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The Definition Of Style ~ Have A Seat !

How do YOU, define Style ?

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Verner Panton

Verner Panton (13 February 1926 - 5 September 1998) is considered one of Denmark's most influential 20th-century furniture and interior designers. During his career, he created innovative and futuristic designs in a variety of materials, especially plastics, and in vibrant colors. His style was very "1960s" but regained popularity at the end of the 20th century; as of 2004, Panton's most well-known furniture models are still in production (at Vitra, among others).
Panton was trained as an architectural engineer in Odense; next, he studied architecture at the Royal Danish Academy of Art (Det Kongelige Danske Kunstakademi) in Copenhagen, graduating in 1951. During the first two years of his career, 1950-1952, he worked at the architectural practice of Arne Jacobsen, another Danish architect and furniture designer. Panton turned out to be an "enfant terrible" and he started his own design and architectural office. He became well known for his innovative architectural proposals, including a collapsible house (1955), the Cardboard House and the Plastic House (1960). Near the end of the 1950s, his chair designs became more and more unconventional, with no legs or discernible back. In 1960 Panton was the designer of the very first single-form injection-moulded plastic chair. the Stacking chair or S chair, which would become his most famous and mass-produced design.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Verner Panton experimented with designing entire environments: radical and psychedelic interiors that were an ensemble of his curved furniture, wall upholstering, textiles and lighting. He is best known for the design of a German boats interior, now a famous museum. He is also known for a hotel in Europe that utilized circular patterns and cylindrical furniture.
Additionally, Panton is well-known for his innovative design work for "Der Spiegel," a well-known German publication in Hamburg.

http://www.danish-furniture.com/designers/verner-panton

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Influential Designers of the 20th Century - Archille Castiglioni

Achille Castiglioni (Milan, 1918-2002) was a renowned industrial designer. He was often inspired by everyday things and made use of ordinary materials. He uses the minimal amount of materials while creating forms with a maximum effect.
Contents

1 Biography
2 The Castiglioni brothers
3 The Castiglionis' Work
4 The Creation of ADI
5 The Fifties' and Sixties' creations
6 The Universty Lessons
7 The Exhibits & Awards
8 His Method
9 Family
10 External links
Biography
Achille Castiglioni studied architecture at the Politecnico di Milano University and set up a design office in 1944 with his brothers, Livio Castiglioni and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni.
The Castiglioni brothers
The teamwork and professional partnership that came out from the work of Achille Castiglioni, Livio Castiglioni and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni gave birth to the so-called Castiglioni brothers team. Livio then left in 1952. This group have become one of the most witty, elegant and innovative partnerships in modern design. The brothers worked from the viewpoint that design must restructure an object's function, form and production process, and applied this maxim to every work that they produced. Castiglioni described this process with these words: "Start from scratch. Stick to common sense. Know your goals and means".
The Castiglionis' Work
In the 1950's the Castiglioni brothers publicly cemented their commitment to redesigning objects, with their tractor seat stool, Mezzadro and their Sella chair made of a bicycle seat. Castiglioni said of his design for the Sella, "When I use a pay phone, I like to move around, but I also would like to sit, but not completely." These designs drew upon the ready made school of art, in which everyday objects are repurposed for the showroom floor.
The chairs also embrace Castiglioni's theory of a Principal Design Component, or PDC, which the designer has found and is building upon within his design.
The Creation of ADI
In 1956, Castiglioni founded the ADI (Association for Industrial Design).
The Fifties' and Sixties' creations
During the fifties and sixties the Castiglioni brothers produced a remarkable number of popular designs. Their "Spalter" vacuum cleaner (1956), manufactured by Rem, was made of bright red plastic and was meant to be slung across the user's back with a leather strap, like a bag. Their lamps, the minimalist "Luminator" (1955) and "Bulb" (1957), employed exposed bulbs. In 1957 they held a show entitled, "Forme e Colori nella Casa d'Oggi" (Shapes and Colours in Today's Home) at Villa Olmo in Como, to exhibit their series of ready made designs.
In 1962 they introduced their "Arco", which was a floor lamp with a long, curved arm extending eight feet from the marble base which had to be moved "by two people inserting a broomstick through the hole in the base.
"Their"Snoopy Lamp of 1967 was a table lamp, indeed inspired by the cartoon character, also had a marble base, which stabilized the egg-shaped metal and glass shade. Their "Toio" (1962) lamp again turned to the PDC method, using a car reflector as its inspiration. Their lighting system for the Montecatini pavilion at the Milan Fair in 1962 featured cone shaped lights suspended from wires.
The Castiglinis also designed the "RR126" stereo system (1965) which was meant to be a "musical pet," and was considered to be one of his "Expressionistic Objects." The dials and controls form the shape of a face, with the speakers as ears. This design, for Brionvega, was free standing, with casters to make it mobile, and the speakers folded up when not in use, to make the design more compact.
The Universty Lessons
Castiglioni taught for many years, first at the Politecnico of Turin University, in 1969 and later leading a class in Industrial Design at the faculty of Architecture at Politecnico di Milano University, to a group of several thousand students.
The Exhibits & Awards
Castiglioni has exhibited his designs at every Milan Triennial since 1947 and has received seven Compasso d'Oro awards.
His Method
Castiglioni's method, to have "a constant and consistent way of designing, not a style" led him to help create new products to restore Italy's quality of life in the post-war years and to innovate upon the household object.
Most of Castilglioni's products are design classics and are still in production under licence. The MoMA has his most important designs in its permanent collection.
Family
Castiglioni has a daughter Monica Castiglioni who is a jewellery designer. She owns the design store Anthias in Milan. She lives and works between Milan and New York.
External links
Biography of Achille Castiglioni
MoMA 1997 Exhibition
http://www.evanizer.com/castiglioni/castiglioni.html
ANTHIAS - Monica Castiglioni & Natsuko Toyofuku
Achille Castiglioni Furniture Designs
Achille Castiglioni official site
His projects on Interaction Ivrea

