Frank Gehry - Wiggle side chair

Design: 1972 

Manufacture: Easy Edges, Inc. New York

Material: corrugated cardboard, fibreboard, round timber. 

Frank Gehry - "One day I saw a pile of corrugated cardboard outside of my office- the material which I prefer for building architecture models, and I began to play with it, to glue it together and to cut it into shapes with a hand saw and a pocket knife. it was thus possible to transform massive blocks of cardboard sculptures". Gehry named this material Edge board: it consisted of glued layers of corrugated cardboard running in alternating directions, in 1972 Gehry introduced a series of cardboard furniture under the name "Easy Edges" and this included the Wiggle side chair. The furniture was made by gluing layers of card in alternating directions. 

Gehry's furniture , like his architecture is characterised by its abstract sculptural qualities and thus provides an important means of representing the architect's aesthetic in the collection. in addition to its associations with a highly important 20th  century architect, The Wiggle side chair  also references the innovative design aesthetic of the 1960's, particularly that decades expermentation with plastic seating. in its shape and structural principles. 

Human Scale Form.

This is a sheet of the measurements of my class mates and I in a total average. These measurements represent the measurements of a chair suitable for everyone in the class to use. 

in order to create a chair suitable for all types of body forms we had to all get into groups and take the measurements of eachothers body parts for example: hip - knee , hip- tip of shoulder and finger tip - finger tip. these meausrements was then added up and divided by the number of us to find a average for all of us. 

Red and Blue Chair.

The Red and Blue chair is a chair designed in 1917 by Gerrit Rietveld. it represents one of the first explorations by the De Stijl art movement in three dimensions. 

The Chair was constructed of u stained beech wood the chair was also not painted until the early 1920's. Rietveld built another new model using thinner wood and painted it all black but painted areas of primary colours to represent the De Stijl movement. 

The De Stijl movement was founded in 1917 and its members believed in pure abstraction by reducing pieces to their essential forms and pure colours. some furniture was simplified to horizontal and vertical lines and they used only the primary colours with black and white..

This is the measurements of the Red and Blue chair drawn out in orthographic drawing. 

Print making

Print making is the process of making artworks by printing, normally on paper. print making covers only the process of creating prints that has originality, other than just being a photographic reproduction of a painting. 

Except in the case of monotyping, the process is capable of producing multiples of same piece, which is called a print , the prints are produced but are not considered as a copy but are known to be a original. 

Prints are created by transferring ink from a matrix or through a prepared screen to a sheet of paper or other material such as a fabric. common types of matrices include: metal plates, usually cooper or zinc, or polymer plates for engraving or etching, stone, aluminium, or polymer for lithography blocks of wood for woodcuts and wood engravings and also linoleum for Lino cuts. 

A matrix is a mold for casting a letter known as a sort used in letterpress printing. however printmaking the matrix is used with ink to hold the image that makes up the print wheather a plate in etching and engraving or a woodblock in woodcut.   

Artists like Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol have both used a printing technique. 

Victor Horta

Victor Horta , was a Belgium architect and designer, he was born 1861 and passed away 1947, he was the one of the leading architect and designers of the Art Nouveau movement his style inspired a variety of modern artists. 

 

By observing Horta's work I can see a clear understanding of the Art Nouveau style. Horta's use of line and texture is very simplistic and elegant this symbolises a plant in its natural form. From the patterns on the wall and floor to the swirling staircase Horta has presented art nouveau beautifully in my opinion. 

Art Nouveau Movement

Art Nouveau:

was an innovative international style of modern art that became popular around the 1890s to the First World War...Art Nouveau rooted in the industrial revolution and the arts and crafts movement but was also influenced by japonism and Celtic designs.

 

Typically Nouveau used intricate curvilinear patterns of sinuous asymmetrical lines, this was often based on plant-forms which came from Celtic art; Floral and other plant-inspired motifs are very popular Art Nouveau designs. 

ART NOUVEAU-ARCHITECTURE 

Art Nouveau buildings have many of these features: 

- Asymmetrical Shapes 

- Extensive use of arches and curved forms 

- Curved Glass

- Curving, plant-like embellishments

- Mosaics 

- Stained glass 

- Japanese motifs 

ART NOUVEAU- FASHION

Art Nouveau fashion provides a fascinating introduction to the style, defining it and placing it in design history by focusing on a number of important designers- Worth, Lucile, Paquin, Poiret. 

