Discover the Stettheimer Dollhouse: The 12-Room Dollhouse Featuring Miniature, Original Modernist Art by Marcel Duchamp

in Art, Design, Museums | July 28th, 2021

The Stet­theimer Doll­house has been wow­ing young New York­ers since it entered the Muse­um of the City of New York’s col­lec­tion in 1944.

The lux­u­ri­ous­ly appoint­ed, two-sto­ry, twelve-room house fea­tures tiny crys­tal chan­de­liers, trompe l’oeil pan­els, an itty bit­ty mah-jongg set, and a deli­cious-look­ing dessert assort­ment that would have dri­ven Beat­rix Potter’s Two Bad Mice wild.

Its most aston­ish­ing fea­ture, how­ev­er, tends to go over its youngest fans’ heads — an art gallery filled with orig­i­nal mod­ernist paint­ings, draw­ings, and sculp­tures by the likes of Mar­cel Duchamp, George Bel­lows, Gas­ton Lachaise, and Mar­guerite Zorach.

The house’s cre­ator, Car­rie Wal­ter Stet­theimer, drew on her family’s close per­son­al ties to the avant-garde art world to secure these con­tri­bu­tions.

The art deal­er Paul Rosen­berg described the affin­i­ty between these artists and the three wealthy Stet­theimer sis­ters, one of whom, Florine, was her­self a mod­ernist painter:

Artists… went there and not at all mere­ly because of the indi­vid­u­al­i­ties of the trio of women and their taste­ful hos­pi­tal­i­ty. They went for the rea­son that they felt them­selves entire­ly at home with the Stetties—so the trio was called—and the Stet­ties seemed to feel them­selves entire­ly at home in their com­pa­ny. Art was an indis­pens­able com­po­nent of the mod­ern, open intel­lec­tu­al life of the place. The sis­ters felt it as a liv­ing issue. Sin­cere­ly they lived it.

Art is def­i­nite­ly part of the dollhouse’s life.

Duchamp recre­at­ed Nude Descend­ing a Stair­case, inscrib­ing the back “Pour la col­lec­tion de la poupée de Car­rie Stet­theimer à l’occasion de sa fête en bon sou­venir. Mar­cel Duchamp 23 juil­let 1918 N.Y.”

Mar­guerite Thomp­son Zorach, Alexan­der Archipenko, and Paul Theve­naz also felt no com­punc­tion about fur­nish­ing a doll­house with nudes.

Louis Bouché — the “bad boy of Amer­i­can art” as per the Stet­theimers’ friend, writer and pho­tog­ra­ph­er Carl Van Vecht­en, made a tiny ver­sion of his paint­ing, Mama’s Boy.

Car­rie wrote to Gas­ton Lachaise, to thank him for two minia­ture nude draw­ings and an alabaster Venus:

My dolls and I thank you most sin­cere­ly for the love­ly draw­ings that are to grace their art gallery. I think that the dolls—after they are born, which they are not, yet—ought to be the hap­pi­est and proud­est dolls in the world as own­ers of the draw­ings and the beau­ti­ful stat­ue. I am now hop­ing that they will nev­er be born, so that I can keep them [the art works] for­ev­er in cus­tody, and enjoy them myself, while await­ing their arrival.

Car­rie worked on the doll­house from from 1916 to 1935. Her sis­ter Ettie donat­ed it to the muse­um and took it upon her­self to arrange the art­work. As Johan­na Fate­man writes in 4Columns:

Twen­ty-eight of the artists’ gifts were stored sep­a­rate­ly; Ettie select­ed thir­teen from the col­lec­tion, and her grace­ful arrange­ment became per­ma­nent, though it’s like­ly that the pieces were meant to be shown in rota­tion.

The Muse­um of the City of New York’s cur­rent exhi­bi­tion, The Stet­theimer Doll­house: Up Close, includes pho­tos of the art­works that Ettie did not choose to install.

