Objects of Design: From the Museum of Modern Art. This item is unavailable.Objects of Design: From the Museum of Modern Art

The book's 341 color plates, arranged in nine thematic sections, reveal the huge variety of aesthetic and conceptual viewpoints in design since the late nineteenth century and together trace the historical development of modern design as well as that of the Museum's celebrated design collection. The volume's authoritative texts include a preface by Terence Riley, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum, and an introductory essay by Curator Paola Antonelli. The lavish plate section is enriched by numerous brief texts by these and other curators in the Architecture and Design department, which illuminate the entire course of modern design, its major styles, and its individual masterpieces. Objects of Design is the second in a series of three volumes on the holdings of the department, the first of which, Envisioning Architecture, surveys the Museum's extraordinary architecture drawings.

Objects of Design features a wide variety of industrial and domestic artifacts by great designers of the modern period, from early masters such as Hector Guimard, Frank Lloyd Wright and Josef Hoffmann to contemporary practitioners including Droog Design, Ettore Sottsass, Gaetano Pesce, Hella Jongerius, and others. Some of the objects represent turn-of-the -century designs of the Vienna Secession, Art Nouveau and the Arts and Crafts movement; others are Bauhaus and de Stijl explorations; still others show Charles and Ray Eames and other American designers of the second half of the twentieth century; representations of the Italian design revolutions; and contemporary manifestations of familiar genres using radical new materials and techniques of manufacture. The book's 360 colour plates not only reveal the range of aesthetic viewpoints in design since the late nineteenth century but together trace the historical development of the Museum's celebrated design collection.

In the introductory essay, Paola Antonelli, curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, explores the history of modern design as well as the story of the Museum's collection and its influence on the history of modern and contemporary design itself.