Design has traditionally been problematic in Anglo-Saxon, and particularly British, culture. Often seen as something better left to our pretentious continental cousins, while we concentrate on the more serious-sounding “inventions”, “engineering” or even “street-style”, design is nevertheless becoming an increasingly universal language, a language read and understood as easily and internationally as that of any globalised brand.
Traditionally, British homes were fitted out with obsessive conservatism. New furniture was barely available and often frowned upon - one recalls Alan Clark’s notorious, patrician put-down of Michael Hesletine as the kind of man who “had to buy all his furniture”. There was Habitat, more recently Ikea, and a handful of design boutiques; but design remained somehow un-English, effete and attention-seeking.
Curiously, the outlook began to change during the “conservative” years of Thatcherism, an era defined by money and the marginalisation of culture. Yuppies - as well as liberal creatives on both sides of the Atlantic - bought into the new genre of the industrial loft, and suddenly needed big furniture, contemporary art and striking objects to fill up those huge spaces. The ubiquitous three-piece suite - the buying of which was formerly a British rite of passage - was crushed under the weight of Italian sofas and statement chairs, of matt black and chrome. Design became a new way to express individuality, as well as wealth, status and taste.
By the late 1990s, everything was different: show homes and interiors photo-shoots were no longer dominated by sub-Chippendale, chintz and china. The aspirational publications Wallpaper* and the Hip Hotels series were launched with great success; Muji had brought brown-paper minimalism to the high street; and fashion designers did their own lines of home accessories, adding a veneer of glamour to interior fit-outs.
Everyone wanted to be involved in design. After years of anonymity, designers themselves began to become stars, even in Britain. A handful became superstars, the pack led by that French eccentric and genius of self-publicity, Philippe Starck. The ordinary and the everyday were banished; every new item had to be “designer”, from jeans to toothbrushes. It was enough to make you yearn for the banal, for the quiet of the background.
More recently, design has surfed the new wave of technology, with everything from mobile phones and laptops to iPods becoming “design statements”. All these things had to be designed. And some were more designed than others. In fact, the US-based Briton Jonathan Ive, responsible for Apple’s iBook and iPod, has become arguably the single most influential contemporary designer, outstripping even Starck.
Two books from the two biggest publishers of design titles perfectly encapsulate the astonishing, snowballing obsession with the culture of design, but do so in very different and revealing ways. The first and, by far the biggest, is Phaidon’s s(h)elf-important collection of Design Classics. Three huge volumes in high-visibility yellow, with the kind of stencil lettering fetishised by 1920s architects, will dominate the bookshelf like no other recent title.
So unwieldy are these books that they come in an odd, staggered, disposable plastic carry- case. This was designed by the usually reliable Konstantin Grcic, but its throwaway dysfunctionality (it cannot be reused and, even if it could, would provide a hopeless storage method) bodes ill for the publication itself.
The three volumes cover 999 classic designs, embracing everything from chairs and cars to packaging and planes. Many items are still in production, their design deemed so good that they have remained largely unchanged since their creation. Many will be familiar, not only to aesthetes but to normal folk as well. The jumbo jet is there, with Concorde, the Jeep and the Volkswagen Golf, the Swiss Army knife and the Spitfire, the Coke bottle with the Heinz bottle. Mostly, however, these gigantic volumes are filled with the designer chairs and coffee pots that one expects in this kind of venture.
While an enjoyable (if time-consuming) flick-through, this multi-authored book actually adds little to our knowledge of design. It is the upmarket, literary equivalent of those endlessly repeated, infuriatingly glib and painfully addictive TV list shows, the sort of programme you feel you have seen before - or maybe it is just that you’ve seen the same sub-celebrities before, on a different show but talking about similar things.
The quality of the writing in Design Classics varies from short and sharp to short and rubbish; there is no stylistic or narrative consistency, no cross- referencing, no coherence. Each product is presented in a bubble, which might have worked as a magazine column but makes for a poor book. There is also a nasty proliferation of fonts coming out all over the book like a rash, which cheapens the pages and displays a lack of consistency of confidence in the very design it is promoting.
There is nothing intellectually challenging here, no essays on the role of design in social change, nothing on how changes in manufacturing technology or outsourcing may have changed the nature of products or their consumption. There is nothing on meaning or symbolism, nothing on the ever- blurring boundaries between art, design and architecture. Just lots and lots of (occasionally outstanding) pictures, with those brief, extremely variable potted histories.
The publisher Taschen has also done this kind of thing, covering almost every angle. While Phaidon’s effort is, admittedly, bigger, it is also a huge lost opportunity. An extraordinary collection of writers and designers was assembled, and the publication’s size, cost and impact would have made it a superb vehicle for some serious discussion of the subject.
There is, in fact, plenty of discussion about design out there, but it tends towards either ends of the spectrum: at one extreme, the pretentious drivel of academia, where everything reads like a hugely dull PhD; at the other, the Sunday-supplement snippets - the 10 best place mats or how-I-decorated-my-room features. Yet this is a subject that is becoming increasingly important as the west, which generates most designs, cedes its manufacturing base to the east - and, for the moment at least, clings precariously to the intellectual end of the process.
