Historical and Theoretical Issues of WWII - Essay Example

In the decade which followed the Second World War, industrial society became characterized increasingly by the role that the mass media played in determining the nature of its institutions, its organizations, its consumption patterns and the life-styles of its populations. More than ever before, the effects of the press, the radio, television and the cinema entered the lives of practically every individual in the industrialized world, providing new sources of information, creating new expectations and suggesting new values. Inevitably, within this changing cultural climate, design took on new guises and performed new roles. During the early postwar period, which was one of economic, social and cultural reconstruction in the industrialized world, design played a crucial, although usually silent, role. It became an important factor within two areas of postwar life; the first as part of the need to create a national identity for products on the international market and the second in the formation of mass culture - both of them highly significant aspects of the world history of the post-1945 period (Bonsiepe, 1965). Within this economic rebirth the manufacture and trade of goods played a major role. The reasons for this resurgence were complex but the strongest stimulus, in addition to the numerous social and economic changes that occurred in these years, was the rapid development of technology. Many advances had been made during the Second World War, including the development of radar and work in aircraft production which, in Britain, was sustained into the 1950s. Perhaps the most significant development of the late 1940s, however, was that of the transistor which made possible the miniaturization of electronic equipment, including computers, which in turn were to play such a central role in the postwar period, both in the automation of production and in information retrieval (Stearn, 1968). As a result of the numerous social, economic and technological changes that took place in these years, manufacturing expanded rapidly and provided industrial designers with their major challenge. In several of the countries participating in international trade, design became the means by which goods were distinguished from those of competitive countries and made more desirable for the purchaser, both at home and abroad. The lesson presented by the prewar USA example that 'design sells' was learnt and digested and became one of the major strategies in most countries' programmes of industrial reconstruction and within international trading in the postwar period (Rogers, 1946). Design in postwar Italy was quick to develop into a highly sophisticated marketing exercise. Because its products were aimed from the beginning at a small, wealthy, international market, Italy was able to focus on quality and aesthetic innovation as the two defining characteristics of its consumer goods. This inevitably placed a strong emphasis on the role of the designers, giving them the sole responsibility of finding the right visual formula for the product. For the most part, disillusioned with prewar Rationalism because of its associations with fascism, they took their cue from contemporary fine art incorporating into many of their designs sensuous curves directly inspired by the abstract, organic sculpture of artists like Henry Moore, Hans Arp, Alexander Calder and Max Bill (qq.v.). The Turinese furniture designer, Carlo Mollino (q.v.), took this expressive aesthetic to an extreme in what he called his 'streamline surreal' tables and chairs. As a result of this pioneering work Italy, in particular Milan, soon became a centre for debate and discussion about progressive attitudes towards design, and the postwar Triennales, three-yearly exhibitions of design which had been initiated in the 1920s (Huisman and Patrix, 1968). Mollino was the most idiosyncratic of the Italian postwar furniture designers. Based in Turin rather than Milan where most furniture designing went on, he developed a personal style which he described as Streamlined Surreal and which derived, he claimed, from natural phenomena like branches of trees and antlers' horns and from the curved paths of downhill skiers, a sport at which he was adept. This little table, which is made out of organically shaped laminated plywood and glass joined to each other by small wooden pegs, is typical of Mollino's forms and represents Italian postwar sculptural design at its most extreme. It resumed in 1947, and turned into a necessary pilgrimage for enthusiastic young designers all over the world (Hopkins, 1964). Finland was among the other countries which presented a unified and exciting image of postwar design at the Triennales of 1951 and of 1954. Although late in starting its onslaught on the world market, and in spite of being well behind its Scandinavian partners which by 1939 had established both Swedish Modem and Danish Modem as significant mid-century design styles, Finland's impact, when it came, was both more dramatic and more immediately effective. Like Italy, Finland focused on exclusive products aimed at the top end of