Design History

Responsive Eyes looks closely at a series of temporary-built environments created by the design team for the organizing committee of the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. Integrating architecture, visual communication, and mass media, the team created kinetic environments, or spaces that estranged user-beholders’ visual and spatial perceptions, inviting immersion and interaction to produce a holistic image of a thoroughly modern, socially integrated Mexico at a time when this view of Mexico was not necessarily held by audiences at home and abroad. The team’s design choices demonstrated cosmopolitan awareness of global aesthetics and discursive currents, including optical and kinetic art as well as recent advances in scientific investigation that inspired new modes of urban vision and engagement, part of an international renewal of modernist techniques and aspirations. These environments also responded to more local concerns, including Mexico City’s ongoing capitalist urbanization and a reticulation of the modernist architect’s professional and social purchase in Mexico in light of increasing globalization. By situating the Olympic environments within the larger context of exhibitions of kinetic art and art happenings from the period, this article highlights the possibilities and limits of transformation envisaged by Mexico 68’s kinetic environments, arguing that their design provides a window through which to assess Mexican architects’ claim to act as expert mediators between the city and state, architecture and art, Mexico and the wider world.

Three lectures given at Lamport Hall, Northamptonshire, given on behalf of The Centre for the Study of the Country House, University of Leicester, 9 September 2014

Lecture 1
The good: Classical architecture’s emergence and dominance under Lord Burlington, William Kent and Robert Adam

Lecture 2
The bad: scrolls, Francophile frippery and the rococo

Lecture 3
The objectionable: Gothic as ‘crinkle crankle’ or a romantic reconstruction?



The eighteenth century was a period of tremendous stylistic experimentation, and many aspects of the British country house, including its architecture, interior decoration and furniture, are testament to this. Architects, scholars and connoisseurs, with the intention of schooling patrons and the public in ‘good taste’, issued numerous tracts in support of Classical design. Despite opinion widely favouring Classicism, other styles — the Rococo, Gothic and Chinoiserie — took hold and proliferated.
These three lectures, based in part upon my doctoral research and teaching interests, disentangle eighteenth-century Britain’s stylistic traditions in architecture and applied art. They examine the reasons why Classical architecture was elevated to the ‘gold standard’ of taste, and the reasons why apparently ‘corrupt styles’, according to the supporters of Classical design, were adopted.

ABSTRACT: The paper explains how design history can become a tool for better design practice. Design historians are inclined to perceive the aesthetic idioms pertaining to past artefacts as expressions of particular periods, and their aesthetic validity as limited to the periods in question.  This tends to turn design history before the Bauhaus into an overview of extinct aesthetic species. Very little has been made of the fact, better understood by the general public, that all the “objects of the past” exist right now, in our very own lifetime, both physically and as multiple images. What is needed to turn the aesthetic captives of the past into a treasure trove for present day designers, in other words, what would elevate design history into a potential tool for better design, is to develop an ability, in teachers and students alike, to see the pre-Bauhaus world of aesthetic idioms as part of our present. In order to achieve this, we design historians should cease to subscribe to the modernist claim that there is just one genuinely modern aesthetic idiom.

Between World War II and well into the 1970s, ‘design for the public sector’ or ‘public design’ became a subject of national and international policies in the Netherlands. For example, the Ministry of Culture, Recreation and Social Welfare organized the internationally traveling exhibitions Dutch Design for the Public Sector I (1973) and Dutch Design for the Public Sector II (1978) in order to illustrate the government’s implementation of design in basic public services such as transportation, healthcare, and street furniture among others. Through this government-produced discourse, design from the Netherlands became successfully construed as quintessentially ‘democratic’—an association that persists until today.
Although retrospectively explained as the natural outcome of a ‘typically’ Dutch cultural identity by design discourse, to understand the development of public design in the Netherlands, it is necessary to examine its entanglements not only in national frameworks but also in international networks. On the one hand, the integration of modern industrial design for the public sector—both in terms of its social idealism and functionalist aesthetics—in national policies makes sense in the context of the Netherlands as a welfare nation-state in the postwar, reconstruction period. On the other hand, carried out under the umbrella of international cultural policy formulated by the ministries of Culture, Recreation and Social Welfare and of Foreign Affairs, the dissemination of Dutch culture abroad (including public design) was implicated in Cold War politics of containment and détente. Indeed, the itineraries and content of the above-mentioned exhibitions have to be understood in relation to the logic of bilateral cultural treaties that the Netherlands concluded with a number of Western and Eastern European countries as a means to both protect cultural and scientific exchange behind the Iron Curtain and to promote the ‘national culture’ and ‘Western values’ beyond it.
Taking its cue from Bruno Latour, this paper traces the actor-networks involved in the production, dissemination and reception of Dutch Design for the Public Sector I and its sequel. In so doing it sheds light on the interrelations between the constructions of Dutch Design as a democratic practice and its mobilization by the government as a form of cultural diplomacy during the Cold War. By positioning the development of public design in the Netherlands as an interchange between national and international networks, this paper offers an original contribution to the development of national design histories in a global context.

