History and the Designer  

Theres the connection...
Theres the connection between Georgian furniture and technique and all the Danish furniture discussed on here, the work effort involved in something like Wegners round chair before pp mobler adopted cnc makes me wonder if they could really be described as modern, indeed that could be the case with many of the 'classics' which require a great deal of handwork and traditional skill. Are 'modernism' and 'craft' mutually exclusive terms?
New materials and processes sadly seem to come into widespread use through the influence of war, leg splints? Lets not forget the initial horror that I presume financed much of the the Eames subsequent work, of course they did good work but the skills learned in producing the splints came from the worst of the 20th century.
I often look at vernacular furniture for ideas, experimentsl and novel designs too often fail in my experience, the immediate gratification and rush to get product to market is sadly indicative of our time, you only have to do a google search to see how many ridiculous designs are being produced in low volumes for nothing more than the spectacle of it.
Forgot to mention, always been fascinated by the similarity between Schinkel and Mies, if you look at the floor plans of the Altes Museum and one of the buildings (Crown hall?) on the IIT campus you can see that Mies was coming from somewhere profoundly idiosyncratic yet traditional, but he is thought of as a forefather of modernism.
http://www.paleofuture.com

Heath...
Thank you so much for this link to paleofuture.com. I have have been thinking about this notion for awhile but have never been able to pull it out of the ethers; this did it for me. Thanks again!