The works that have always been on view are Mar­cel Duchamp’s Nude Descend­ing a Stair­case, Alexan­der Archipenko’s Nude, Louis Bouche’s Mama’s Boy, Gas­ton Lachaise’s Venus and two nudes, Carl Sprinchorn’s Dancers, Albert Gleizes’ Seat­ed Fig­ure and Bermu­da Land­scape, Paul Thevenaz’s L’Ombre and Nude with Flow­ing Hair, Mar­guerite Zorach’s Bather and Bathers, William Zorach’s Moth­er and Child, and a paint­ing of a ship by an unknown artist.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Grue­some Doll­house Death Scenes That Rein­vent­ed Mur­der Inves­ti­ga­tions

A Record Store Designed for Mice in Swe­den, Fea­tur­ing Albums by Mouse Davis, Destiny’s Cheese, Dol­ly Pars­ley & More

An Art Gallery for Ger­bils: Two Quar­an­tined Lon­don­ers Cre­ate a Mini Muse­um Com­plete with Ger­bil-Themed Art

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Discover The Grammar of Ornament, One of the Great Color Books & Design Masterpieces of the 19th Century

in Art, Books, Design | July 22nd, 2021

In the mid-17th cen­tu­ry, young Eng­lish­men of means began to mark their com­ing of age with a “Grand Tour” across the Con­ti­nent and even beyond. This allowed them to take in the ele­ments of their civ­i­liza­tion­al her­itage first-hand, espe­cial­ly the arti­facts of clas­si­cal antiq­ui­ty and the Renais­sance. After com­plet­ing his archi­tec­tur­al stud­ies, a Lon­don­er named Owen Jones embarked upon his own Grand Tour in 1832, rather late in the his­to­ry of the tra­di­tion, but ide­al tim­ing for the research that inspired the project that would become his lega­cy.

Accord­ing to the Vic­to­ria and Albert Muse­um, Jones vis­it­ed “Italy, Greece, Egypt and Turkey before arriv­ing in Grana­da, in Spain to car­ry out stud­ies of the Alham­bra Palace that were to cement his rep­u­ta­tion.”

He and French archi­tect Jules Goury, “the first to study the Alham­bra as a mas­ter­piece of Islam­ic design,” pro­duced “hun­dreds of draw­ings and plas­ter casts” of the his­tor­i­cal, cul­tur­al, and aes­thet­ic palimpsest of a build­ing com­plex. The fruit of their labors was the book Plans, Ele­va­tions, Sec­tions and Details of the Alham­bra, “one of the most influ­en­tial pub­li­ca­tions on Islam­ic archi­tec­ture of all time.”

Pub­lished in the 1840s, the book pushed the print­ing tech­nolo­gies of the day to their lim­its. In search of a way to do jus­tice to “the intri­cate and bright­ly col­ored dec­o­ra­tion of the Alham­bra Palace,” Jones had to put in more work research­ing “the then new tech­nique of chro­molith­o­g­ra­phy — a method of pro­duc­ing mul­ti-col­or prints using chem­i­cals.” In the fol­low­ing decade, he would make even more ambi­tious use of chro­molith­o­g­ra­phy — and draw from a much wider swath of world cul­ture — to cre­ate his print­ed mag­num opus, The Gram­mar of Orna­ment.

With this book, Jones “set out to reac­quaint his col­leagues with the under­ly­ing prin­ci­ples that made art beau­ti­ful,” write Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art cura­tor Femke Speel­berg and librar­i­an Robyn Flem­ing. “Instead of writ­ing an aca­d­e­m­ic trea­tise on the sub­ject, he chose to assem­ble a book of one hun­dred plates illus­trat­ing objects and pat­terns from around the world and across time, from which these prin­ci­ples could be dis­tilled.” To accom­plish this he drew on his own trav­el expe­ri­ences as well as resources clos­er at hand, includ­ing “the muse­o­log­i­cal and pri­vate col­lec­tions that were avail­able to him in Eng­land, and the objects that had been on dis­play dur­ing the Uni­ver­sal Exhi­bi­tions held in Lon­don in 1851 and 1855.”

The Gram­mar of Orna­ment was pub­lished in 1856, emerg­ing into a Britain “dom­i­nat­ed by his­tor­i­cal revivals such as Neo­clas­si­cism and the Goth­ic Revival,” says the V&A. “These design move­ments were rid­dled with reli­gious and social con­no­ta­tions. Instead, Owen Jones sought a mod­ern style with none of this cul­tur­al bag­gage. Set­ting out to iden­ti­fy the com­mon prin­ci­ples behind the best exam­ples of his­tor­i­cal orna­ment, he for­mu­lat­ed a design lan­guage that was suit­able for the mod­ern world, one which could be applied equal­ly to wall­pa­pers, tex­tiles, fur­ni­ture, met­al­work and inte­ri­ors.”

