Abstract In a 1955 photographic essay, Life magazine published model interiors designed by Pipsan Saarinen Swanson, telling its readers they represented an authentic regional style called “Nordic Modern of the Midwest.” In this paper, I conduct a close visual and textual reading of the magazine spread as well as other archival documents related to Swanson’s model home. This reading I contextualize within design and cultural histories to demonstrate that Life framed the model home to suit its own agendas to, on the one hand, celebrate American culture and, on the other hand, promote modern design. I argue that in so doing, the magazine presented Swanson’s work in a manner that bolstered and expounded on a myth that had recently been circulating the design world in the United States. Promulgated by historians, writers, and designers, this myth revised the established history of modern design to relocate its origins from early twentieth-century Europe to pre-1900 America.

Abstract This article discusses Saloua Raouda Choucair’s commitment to design through her combined interest in science and Sufism. Her artistic and design accomplishments portray her as a resolute and determined woman who actively pursued education, independence, and progress throughout her career. By looking into Saloua’s engagement with science, technology, and mysticism, this study seeks to unravel the nuanced intersections between tradition and modernity, craftsmanship, and technology in the realm of design production. The aim is to illuminate how her utilization of scientific knowledge and Sufism shaped her design thinking, challenging prevailing norms and contributing to a broader understanding of the dynamic relationship between gender, education, and design practice in Lebanon. This research aims to interrogate the intricacies of design production by challenging the conventional dichotomy that juxtaposes tradition against modernity and craftsmanship against technology.

Charlotte Benton, who died in Cambridge earlier this year aged 79, was an indefatigable and widely acknowledged British researcher, writer, curator, educator, and advocate for high quality history of architecture and design for more than fifty years (Figure 1). She is also recognised nationally and internationally for her involvement in a wide variety of major projects. These included the pioneering Arts Council exhibition devoted to The Thirties: British Art and Design before the War at the Hayward Gallery, London (1979-80), for which she served on the multi-layered Exhibition Committee with her husband Tim Benton and others, co-authoring a lead essay in the accompanying book.1 For many, including myself as a youngish would-be design historian at the time, this exhibition and the linked symposium at the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) stimulated fresh approaches to understanding the complexities and diversity of design in Britain at the end of a decade in which design history had been emerging as a recognised field of study and research. Almost a quarter of a century later Charlotte co-authored and co-edited the weighty Art Deco, 1910-1939 (2003) volume that accompanied the high-profile V&A exhibition of the same name.2 In a less obviously spectacular but typically sharply focused way her research and curatorial skills were embodied in an earlier project entitled A Different World: Emigré Architects in Britain 1928-1958, an exhibition held in 1995 at the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Heinz Gallery, London. This was complemented by a quietly influential publication that presented a more inclusive perspective than customary of the make-up of architectural practice in Britain at the time.3 The progressive outlook and values that this embraced led to a collaborative project with Penelope Curtis and the Henry Moore Foundation4 which culminated in a symposium and substantial book of proceedings and documents entitled Figuration-Abstraction: Strategies for Public Sculpture in Europe 1945-1968 (2004), edited by Charlotte.5 Her work on French design of the interwar years was another rich vein that ran through her oeuvre, from the authorship of individual course texts and radiovision programmes for the agenda-setting Open University A305 History of Architecture and Design 1890-1939 course (1975) through to Art Deco 1910-1939 (2003) and beyond.6 Additionally, from the mid 1970s onwards Charlotte foregrounded women’s contributions to design, thereby encouraging, with others, a generation of design historians to develop and promote pioneering research in the field. She herself contributed influential articles in the field7 as well as her 1996-7 exhibition on Charlotte Perriand: Modernist Pioneer at the Design Museum, London, the first significant show of Perriand’s work in Britain.8 Such initiatives, informed by a series of personal interviews, clearly situated Perriand as an independent woman designer of note, no longer overshadowed by celebrated male contemporaries. Such was the perceived significance of this exhibition that its 25th anniversary was celebrated in a subsequent Design Museum exhibition, “Charlotte Perriand: The Modern Life,” mounted in 2021.

