EDITOR’S WORD
Affordability is an ideal that has long energized modernist experiments, from the first social housing in Europe and well designed mass-produced products to today’s new sustainable prefabricated houses. The 20th century marked a turning point in attitudes towards beauty and luxury: rather than reside in rarified materials, these came to emanate from the quality of the design. Once it no longer mattered whether an object was made of silver or brass, fine wood or plywood, the floodgates of creativity towards affordable design swung wide.
In Europe, this new concept of luxury flourished in the public sphere as the Roaring Twenties fell into the hard times of the 1930s. Fashionable women embraced inexpensive costume jewelry whose beauty and value lay in its shapes and colors, rather than precious materials; “…a lady can be wearing a fortune that’s not worth a penny,” trilled Coco Chanel, Parisian doyenne of fashion in the 1920s. In her article on the jewelry of the Jakob Bengel company, Christianne Weber-Stöber describes how this trend, and the development of new plastics, led a provincial German watch chain company to try manufacturing jewelry, resulting in some of the most astounding designs of the Art Deco era.
Sharon Darling’s article on Teco pottery profiles the architectural terra cotta tile company that began, as the ostentatious decorative style of the Gilded Age waned in the first decade of the 20th century, to produce inexpensive ceramics whose beauty lay not in ornamentation but in pure form. Not surprisingly, many Teco designs were created by the architects who were just then inventing Chicago’s first skyscrapers. These buildings and Chicago’s many other modernist architectural masterpieces are detailed by Edward Keegan in City Report.
The skyrocketing cachet of vintage modernist design over the past few years has sent the prices of many products once destined for the middle class out of reach for all but the wealthy, but Ellen Firsching Brown’s article on artists’ books — art objects that both embrace and subvert the traditional book form — introduces a new area of collecting where the canon is still unformed and prices are still low.
Our Spaces story features architect Steven Ehrlich’s home in Venice, California. Bringing the best ideas of the past up to the present, he brought state-of-the-art technologies and materials to ideas gleaned from the early Southern California modernists and from ancient architectural solutions for natural climate control. While investments into sustainable solutions can be more expensive than traditional practices upfront, the payoff in energy savings — both economic and environmental — can be enormous over time.
If you are a subscriber, you may have noticed one of our own efforts towards sustainability: this issue of Modernism was delivered to you without a plastic bag.
We are pleased to note that Apartment Therapy is the sponsor of the online edition of this issue, which is accessible
for free via our website. Apartment Therapy’s website at
www.apartmenttherapy.com is the ideal resource for finding out how to achieve the luxury of affordable and simple design for your own home.
–Andrea Truppin
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