California Design, 1930-1965: “Living in a Modern Way” (The MIT Press)

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Description

The first comprehensive examination of California’s mid-century brand new design, generously illustrated.

In 1951, designer Greta Magnusson Grossman observed that California design was once “not a superimposed style, but an answer to present conditions…. It has developed out of our own preferences for living in a brand new way.” California design influenced the material culture of all the country, in the whole thing from architecture to fashion. This generously illustrated book, which accompanies a major exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is the first comprehensive examination of California’s mid-century brand new design. It begins by tracing the origins of a distinctively California modernism in the 1930s by such European émigrés as Richard Neutra, Rudolph Schindler, and Kem Weber; it finds other specific design influences and innovations in solid-color commercial ceramics, inspirations from Mexico and Asia, new schools for design training, new concepts about leisure, and the conversion of wartime technologies to peacetime use (exemplified by Charles and Ray Eames’s plywood and fiberglass furniture).

The heart of California Design is the brand new California home, famously characterized by open plans conducive to out of doors living. The layouts of modernist homes by Pierre Koenig, Craig Ellwood, and Raphael Soriano, as an example, were intended to blur the distinction between indoors and out. Homes were furnished with products from Heath Ceramics, Van Keppel-Green, and Architectural Pottery in addition to other, up to now unheralded companies and designers. Many objects were designed to be multifunctional: pool and patio furniture that was once equally suitable indoors, lighting that was once both task and ambient, bookshelves that served as room dividers, and bathing suits that would develop into ensembles appropriate for indoor entertainment.

California Design includes 350 images, most in color, of furniture, ceramics, metalwork, architecture, graphic and industrial design, film, textiles, and fashion, and ten incisive essays that trace the upward thrust of the California design aesthetic.

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