Good Design
The Good Design movement was a mid-century design concept that took shape principally in the United States after the Second World War, though its roots reach back to the 1930s and the functionalist teaching of the Bauhaus. It argued that well-designed objects - furniture, buildings, kitchen implements, household goods, garden tools - should be honest in material, clear in construction, and beautiful through use rather than ornament. The Museum of Modern Art in New York became the movement's great promoter: its 1952 exhibition Good Design and the catalogs of Edgar Kaufmann set the standard for what modern households should own. Designers such as Charles and Ray Eames, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Hans Wegner gave the ideal physical form, and MoMA's retrospective What Was Good Design? MoMA's Message, 1944-56 later defined the period.
Defining characteristics
- Honest materials: molded plywood, tubular steel, glass, and plastic left legible as themselves
- Clean functional forms stripped of ornament
- Everyday objects - from chairs to kitchen tools - refined to simple geometry or organic curves
- Machine-made objects designed for efficient mass production
- Fitness for use: beauty arising from clarity of construction
- Warm modernism: natural finishes and human scale softening strict geometry
Key figures
- Charles Eames (1907-1978) — American designer whose molded-plywood and lounge chairs defined postwar furniture
- Ray Eames (1912-1988) — Designer and artist, equal partner in the Eames Office
- Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) — Bauhaus artist whose New Vision linked art, technology, and design in America
- Hans Wegner (1914-2007) — Danish furniture designer whose chairs exemplify honest, refined craft
Example works
- Eames Lounge Chair — Charles and Ray Eames (1956)
- Wishbone chair (CH24) — Hans Wegner (1949)
Sources
- Good Design - Wikipedia encyclopedia