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Influential Designers of the 20th Century- Charles Eames

Influential Designers of the 20th Century

Charles (1907-1978) and Ray (1912–1988) Eames were American designers, married in 1941, who worked and made major contributions in many fields of design including industrial design, furniture design, art, graphic design, film and architecture.

Charles Eames
Charles Ormond Eames, Jr was born in 1907 in Saint Louis, Missouri. By the time he was 14 years old, while attending high school, Charles worked at the Laclede Steel Company as a part-time laborer, where he learned about engineering, drawing, and architecture (and also first entertained the idea of one day becoming an architect).
Charles briefly studied architecture at Washington University in St. Louis on an architectural scholarship. He proposed studying Frank Lloyd Wright to his professors, and when he would not cease his interest in modern architects, he was dismissed from the university. In the report describing why he was dismissed from the university, a professor wrote the comment "His views were too modern." While at Washington University, he met his first wife, Catherine Woermann, whom he married in 1929. A year later, they had a daughter, Lucia.
After he left school and was married, Charles began his own architectural practice, with partners Charles Gray and later Walter Pauley.
One great influence on him was the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen (whose son Eero, also an architect, would become a partner and friend). At the elder Saarinen's invitation, he moved in 1938 with his wife Catherine and daughter Lucia to Michigan, to further study architecture at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, where he would become a teacher and head of the industrial design department. One of the requirements of the Architecture and Urban Planning Program, at the time Eames applied, was for the student to have decided upon his project and gathered as much pertinent information in advance – Eames' interest was in the St. Louis waterfront. Together with Eero Saarinen he designed prize-winning furniture for New York's Museum of Modern Art "Organic Design in Home Furnishings" competition.[1] Their work displayed the new technique of wood moulding (originally developed by Alvar Aalto), that Eames would further develop in many moulded plywood products, including, beside chairs and other furniture, splints and stretchers for the U.S. Navy during World War II.[2]
In 1941, Charles and Catherine divorced, and he married his Cranbrook colleague Ray Kaiser, who was born in Sacramento, California. He then moved with her to Los Angeles, California, where they would work and live for the rest of their lives. In the late 1940s, as part of the Arts & Architecture magazine's "Case Study" program, Ray and Charles designed and built the groundbreaking Eames House, Case Study House #8, as their home. Located upon a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and hand-constructed within a matter of days entirely of pre-fabricated steel parts intended for industrial construction, it remains a milestone of modern architecture.
Ray Eames
Ray-Bernice Alexandra Kaiser Eames (December 15, 1912 - August 21, 1988) (pronounced [ɹeɪ ˈiːmz]) was an American artist, designer, architect and filmmaker who, together with her husband Charles, is responsible for many classic, iconic designs of the 20th century. She was born in Sacramento, California. Having lived in a number of cities during her youth, in 1933 she moved to New York, where she studied abstract painting with Hans Hofmann.
In September 1940 she began studies at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where she met Charles Eames, marrying him the following year. Settling in Los Angeles, California, Charles and Ray Eames would lead an outstanding career in design and architecture (for details see "Charles Eames").
Ray Eames died in Los Angeles in 1988, ten years to the day after Charles.
Designers
In the 1950s, the Eameses would continue their work in architecture and modern furniture design, often (like in the earlier moulded plywood work) pioneering innovative technologies, such as the fiberglass and plastic resin chairs and the wire mesh chairs designed for Herman Miller. Besides this work, Charles would soon channel his interest in photography into the production of short films. From their first one, the unfinished Traveling Boy (1950), to the extraordinary Powers of Ten (1977), their cinematic work was an outlet for ideas, a vehicle for experimentation and education.
