#Very modern end tables series

#Very modern end tables series

(Memphis fell out of fashion when the Reagan era gave way to cool 1990’s minimalism.) The architect Robert Venturi had by then already begun a series of plywood chairs for Knoll Inc., with beefy, exaggerated silhouettes of traditional styles such as Queen Anne and Chippendale. Even though it preceded the Memphis Group’s formal launch, Sottsass’s iconic Ultrafragola mirror - in its conspicuously curved plastic shell with radical pops of pink neon - proves striking in any space and embodies many of the collective’s postmodern ideals.Īfter the initial Memphis show caused an uproar, the postmodern movement within furniture and interior design quickly took off in America. Memphis works remain icons of postmodernism: the Sottsass Casablanca bookcase, with its leopard-print plastic veneer de Lucchi’s First chair, which has been described as having the look of an electronics component Martine Bedin’s Super lamp: a pull-toy puppy on a power-cord leash. That it did: The first Memphis collection appeared in 1981 in Milan and broke all the modernist taboos, embracing irony, kitsch, wild ornamentation and bad taste. Members of the Memphis Group, which would come to include Martine Bedin, Michael Graves, Marco Zanini, Shiro Kuramata, Michele de Lucchi and Matteo Thun, saw design as a means of communication, and they wanted it to shout. Sottsass, an industrial designer, philosopher and provocateur, gathered a core group of young designers into a collective in 1980 they called Memphis. Later, in Milan, a cohort of creators led by Ettore Sottsass and Alessandro Mendini - a onetime mentor to Sottsass and a key figure in the Italian Radical movement - brought the discussion to bear on design. Starting in the 1960s, a small cadre of mainly American architects began to argue that modernism, once high-minded and even noble in its goals, had become stale, stagnant and blandly corporate. Postmodern design began as an architectural critique. Decades later, the fact that postmodernism still has the power to provoke thoughts, along with other reactions, proves they were not entirely correct. Unconventional proportions and abundant ornamentationĬritics derided postmodern design as a grandstanding bid for attention and nothing of consequence.Use of plastic and laminates, glass, metal and marble lacquered and painted wood.Dizzying graphic patterns and an emphasis on loud, off-the-wall colors.Interest in style declines, minimalism gains steamĬHARACTERISTICS OF POSTMODERN FURNITURE DESIGN.Memphis collective debuts more than 50 objects and furnishings at Salone del Milano (1981).Italian design collective the Memphis Group, also known as Memphis Milano, meets for the first time (1980).Theorist Charles Jencks, who championed architecture filled with allusions and cultural references, writes The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977).Architect Robert Venturi critiques modern architecture in his Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966).

A reaction to prevailing conventions of modernism by mainly American architects.Emerges during the 1960s popularity explodes during the ’80s.The characteristics of vintage postmodern furniture and other postmodern objects and decor for the home included loud-patterned, usually plastic surfaces strange proportions, vibrant colors and weird angles and a vague-at-best relationship between form and function. Postmodern design was a short-lived movement that manifested itself chiefly in Italy and the United States in the early 1980s.