STYLE OVER SUBSTANCE: FURNITURE GOES POP

Postwar Modern

The furniture of the 1940s and 1950s, particularly after World War II, was based on the modernist aesthetic—it was rationally designed and functional. Not that it was necessarily boring: unlike many examples of modernist furniture before World War II, the furniture of the late 1940s and the 1950s was often exciting, with lively colors and patterns. Still, it was inherently functional. Furniture was designed first and foremost to be efficient, enabling people to sit, sleep, eat, or store their belongings. Modernist furniture designers took design ideas of the late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century Arts and Crafts movement, as well as certain motifs of early-twentieth-century Art Nouveau and Art Deco, and incorporated them into the modernist vocabulary of rational function. Influential in furniture design of this period was the ideal of a masterfully planned living environment. From the Arts and Crafts movement also came a concern with durability. By using newly developed and perfected synthetic materials, particularly plastics, modernist designers could create objects that lasted much longer than even their Arts and Crafts counterparts. The most prolific and popular de-signers were from the Scandinavian countries, and Danish modern, Swedish modern, and Finnish modern furniture and other interior-design objects filled many American homes by the late 1950s.

Pop

The baby boomers coming of age at the beginning of the 1960s had a significant effect on furniture design—not surprising, since they indirectly affected the design of clothing, art, architecture, and almost all aspects of consumer society. Toward the end of the 1950s a new pop aesthetic, based on the ever-changing fads of popular culture rather than an established tradition of quality, began to emerge. Instead of durability, permanence, high-quality materials, and designs that were rational and functional, pop objects were conceived in terms of disposability, cheap materials, and whimsical, often-witty "antidesign."

More Objects

Modernists had strived to pare down the number of objects needed by humans. The theory was essentially that as more rationally designed objects that functioned efficiently were produced, many superfluous items could gradually be eliminated. As designer-architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe succinctly put it, "Less is more." The pop ideal, on the other hand, involved providing a prosperous consumer society with many objects. Manufacturers and their designers realized that if they created more pieces of furniture with shorter life spans, consumers would shortly have to replace them. Also, if the sofa or lamp were odd and faddish enough, consumers would purchase the next fashionable item even before built-in obsolescence occurred naturally. While the use of less expensive synthetic materials had aided modernist designers in creating mass-produced but carefully designed furniture, the availability of those materials was the enabling force behind the creation of pop furniture, which depended on being cheap and quickly made.

Status No More

Mirroring certain changes in attitude regarding other areas of culture, some people expressed a new contempt for the associations of furniture ownership with status. The more youthful sector of the population advocated—and therefore spent money on—furniture that was inexpensive and accessible enough to be available to a wider range of the population, a trend similar to their response to fashion. Furniture such as Peter Murdoch's child's chair (1963)—constructed from polyethylene-coated paperboard—Roger Dean's Pumpkin Chair (1967), and Robin Day's injection-molded arm-chair are typical of the designs that met the demands of the new market. Each was simple and cheaply produced, and not many people could seriously associate either with status. As furniture became less expensive and therefore more accessible, designs became more playful as well. Designers did not have to worry as much about using expensive materials for unusual creations that could easily turn out to be failures. Also, many people were tired of staid, traditional, functional designs.

Fanciful Designs

Some chairs were shaped like half globes, while others were designed as continuous ribbons folded in on themselves. There was no purpose for such designs except for sheer novelty and the knowledge that when they broke one could go to the store and buy other unusually designed chairs as replacements. Colors were often bright, and shapes and patterns were often intricate and fanciful. Pop invested a sense of the personal that had gotten lost in modernism. Some furniture, in fact, actually began to take on human and other organic shapes, a radical departure from Bauhaus-inspired starkness. French designer Olivier Morgue took this idea to the extreme with his fiberglass upholstered, chaise-longue Bouloum seats (1968)—also called "person seats" because they were shaped like a reclining human figure. One would sit in them as if one were sitting in another person's lap. The Bouloum chairs could be used singly or stacked to make the chair as high as desired. American designer Wendell Castle created furniture that suggested neosurrealist biomorphic shapes, including his Molar Sofa (1969-1970) constructed out of plastic. Italian de-signer Gaetano Pesce created the Up Series, which consisted of "transformation" furniture. The polyurethane-foam furniture was packed in flat boxes; when the boxes were taken home and opened, the three-dimensional forms would magically spring to life.

Modernist Footholds

Many people, however, remained basically conservative during the 1960s with regard to taste in furniture. Rationally designed, functional furniture continued to attract a substantial market, especially in corporate environments where the crisp, stark look of modernism seemed to project the right image of efficiency and success. Many examples of Scandinavian modern furniture were generally pleasing to the more conservative eye. Modernist furniture was no longer seen as the progressive wave of the future that it had been in previous decades.