 The "Good Design" Movement
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Avant-Garde Interiors
The most "avant-garde" interiors in the 1950s and 1960s depended on the twin influences of European modernism.
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The 1960s were all free love, flower power and pop music but, as the saying goes, if you remember it, you weren't there. The previous decade's love of American design was replaced, as Swinging London became the centre of all things groovy. By the mid 1960s the concept of design as a commodity “added”to consumer objects to increase thir value had become economically and culturally integrated into all the capitalist countries of the industrialized world. Design differentiated products in competition with each other, or else served as a form of national self-identification on the world market.
During the 1950s the reconstructed economies of Germany, Italy and Japan, had sought to restore themselves in international trading through identifying their goods with a paticular product esthetic. For the most part, only goods aimed at a fairly exclusive, wealthy international market were overtly described as incorporating “design”, often with the name of a well-known designer attached to them. Only those companies which aimed their goods at the top end of the market made sure that they were seen by the media as being design-conscious. Others, with a mass market in mind, concentrated more on minimizing the price of their products than on their esthetic content.
The “goog design”movement of these years became a clearly defined cultural phenomenon, supported by museum collections, exhibitions such as the Milan Triennales and conferences, competitions, awards and glossy magazines. A very tightly delineated design culture grew out of this network, and as long as it remained in the hands of an international elite it was easy to identify its ideological function and cultural effects. Synonymous with the concept of good taste, it preferred minimalism to ostentation and elegance to vulgarity. Well designed products became increasingly identified with a cosmopolitan, middle-class, well-educated lifestyle. Some furniture and electronic equipment manufacturers - Olivetti and Cassinini in Italy; Hille in Britain; Bang& Olufsen in Denmark; Braun in Germany; Sony in Japan; and IBM in the United States -established their identities through their commitment to design and largely depended upon it for their commercial success.
The modernism of past decades had rejected historical influences so, in a spirit of rebellion, 1960s plundered the past for inspiration. The result is a ragbag of styles culled from all over, including Victorian and Edwardian, the 1920s and art nouveau. But it was not just about replicating past styles; everything was given an irreverent twist to make it all its own.
Pop art and op art both had a firm footing in the 1960s. Artists such as Andy Warhol and David Hockney with their pop art references to mass culture (soup cans, comic strips, images of icons like Marilyn Monroe) crossed over into interiors, and on to murals, wallpaper and posters. Similarly, op art with its use of pattern and colour to simulate movement found its way on to everything from furniture to wallpaper. Artists such as Bridget Riley, who works predominantly in black and white, became the vogue. Whether you choose the hippy ethnic look or plastic space age, it will be far out.
The national styles of these goods varied one from another, however, and the modern design movement in Italy had the greatest international impact. Industrial and cultural reconstruction in the years since 1945 had encouraged close collaboration between consumer-goods manufacturers and a group of highly creative architect designers. The economic boom of the years 1958-63, combined with a forward-looking attitude towards new materials and a commitment to an aggressively modern esthetic with its roots in sculpture, resulted in the proliferation of goods for home and office which were associated with a sophisticated, cosmopolitan lifestyle.
Italy's ability to compete favorably in international markets stemmed primarily from its policy of paying low wages to its workforce rather than from investing in advanced technology. Italian design was limited to those goods which depended on low technology - furniture, household appliances - rather than the more complex electrical and electronic products to which Japan was dedicating its energies. Forbidden by the terms of the postwar settlement to develop an armanents industry, Japan had come to dominate the consumer electronics market, in part because of American industry's preoccupation with military contracts.
“Italian design” became linked, in the minds of many, with glossy plastic tables and chairs, sumptuous leather armchairs and sofas, sculptural lamps in steel and marble, and other items of household and office equipment which appealed more on the basis of their elegant forms than their technological sophistication.
The exclusivity of Italian design gave rise to an alternative design movement in that country, to challenge the glossy, status-ridden image of mainstream fashion. Linked to social and economic factors such as the students revolution of 1968, the anti- or counter-design movement sought to reunite design in Italy with the cultural base which had inspired it in the early postwar years. Kitsch, stylistic revivalism and irony were used in an attempt to take design out of the hands of industry and to reposition it within the mass culture.
Radical architectural groups based in Florence presented Utopian visions of the future which were destined for the art gallery rather than the factory floor. From the Op–Art movement of the early '60s came geometric patterns in bright colors, and lots of contrasting shiny and smooth surfaces.
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1960 - 1973
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