The Eameses also conceived and designed a number of landmark exhibitions. The first of these, Mathematica: a world of numbers...and beyond (1961), was sponsored by IBM, and is the only one of their exhibitions still existent. The original was created for a new wing of the (currently named) California Science Center; it is now owned by and on display at the New York Hall of Science. In late 1961 a duplicate was created for the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago; in 1980 it moved to the Museum of Science, Boston. Another version was created for the 1964/1965 New York World's Fair IBM exhibit. After the World's Fair it was moved to the Pacific Science Center in Seattle where it stayed until 1980. The Mathematica Exhibition is still considered a model for scientific popularization exhibitions. It was followed by "A Computer Perspective: Background to the Computer Age" (1971) and "The World of Franklin and Jefferson" (1975-1977), among others.
The office of Charles and Ray Eames, which functioned for more than four decades (1943-88) at 901 Washington Boulevard in Venice, California, included in its staff, at one time of another, a number of remarkable designers, like Don Albinson, Deborah Sussman, Richard Foy and Henry Beer. Among the many important designs originating there are the molded-plywood DCW (Dining Chair Wood) and DCM (Dining Chair Metal with a plywood seat) (1945), Eames Lounge Chair (1956), the Aluminum Group furniture (1958) and as well as the Eames Chaise (1968), designed for Charles's friend, film director Billy Wilder, the playful Do-Nothing Machine (1957), an early solar energy experiment, and a number of toys.
Short films produced by the couple often document their interests in collecting toys and cultural artifacts on their travels. The films also record the process of hanging their exhibits or producing classic furniture designs, to the purposefully mundane topic of filming soap suds moving over the pavement of a parking lot. Perhaps their most popular movie, "Powers of 10" (narrated by the late physicist Philip Morrison), gives a dramatic demonstration of orders of magnitude by visually zooming away from the earth to the edge of the universe, and then microscopically zooming into the nucleus of a carbon atom. Charles was a prolific photographer as well with thousands of images of their furniture, exhibits and collections, and now a part of the Library of Congress.
Charles Eames died of a heart attack on August 21, 1978 while on a consulting trip in his native Saint Louis, and now has a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame. Ray died 10 years later to the exact day.
At the time of his death they were working on what became their last production, the Eames Sofa which went into production in 1984.
From the beginning, The Eames furniture has usually been listed as by Charles Eames; indeed in the 1948 and 1952 Herman Miller bound catalogs, only Charles' name is listed, but it's become clear that Ray was deeply involved and should be considered an equal partner. The Eames fabrics (many are currently available from Maharam were mostly designed by Ray, as were the Time Life Stools. But in reading the various books on Eames, and seeing the photos of furniture developement, it's clear that Ray's involvement is absolute.
Philosophy
The Eames philosophy was very much entrenched in process.[citation needed] Process to get to the final product often took years of trial and error.[citation needed]
In 1970-71, Charles Eames gave the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University. At the lectures, the Eames viewpoint and philosophy are related through Charles' own telling of what he called the banana leaf parable, a banana leaf being the most basic dish off which to eat in southern India. He related the progression of design and its process where the banana leaf is transformed into something fantastically ornate. He explains the next step and ties it to the design process by finishing the parable with:
"But you can go beyond that and the guys that have not only means, but a certain amount of knowledge and understanding, go the next step and they eat off of a banana leaf. And I think that in these times when we fall back and regroup, that somehow or other, the banana leaf parable sort of got to get working there, because I'm not prepared to say that the banana leaf that one eats off of is the same as the other eats off of, but it's that process that has happened within the man that changes the banana leaf. And as we attack these problems – and I hope and I expect that the total amount of energy used in this world is going to go from high to medium to a little bit lower – the banana leaf idea might have a great part in it."