Evening garments were the most lavishly attuned to art nouveau, couturiers swathed their evening wear with a profusion of silk brocade, appliqué, embroidery and lace. From neckline to hem, the designers played art nouveau swirls around the voluptuousness of the fashionable figure, which itself was curvaceously shapes by the "S" -bend corsets. 

ART NOUVEAU-GRAPHIC DESIGN

Alfons Maria Mucha :

Is maybe the most famous representative of the art nouveau style. He was a painter, illustrator, graphic designer and poster artist. Mucha worked in Paris and is Widely known as the graphic designer who took art nouveau to its ultimate visual expression. 

In the 1890s, he created designs- usually featuring beautiful young women whose hair and clothing swirl in rhythmic patterns that achieved an idealised prefection. he organised into tight compositions lavish decorative elements inspired by Byzantine and Islamic design , stylised lettering and sinuous female forms. 

ART NOUVEAU- FURNITURE 

Furniture created in the Art Nouveau style was prominent from the late 19th century to the advent of the First World War.

Art Nouveau furniture was usually expensive with a fine finish that was usually polished or varnished. Continental designs were usually very complex, with curving shapes that were expensive to make. it by no means entirely replaced other styles of furniture, which continued to be popular. 

Charles Rennis Mackintosh furniture was relatively geometrical, marked by dimensions and right-angles. Continental designs were much more alaborate , often using curved shapes both in the basic shapes of the piece , apples in decorative motifs. 

Art Deco Movement

Art Deco:

was an influential visiual arts design style that first appeared in France after the First World War. Deco began to flourish internationally in the 1920s.The style of Art Deco is very distinctive it combines traditional crafts motifs with machine age imagery and materials it is also characterised by rich colours, bold geometric shapes and lavish ornamentation.

ART DECO- ARCHITECTURE 

Art Deco not only influenced the architecture of most American cities but had an impact on the fashion, art, and furniture too. Art Deco was essential to Americans they embraced it as a refreshing change from the eclectic and revivalist sensibilities that preceded it. A lot of buildings was embellished with hard-edged, low relief designs such as geometric shapes, including chevrons and ziggurats and also floral and sunrise patterns. 

ART DECO- FASHION

It all started in the 1920's when women were given the freedom to work for the first time to fill employment void created when men went off to war. 

During the 1920's women started rebelling against tradition they no longer wanted to be incolved with Victorian values and wanted to do everything to distance themselves from the feminine image. Alternatively, Art Deco fashion relied heavily on beautifully textured richly dyed fabrics that lent depth to the simple angular lines of the dresses. These dresses relied more upon simple shapes combined with the bold colours and textures to the depth beauty and overall effect of the fashion scene. 

ART DECO- FURNITURE

Jacques-Emile Ruhlmann, Furniture and interior designer and other furniture designers specialised in furniture made of rich, exotic woods, desingers would also finaih off most of their furnitures with a high-gloss lacquer this gave furniture a very rich and sleek look, using Lacquer was known to be a typical art deco style. 

However, leather furniture was also very popular in the 20's it was mainly used for arm chairs and sofas , the typical leather colour was black, brown and tan , but some leathers was also dyed in bold Art Deco colours such as cherry red and tangerine orange, these colours reflected on the overall cheerful spirit of the Art Deco times. 

ART DECO- GRAPHIC DESIGN

Influential designer: A.M. Cassandre commercial poster artist, and typeface designer was the most influential designer of the Art Deco stages. Cassandre's advertisements helped define the Art Deco look. His first poster design was for "The woodcutter" department store was 12 feet wide, his airbrushed ray bans motif became a major influence on the look of Art Deco graphics

When desinging Cassandre often reduced his subjects to silhouettes and geometric symbols and shapes. 

MODERNISM:
Modernism, which gathered pace from about 1850, proposes new forms of art on the grounds that these are more appropriate to the present time. it is therefore characterised by constant innovation and a rejection of conservative values such as the realistic depiction of the world. This had led to experiments with form and to an emphasis on processes and materials.


