1950

The 1950s saw an interplay of three dominant styles. Most famously, there was what designer George Nelson called “the machine look” – functionality atop polished tubular steel frames and wire-strut bases. But it wasn’t the only fashion. European designers such as Hans Wegner and Finn Juhl pursued a handcrafted style, all light wood, rope seats and comfy, cottage-friendly looks. But although both have retained their broad appeal half a century on, the period is arguably better known for biomorphism: an exploration of new materials and technologies to create free-form shapes said to mimic biological organisms, without suggesting any specific one. It made for a strong, curvy look of rounded edges and sensuous curves adopted by graphics designers, potters and furniture designers alike: key pieces included Achille Castiglioni’s Taraxacum hanging lightshade (1950), Fulvio Bianconi’s handkerchief vase (1950) (pictured above) and Vladimir Kagan’s glass coffee-table (1952). But biomorphism didn’t last much longer than the decade – even though, more recently, it has been taken up as an influence by the likes of designers Marc Newson and Ross Lovegrove.

1951

When, in 1951, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe built Farnsworth House (left), near Plano, Illinois, the 1,500 sq ft, one-room country retreat was considered a benchmark in modernist design, despite it being unfinished due to legal wranglings between the Bauhaus giant and his client. It embodied all that was new and, what is more, rigorously functional in homes of the International Style: exposed steel structure, floor-to-ceiling glass, geometric shape, elevation from the ground. All these features contributed to the demand for pure forms – so pure as to ignore the messier aspects of domestic life. But perhaps that was to be expected from the man who stated that “the individual is losing significance”. The decade saw the corporate world adopt this style with relish, its ordered linearity an expression of their own efficient bureaucracies.

1952

Living room became play room became dining room became office. Inside became outside. Walls moved. A characteristic of 1950s interiors was the advent of open planning. George Nelson was joking when he wrote in his book Living Spaces (1952) that the vogue for openness was such that soon there would be no rooms in houses at all. We would have “freedom from dimensional barriers”. But he was right. The prewar cosiness of ornamentation and texture gave way to a monastic emptiness, with the same flooring continuous through the home, lamps replaced by overhead lighting and areas defined only by the type of (highly mobile) furniture within it.

The 1950s was the quintessential American decade, when mass consumerism drove progressive design, in contrast to the mend-and-make-do of austerity Europe. But Europe did produce its own clutch of landmark product designers: in the UK, Robin and Lucienne Day, Giò Ponti in Italy and, arguably more influential, the Dane Arne Jacobsen, among others. The 1950s saw Jacobsen create a series of chairs that have achieved iconic status – most popular, and still copied, the Ant (1952) but also the Series 7 (1955), the Egg (above) and the Swan (both 1958). Indeed, while the US toyed with the contrasts of simplicity and maximalism, European consumer goods were being shaped by the establishment of a Scandinavian design identity: clean-lined, intuitive, with classical Greek proportions and working with, rather than against, a material’s properties. Design of the period was, Jacobsen noted: “too much based on fads and trends ... tableware products supposed to look as if they might go 80km an hour ...” He provided much of the product design groundwork for the 1960s.

1956

Just as their iconic chairs covered diverse styles – from wire-mesh to aluminium and fibreglass – so the husband and wife team of Charles and Ray Eames were the first designers whose work covered the full breadth of design; from landmark houses, interiors and multi-media presentations to World’s Fair exhibitions and films, providing the multi-disciplinary approach of designers today. Perhaps more importantly, they were also among the first designers to devise the mechanics that allowed their ideas to be realised: hence their application of bent plywood to make sturdy, lightweight mass-manufacturable chairs. Indeed, with other designers the Eames shared in the creation of a new Modern American design philosophy, driven by manufacturers such as Knoll and Herman Miller and characterised by an honesty of materials and simplicity of form. In spite of this, it is for one of the Eames’ most luxurious, elitist creations that the duo remain best known: the lounge chair and ottoman (1956) (above). Originally designed for the film-maker Billy Wilder, it is now an icon (not to mention often being hailed the world’s most comfortable chair).

The decade might have been defined by the notion of “good design”, in which functionality left little room for decoration, but that did not stop a counter movement of overt over-styling from winning fans. For some designers, among them Estelle Laverne, bland was bad: instead, objects nodded to antique design styles (without the need for historic accuracy), played on motifs of the times (the scientific model of the atom, for instance), or courted the extremely whimsical. Indeed, George Nelson’s designs – among them his Marshmallow Sofa (1956), Bubble lamps and Spindle and Ball Clocks, for which he is arguably best known – have come to epitomise 21st century conceptions of this 1950s “retro” style. Their toolbox of asymmetry, organicism, pastel shades, bold prints and sometimes the overtly wacky continue to be referenced today. Ironically, the Ball Clock might not have been designed by Nelson. He admitted that he woke after a drunken night spent with designers Buckminster Fuller and Isamu Noguchi to find a pile of rough sketches. He vaguely remembered them scribbling ideas for clocks but had no idea who came up with the ball style.

1958

By 1958, when Earl Tupper, a chemist and one-time Du Pont chemical plant employee, sold his Tupperware brand and bought a private, tax-free island, his molded polyethylene storage containers (left) not only represented a leap in the use of plastics – which until then had been brittle and malodorous – they had become the household product and marketing phenomenon of the decade. This was in large part down to the advent of the Tupperware party but also because of a voracious appetite for the kitchen appliances of tomorrow: heat and cold-resistant, air-tight and unbreakable. Certainly, the storage system also echoed the decade’s high regard for new, futuristic materials. While the elite’s interiors might have been decked out in wood and brick-work in a bid to seamlessly marry the domesticated with the great outdoors, the more everyday home had industrial materials: coated aluminium (hard-wearing and attractive), melamine (cheap and lightweight) and patterned laminates such as Formica (hygienic and decorative).

1959

A man pursuing his own style in a world of boxy, corporate architecture, Frank Lloyd-Wright depended on private commissions from people as individualistic as his vision. During the 1950s the result was a series of dazzling, landmark buildings such as Oklahoma’s Price Tower (1955). Each was increasingly curvaceous and each increasingly at odds with decade’s embrace of the International Style, culminating with New York’s Guggenheim Museum (left), completed in 1959. Indeed, while other architects followed the era’s “form follows function” mantra, Lloyd-Wright evoked nature, in spite of the often impractical character of his designs (the Guggenheim’s spiral means some artworks have to be viewed standing on a slant) and total disregard for location. Nevertheless, Lloyd-Wright has since been hailed the greatest American architect – not to mention the “fighter, lover of space, an agitator, a tester” that Solomon Guggenheim’s art advisor, Hilla Rebay, insisted she needed when choosing the museum-to-be’s designer. Why him? Largely because of his insistence that a building could be any fantastic shape that the technology of the time allowed, as the likes of Frank Gehry and Norman Foster have acknowledged.