Indeed, the pat­terns so lav­ish­ly repro­duced in the book soon became trends in real-world design. They weren’t always employed with the intel­lec­tu­al under­stand­ing Jones sought to instill, but since The Gram­mar of Orna­ment has nev­er gone out of print (and can even be down­loaded free from the Inter­net Archive), his prin­ci­ples remain avail­able for all to learn — and his painstak­ing­ly artis­tic print­ing work remains avail­able for all to admire — even in the cor­ners of the world that lay beyond his imag­i­na­tion.

You can pur­chase a com­plete and unabridged col­or edi­tion of The Gram­mar of Orna­ment online.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Com­plex Geom­e­try of Islam­ic Art & Design: A Short Intro­duc­tion

Explore the Beau­ti­ful Pages of the 1902 Japan­ese Design Mag­a­zine Shin-Bijut­sukai: Euro­pean Mod­ernism Meets Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Design

A Beau­ti­ful 1897 Illus­trat­ed Book Shows How Flow­ers Become Art Nou­veau Designs

The Bauhaus Book­shelf: Down­load Orig­i­nal Bauhaus Books, Jour­nals, Man­i­festos & Ads That Still Inspire Design­ers World­wide

Every Page of Depero Futur­ista, the 1927 Futur­ist Mas­ter­piece of Graph­ic Design & Book­mak­ing, Is Now Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Pulp Tarot: A New Tarot Deck Inspired by Midcentury Pulp Illustrations

in Art, Creativity, Design, Games | June 29th, 2021

Graph­ic artist Todd Alcott has endeared him­self to Open Cul­ture read­ers by retro­fitting mid­cen­tu­ry pulp paper­back cov­ers and illus­tra­tions with clas­sic lyrics from the likes of David Bowie, Prince, Bob Dylan, and Talk­ing Heads.

Although he’s dab­bled in the abstrac­tions that once graced the cov­ers of psy­chol­o­gy, phi­los­o­phy, and sci­ence texts, his over­ar­ch­ing attrac­tion to the visu­al lan­guage of sci­ence fic­tion and illic­it romance speak to the pre­mi­um he places on nar­ra­tive.

And with hun­dreds of “mid-cen­tu­ry mashups” to his name, he’s become quite a mas­ter of bend­ing exist­ing nar­ra­tives to his own pur­pos­es.

Recent­ly, Alcott turned his atten­tion to the cre­ation of the Pulp Tarot deck he is fund­ing on Kick­starter.

A self-described “clear-eyed skep­tic as far as para­nor­mal things” go, Alcott was drawn to the “sim­plic­i­ty and strange­ness” of Pamela Col­man Smith’s “bewitch­ing” Tarot imagery:

Maybe because they were sim­ply the first ones I saw, I don’t know, but there is some­thing about the nar­ra­tive thread that runs through them, the way they delin­eate the devel­op­ment of the soul, with all the choic­es and crises a soul encoun­ters on its way to ful­fill­ment, that real­ly struck a chord with me. You lay out enough Tarot spreads and they even­tu­al­ly coa­lesce around a hand­ful of cards that real­ly seem to define you. I don’t know how it hap­pens, but it does, every time: there are cards that come up for you so often that you think, “Yep, that’s me,” and then there are oth­ers that turn up so rarely that, when they do come up, you have to look them up in the lit­tle book­let because you’ve nev­er seen them before.

One such card for Alcott is the Page of Swords. In the ear­ly 90s, curi­ous to know what the Tarot would have to say about the young woman he’d start­ed dat­ing, he shuf­fled and cut his Rid­er-Waite-Smith deck “until some­thing inside said “now” and he flipped over the Page of Swords:

I looked it up in the book­let, which said that the Page of Swords was a secret-keep­er, like a spy. I thought about that for a moment; the woman I was see­ing was noth­ing like a spy, and had no spy-like attrib­ut­es. I shrugged and began the process again, shuf­fling and cut­ting and shuf­fling and cut­ting, until, again, some­thing inside said “now,” and turned up the card again. It was the Page of Swords, again. My heart leaped, I put the deck back in its box and qui­et­ly freaked out for a while. The next day, I asked the young lady if the Page of Swords meant any­thing to her, and she said “Oh sure, when I was a kid, that was my card.” Any­way, I’m now mar­ried to her.

