slowly transformed the appearance of the once-golden oak. The furniture became impregnated with carbon deposits. This naturally preserved it against attack by wood-worm, and everything else but fire itself. Eventually, incrementally,the smoke blackened everything, including a little coffer, before cherishing hands polished the now esteemed 'antique' into a high-sheen, ebony finish. Whence the term, "English black oak". <> | ||||||||
The 20th Century Design Collection @ Dean Clough took on the business of collecting three-dimensional, cultural history: assembling the most significant work by key furniture designers designing for postwar, post-Festival of Britain, consumers. In France, in the early 50s, they saw magazine articles promoting Robin & Lucienne Day as the designer-celebrity couple, saw the interiors then displaying Howard Keith, Terence Conran and the Days' furniture and fabrics, and called it the "English Contemporary Style". Fifteen years later in the mid-60s, the "English Contemporary Style" slid out of view, if not off the cultural map altogether, as the next wave of American and Italian designers, startled the newly affluent when it was shown in colour ads. Everything from the previous era was pushed out of sight -- or 'demoted' would be the word. In terms of the publicly accessible art-forms then current, it has to be re-stated, from the distance we have, what was culturally accessible on the airwaves and in the print media, and in the high streets of Britain. The then, newly recognized 'mass entertainment', was hugely influenced by the impact of radio on a knowledge-hungry public, (imagine! - before TV,) and the new social realism of newsprint, plus photo-journalism. There was also a revamped magazine industry aimed at 'the housewife at home'. And, then, communal attendance at British and Hollywood films. (Couture was probably, financially, inaccessible.) In the early 50's, the British films, especially the social comedies about the established professions, such as doctoring, are likely to show the new interiors of the time with living room/reception furniture by Andrew John Milne or Dick Russell, (for Gordon Russell). The 20th Century Design Collection is a collection of furniture that was series' production in its time. That is, it was designed to be machined, or pre-formed as component materials. Initially developed during the First World War, these materials had been used after that of course, and fighter aircraft production gave widespread exposure to such components as perspex, (in the US, lucite,) for unshatterable cockpit covers, cross-ply, wood laminates for the skeletal structure of a small-bodied fuselage, (before titanium,) and aluminium castings as a lightweight substitute for iron or steel. There was also heavy-duty, stainless steel. In the after-war years, 'peace time' furniture producers, such as the British company, Hille, took their cue from the major American manufacturers, Herman Miller and Knoll International. The development and use of Charles and Ray Eames' designs through Herman Miller, took production standards to new levels of functional problem-solving. Out of these developments, "series production" comes to be known, and valued, as a criterion for quality in production. Ipso facto, there is a re-evaluation of the aesthetics of mid-20th century, assembly-line production, taking place. It can all now be seen to be part of an ongoing revolution. The greater part of looking back to discover the impact that these designs had on a population starved of modernity, is to re-discover the cultural innovation it symbolised. | ||||||||
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THE FESTIVAL OF BRITAIN: As with the pre-Millennium hype, generated by expectations of mass adulation for The Dome, "Millennium Experience" in MM year, 2000, so The Festival of Britain, staged a mere few miles further up the Thames from Greenwich, in 1951, is the prototype for that. The Festival of Britain, generated tremendous public confidence as The Dome of Discovery. It made the Day's work internationally known, along with Ernest Race and Andrew John Milne, whose piazza furniture was published many times over at the time. Photo: Picture Post: Hulton Picture Company | ||||||||
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ERNEST RACE: A coiled sprung, piazza chair, designed for The Festival of Britain. (The prototype by Rene Herbst in the late 20's.) What is not self-evident from the rib-like rigidity of the cross slinging, is the bounciness of the sleeved springs. For outdoor seating, it was designed to take rain or shine, without corroding. (However, many have not withstood decades of English rain.) 'Atomic ball' feet, are in brass. -- Made by Race Furniture. | |||||||
ROBIN DAY: Coffee table in heavy duty, veneered ply, on steel rod. Stamped, "14:6:51 Festival of Britain". Designed for indoor public-area seating, all these tables were sold off when the Festival closed in '51, for £5.00 each. -- Hille, London | |||||||
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Plywood, laminates, and aluminium technologies evolved and developed during the years from 1939 to 1945. The work produced on the back of those developments, includes a great deal of what is in The 20thCentury Design Collection. Hence, the work of Dick Russell (for Gordon Russell,) Basil Spence, Robert Heritage, Frank Guille, John and Sylvia Reid, Andrew John Milne, (for Heals,) Ronald Carter, Terence Conran and William Plunkett. Since 1945, the main impetus behind a latent inertia over design innovation has been over the 'brand-new', with obviously developed component materials that were unlike anything else produced in Britain. Starting out as consumer resistance by those wedded to the pseudo-imperious idea that furniture meant new, (old brown,) wood, it gradually became resistance to any knowledge of modern culture. A sort of spurious distain towards technological possibility, never mind what was actually produced, or how . . . Thereafter, this inertia developed in a new direction. By the time satellite and cable delivered another 50 channels to most of the country, it was now a dog-eat-dog competition for audience share, and that on the back of ad-agency research on audience numbers and age groups. Given the acknowledged dumbing down of terrestial TV, even greater inertia has come about. 