CategoriesDesign Concepts and Techniques
Design by Architects
Furniture, lighting and objects created by architects, often for their own buildings and often testing architectural ideas at a smaller scale.
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About
Architects have long wanted control of everything inside their buildings. A. W. N. Pugin designed furniture, metalwork and wallpaper for the new Palace of Westminster, and around 1900 Victor Horta, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Josef Hoffmann drew door handles, chairs and cutlery as part of a single vision.
Modernism turned the habit into a tradition. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe designed his steel-framed Barcelona chair (1929) for the German pavilion in that city, and Alvar Aalto shaped bent birch seating for his Paimio Sanatorium. For some architects a chair or a kettle is a laboratory: structure, material and proportion can be tested quickly and at full size. Postmodern architects such as Michael Graves and Aldo Rossi designed coffee pots and kettles for Alessi, and Zaha Hadid carried her fluid geometry into tables and vases. Look for echoes of the architect's buildings.