Modern art has also been driven by various social and political agendas. These were often utopian, and modernism was in general associated with ideal visions of human life and society and a belief in progress. The terms modernism and modern art are generally used to describe the succession of art movements that critics and historians have identified since the realism of Gustav Courbet, culminating in abstract art and its developments up to the 1960s. By that time modernism had become a dominant idea of art, and a particularly narrow theory of modernist painting had been formulated by the highly influential American critic Clement Greenberg. A reaction then took place which was quickly identified as postmodernism.

ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM:


Abstract Experssionism was never an ideal label for the movement which grew up in New York in the 1940s and 1950s. It was somehow meant to encompass not only the work of painters who filled their canvases with fields of colour and abstract forms, but also those who attacked their canvases with a vigorous term for a group of artists who did hold much in common. All were committed to an expressive art of profound emotion and universal themes , and most were shaped by the legacy of "Surrealism", a movement which they translated into a new style fitted to the post-war mood of anxiety and trauma. In their success, the New York painters robbed Paris of its mantle as leader of modern art, and set the stage for America's post-war dominance of the international art world.

BAUHAUS MOVEMENT:
"If today's arts love the machine, technology and organization if they aspire to precision and reject anything vague and dreamy, this implies an instinctive repudiation of chaos and a longing to find the form appropriate to our times."- Oskar Schlemmer


The Bauhas was the most influential modernist art school of the 20th century, one whose approach to taching, and understanding art's relationship to society and technology, had a major impact both in Europe and the United States long after it closed. It was shaped by the 19th and early 20th centuries trends such as Arts and Crafts movement, which had sought to level the distinction between fine and applied arts, and to reunite creativity and manufacturing. This is reflected in the romantic medievalism of the school's early years, in which it pictured itself as a kind of medieval crafts guild. But in the mid 1920s the medievalism gave way to a stress on uniting art and industrial design, and it was this which ultimately proved to be its most original and important achievement. The school is also renowned for its faculty, which included artists Wassily Kandinsky, Josef Albers, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Paul Klee and Johannes Ittern, architects Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and designer Marcel Breuer.


The motivations behind the creation of the Bauhaus lay in the 19th century, in anxieties about the soullessness of manufacturing and its products, and in fears about art's loss of purpose in society. Creativity and maufacturing were drifiting apart, and the Bauhaus aimed to unite them once again , rejuvenating design for everyday life. Although the Bauhaus abandoned much of the ethos of the old academic tradition of fine art education, it maintained a stress on intellectual and theoretical pursuits, and linked these to an emphasis on practical skills, crafts and techniques that was more reminiscent of the medieval guild system. Fine art and craft were brought together with the goal of problem solving for a modern industrial society. In so doing, the Bauhaus effectively leveled the old hierarchy of the arts, placing crafts on par with fine arts such as sculpture and painting, and paving the way for many of the ideas that have inspired artists in the late 20th century.


The stress on experiment and problem solving at the Bauhaus has proved enormously influential for the approaches to education in the arts. it has led to the ' fine arts' being rethought as the 'visual arts' and art considered less as an adjunct of the humanities, like literature or history, and more as a kind of research science.

ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT:
The Arts and Crafts Movement was one of the most influential , profound and far-reaching design movements of modern times. it began in Britian around 1880 and quickly spread across America and Europe before emerging finally as the Mingei (Folk Crafts) movement in Japan. It was a movement born of ideals. it grew out of a concern for the effects of industrialisation: on design, on traditional skills and on the lives of ordinary people. In response , it established a new set of principles for living and working. it advocated the reform of art at every level and across a broad social spectrum, it turned the home into a work of art. This was a movement unlike any that had gone before. Its pioneering spirit of reform, and the value it placed on the quality of materials and design , as well as life , shaped the world we live in today.


The Origins of the Movement:
I was not untill the 1860s and 1870s that architects, designers and artists began to pioneer new approaches to design and the decorative arts. These in turn led to the foundation of the Arts and Crafts Movement. The two most influential figures were the theorist and critic John Ruskin and the designer , writer and activist William Morris. Ruskin examined the relationship between art, society and labour. Morris put Ruskin's philosophies into practice, placing great value on work, the joy of craftsmanship and the natural beauty of materials.
By the 1880s Morris had become an internationally renowned and commerically successful designer and manufacturer. New guilds and societies began to take up his ideas, presenting for the first time a unified approach among architects, painters , sculptors and designers. in doing so, they bought Arts and Crafts ideals to a wider public.