Design Movements

A Brief History of Design

Arts & Crafts Movement 1851 - 1914

aimed to promote a return to hand-craftsmanship and to assert the creative independence of individual craftspeople. It was a reaction against the industrialised society that had boomed in Britain in the Victorian period, and aimed for social as well as artistic reform.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh - Ladies Luncheon Room

Aesthetic Movement 1870 - 1900is a loosely defined movement in literature, fine art, furniture, metalwork, ceramics, stained glass, textiles, and wallpapers in later nineteenth-century Britain.The Aesthetic Movement argued that art was not supposed to be utilitarian or useful in any practical sense. Instead, aesthetic experience is a fully autonomous and independent aspect of a human life. Thus, art should exist solely for its own sake.

Aesthetic movement furniture is characterised by several common themes:•Ebonised wood with gilt highlights•Japanese influence•Prominent use of nature, especially flowers, birds, ginko leaves, and peacock feathers.•Blue and white on porcelain and china.

Louis Comfort Tiffany Lamp

Art Nouveau 1880 – 1905

Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo, Chair, 1882

was a concerted attempt to create an international style based on decoration.It is characterized by organic, especially floral and other plant-inspired motifs, as well as highly-stylized, flowing curvilinear forms

Jugendstil 1880 - 1910The German Art Nouveau – it encouraged functional, linear ornamentation modelled on the Pre-Raphaelite movement in England and on Japanese art.

Atelier Elvira, designed by Jugendstil architect August Endell

Deutscher Werkbund 1907 - 1935was founded in 1907 to advance the quality of Industrial Design, and it is from this foundation that the later Bauhaus style developed - which is probably the most important school in the history of object design.

Futurism 1909 - 1930

An Example of Futurist Architecture, by Antonio Sant’ella

Umberto BoccioniUnique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913)

Constructivism 1917 - 1935

Malevich teapot and cups

De Stijl 1917- 1928

Red Blue ChairGerrit Rietveld

Dutch for ‘The Style’ – sought to express a new utopian ideal of spiritual harmony and order. They advocated pure abstract form and universality by a reduction of the essentials of form and colour; they simplified visual compositions to the vertical and horizontal directions, and used only the primary colours along with black and white.

Piet Mondrian, Composition in Red, Blue and Yellow, 1930

Bauhaus 1920 - 1930From 1919 to 1933, this profoundly influential German school of art & architecture existed in Weimar, Dessau & Berlin under the leadership of Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe - & later for a year in Chicago as New Bauhaus under László Moholy-Nagy. (via wikipedia)The influence of the Bauhaus is still felt on art, arthitecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design and typography. This fun Walter Gropius chair looks as modern today as the day it was designed, and shows why, when expertly executed, graphic combinations never go out of fashion. Wassily chair by Bruer

International 1920 - 1980

Art Deco 1920 - 1939

Kem Weber, German, Zephyr, electric clock. Brass and Bakelite, American, c.1934.

Organic and Biomorphism 1930 - 1960

Streamlining 1930 - 1960

Pop 1958 – 1972

Radical Design & Anti-Design 1968 - 1978

Design: Archizoom AssociatiColour: Black / LeopardYear: 1968

Superstudio: Istogrammi (detail)1969-2000

Eco Design 1970 - Present

Postmodernism 1978 - present

Memphis 1981 - 1988