The Three of Pen­ta­cles is anoth­er favorite, one that pre­sent­ed a par­tic­u­lar design chal­lenge.

The Smith deck shows a stone­ma­son, an archi­tect and a church offi­cial, col­lab­o­rat­ing on build­ing a cathe­dral. Now, there are no cathe­drals in the pulp world, so I had to think, well, in the pulp world, pen­ta­cles rep­re­sent mon­ey, so the obvi­ous choice would be to show three crim­i­nals plan­ning a heist. I could­n’t find an image any­thing close to the one in my head, so I had to build it: the room, the table, the map of the bank, the plan, the peo­ple involved, and then stitch it all togeth­er in Pho­to­shop so it end­ed up look­ing like a cohe­sive illus­tra­tion. That was a real­ly joy­ful moment for me: there were the three con­spir­a­tors, the Big Cheese, the Dame and The Goon, their roles clear­ly defined despite not see­ing any­one’s face. It was a real break­through, see­ing that I could put togeth­er a lit­tle nar­ra­tive like that.

Smith imag­ined a medieval fan­ta­sy world when design­ing her Tarot deck. Alcott is draw­ing on 70 years of pop-cul­ture ephemera to cre­ate a trib­ute to Smith’s vision that also works as a deck in their own right “with its own moral nar­ra­tive uni­verse, based on the atti­tudes and con­ven­tions of that world.”

Before draft­ing each of his 70 cards, Alcott stud­ied Smith’s ver­sion, research­ing its mean­ing and design as he con­tem­plates how he might trans­late it into the pulp ver­nac­u­lar. He has found that some of Smith’s work was delib­er­ate­ly exact­ing with regard to col­or, atti­tude, and cos­tume, and oth­er instances where spe­cif­ic details took a back seat to mood and emo­tion­al impact:

Once I under­stand what a card is about, I look through my library to find images that help get that across. It can get real­ly com­pli­cat­ed! A lot of times, the char­ac­ter’s body is in the right posi­tion but their face has the wrong expres­sion, so I have to find a face that fits what the card is try­ing to say. Or their phys­i­cal atti­tude is right, but I need them to be grip­ping or throw­ing some­thing, so I have to find hands and arms that I can graft on, Franken­stein style. In some cas­es, there will be fig­ures in the cards cob­bled togeth­er from five or six dif­fer­ent sources. 

These cards are eas­i­ly the most com­plex work I’ve ever done in that sense. The song pieces I do are a con­ver­sa­tion between the piece and the song, but these cards are a con­ver­sa­tion between me, Smith, the entire Tarot tra­di­tion, and the uni­verse. 

Vis­it Todd Alcott’s Etsy shop to view more of his mid-cen­tu­ry mash ups, and see more cards from The Pulp Tarot and sup­port Kick­starter here.

All images from the Pulp Tarot used with the per­mis­sion of artist Todd Alcott.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Clas­sic Songs Re-Imag­ined as Vin­tage Book Cov­ers Dur­ing Our Trou­bled Times: “Under Pres­sure,” “It’s the End of the World as We Know It,” “Shel­ter from the Storm” & More

David Bowie Songs Reimag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers: Space Odd­i­ty, Heroes, Life on Mars & More

Songs by Joni Mitchell Re-Imag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers & Vin­tage Movie Posters

Four Clas­sic Prince Songs Re-Imag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Cov­ers: When Doves Cry, Lit­tle Red Corvette & More

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Google’s UX Design Professional Certificate: 7 Courses Will Help Prepare Students for an Entry-Level Job in 6 Months

in Design, Online Courses | June 22nd, 2021

Dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, Google launched a series of Career Cer­tifi­cates that will “pre­pare learn­ers for an entry-lev­el role in under six months.” One such cer­tifi­cate focus­es on User Expe­ri­ence Design, or what’s called UX Design, the process design teams use to cre­ate prod­ucts that pro­vide mean­ing­ful expe­ri­ences to users.