Humble Masterpieces is (I measured it) one-quarter of the spine-width of a single volume of Phaidon’s blockbuster. But it is not just size that distinguishes it. It is emphatically not about designer chairs.
Quite the opposite: Humble Masterpieces is concerned with the tools of everyday life, tools we so often overlook. The paperclip, the Coke and ketchup bottles (again), the tea bag, tampon, baseball, safety pin, condom, light bulb, safety match - along with another 90 such. Many of these devices are actually life-changing - not over-designed furniture or over-thought cultural artefacts, but things that actually work without making a fuss. They are instances of how design can make our lives more liveable, though we rarely register them.
While there are significant crossovers in the two titles, one is in effect look-at-me, the other is use-me-but-don’t-notice-me. Humble Masterpieces was written by the switched-on curator of design at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Paola Antonelli. And, while it shares a lack of intellectual ambition with Design Classics, it takes a very different and coherent curatorial line. The choice and compilation of these 100 objects present a real thesis: the impact that design can have on everyday life, and the enduring anonymity of the work of many of the most brilliant designers.
Humble Masterpieces also features some wonderfully quirky facts: I didn’t know that Salvador Dali designed the Chupa Chups lollipop wrapper; I’d never heard of the stainless steel soap used by cooks to cleanse their hands of garlic and fish smells; I didn’t know that the mustachioed, behatted caricature on the sides of the classic angular Bialetti espresso pots (the one you see on every Italian’s stove) is of Alfonso Bialetti, the inventor himself.
Antonelli’s book may be the humble alter-ego to Phaidon’s blockbuster, but it is not the ultimate antidote. That honour has been taken (for me at least) by the extraordinary survey Home-Made: Contemporary Russian Folk Artifacts, edited by the Russian artist Vladimir Arkhipov. The title is mischievous and misleading, implying as it does an exploration of Brezhnev or Putin-faced Russian dolls, Lenin busts and furry, red-starred hats - the kind of tat you see on stalls across Europe. But in fact, this is actually the richest and most wonderful archive of improvisation.
With a blend of pathos and humour, the book exposes Arkhipov’s own collection of homemade tools and objects gathered from around the former Soviet Union. Rather than imposing any pretentious or portentous text, the owners and makers are allowed to describe their objects themselves, as well as the circumstances that brought about their creation.
The occasionally brilliant, absurd and Duchampian items shown here are the result of Russia’s communist-era non-consumer economy, where many everyday items that we in the west take for granted were either unavailable or unaffordable, a situation that gave rise to an outburst of creative improvisation. Here we see a quite beautiful TV aerial fashioned from cutlery, a pot-holder made from a distorted LP, a leather cap made out of a worn-out punchbag, a sardine tin re-formed to create a case for a calculator, a jerry can hilariously fashioned to resemble an attache case, a bathplug carved from an old boot heel. These are objects that speak of politics, of hardship, of ingenuity and craft, which truly embody the indomitability of the society that produced them.
Here is Yurii Fesun’s grandson’s commentary on an ingenious object made by his grandfather: “My grandfather calls it a basket... I had this punctured ball and we were going to throw it out. But my grandfather cut out a sort of handle and said, `There you are. Now you can go gathering mushrooms and berries in the forest.’ I’ve never gone gathering mushrooms in my life, and I don’t ever intend to, either.” Here’s Ivan Pogodin on his coat hanger: “When my daughter was little I made coat hangers for the kindergarten - for the whole class. And what kind of hangers do you get nowadays? My wife bought a coat, brought it home and hung it up. A really beautiful hanger, plastic it was, one week later it broke. When I make one, you can hang a bulletproof vest on it.” And Ivan Sokolov on his duct-tape-and-broken-branch hockey stick: “Is it still a hockey stick if you play once with it and it turns into a piece of shit?”
These are objects that illuminate the little rituals of everyday life, and make us appreciate our comfortable, consumer lives, where everything is ready-made and readily available. My favourite artefact, by the way, is a snow shovel made from a broom handle attached to a triangular “Men at Work” sign: signifier and signified in a sublime new tool.
Ironically it is this book, laid out in a similar page-per-item format to the Phaidon volumes, that is by far the better designed. Personal, innovative, occasionally heart-breaking, there is real depth and insight in these pages, design’s dirty realism. Ecologically, emotionally and intellectually sound, the items it displays present a profound critique of our throwaway culture - and the cult of design, which presents a set of lovely books in an elaborate case that functions as no more than a disposable carrier bag.
Edwin Heathcote is the FT’s architecture critic.
Phaidon Design Classics
edited by Emilia Terragni
Phaidon ₤100, 2,850 pages (three volumes)
Humble Masterpieces: 100 Everyday Marvels of Design
by Paola Antonelli
Thames & Hudson ₤12.95, 206 pages
Home-made: Contemporary Russian Folk Artifacts
edited by Vladimir Arkhipov
Fuel ₤19.95, 304 pages
