June 26, 2017
Charles (1907–1978) and Ray Eames (1912–1988) were husband and wife American designers who made significant historical contributions to the development of modern architecture and furniture. Among their most well-known designs is the ‘Eames Lounge Chair.’ They also worked in the fields of industrial and graphic design, fine art, and film.
Charles was an American designer, architect and filmmaker. He and his second wife Ray Kaiser are responsible for groundbreaking contributions in the field of architecture, furniture design, industrial design, manufacturing and the photographic arts.
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October 8, 2015
Massimo [ma-see-moh] Vignelli [veen-yell-ee] (1931 – 2014) was an Italian graphic and industrial designer who worked in a number of areas including product packaging, housewares, furniture, public signage, and showrooms. He was the co-founder of Vignelli Associates, with his wife, Lella. His ethos was, ‘If you can design one thing, you can design everything,’ and this was reflected in the broad range of his work. Vignelli worked firmly within the Modernist tradition, and focused on simplicity through the use of basic geometric forms in all his work.
His educational background was in architecture, which he studied at the Politecnico di Milano and later at the Università di Architettura, Venice. From 1957 to 1960, he visited America on a fellowship, and returned to New York in 1966 to start the New York branch of a new company, Unimark International, which quickly became, in scope and personnel, one of the largest design firms in the world.
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October 9, 2013
Victor Papanek (1923 – 1998) was a designer and educator who became a strong advocate of the socially and ecologically responsible design of products, tools, and community infrastructures. He disapproved of manufactured products that were unsafe, showy, maladapted, or essentially useless. Papanek was a philosopher of design and as such he was an untiring, eloquent promoter of design aims and approaches that would be sensitive to social and ecological considerations.
He wrote that ‘design has become the most powerful tool with which man shapes his tools and environments (and, by extension, society and himself).’ With his interest in all aspects of design and how they affected people and the environment, Papanek felt that much of what was manufactured in the U.S. was inconvenient, often frivolous and even unsafe.
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May 16, 2012
Verner Panton (1926 – 1998) is considered one of Denmark’s most influential 20th-century furniture and interior designers. During his career, he created innovative, funky and futuristic designs in a variety of materials, especially plastics, and in vibrant and exotic colors.
His style was very ‘1960s’ but regained popularity at the end of the 20th century; as of 2004, Panton’s most well-known furniture models are still in production (at Vitra, among others).
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November 25, 2011
Dieter Rams (b. 1932) is a German industrial designer closely associated with the consumer products company Braun and the Functionalist school of industrial design. Rams studied architecture at the Werkkunstschule Wiesbaden as well as learning carpentry from 1943 to 1957. After working for the architect Otto Apel between 1953 and 1955 he joined the electronic devices manufacturer Braun where he became chief of design in 1961, a position he kept until 1995.
Rams once explained his design approach in the phrase ‘Weniger, aber besser’ which freely translates as ‘Less, but better.’ Rams and his staff designed many memorable products for Braun including the famous SK-4 record player and the high-quality ‘D’-series (D45, D46) of 35 mm film slide projectors. He is also known for designing the 606 Universal Shelving System by Vitsœ in 1960. Many of his designs — coffee makers, calculators, radios, audio/visual equipment, consumer appliances and office products — have found a permanent home at many museums over the world, including MoMA in New York. He continues to be highly regarded in design circles and currently has a major retrospective of his work on tour around the world.
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September 6, 2011
Norman Bel Geddes [bel-ged-eez] (1893 – 1958) was an American theatrical and industrial designer who focused on aerodynamics. His book ‘Horizons’ (1932) had a significant impact: ‘By popularizing streamlining when only a few engineers were considering its functional use, he made possible the design style of the thirties.’
He designed the General Motors Pavilion, known as Futurama, for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. For that famous and enormously influential installation, Bel Geddes exploited his earlier work in the same vein: he had designed a “Metropolis City of 1960′ in 1936.
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August 16, 2011
Raymond Loewy [loh-ee] (1893 – 1986) was an industrial designer. Born in France, he spent most of his professional career in the United States. Among his work were the Shell and former BP logos, the Greyhound bus, the Coca-Cola bottle, the Pennsylvania Railroad GG1 and S-1 locomotives, the Lucky Strike package, Coldspot refrigerators, the Studebaker Avanti and Champion, and the Air Force One livery. His career spanned seven decades.
Loewy was born in Paris in 1893, the son of a Jewish Viennese journalist and French woman. He served in the French army during World War I, attaining the rank of captain. He boarded a ship to America in 1919 with only his French officer’s uniform and $50 in his pocket. He lived in New York and found work as a window designer for department stores, including Macy’s, Wanamaker’s and Saks in addition to working as a fashion illustrator for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar.
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August 16, 2011
Henry Dreyfuss (1904 – 1972) was an American industrial designer. Dreyfuss was a native of Brooklyn, New York. As one of the celebrity industrial designers of the 1930s and 1940s, Dreyfuss dramatically improved the look, feel, and usability of dozens of consumer products.
As opposed to Raymond Loewy and other contemporaries, Dreyfuss was not a stylist: he applied common sense and a scientific approach to design problems. His work both popularized the field for public consumption, and made significant contributions to the underlying fields of ergonomics, anthropometrics, and human factors.
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July 25, 2011
Luigi Colani (b. 1928) is a German industrial designer. The prime characteristic of his designs are the rounded, organic forms, which he terms ‘biodynamic’ and claims are ergonomically superior to traditional designs. His ‘kitchen satellite’ from 1969 is the most prominent example of this school of thought. Many of his designs for small appliances are being mass-produced and marketed, but his larger designs have not been built, ‘a whole host of futuristic concepts that will have us living in pods and driving cars so flat that leg amputation is the only option.’
Colani responding to his critics said, ‘The earth is round, all the heavenly bodies are round; they all move on round or elliptical orbits. This same image of circular globe-shaped mini worlds orbiting around each other follows us right down to the microcosmos. We are even aroused by round forms in species propagation related eroticism. Why should I join the straying mass who want to make everything angular? I am going to pursue Galileo Galilei’s philosophy: my world is also round.’
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