{"id":2511,"date":"2019-04-15T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-04-15T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/2019\/04\/modern-love-how-to-teach-design-history-1781b74bbea6\/"},"modified":"2019-04-15T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2019-04-15T00:00:00","slug":"modern-love-how-to-teach-design-history-1781b74bbea6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/2019\/04\/modern-love-how-to-teach-design-history-1781b74bbea6\/","title":{"rendered":"Modern Love: how to teach design\u00a0history"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 name=\"bfcf\" id=\"bfcf\" class=\"graf graf--h3 graf--leading graf--title\">Modern Love: how to teach design\u00a0history<\/h3>\n<p name=\"f422\" id=\"f422\" class=\"graf graf--p graf-after--h3\">In case you\u2019ve been hiding under a rock you\u2019ll have noticed it\u2019s the 100 year anniversary of the Bauhaus this year. I graduated from a 4 years industrial design degree from the University of Montreal in 2004. I graduated knowing nothing about the Bauhaus and not only that but I thought design history started with Raymond Leowy, in the 1950s. Many people today not only think that this is true for design but also technology and advertising.<\/p>\n<p name=\"b8a6\" id=\"b8a6\" class=\"graf graf--p graf-after--p\">Being a voracious reader and then researching my <a href=\"http:\/\/designswarm.com\/book\" data-href=\"http:\/\/designswarm.com\/book\" class=\"markup--anchor markup--p-anchor\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">book<\/a>, I realised that it wasn\u2019t just about being taught about the Bauhaus but talking about design in a wider context and describing earlier influences. <a href=\"http:\/\/designswarm.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/modernhome.pdf\" data-href=\"http:\/\/designswarm.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/modernhome.pdf\" class=\"markup--anchor markup--p-anchor\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\"><strong class=\"markup--strong markup--p-strong\">But let\u2019s start with a little visual experiment I put together<\/strong><\/a><strong class=\"markup--strong markup--p-strong\">.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p name=\"0f2e\" id=\"0f2e\" class=\"graf graf--p graf-after--p\">What am I highlighting here?<\/p>\n<ul class=\"postList\">\n<li name=\"a7e4\" id=\"a7e4\" class=\"graf graf--li graf-after--p\">\n<strong class=\"markup--strong markup--li-strong\">Most design books do not contextualise what is happening elsewhere in the arts nor how ideas travel<\/strong>. Before social media, the internet or even cheap newspapers there were fairs and museums. Those museums were born out of the private collections of the rich or filled with the leftovers of wars and conflict elsewhere in their empires. \u2018Ethnography museums\u2019 started popping up when the most influential architects of the last century were kids. Once you think about this, it\u2019s very very difficult not to recognise the influence of Japan\u2019s aesthetics on modernism and the African continent\u2019s influence in the arts and cubism. The irony is of course that we then went back to those parts of the world selling them back a western version of \u2018modernism\u2019. That process of influence, money, power and war on ideas is really key and not talked about much in design history.<\/li>\n<li name=\"05d2\" id=\"05d2\" class=\"graf graf--li graf-after--li\">\n<strong class=\"markup--strong markup--li-strong\">Design isn\u2019t a 20th century profession but it\u2019s a 20th century marketplace. <\/strong>At a time of the industrial revolution in the 1800s, people had plenty of access to new designs but we don\u2019t consider those worthy because the authors of that work aren\u2019t running well-funded foundations and managing image rights in the modern world. We also don\u2019t collect 19th century furniture as much as we collect mid-century designs. We simply value that older industrial design and those designers less. There\u2019s also a plethora of wonderful designers who died young, or (in the case of Mallet-Stevens) wanted their archive of work destroyed when they died.<\/li>\n<li name=\"1d8c\" id=\"1d8c\" class=\"graf graf--li graf-after--li\">\n<strong class=\"markup--strong markup--li-strong\">There\u2019s also an awful lot of ego, jealousy and bad behaviour we don\u2019t talk about in design history books.<\/strong> In an era of #MeToo best not to look too closely at Le Corbusier\u2019s abuse of Eileen Gray\u2019s fantastic E-1027 nor read too much into his losing the Villa Noailles contract to Robert Mallet-Stevens. He also made sure the young Eugene Beaudoin wasn\u2019t chosen to design the UNESCO building in Paris but got his mates from the Bauhaus in instead (his own design had been refused but he was on the advistory committee). There\u2019s a reason why we remember some architects and designers more than other and it\u2019s the same reasons in any industry: they were probably abusive as hell. But we prefer calling that \u2018larger than life\u2019 in design books. That\u2019s dangerous, to make people believe that design, architecture, all these areas of creativity have somehow a naturally meritocratic environment around them. Tech suffers from the same delusion.<\/li>\n<li name=\"dd17\" id=\"dd17\" class=\"graf graf--li graf-after--li\">\n<strong class=\"markup--strong markup--li-strong\">Who were the pioneers then?<\/strong> I dropped by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pro-qm.de\/\" data-href=\"https:\/\/www.pro-qm.de\/\" class=\"markup--anchor markup--li-anchor\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">ProQm<\/a> in Berlin the other day and picked up a couple of books on Adolf Loos, Josef Hoffmann and Peter Behrens. These men taught or were the early employers of Mies Van Der Rohe, Margarete Sch\u00fctte-Lihotzky, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and many more. And they sound interesting and did some amazing work. And they aren\u2019t very well known. When you look at <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Stoclet_Palace\" data-href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Stoclet_Palace\" class=\"markup--anchor markup--li-anchor\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Le Palais Stoclet<\/a> in Bruxelles and you look at Le Corbusier\u2019s work, you get it. Ahhh, there is the master and this is the student. The continuity is crystal clear. Why don\u2019t we see these lines of influence more in design books? Why do we keep talking about design and architecture like the \u2018lone geniuses\u2019 of the art world (which also didn\u2019t work that way, as per Braque &amp; Picasso who were best mates). Who does it serve? It just makes young designers think that group work and collaboration is somehow not as good as being able to express themselves alone.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p name=\"8b2b\" id=\"8b2b\" class=\"graf graf--p graf-after--li graf--trailing\">So there, if someone wants to re-write a good design history book some day, call me. Otherwise, next time you open a design history book or go visit an exhibition of one person\u2019s work, ask yourself: I wonder what was invented that year? what kind of music did they listen to? who did they admire? whose work did they see in museums when they were young? It makes it all so much more interesting than the 1950s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Modern Love: how to teach design\u00a0history In case you\u2019ve been hiding under a rock you\u2019ll have noticed it\u2019s the 100 year anniversary of the Bauhaus this year. I graduated from a 4 years industrial design degree from the University of Montreal in 2004. I graduated knowing nothing about the Bauhaus and not only that but&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/2019\/04\/modern-love-how-to-teach-design-history-1781b74bbea6\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Modern Love: how to teach design\u00a0history<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet-of-things","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p41XhY-Ev","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2511"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2511\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}