Search results for ""Author Justin McGuirk""

Charlotte Perriand was one of great designers of the twentieth century. A pioneer of modernism, her work was often overshadowed by her more famous male collaborators, who included Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret and Jean Prouvé. However, in recent years her reputation as a furniture designer and architect has matched the stature of her peers – her furniture in particular has become highly prized by collectors. From the 1920s onwards, Perriand was instrumental in bringing the modernist aesthetic to interiors. But she also believed in the synthesis of the arts, and was friends with visual artists such as Pablo Picasso and Fernand Léger. This book will explore Perriand’s journey from the machine aesthetic to her adoption of natural forms, and from modular furniture systems to major architectural projects such as Les Arcs ski resort. Featuring some of her most famous interiors, as well as her original furniture, her photography and her personal notebooks, this book sheds new light on Perriand’s creative process and her place in design history. It will accompany the forthcoming Design Museum exhibition of the same title, which will coincide with the twenty-fifth anniversary of Perriand’s last significant presentation in London, held at the Design Museum in 1996.

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The first book to dive exclusively into Ai Weiwei’s approach to design and collecting, shedding light on the value we ascribe to everyday objects. Artist, film-maker, architect, activist, collector – whatever mode Ai Weiwei is in, he is trying to tell us something about the state of the world. This book presents Ai’s work as a commentary on design and what it reveals about our changing values. Confronted by the rapid pace of change in his country, Ai became fascinated by Chinese antiquities. His vast collections of historical artefacts, from Stone Age tools to broken teapot spouts, attest to the way the language of objects speaks across the ages. Is this a classic tale of technical progress, or have we lost crucial qualities with the march of time? Ai invites us to make sense of these objects as he explores the tensions between past and present, hand and machine, precious and worthless, construction and destruction.

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This book examines California's enormous impact on contemporary design, from the counterculture of the 1960s to the tech culture of Silicon Valley. On a more expansive level, California: Designing Freedom explores the idea that California has pioneered tools of personal liberation - from LSD to surfboards and iPhones. This ambitious survey brings together political posters and portable devices, but also looks beyond hardware to explore how user interface designers in the San Francisco Bay Area are shaping some of our most common daily experiences. Californian products have influenced contemporary life across the globe to such an extent that in some ways we are all now Californians. Put simply, 'Designed in California' is the new 'Made in Italy'.

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To accompany The Design Museum's opening exhibition, which explores the anxiety and optimism inherent in contemporary designFear and Love, published to accompany the major exhibition that will open the Design Museum's highly anticipated new home in Kensington, London, examines the role of design in the twenty-first century. It proposes that, in a rapidly changing world, design is defined by both anxiety and optimism. Organized by five key themes - Network, Empathy, Body, Earth and Periphery - the book explores design's relationship to emotive issues. Eleven leading figures from across the spectrum of design provide a wide-ranging set of attitudes to design in our times: Andrés Jaque/Office for Political Innovation, OMA, Madeline Gannon, Metahaven, Hussein Chalayan, Neri Oxman, Christien Meindertsma, Ma Ke, Kenya Hara, Arquitectura Expandida and Rural Urban Framework.

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The twentieth century offered up countless visions of domestic life, from the aspirational to the radical. Whether it was the dream of the fully mechanised home or the notion that technology might free us from home altogether, the domestic realm was a site of endless invention and speculation. But what happened to those visions? Are the smart homes of today the future that architects and designers once predicted, or has ‘home’ proved resistant to radical change? Home Futures: Living in Yesterday’s Tomorrow –accompanying a major Design Museum exhibition of the same title–explores a number of different attitudes toward domestic life, tracing the social and technological developments that have driven change in the home. It proposes that we are already living in yesterday’s tomorrow, just not in the way anyone predicted. This book begins with a lavishly illustrated catalogue portraying the ‘home futures’ of the twentieth century and beyond, from the work of Ettore Sottsass and Joe Colombo to Google’s recent forays into the smart home. The catalogue is followed by a reader consisting of newly commissioned essays by writers such as Dan Hill and Justin McGuirk, which explore the changes in the domestic realm in relation to space, technology, society, economy and psychology.

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