This is the latest Phaidon Atlas style title covering designers who created pieces for the home or for personal use, including furniture, textiles, glassware, ceramics, wall coverings, cutlery and more. Industrial designers get a reduced appearance in these pages but essential people are obviously included, like Max Bill, Henry Drefuss, Kenneth Grange, Alec Issigonis, Raymond Loewy, Eliot Noyes, Sergio Pininfarina, Ferdinand Porsche, Ralph Rapson, Walter Dorwin Teague and Massimo Vignelli.
The author makes an important point in his intro. During the fifties and sixties, there was a crossover between design, art and craft so that these disciplines strongly influenced the creative look of commercially produced products. The beautiful textiles from the Finnish Marimekko company are inspired by art, Dieter Rams and his "less is better" electrical products for Braun are design-led. Anyone looking through the book will become aware of the huge number of designers from northern Europe. The Scandinavian countries, with small populations, produced an outstanding collection of well-designed products for the home, in particular glassware and ceramics.
The book is arranged alphabetically, with each person getting a page with text about their life, influences and product output plus a photo of a significant product. I would have preferred to see more than one photo, some designers do have two and it makes an appreciation of their work easier. The back of the book has a nine-page index with, at a rough guess, more than 2,700 entries. This reveals just how comprehensively it covers those mid-century designers.
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