Furniture
Eames-Saarinen Kleinhans chair (1939)
Eames-Saarinen organic chair (1941)
Children's chairs (1945)
Eames Lounge Chair Wood (LCW) (1945)
Circular table wood (1945)
Eames Plywood Side Chair (1946)
La chaise (1948)
Eames RAR (Rocker Armchair Rod) Rocker (1948)
Eames Eiffel Plastic Side Chair (1950)
Eames Eiffel Plastic Armchair (1950)
Eames Desk and Storage Units (1950)
Eames Desk and Storage Units (1950)
Eames Sofa Compact (1954)
Eames lounge chair and ottoman (1956)
Eames Aluminum Management Chair (1958)
Eames Aluminum Side Chair (1958)
Eames Aluminum Ottoman (1958)
Eames Executive Chair (1960) (aka: Lobby Chair, Time-Life Chair)
Eames Walnut Stool (3 styles; Shapes A, B and C 1960)
Eames tandem sling seating (1962)
Two piece plastic chair (1971)
Eames Sofa (1984) produced after Charles Eames' death
(most of the above are still available; see http://www.hermanmiller.com/)

The trend highlights at Cologne 2008

Inspiring design ideas –
yesterday, today and tomorrow

Through its special installations, imm cologne turns the spotlight on important trends in the world of interior design. This year's trend highlights include visionary interior design scenarios as well as classics that are always "in".

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A focus on Dutch design

For the first time ever, imm cologne 2008 will feature a special guest country. This year, the focus is on Dutch design and its significance in an international context. What characterizes Dutch furniture and interiors? And what kind of ideas for living can customers find in Dutch furniture and design outlets? imm cologne provides an overview of the national characteristics of the Netherlands and presents ideas for future living from Dutch architects and designers. In addition, the services of one of the country's best-known architects, Ben van Berkel, have been secured to create the design for imm pure.

The Netherlands have always been a major trading nation with a long tradition of close commercial ties to Germany. The country also plays a leading role in the furniture trade. imm cologne will further strengthen the trading links between the two neighbours and help promote the development of innovative sales and marketing strategies.

imm comfort

The whole wide world of upholstered furniture: imm comfort will be presenting a unique variety of three-piece suites, armchairs, divans and individual sofas and couches - a broad selection of high-quality furniture for sitting and relaxing. Today there are no limits to the shapes on offer: whether it's solidly square, oval, rounded or even playfully curved, the modern sofa accommodates all design styles. Likewise, floor-length upholstery is also making a comeback. As in other segments, multifunctionality is in big demand, with more and more innovative models featuring integrated technology that can adapt to individual comfort requirements.

Flexible living at the highest level: visitors to imm comfort will gain not only a broad overview of all the latest design trends but also comprehensive information on services and sales concepts. The show represents the full spectrum of the international upholstered furniture industry

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Make way for talented young designers

The [d3] design talents: Generating momentum for the interior design of tomorrow
the [d³] design talents event for young, independent designers will be taking place at imm cologne for the third time - but with a new look and in a new location.The previous trio of Future Point, inspired by cologne and NRG will become [d³] schools, [d³] contest and [d³] professionals, which will remain separate features of the overall [d³] design talents event.
d3 remains the platform for colleges and universities to stage exciting presentations of product design, interior design and architecture.