the market and evolved a highly expressive style which had little in common with Sweden's and Denmark's socially democratic approach to design. Instead, Finland's postwar programme was a sophisticated, well- executed exercise in public relations and marketing which earned that country a unique position in world trade. The names of Finnish designers, in particular those of Tapio Wirkkala (q.v.) and Timo Sarpaneva (q.v.), were associated closely with their products. These were among the first of the European 'superstar' designers who were marketed along with their products and whose very names were enough to render a product more desirable than its anonymous competitors (Hebdige, 1981). Another country to make an impact at the Triennales of the mid-1950swas West Germany which was by then making a rapid recovery from the setbacks it had received during the war. West Germany created its particular postwar image for the product on the basis of a superrational aesthetic which was manifested most clearly in the design of its electrical and electronic consumer goods. This represented a deliberate return to the pre-Nazi, 'ideologically acceptable' days of the Bauhaus and, by the 1960s, West Germany had re-established itself as a leader in world trade, largely on the basis of this rigorous approach to design and its commitment to technological research (Henrion, 1969). Finland's experiments in glass design in the early postwar period laid the seeds of a new Finnish design wave. It was characterized by elegant, expressive, organically shaped forms which implied luxury and exclusiveness. Trained initially as a sculptor, Wirkkala was one of the main exponents of this new glass style and this vase was among his first projects for the littala Glass Company. It won him a prize in an littala competition held in 1947 and another at the Milan Triennale of 1951 and helped pave the way for much of the Finnish design produced in the postwar period. Like so many of the early postwar designs to come out of Japan, the appearance of this product was dictated by its functions rather than by any abstract notion of styling. Shigeru Honda's little motorized bicycle, which began life with a 50 c.c. engine but later acquired a 100 c.c. one, was a step-through model designed to go across rice-field trails and through the narrow alleys in Japanese cities. Honda needed a low-priced, light, manoeuvrable bike with a small but powerful engine which he situated under the bicycle-style seat so that it could be cooled by the breeze. A platform was put on the back for the delivery boy. Through clever promotion, Honda succeeded in capturing a large US market for his design (Dorfles, 1974). The postwar emphasis on design as a means of promoting a national identity within international trade meant a significant shift of definition for the concept. It became in fact a kind of product signature in a world where mass communication made it possible for, and indeed inevitable that, goods produced in one country were very quickly available and desirable in another. Many products were, in fact, made only for export and were never seen by the home market. This resulted in the emergence of a select group of exclusive 'designed' objects which attained an international status and seal of approval. This was encouraged by the professional magazines, exhibitions, competitions, museum collections and other forms of mass communication and propaganda which specialized in design and which served to form an international consensus on the subject. The design collection at the Museum of Modem Art in New York, for example, consisted of the same products - most of them from Scandinavia, Germany and Italy - which filled the pages of the Italian magazine Domus and the British magazine Design in the postwar period. In the late 1950s an international concept of 'good design' emerged and the objects which earned this label achieved the status of super-products. Even in Japan the 'G' mark was evolved as an award granted by the Japanese body concerned with exports - JIDPO - to those international products which merited the description of 'good design.' Among the goods they selected were machines manufactured by Braun and Olivetti (Douglas, M., and Isherwood, B, 1980). While one facet of design in the post-Second World War context was characterized by this exclusive, international, establishment-promoted 'high cultural' phenomenon which played a significant role within world trade, its other major manifestation in the period, which was equally dependent upon the role of mass communications media for its dissemination, was within the context of mass culture. As a result of its early realization of the alliance between design and the popular imagination, the USA were well in advance of Europe in its acceptance of design as part of mass culture. By the 1940s and 1950s, in the streets outside the exclusive objects housed in the Museum of Modem Art, the USA were pioneering an approach to design in which object symbolism, obsolescence and overt consumerism played a fundamental role. The products involved were aimed at a different sector of society from the one which consumed 