Postwar Modern

Postwar Modern
Author: Jane Alison
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2022-07-26
Genre: Art
ISBN: 3791379356

This landmark volume offers a major re-assessment of the art that emerged in Britain in the twenty years following the end of the Second World War: a period of anxiety, profound social change and explosive creativity. Published to coincide with the Barbican Centre’s 40th anniversary, it draws together the work of fifty artists, exploring a period straddled precariously between the horror of the past and the promise of the future. Spanning painting, sculpture, architecture, ceramics and photography, Postwar Modern will explore a rich field of experiment which challenges the idea that Britain was a cultural backwater at this time. Through new texts by Jane Alison, Hilary Floe, Ben Highmore, Hammad Nassar and Greg Salter, the book looks afresh at celebrated artists such as Francis Bacon, David Hockney, Lucian Freud and Eduardo Paolozzi, shown in dialogue with lesser-known figures. These will include those, like Francis Newton Souza, Avinash Chandra and Robert Adams, who were acclaimed by contemporaries but neglected in subsequent history-making; others, like Kim Lim, Anwar Jalal Shemza and Franciszka Themerson, are only now attracting the attention they deserve. Throughout their work, vital shared preoccupations become visible: gender, class, race and nationhood; the body, the bombsite, and the home. It is a period resonating strongly with our own: as the UK emerges from more than a decade of austerity and confronts the challenges of post-pandemic reconstruction, society is asking similarly deep questions about who we want and need to be.

Design for Victory

Design for Victory
Author: William L. Bird
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
Total Pages: 132
Release: 1998-06
Genre: Antiques & Collectibles
ISBN: 9781568981406

The poster - inexpensive, colorful, and immediate - was an ideal medium for delivering messages about Americans' duties on the home front during World War II. Design for Victory presents more than 150 of these stunning images - many never reproduced since their first issue - culled from the collections of the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. William L. Bird, Jr. and Harry R. Rubenstein delve beneath the surface of these colorful graphics, telling the stories behind their production and revealing how posters fulfilled the goals and needs of their creators. The authors describe the history of how specific posters were conceived and received, focusing on the workings of the wartime advertising profession and demonstrating how posters often reflected uneasy relations between labor and management.

Pandemonium

Pandemonium
Author: Branden Hookway
Publisher: New York : Princeton Architectural Press ; Houston : Rice University School of Architecture
Total Pages: 92
Release: 1999
Genre: Architecture
ISBN:

In our global society, information processing transpires so quickly that it is essentially timeless, and communication systems have become indistinguishable from the act of communication itself. The medium, once the message, is now invisible, resulting in new methods for wielding power in our decentralized environment. Pandemonium explores the new techniques of control underlying our digital culture. Topics discussed include the transformation of relations between labor and machines in cybernetic and informational environments, and the reorganization of the urban fabric according to new methods of communication flow. This title is conceived as a photo roman in which the design, in collaboration with Bruce Man Design, plays as great a role as the text. It includes forewords by Lars Lerup and Bruce Man and an introduction by Sanford Kwinter.

Design and Politics

Design and Politics
Author: Katarina Serulus
Publisher: Leuven University Press
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2018-10-08
Genre: Design
ISBN: 9462701350

The unique position of design in the political context of postwar Belgium In the postwar era, design became important as a marker of modernity and progress at world fairs and international exhibitions and in the global markets. The Belgian state took a special interest in this vanguard phenomenon of ‘industrial design’ as a vital political and economic strategic tool in the context of the Cold War and the creation of the European community. This book describes the unique position that design occupied in the political context of postwar Belgium as it analyses the public promotion of design between 1950 and 1986. It traces this process, from the first government-backed manifestations and institutions in the 1950s through the 1960s and 1970s, until design lost its privileged position as a state-backed institution, a process which culminated in the closure of the Brussels Design Centre in 1986, in the midst of the Belgian federalisation process. A key figure in this history is the policymaker Josine des Cressonnières, who played a leading role in the national and international design community and succeeded in connecting very different political worlds through the medium of design.

Landed Internationals

Landed Internationals
Author: Burak Erdim
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2020-07-08
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1477321217

Landed Internationals explores how postwar encounters in housing and planning helped transform the dynamics of international development and challenged American modernity.