Journal Article Ecological by Design: A History from Scandinavia Get access Kjetil Fallan The MIT Press, 2022. 368pp., 33 col. and 38 b&w illus, cloth,$40. ISBN: 978-0-262-04713-5 Kaisu Savola Kaisu Savola Department of Design, School of Arts, Design and Architecture Aalto University Espoo, Finland E-mail: kaisu.savola@aalto.fi Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Design History, epad056, https://doi.org/10.1093/jdh/epad056 Published: 06 January 2024

Abstract The study of collaborative work by architects and designers can present difficulties. The principal biographers of Eileen Gray asserted that she played the key role in the design of the houses that her friend Jean Badovici (1893–1956) acquired and transformed in Vézelay between 1926 and 1934 and that this work contributed to the design of her other buildings. This claim is worth investigating because the Vézelay houses present innovative and distinctive features, and because Jean Badovici’s qualities as architect have been insufficiently studied. A method is presented here for distinguishing between different hands based on the forensic analysis of individual words and letters. This approach could be of use in many contexts but particularly in the case of close collaboration between architects and designers. Applied initially to drawings for Badovici’s houses at Vézelay, the method can be applied to the many other drawings in the archives of the V&A, the Pompidou Centre, the Eileen Gray archive in the National Museum of Ireland, and the Badovici archive in the Getty Research Institute. The evidence from this analysis is set alongside other arguments for evaluating Gray’s involvement in the design of the Badovici houses at Vézelay. The aim of this essay is not to challenge Gray’s collaboration in the design process but to test claims of her sole or principal role in the design of these houses.

Journal Article Il design e l'invenzione del Made in ItalyA New History of "Made in Italy": Fashion and Textiles in Post-War Italy Get access Elena Dellapiana, Il design e l'invenzione del Made in Italy. Einaudi, 2022. 316pp.,€24.0078 b&w illus, ISBN: 9788806251406. Lucia Savi, A New History of "Made in Italy": Fashion and Textiles in Post-War Italy. Bloomsbury 2023. 248pp., 34 b&w and col. illus,€85.00, ISBN: 9788806251406. Donatella Cacciola Donatella Cacciola Lecturer Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Bonn, Germany E-mail: design@uni-bonn.de Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Design History, epad037, https://doi.org/10.1093/jdh/epad037 Published: 31 July 2023

Abstract In 1980, Frigidaire Australia launched an advertising campaign in popular women’s magazines calling for readers’ opinions on refrigerator design. Soon after, Frigidaire held the Group 200 Women’s Design Conference in Sydney, leading to the release of the G2 refrigerator in 1981, which was promoted as being “designed” by the women involved in this market research. This example offers insights into evolving public understandings of design in mainstream Australia in the early 1980s. It also demonstrates the troubled position of design in relation to the maturing second-wave feminist movement, and particularly amid feminist debates regarding domestic labor. Furthermore, Frigidaire’s marketing strategy can be read as an example of the emergent neoliberalization of design in the 1980s. The article finds that, despite Frigidaire’s marketing rhetoric, the women participants had little agency over the G2’s design. The politics of identity (in this case, a subtle form of feminist agency) was effectively co-opted by capital to encourage consumption. Nonetheless, the Women’s Design Conference was meaningful in a discrete sense, as a moment in time when a group of women (mostly middle-aged “homemakers”) recognized their own domestic knowledge as design expertise. This may be the only saving grace from what was otherwise a thoroughly unambitious attempt to incorporate women’s knowledge into product design.

Abstract A popular 1941 gallery show in Chicago entitled “The Advance Guard of Advertising Artists” included five prominent European advocates of modernist design and four Americans who did daring and innovative work. All but one of these designers is today included in the mid-century design canon. The odd man out was Frank Barr (1906–1955), a Chicago letterpress printer with a modest, entirely local reputation both before and after the exhibit. This article explores Barr’s career to explicate the meaning of avant-garde design during at the period and shed light on the larger question of canonical status. Chicago was a major industrial and printing hub that nonetheless seemed provincial in design terms into the 1930s. Many design professionals educated there (like Barr) had remained content with the opportunities the city provided. The arrival of the New Bauhaus in 1937 injected new vitality into the local design scene and gave birth to a fresh sense of Chicago’s potentially international credentials. Barr’s career spanned the two decades of this transition and provides a useful case study of provincialism, avant-garde status, and internationalism.

Journal Article Luxury After the Terror Get access Luxury After the Terror Iris Moon, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022. 272 pp., 65 b&w and 30 col. illus, cloth, $104.95. ISBN: 9780271091617. Peter McNeil Peter McNeil Distinguished Professor of Design History, School of Design, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia Email: peter.mcneil@uts.edu.au Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Design History, epad019, https://doi.org/10.1093/jdh/epad019 Published: 09 June 2023