....concerning design that is...
For those who cannot see the clips
Apologies friends, YouTube's "embed" code doesn't seem to work with all browsers, so here are the links to the clips. I promise you'll like what you see, and you might even be amused with the cold-war rhetoric as narrative.
American Look, 1958, part 1 of 3, click:
the_beloved
I love that you posted that, seeing that i lived it every day in the 50's,
I grew up in conservative Oklahoma to parents of wealth as my dad was in the oil and gas business and we had a beautiful home done in traditional furniture of Baker and Henredon,
I hate to say but in the late 50's if you had modern you were considered rather weird or different, one of my parents best friends loved modern as they were from NYC and came to Oklahoma to find new wealth and ended up starting a multinational business headquarter in Oklahoma,, they brought the modern ideas and when you went into their home it was the future, and almost 50 years later, I can remember the Eames CSU and the saarine Tulip chairs and womb chairs and the Eames lounge chair, and their modern home, I know my parents generation thought it was so far out, but of course being the good people that they were embraced them as they were great people and way ahead of their time ,but not there modern looking homes and furniture,
Most of the folks in the neighborhood were content to have the traditional look and some the ghastly early American furniture that could make me throw up just cause it looked so ugly,
It is hard to believe that one who has tried to be come a Expert on Modern Architecture and mid century modern took so long to get with the modern ideas and the program ,
My first home was a large country English home with every thing that comes with it, although I was some what rebellious with the first wife, i had to display my modern art collection ( even though i knew it really did not go in the house but i was still determined to display it ,
Then one day in the early 1980s while at a flee market i realized that the look that i really wanted was the cool look of the 50's and 60's but not the cheap dime store kitschy stuff, that was all around, I had been buying great art all modern since 1973 and that is how I got into the furniture and one thing
and then another, and here we are 30 years later and modern has survived and in my opinion better than ever,
a book that i suggest that every modern thinker will enjoy reading is book my Thomas Hine called Populuxe a great book that tells us where this all came from , you can pick it up on Amazon
Thanks, the_beloved
That link brought back some great memories of my childhood (late 60's-early 70's).
Much of the film was from the General Motors Technical Center (designed by the firm Saarinen and Swanson). This place was only about a ten mile drive from Cranbrook Academy.
My father worked there as a modeler/moldmaker, working in clay, plaster and fiberglas. Every year or so, the company would sponsor a "family day" where all the little brats of the GM employees could visit where daddy worked all day. I remember it was like walking into a much cooler world than i lived in. We got to tour the campus, stuff our dirty little faces and watch neato propaganda films just like this one.
My brother and i grew up thinking we were going to benefit from nepotism and find ourselves comfortably ensconsed in a secure job, courtesy of dad's beneficence. Sadly for me, GM put an end to that practice, as the Big Three American auto companies were just beginning their headlong decline into irrelevance. We were forced to go out and find our own careers.
Dammit.
Saarinen design beats the hell outta the cube farm i work in now.
http://www.mkthink.com/gm_tech_center_history.htm
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