Design Features Interior Design: Tips On Modernism

Date Published:

11/06/2008

Functional, minimalist, clean lines, polished surfaces, strong geometric shapes, neutral colour palette - all are hallmarks of today's ultramodern design style. Ironically though, this 'modern' look originated around a century ago with a school of thought which was initially adopted by artists, musos and literary bods who wanted to portray a truer emotional picture of how people really feel and think. Or to put it in a more 'modernist' way, they wanted to tell it like it is.

This backlash against Victorian values and Edwardian frills was later whole-heartedly embraced by designers - with British designers finally getting in on the act from the 1920s onwards ' who believed the design of an object should be based purely on its purpose: that 'form follows function'.

British intellect Herbert Read - who founded the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London - was an avid promoter of modernism throughout the middle of the twentieth century. He asserted that design is a form that must appease the senses or intellect, but which must also be of use.

An object, he argued, will maintain its value regardless of its historical or social context because its values are absolute or universal. Cultures such as Ancient Greece (5th Century BC) he saw as successful because they are. Without an aesthetic. What they did they did as the result of practical problems, without taste, without academic tradition".

Modernist designers strived to instil in their products and architecture a kind of timelessness, creating forms with a universal appeal which would transcend individual taste differences and grab a person whatever their social class. Such pieces were also supposed to be immune to the ever-changing fickle faces of fashion.

In weaving their creative spells, modernist designers rejected tried and tested methods, opting instead to use new materials and technology wherever possible and attempted to take an objective view of the product they were designing.

Ornamentation was a big no-no: the modernist designers felt the aesthetic of a product should stem from its structural integrity rather than added embellishment or from the continual harking back to the past, again with immutable appeal in mind.

The idea of such everlasting appeal didn't really work out, of course. By the 1950s the tide began to turn against the fundamental principles of modernism, with designers proclaiming that design should embrace and work within cultural differences instead of trying to eliminate them. Rather than searching for universal solutions, designers began to declare that products play an important role in forming personal identity and so the individual tastes and preferences of consumers needed to be recognised and catered for.