Offered on the Cours­era plat­form, the User Expe­ri­ence (UX) Design Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate fea­tures sev­en cours­es, includ­ing the Foun­da­tions of User Expe­ri­ence, Start the UX Design Process, Build Wire­frames and Low-Fideli­ty Pro­to­types, and Con­duct UX Research and Test Ear­ly Con­cepts. In total, this pro­gram “includes over 200 hours of instruc­tion and hun­dreds of prac­tice-based activ­i­ties and assess­ments that sim­u­late real-world UX design sce­nar­ios and are crit­i­cal for suc­cess in the work­place. The con­tent is high­ly inter­ac­tive and devel­oped by Google employ­ees with decades of expe­ri­ence in UX design.” Upon com­ple­tion, stu­dents can direct­ly apply for jobs with Google and over 130 U.S. employ­ers, includ­ing Wal­mart, Best Buy, and Astreya. You can start a 7‑day free tri­al and explore the cours­es. If you con­tin­ue beyond that, Google/Coursera will charge $39 USD per month. That trans­lates to about $235 after 6 months.

Explore the User Expe­ri­ence (UX) Design Pro­fes­sion­al Cer­tifi­cate by watch­ing the video above. Learn more about the over­all Google career cer­tifi­cate ini­tia­tive here. And find oth­er Google pro­fes­sion­al cer­tifi­cates here.

Note: Open Cul­ture has a part­ner­ship with Cours­era. If read­ers enroll in cer­tain Cours­era cours­es and pro­grams, it helps sup­port Open Cul­ture.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Online Degrees & Mini Degrees: Explore Mas­ters, Mini Mas­ters, Bach­e­lors & Mini Bach­e­lors from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Google Intro­duces 6‑Month Career Cer­tifi­cates, Threat­en­ing to Dis­rupt High­er Edu­ca­tion with “the Equiv­a­lent of a Four-Year Degree”

Cours­era and Google Launch an Online Cer­tifi­cate Pro­gram to Help Stu­dents Become IT Pro­fes­sion­als & Get Attrac­tive Jobs

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Who Designed the 1980s Aesthetic?: Meet the Memphis Group, the Designers Who Created the 80s Iconic Look

in Architecture, Art, Design, Fashion | June 2nd, 2021

For those who remem­ber the 1980s, it can feel like they nev­er left, so deeply ingrained have their designs become in the 21st cen­tu­ry. But where did those designs them­selves orig­i­nate? Vibrant, clash­ing col­ors and pat­terns, bub­bly shapes; “the geo­met­ric fig­ures of Art Deco,” writes Sara Barnes at My Mod­ern Met, “the col­or palette of Pop Art, and the 1950s kitsch” that inspired design­ers of all kinds came from a move­ment of artists who called them­selves the Mem­phis Group, after Bob Dylan’s “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Mem­phis Blues Again,” a song “played on repeat dur­ing their first meet­ing” in a tiny Milan apart­ment. “I think you’d be hard-pressed to think of any oth­er design phe­nom­e­non that can be locat­ed as specif­i­cal­ly to a group of peo­ple,” says Yale Cen­ter of British Art’s Glenn Adam­son in the Vox explain­er above,

Found­ed in Decem­ber 1980 by design­er Ettore Sottsass — known for his red Olivet­ti Valen­tine type­writer — and sev­er­al like-mind­ed col­leagues, the move­ment made a delib­er­ate attempt to dis­rupt the aus­tere, clean lines of the 70s with work they described as “rad­i­cal, fun­ny, and out­ra­geous.” They flaunt­ed what had been con­sid­ered “good taste” with aban­don. Mem­phis design shows Bauhaus influ­ences — though it reject­ed the “strict, straight lines of mod­ernism,” notes Curbed. It taps the anar­chic spir­it of Dada, with­out the edgy, anar­chist pol­i­tics that drove that move­ment. It is main­ly char­ac­ter­ized by its use of lam­i­nate floor­ing mate­ri­als on tables and lamps and the “Bac­te­rio print,” the squig­gle design which Sottsass cre­at­ed in 1978 and which became “Memphis’s trade­mark pat­tern.”