'Info-tainment' has taken over. Interior decor magazine-shows avoid the process and substance of anything that gets said about it. But, since televised magazine formats are targeted towards dual-income, hot consumers, all references to quality in construction are regarded as didactic; and, that smacks of late night, Learning Zone stuff, (Open University, BBC2). Therefore, avoid references to hard knowledge. The result? - inbuilt inertia to issues of ergonomics, structural problem-solving in any given material, design evaluation, or even scarcity. On the page, in colour, in the TV, show-case, 'makeover' house, particularized living space is identified with 'classless',childless home-makers dedicated to demonstrating full-blown decorator consumption. After the 'ordeal' has thrown together the makeover, IKEA will be visited, and the car loaded up, if it hasn't already. Given decades of consumers being saturated with photographics, covering TV, and home-and-garden, magazine presentations, it is, more often than not, cliched attitudes towards architect-designed furniture icons that have become a kind of whores' world of gauche publicity. In England, that now takes on a typical, art director's ambience of a fashion shoot which conspicuously includes, a singularly placed Charles Eames rosewood lounger on the marble, paved floor of an otherwise objectless, clutterless, palatial flat. Yes, it's all a take on the minimalist stereotype -- a completely empty room, bar two pieces of furniture. Thus featured in a TV commercial, it runs every hour of every evening, week in, week out, in an up-market (for US visitors, 'upscale') ad for 'her car', with sexually-available man, as driver. It plays upon our susceptibilities by using stereotypes in furniture, crashing out of our expectations about gender-roles altogether (Which it reverses). But, on another evening, on another channel, this is when a TV-company production, home-decorating team on 'Changing Rooms' -- the current turn-your-semi-detached house into a miniature palace -- aren't openly acting out the mock fatigue of catalogue shoppers who've had enough of mixing paint before the lilac and burnt orange walls have been finished. In this scenario they must be careful, of course, with the owners of the 'semi', (oh, what a lucky couple!) not to raise issues of what lies behind the choice in furniture, rather than the cultural taste in decorated wall-painting. Furniture, of course, is just an arbitrary add-on when all the hard work has been done . . ? Apparently. Contrary to the ads that dramatize a car-buying, independent, un-available woman, is that the TV decorating team are about the values that exude a world of choice, where choice all has the same value, rather than excellence in the quality of furniture, and how that can be demonstrated. All of which says a great deal about a brave new shoppers' world of undifferentiated delirium. Anything goes. If the products of modernist architects are shown and written up, in magazines like 'Elle Decoration' and 'Wallpaper', they will, predictably, be in terms of sale-room values. This is considered raunchy. Clearly, its currency, is price-out-of-reach, shock the viewers. The game-plan? -- to elicit gasps of disbelief. Otherwise, such catwalk moodiness centered around 'an icon', fails to arouse any I-must-have cupidity, because desire and its realisation is not explicitly aroused, any more than it is for those who are unexpectedly presented with a floor-show, on-stage. Enjoyment, is not the same as joy itself. It is possessive desire that is under consideration. Normal audience consumption of a spectacle, is not what it is about. Really, the commercials are soap and 15-second melodramas. All a dress rehearsal for a brave new world of two-dimensional, TV shopping . . . Changing stereotypes: giving recognition to design innovation rather than the venal pricing of overexposed "icons of the 20th century". None of this is open to anyone with a mere web-page to turn around. Why it is that a heritage culture, which still emulates a system of aristocratic preferences, has such a hold as the creaking arbiter of value, is the measure by which a tradition-bound culture stimulates yearning for the worship of ancestry for its own sake. And because of scarcity only? Hardly. This gives precedence to 'period furniture' filling stately homes, rather than to successful design solutions in the adaptable use of mouldable and bendable components in furniture. The best designs have economy built into them. Arne Jacobsen and Hans Wegner's or Poul Kjaerholm's work stands out for the use of materials through tensile strength. Now a much younger generation design de-cloned versions for the IKEA business empire. Business goes on . . . The revolution in materials that came about during the mid-20th century, has still to be re-assessed -- the 'finds' still to be found.<> | ||||||
ROBIN DAY: | ||||||
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GERALD SUMMERS: | ||||||
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EASY CHAIR (Top right): | "SHOW-WOOD", easy chair, 1932 | |||
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"SHOW-WOOD", EASY CHAIR, LLOYD LOOM: | Jean Prouve, whose work was probably unavailable to magazines in Britain,) this was mainstream and affordable in the interwar years when the Modernist enterprise was forced to grind to a halt at the end of 1939. | |||
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ROBIN DAY: | BASIL SPENCE: | HOWARD KEITH: | ERNEST RACE: | |||||
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 | FRANK GUILLE: LEFT; with Frank Guille’s chair, the chair-back support becomes the chair leg, thereby eliminating joints that intersect . . . always the weakest element of chair design. So the joining of the standard parts, normally two segments, is no longer in the reckoning. Instead, it is transferred the entire length of the laminated element, transforming it from a rigid, to a reflexive structure.
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The British Collection has become the primary focus when collecting | ||
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The above exhibition plans are on track. | ||
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When the above exhibition is complete the aim is to stage a major celebration of furniture designers working in Britain in the mid 20th Century, to be staged after the British Millennium celebrations are over, beginning in 2001. Major museum partnerships are invited to correspond in order to collaborate on publishing, as well as touring this exhibition in Europe and North America | ||
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Morce Ambler | ||
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