Indoor America

Indoor America
Author: Andrea Vesentini
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 479
Release: 2018-11-27
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0813941806

Cars, single-family houses, fallout shelters, air-conditioned malls—these are only some of the many interiors making up the landscape of American suburbia. Indoor America explores the history of suburbanization through the emergence of such spaces in the postwar years, examining their design, use, and representation. By drawing on a wealth of examples ranging from the built environment to popular culture and film, Andrea Vesentini shows how suburban interiors were devised as a continuous cultural landscape of interconnected and self-sufficient escape capsules. The relocation of most everyday practices into indoor spaces has often been overlooked by suburban historiography; Indoor America uncovers this latent history and contrasts it with the dominant reading of suburbanization as pursuit of open space. Americans did not just flee the city by getting out of it—they did so also by getting inside. Vesentini chronicles this inner-directed flight by describing three separate stages. The encapsulation of the automobile fostered the nuclear segregation of the family from the social fabric and served as a blueprint for all other interiors. Introverted design increasingly turned the focus of the house inward. Finally, through interiorization, the exterior was incorporated into the all-encompassing interior landscape of enclosed malls and projects for indoor cities. In a journey that features tailfin cars and World’s Fair model homes, Richard Neutra’s glass walls and sitcom picture windows, Victor Gruen’s Southdale Center and the Minnesota Experimental City, Indoor America takes the reader into the heart and viscera of America’s urban sprawl.

Design and Cultural Politics in Postwar Britain

Design and Cultural Politics in Postwar Britain
Author: Patrick Maguire
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 276
Release: 1997-01-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780718501419

Nine essays and a collection of documents intended as a working tool for students of the post-war period and in particular of design within the period. They discuss the textiles, pottery, and furniture industries in terms of the shifts in meaning and location during the transition from highly controlled wartime production to the more market-based structure that would become characteristic after the immediate reconstruction. Among the specific topics are the place of the exhibition in the history of design; patriotism, politics, and production; adapting utility furniture to peace-time production; and aesthetic idealism and economic reality. Distributed in the US by Books International. The CiP data shows the main title as Popular Politics and Design in Post-War Britain. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Cold War Crucible

Cold War Crucible
Author: Hajimu Masuda
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 397
Release: 2015-02-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674598474

After World War II, the major powers faced social upheaval at home and anticolonial wars around the globe. Alarmed by conflict in Korea that could change U.S.–Soviet relations from chilly to nuclear, ordinary people and policymakers created a fantasy of a bipolar Cold War world in which global and domestic order was paramount, Masuda Hajimu shows.

Alternative Visions of Post-War Reconstruction

Alternative Visions of Post-War Reconstruction
Author: John Pendlebury
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2014-08-19
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1317698657

The history of post Second World War reconstruction has recently become an important field of research around the world; Alternative Visions of Post-War Reconstruction is a provocative work that questions the orthodoxies of twentieth century design history. This book provides a key critical statement on mid-twentieth century urban design and city planning, focused principally upon the period between the start of the Second World War to the mid-sixties. The various figures and currents covered here represent a largely overlooked field within the history of 20th century urbanism. In this period while certain modernist practices assumed an institutional role for post-war reconstruction and flourished into the mainstream, such practices also faced opposition and criticism leading to the production of alternative visions and strategies. Spanning from a historically-informed modernism to the increasing presence of urban conservation the contributors examine these alternative approaches to the city and its architecture.

At Home in Postwar France

At Home in Postwar France
Author: Nicole C. Rudolph
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2015-03-01
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1782385886

After World War II, France embarked on a project of modernization, which included the development of the modern mass home. At Home in Postwar France examines key groups of actors — state officials, architects, sociologists and tastemakers — arguing that modernizers looked to the home as a site for social engineering and nation-building; designers and advocates of the modern home contributed to the democratization of French society; and the French home of the Trente Glorieuses, as it was built and inhabited, was a hybrid product of architects’, planners’, and residents’ understandings of modernity. This volume identifies the “right to comfort” as an invention of the postwar period and suggests that the modern mass home played a vital role in shaping new expectations for well-being and happiness.