Mem­phis design shared with mod­ernism anoth­er qual­i­ty ear­ly mod­ernists them­selves ful­ly embraced: “Noth­ing was com­mer­cial­ly suc­cess­ful at the time,” says Bar­bara Radice, Sottsass’s wid­ow and Mem­phis group his­to­ri­an. But David Bowie and Karl Lager­field were ear­ly adopters, and the group’s 80s work even­tu­al­ly made them stars. “We came from being nobod­ies,” says design­er Mar­tine Bedin. By 1984, they were cel­e­brat­ed by the city of Mem­phis, Ten­nessee and giv­en the key to the city. “They were wait­ing for us at the air­port with a band,” Bedin remem­bers. “It was com­plete­ly crazy.” The Mem­phis Group had offi­cial­ly changed the world of art, archi­tec­ture, and design. The fol­low­ing year, Sottsass left the group, and it for­mal­ly dis­band­ed in 1987, hav­ing left its mark for decades to come.

By the end of the 80s, Mem­phis’ look had become pop cul­ture wall­pa­per, inform­ing the sets, titles, and fash­ions of TV sta­ples like Saved by the Bell, which debuted in 1989. “Although their designs didn’t end up in people’s homes,” notes Vox — or at least not right away — “they inspired many design­ers work­ing in dif­fer­ent medi­ums.” Find out above how “every­thing from fash­ion to music videos became influ­enced” by the loud, play­ful visu­al vocab­u­lary of the Mem­phis Group artists, and learn more about the design­ers of “David Bowie’s favorite fur­ni­ture” here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Meet the Mem­phis Group, the Bob Dylan-Inspired Design­ers of David Bowie’s Favorite Fur­ni­ture

The Ulti­mate 80s Med­ley: A Nos­tal­gia-Induc­ing Per­for­mance of A‑Ha, Tears for Fears, Depeche Mode, Peter Gabriel, Van Halen & More

Watch Bri­an Eno’s “Video Paint­ings,” Where 1980s TV Tech­nol­o­gy Meets Visu­al Art

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Design Thinking for the Greater Good: A Free Online Course from the University of Virginia

in Business, Design, Online Courses | June 1st, 2021

Design Think­ing for the Greater Good: Inno­va­tion in the Social Sec­tor shows how and why human-cen­tered design is a pow­er­ful tool. Offered by the Dar­d­en School of Busi­ness at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia, the course lets stu­dents “view design think­ing suc­cess sto­ries from around the world, in areas as diverse as gov­ern­ment, health care, and edu­ca­tion.” Through­out the course, stu­dents will “learn the tools, tech­niques and mind­set need­ed to use design think­ing to uncov­er new and cre­ative solu­tions in the social sec­tor.”

You can take Design Think­ing for the Greater Good for free by select­ing the audit option upon enrolling. If you want to take the course for a cer­tifi­cate, you will need to pay a fee.

Design Think­ing for the Greater Good has been added to our list of Free Busi­ness Cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent  

A Brief His­to­ry of IDEO: A Short Doc­u­men­tary Takes You Inside the Design Firm That Changed the Way We Think about Design

The Smith­son­ian Design Muse­um Dig­i­tizes 200,000 Objects, Giv­ing You Access to 3,000 Years of Design Inno­va­tion & His­to­ry

The Let­ter­form Archive Launch­es a New Online Archive of Graph­ic Design, Fea­tur­ing 9,000 Hi-Fi Images

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The Letterform Archive Launches a New Online Archive of Graphic Design, Featuring 9,000 Hi-Fi Images

in Archives, Art, Design | April 8th, 2021

An online design muse­um made by and for design­ers? The con­cept seems obvi­ous, but has tak­en decades in inter­net years for the real­i­ty to ful­ly emerge in the Let­ter­form Archive. Now that it has, we can see why. Good design may look sim­ple, but no one should be fooled into think­ing it’s easy. “After years of devel­op­ment and months of feed­back,” write the cre­ators of the Let­ter­form Archive online design muse­um, “we’re open­ing up the Online Archive to every­one. This project is a labor of love from every­one on our staff, and many gen­er­ous vol­un­teers, and we hope it pro­vides a source of beau­ti­ful dis­trac­tion and inspi­ra­tion to all who love let­ters.”

That’s let­ters as in fonts, not epis­tles, and there are thou­sands of them in the archive. But there are also thou­sands of pho­tographs, lith­o­graphs, silkscreens, etc. rep­re­sent­ing the height of mod­ern sim­plic­i­ty. This and oth­er uni­fy­ing threads run through the col­lec­tion of the Let­ter­form Archive, which offers “unprece­dent­ed access… with near­ly 1,500 objects and 9,000 hi-fi images.”

