Whitespikes dislike of having the television on display got me thinking.
Its quite a common thing, there are other symptoms of it too and I wonder if for all our designerness and so called taste if we are really that far removed from the taselled colonial stripped pine burbs, both camps retreat into something that lets them feel very comfortable, all the gen xers who criticised the taste of their parents seem to reaching back for it themselves. I do it myself.
But I think its an attitude that is blunting the honesty of good design, much as I dislike most peoples taste I'm going to stop criticising them for it.
A danish chair and a Victorian wingback...not so different.
Bravo
Restraint can be a hard thing to do.
I was delegated the task of sorting thru my Grandparents things, both of whom have passed. I've almost broken into tears associating them with certain things. It was stunning to see how modern they really were, and just how critical/discriminating they were in their purchases. All of this was muted to me growing up amonst their possessions.... Surprisingly now I carry on the tradition... Somewhat a hodgepodge of Modernist & Traditonalist, favoring Modern Styles.
It's a shame much of the older styles (Empire, Victorian, etc) aren't as appreciated by my generation. Perhaps it's the over exposure or even badly done reproductions.
I will add
I don't dislike other styles when they are properly executed. There is good and bad Victorian, just like there is good and bad anything. Where I do tend to lean towards the idea that modernism has the upper hand, is the fact that modernism has the ability to progress.
Other historical styles have to be contained within the limits of its popular and authentic years of existence. Classic modern design can be reused as inspiration for new ideas. Other historical styles, if tampered with, become only inferior copies of its beginnings. The design becomes bastardized and inappropriate.
New classics do pop up now and then.
Do new Victorian classics exist?
.
Its my fear that modernism isn't developing because of a creeping nostalgia that made me post.
oh sorry whitespike, I misread you, I intended no criticism 🙂 But I do disagree with what you say about re-working, we've lived with modernism for a while now and a victorian re-design or a mcm re-design are now, I think, equally valid or invalid .
There is good design out there but so much of it that gets attention seems to be of the green perspex cad file variety or this re-worked silliness (see the audio chair on the blog)
What I really admire is a lot of Japser Morrisons work, hes clearly working with principles, a rare thing.
TV cart
Speaking of happy mistakes, I bid on and won a Kartell Oxo Cart with blue shelves. I believe I paid less than $60.00 for it(!) on eBay earlier this year. I bought it for my kitchen.
I finally bought an LCD HDTV (Sony Bravia - 32"), and I was checking out my Oxo cart at the Kartell website, and lo and behold, it's designed to handle up to 100 lbs, but I rolled it into my den and my LCD TV is sitting on this really cool high-tech TV cart.
Then, I discovered that the cart is currently selling for $630.00. Wow, what a cool deal I got and the TV looks real nice on the cart. (photo is from Retromodern....)
since the shelf has holes, I screwed the TV onto the top shelf and I have my cable box and DVD player on the bottom shelf...fits perfectly.
hey hey ! I'm thinking a lot ...
hey hey ! I'm thinking a lot about contradictions in design and youre talking tv! 🙂
Seeing as its going off topic I'd like everyone to pray for Australia, we are having an election this weekend and we need to kick out our 11 year reigning conservative Prim-minister.
HP
Seeing as its going off topic I'd like everyone to pray for Australia, we are having an election this weekend and we need to kick out our 11 year reigning conservative Prim-minister.
we will pray for you !!! and you can pray for us in the USA as our 8 year mistake will come to an end on 01 20 09
Modernist design can't progress much until...
it decides its relation to the status quo; that is, the new world order, which is actually the old world order openly subordinating states to the central banks.
Wright and his wing were Jeffersonian and little d democrats in philosophy and so were a rebellion against the status quo; i.e., they were appealing to a tradition in America that preceeded the robber baron descended multinational corporation and privately owned central bank that dominated the state during the 20th century.
Mies and Johnson were internationalists, which was essentially code for subordinate subjects in a government, culture and economy dominated by central bank owners and multinatinal corporations. They were essentially orthodox in their obedience and fealty to the status quo, despite the then unorthodoxy of their designs.
As Bob Dylan gargled during one of his serial religious conversions, "Sooner or later, ya gotta serve somebody. It may be the devil/ or it may be the lord, but ya gotta serve somebody."
I'm not saying design has to become didactic or political in its service. Mies, to my knowledge, never advocated the status quo, he just designed ground breaking designs for it.
But looking back now, it is unmistakeable that it was Wright who was the rebel aspiring to tie design to an earlier political, social and cultural philosophy that was in eclipse and it was Mies who was tying design to the powers that were and would be.
Both men learned the hard way that the status quo can almost ignore you to death (Wright), or be very fickle and abandon your keenest, most brilliant ideas for the next trend (i.e., Post modernism).
It is because design must keep making this sort of choice that I raise some what tangential issues on DA. I am hoping to trigger discourse I think is needed sooner or later to make such choices sooner or later.
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