'international, good design' and, visually, they had very little in common with it. The US economic presence in Europe during the early postwar years encouraged a process of 'cocacolanization' which, in turn, began to influence the nature of European production and consumption. This did not go without opposition, however, and there was strong resistance from some representatives of the old 'minority' culture. In Britain a number of people condemned the new culture which was beginning to invade Britain, including Raymond Williams who wrote in 1962 that: 'In Britain, we have to notice that much of this bad work is American in origin. At certain levels, we are culturally an American colony. But of course it is not the best American culture that we are getting', and by the early 1950sarticles about the evils of streamlining had already begun to fill the pages of Design magazine. By the early 1960s this subcultural group had become more specific and regimented and its members were known collectively as Mods who stood, ideologically, in opposition to the Rockers for whom the motorbike, rather than the motor-scooter, was a sacrosanct object. The Mods adorned their Vespas with aerials, hung with furry tails and flags, and covered the fronts with mascots and badges - decorative and symbolic additions which D'Ascanio, the Vespa's engineer back in 1946, could never have envisaged. This variability of significance is typical of products which become absorbed into mass culture through mass consumption and turn into the ritualized appendages of the life-style of different social and cultural groupings and subgroupings (Francastel, 1956). With the expanded market of the postwar period, eclecticism became increasingly inevitable and mass culture succeeded in exerting not just one new set of values but several. As Susan Sontag has pointed out: 'The new sensibility is defiantly pluralistic; it is dedicated both to an excruciating seriousness and to fun and wit and nostalgia.' Although the USA continued to influence Europe where mass culture was concerned throughout the 1950s, the early 1960s witnessed a reassertion of Europe over the USA in terms of cultural hegemony. The Pop revolution of those years was predominantly a British phenomenon but its influence was worldwide and, by the middle of the decade, the products of Swinging London were reaching an international audience [27]. The mood changed dramatically, however, in the early 1970s when the curve of economic expansion began to drop significantly downwards for the first time in twenty years and inflation became a worldwide reality (Hoffenberg, 1977). Barthes, R., Mythologies (Paris: Senil, 1967). A text which analyses popular culture from a semiological perspective. The articles on the Citron car and Plastics are most relevant in this context. Baudrillard, J., Le Systme des objets (Paris: Gonthier, 1968). A sociological analysis of consumer objects within a capitalist economy. Bonsiepe, G., Teoria epratica del desegno industriale (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1975). A general discourse on the nature of design in contemporary society. Caplan, R., By Design (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982). A series of essays which examine fairly lightheartedly the tradition of modem design in a US context. Dorfles, G., Introduction l'industrial design (Paris: Casterman, 1974). A general essay on the meaning of modem design. Douglas, M., and Isherwood, B., The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin, 1980). A study of consumption, which does not mention design by name, but which places consumer objects into a context of human demand rather than of economics. Francastel, P., Art et technique (Paris: Editions Densel, 1956). A useful, but somewhat dated, study of the relationship between art and technology. Hoffenberg, A., and Lapidus, A., La Socit du Design (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1977). A dense, sociological analysis of modem design. F. H. K. Henrion, 'Italian journey', Design, no. (January 1969), pp. 7-10. D. Hebdige, 'Object as image: the Italian scooter-cycle', Block, no. 5 (1981), pp. 44-64. H. Hopkins, The New Look: A Social History of the Forties and Fifties (London: Secker & Warburg, 1964), p. 231. Huisman, Denis, and Patrix, G., L'Esthtique industrielle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961). A short analysis of the development and function of modem design. Maldonado, T., Disegno industriale: un riesame (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976). An account of the meaning and function of industrial design. Nelson, G., Problems of Design (New York: Whitney, 1957). A dated but perceptive account. Patrix, G., Design et environment (Paris: Casterman, 1973). A critical study of the role of design in contemporary society. E. Rogers, 'Editorial', Domus, no. 60 (January 1946), p. 3. G. E. Stearn (ed.), McLuhan Hot and Cool (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin, 1968), p. 295 A. Toffler, Future Shock (London: Pan, 1971), p. 247. R. Williams, Communications (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin, 1968), p. 99. Read More