You’ll find in the Archive the sleek ele­gance of 1960s Olivet­ti cat­a­logs, the icon­ic mil­i­tan­cy of Emory Dou­glas’ designs for The Black Pan­ther news­pa­per, and the eeri­ly stark mil­i­tan­cy of the “SILENCE=DEATH” t‑shirt from the 1980s AIDS cri­sis.

The site was built around the ide­al of “rad­i­cal acces­si­bil­i­ty,” with the aim of cap­tur­ing “a sense of what it’s like to vis­it the Archive” (which lives per­ma­nent­ly in San Fran­cis­co). But the focus is not on the casu­al onlook­er — Let­ter­form Archive online caters specif­i­cal­ly to graph­ic design­ers, which makes its inter­face even sim­pler, more ele­gant, and eas­i­er to use for every­one, coin­ci­den­tal­ly (or not).

The graph­ic design focus also means there are func­tions spe­cif­ic to the dis­ci­pline that design­ers won’t find in oth­er online image libraries: “we encour­age you to use the search fil­ters: click on each cat­e­go­ry to explore dis­ci­plines like let­ter­ing, and for­mats like type spec­i­mens, or com­bine fil­ters like decades and coun­tries to nar­row your view to a spe­cif­ic time and place.”

From the rad­i­cal typog­ra­phy of Dada to the rad­i­cal 60s zine scene to the sleek designs (and Neins) found in a 1987 Apple Logo Stan­dards pam­phlet, the muse­um has some­thing for every­one inter­est­ed in recent graph­ic design his­to­ry and typol­o­gy. But it’s not all sleek sim­plic­i­ty. There are also rare arti­facts of elab­o­rate­ly intri­cate design, like the Per­sian Yusef and Zulaikha man­u­script, below, dat­ing from between 1880 and 1910. You’ll find dozens more such trea­sures in the Let­ter­form Archive here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Where to Find Free Art Images & Books from Great Muse­ums, and Free Books from Uni­ver­si­ty Press­es

The First Muse­um Ded­i­cat­ed Exclu­sive­ly to Poster Art Opens Its Doors in the U.S.: Enter the Poster House

Dis­cov­er Iso­type, the 1920s Attempt to Cre­ate a Uni­ver­sal Lan­guage with Styl­ish Icons & Graph­ic Design

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Discover the First Modern Kitchen–the Frankfurt Kitchen–Pioneered by the Architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky (1926)

in Architecture, Design, Gender, Life | April 2nd, 2021

Near­ly 100 years after it was intro­duced, archi­tect Mar­garete (Grete) Schütte-Lihotzky’s famous Frank­furt Kitchen con­tin­ues to exert enor­mous influ­ence on kitchen design.

Schütte-Lihotzky ana­lyzed designs for kitchens in train din­ing cars and made detailed time-motion stud­ies of house­wives’ din­ner prepa­ra­tions in her quest to come up with some­thing that would be space sav­ing, effi­cient, inex­pen­sive­ly pre-fab­ri­cat­ed, and eas­i­ly installed in the new hous­ing spring­ing up in post-WWI Ger­many.

Schütte-Lihotzky hoped that her design would have a lib­er­at­ing effect, by reduc­ing the time women spent in the kitchen. Noth­ing is left to chance in these 1.9 by 3.44 meters, with the main empha­sis placed on the well-trav­eled “gold­en tri­an­gle” between work­top, stove, and sink.

The design’s sci­en­tif­ic man­age­ment hon­ored ergonom­ics and effi­cien­cy, ini­ti­at­ing a sort of house­hold dance, but as film­mak­er Mari­beth Rom­s­lo, who direct­ed eight dancers on a painstak­ing fac­sim­i­le of a Frank­furt Kitchen, below, observes:

…as with any progress, there is fric­tion and pres­sure. As women gain more rights (then and now), are they real­ly just adding more to their to-do list of respon­si­bil­i­ties? Adding to the num­ber of plates they need to spin? They haven’t been excused from domes­tic duties in order to pur­sue careers or employ­ment, the new respon­si­bil­i­ties are addi­tive.

 

(Note: enter your infor­ma­tion to view the film.)

Chore­o­g­ra­ph­er Zoé Hen­rot, who also appears in the film, empha­sizes the Frank­furt Kitchen’s design effi­cien­cies and many of its famous fea­tures — the draw­ers for flour and oth­er bulk goods, the adjustable stool, the cut­ting board with a recep­ta­cle for par­ings and peels.

