Victoria and Albert Museum

Howdy-doo, Americans!

Outside the V & A

Silver sculpture

Here's a cool (and free) place to check out in London: the Victoria and Albert Museum. The building it is currently housed in dates from 1899 and has a cornerstone laid by Queen Victoria, but they've been collecting since 1852. This museum is absolutely enormous and has galleries of pretty much anything imaginable, from huge marble statues to iron works to a long hallway full of things only made of silver.

Marble statue gallery

I went on a weekday and it wasn't crowded at all. I browsed around for a bit through the Greek statues, the jewelry room (no pics allowed, sorry), and the silver room before honing in on the modern furniture gallery. I have visited the modern furniture gallery of the art museum in Milwaukee, WI, but I wanted to see British modern furniture too. I like modern furniture and already have a '60s Space Race living room theme planned out for my first house. Anyway.

I discovered something awesome in the furniture room: the design of chairs evolves because of changes in society! I'd always thought that styles change because of some frouffy whims on the part of designers--like maybe they just switch things up every season so they can get you to buy all new stuff to be in style again. But no. Way more interesting reasons are behind the changes.

LCW and CTW

Check this out:

During the 1940s, chairs—as well as other furniture—had to be as utilitarian as possible so as not to waste desperately needed materials that could otherwise be sent to use in the war. An example of utilitarian furniture can be seen in the stark, waste-free design of the plywood table and chair set, the “LCW” and “CTW” from 1946-1949, by American designers Charles and Ray Eames.

Festival Pattern Group chair

There was actually a ration on furniture in Britain that didn't totally end until 1952, by which point British designers and consumers were tired of utilitarian design and began to take up the American styles of plastic furniture, futurism, bold colors like those of the Mod style, and mass production. An example of this new trend is a red plastic chair with metal legs that was made in Britain in 1951 for the Festival Pattern Group. The pattern of the holes in the plastic body of the chair, arranged in regular square intervals like the holes in a graham cracker, is derived from the x-ray crystallography of atomic structures. This is reflective of the influence that even emerging nuclear science had on fashion and design.

Single-piece chair and
yellow egg chair

In a later backlash against the mass production of furniture that had swept the globe after WWII, specialist industrial designers then began to generate new models and styles of chairs and other furniture, some of which are represented in the museum’s collection. An example is that of a bright orange chair from 1960 that was “the first plastic chair to be conceived entirely as a single piece”. Another innovation of the designers was the creation of the egg chair which is yellow plastic with a bright yellow cushion and looks as if the back could be folded down into the seat to create a little M&M-shaped pod. However, the futurist plastic furniture trend was laid to rest in the early 1970s as a result of skyrocketing oil prices that made the plastic too expensive, and fashion took a turn back toward more natural themes and materials.

So how was that? You just learned about world history through chair design. Are you jazzed? I'm jazzed. It's fun to see how the world works behind the scenes. That's why I like writing: I can show you the things you wouldn't normally see.

Cheers!

~Red