Essay written in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name, presented at Cranbrook Art Museum from June 20 to October 5, 2014.

In a career spanning over half a century, former Cranbrook Academy of Art student and instructor Ken Isaacs (b. 1927) radically deconstructed conventional notions of modernism. His Living Structures—handmade, knock-down, multipurpose furniture and architectural units—challenged ideas of how the public could sit, work, live, and learn within their own homes and the broader built environment.

Isaacs was a child of the Great Depression, and his early adulthood was marked by modest means. Accustomed to life in small, cramped apartments, he conceived of a unit that combined multiple functions of the home into one autonomous design, maximizing economy of space. Constructed of prefabricated parts, Isaacs’s Living Structures were adaptable and easy to build quickly and cheaply, rooted in the idea that furniture should “adjust to people rather than people to it.”

Culture Breakers: The Living Structures of Ken Isaacs highlights Isaacs’s time in the 1950s at Cranbrook as both student and head of the Design Department, his experimentations as an educator with immersive learning chambers, and his role within the countercultural community of the 1960s and 1970s, when he gained wider recognition for his populist approach to design. By constructing total environments for living, Isaacs brazenly defied universally accepted design standards, fundamentally redefining modes of form, space, interaction, and use in a constantly evolving material world.

Free lunchtime lecture, 1 October 2014, 13.00 at the V&A Museum

The Art Nouveau movement overlapped with late Arts and Crafts in the 1890s and early Modernism in the 1910, combining the exquisite workmanship and natural forms of the former with the innovative materials, forms and practices associated with the latter. Art Nouveau Fashion provides a fascinating introduction to the style, defining it and placing it in the context of design history by focussing on a number of important designers – Worth, Lucile, Paquin, Poiret – and key subjects such as jewellery and accessories, the role of advertising, artists as designers, and the relationships between designers and their clients.

During the 15 years of civil war (1975–90), political posters filled the streets and charged the walls of cities all over Lebanon. As the ongoing war formed an intrinsic aspect of everyday life in Lebanon, the graphic signs and political rhetoric of posters became a prevalent sight/reading that shaped the cityscape. The political parties strove to legitimize and sustain their political struggle while battling for power and territorial control. Their military engagement on the battlefronts was coupled with a relentless battle of signs and symbolic appropriation of territory through extensive poster production and distribution.

How to make sense of political posters’ nature of operation in the context of civil war? How does one poster, out of many on the same wall, hail to a specific person and at once be contested by another?
If we begin to rethink the concept of propaganda and question the models of communication on which its various definitions are built, perhaps we could move beyond the reductive notions of ‘mass persuasion’, ‘coercion’ and ‘deceit’. We could then undertake a more complex examination of the posters as inscribed in the socio-political institution of political communities during civil war time. In this chapter, I present the limits of the concept of propaganda and argue for alternative theoretical tools, which allow me to advance a conceptualization of political posters as symbolic sites of hegemonic struggle over meaning and political discourse.

This book contains a series of articles based on some of the best papers presented during the 8th Conference of the International Committee for Design History and Design Studies (ICDHS) held in São Paulo, Brazil, in September 2012. The conference gathered researchers from 26 different countries from America, Europe, Asia and Australasia.  The topic chosen for the 8th edition of the conference, ‘Design Frontiers: territories, concepts, technologies’, which is consistent with the title of this book, aimed at fostering discussion on how design history and design studies may push the limits of design knowledge.  The topic suggested that frontiers of design could be challenged in many ways: by the exploration of new territories, by the establishment of new concepts, by the emergence of new technologies, as well as by rediscovering the past and by finding new ways of applying current wisdom. The papers published in this volume all address one or more of those challenges.  It is our hope that the articles published in this book will enlighten, inspire and provoke, fostering further research on design history and design studies.