At the same time, she man­ages to tele­graph some pos­si­ble Catch-22s.

Its diminu­tive size dic­tates that this work­place will be a soli­tary one — no helpers, guests, or small chil­dren.

The built-in expec­ta­tions regard­ing uni­for­mi­ty of use leaves lit­tle room for culi­nary exper­i­men­ta­tion or a loosey goosey approach.

When crush­ing­ly repet­i­tive tasks begin to chafe, options for escape are lim­it­ed (if very well-suit­ed to the expres­sive pos­si­bil­i­ties of mod­ern dance).

Inter­est­ing­ly, many assume that a female archi­tect work­ing in 1926 would have brought some per­son­al insights to the task that her male col­leagues might have been lack­ing. Not so, as Schütte-Lihotzky read­i­ly admit­ted:

The truth of the mat­ter was, I’d nev­er run a house­hold before design­ing the Frank­furt Kitchen, I’d nev­er cooked, and had no idea about cook­ing.

Singer-song­writer Robert Rotifer is anoth­er artist who was moved to pay homage to Schütte-Lihotzky and the Frank­furt Kitchen, a “cal­cu­lat­ed move” that he describes as some­thing clos­er to design­ing a kitchen than “divine inspi­ra­tion”:

I sat on the train trav­el­ing from Can­ter­bury up to Lon­don… I was about to record a new album, and I need­ed one more uptem­po song, some­thing dri­ving and rhyth­mi­cal. While the noisy com­bi­na­tion of rick­ety train and worn-out tracks sug­gest­ed a beat, I began to think about syn­co­pa­tions and sub­jects.

I thought about the mun­dane things nobody usu­al­ly writes songs about, func­tion­al things that defy metaphor—tools, devices, house­hold goods. As I list­ed some items in my head, I soon real­ized that kitchen uten­sils were the way to go. I thought about the mechan­ics of a kitchen, and that’s when the name of the cre­ator of the famous Frank­furt Kitchen flashed up in my head.

There, in the nat­ur­al rhythm of her name, was the syn­co­pa­tion I had been look­ing for: “I sing this out to Grete Schütte-Lihotzky.” Writ­ing the rest of the lyrics was easy. The repet­i­tive ele­ment would illus­trate the way you keep return­ing to the same tasks and posi­tions when you are work­ing in a kitchen. In the mid­dle-eight I would also find space for some of the crit­i­cisms that have been lev­eled at Schütte-Lihotzky’s kitchen over the decades, such as the way her design iso­lat­ed the kitchen work­er, i.e. tra­di­tion­al­ly the woman, from the rest of the fam­i­ly.

Rotifer, who also cre­at­ed the paint­ings used in the ani­mat­ed music video, gives the archi­tect her due by includ­ing accom­plish­ments beyond the Frank­furt Kitchen: her micro-apart­ment with “a dis­guised roll-out bed,” her ter­raced hous­es at the Werk­bund­sied­lung, a hous­ing project’s kinder­garten, a print­ing shop, and the Vien­nese Com­mu­nist par­ty head­quar­ters.

It’s a love­ly trib­ute to a design pio­neer who, reflect­ing on her long career around the time of her 100th birth­day, remarked:

If I had known that every­one would keep talk­ing about noth­ing else, I would nev­er have built that damned kitchen!

Muse­ums that have acquired a Frank­furt Kitchen include Frankfurt’s Muse­um Ange­wandte Kun­st, New York City’s Muse­um of Mod­ern Art, London’s Vic­to­ria and Albert Muse­um, and Oslo’s Nation­al Muse­um.

Learn more about the Kitchen Dance Project in this con­ver­sa­tion between film­mak­er Mari­beth Rom­s­lo, chore­o­g­ra­ph­er Zoé Emi­lie Hen­rot, and Min­neapo­lis Insti­tute of Art cura­tor Jen­nifer Komar Oli­varez.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Recipes from the Kitchen of Geor­gia O’Keeffe

The Pol­i­tics & Phi­los­o­phy of the Bauhaus Design Move­ment: A Short Intro­duc­tion

Vis­it the Homes That Great Archi­tects Designed for Them­selves: Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Cor­busier, Wal­ter Gropius & Frank Gehry

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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