2,607 research outputs found
Graphic and interior design in the Viennese coffeehouse around 1900: Experience and identity
No full textAynsley was principal investigator for the three-year AHRC-funded research project The Viennese Café and Fin-de-siècle Culture (2006–9), which was led by the RCA, in partnership with Simon Shaw-Miller and Tag Gronberg, co-investigators, at Birkbeck, University of London. The aim of the research project was to cast new light on the history of the Viennese coffeehouse through interdisciplinary scholarship, taking account of recent theoretical and methodological developments in cultural history, literary studies, visual and material culture studies, with particular reference to modernity in central Europe. The project led to an international conference and exhibition at the RCA, which Aynsley co-directed, and a number of publications. In this study, Aynsley bridged print history, often a narrow and technical field, to histories of interior design, to explore the interaction between print culture and the coffeehouse interior from 1870 to 1914. Research was conducted in Viennese libraries to establish how various forms of printed material were experienced within the city’s coffeehouses. The essay argues that these newly designed interior spaces framed a distinctive form of public life in which print culture became a central component. Research drew on collections of works on paper to establish how advertising and posters impinged on the café; the practice of reading in these spaces; signage both inside and on the exterior, and conventions of visually representing designs of the Viennese coffeehouse. Aynsley lectured on the wider historical interrelationship between graphic and interior design at the turn of the 20th century at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2008) and the Deutsches Museum, Munich (2008). He supervised the thesis of the AHRC-funded PhD student Diane Silverthorne, ‘New Spaces of Art, Design and Performance in Vienna 1890–1920: Alfred Roller and the Vienna Secessionists’ (RCA, 2010). The Vienna project was subsequently graded as ‘Outstanding’ by the AHRC peer-reviewer
Introduction
No full textThe co-authored introduction to International Design Organizations. Histories, Legaies, Values characterises the broad developments in these orgnanizations as an important determining factor for the communication of design across the world in the second half of the twentieth century. It considers the theoretical and methodological challenges that design historians encounter with the subject, drawing on references to the wider literature on professionalization across other disciplines. The chapter concludes by explaining the three section divisions of the thirteen essays
The Banham Lectures. Essays on Designing the Future
No full textThis anthology of essays has its origins in a series of annual lectures hosted by the Royal College of Art and Victoria and Albert Museum History of Design programme since 1989. Jeremy Aynsley, as organiser of the event for many years, and Harriet Atkinson, were its co-editors and they also contributed an Introduction which places the contribution of Peter Reyner Banham in British intellectual history. As the most influential writer on design and architecture in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century, Reyner Banham is not easily categorised. His life and career spanned the years of Brutalism and Pop art, the anti-Design movement, ecological critique, and the early stages of Postmodernism, all of which he held firm views about. Originally trained as an engineer, then as an art and architectural historian, Banham’s interests encompassed architecture, urban design and planning, industrial design, popular culture and Americana, as well as the iconography of objects of everyday life. His writings could cover anything from megastructures and architectural visions of the future to the humble ice-cream van
L’Allemagne et la Suisse
No full textAynsley extended his research interests in post-war design by contributing a chapter on design in Germany and Switzerland since 1945 for the publication L’Art du Design (2013). The project was commissioned by Dominique Forest, Chief Curator at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, and presented chapters by world experts on national design traditions in the second half of the 20th century. The pairing of Germany and Switzerland led Aynsley to investigate parallel and contrasting initiatives that expanded his previous research on German design. He undertook research in the Kunstbibliothek and Sammlung Industrielle Gestaltung, Berlin and Museum für Gestaltung, Zurich. Questions central to the project concerned the contrasting positions of Switzerland, the Federal Republic and Democratic Republic of Germany during the period of post-war reconstruction, and the significant role that design education held in countries associated with highly regarded traditions. Alongside this, he evaluated the part that innovation and creativity played in shaping design as a cultural, economic, technological or moral force. The research involved understanding systems of design selection and acquisition by major museum collections as both an historical and contemporary issue. In the 1950s and 1960s, the category of ‘Gute Form’ was especially prevalent in these countries for the promotion of design – values being conferred on objects of industrial design by organisations such as the German and Swiss Werkbund. Research uncovered connections, contrasts and competition between the countries in the context of exhibitions, as well as exchanges between individual designers, e.g. Max Bill and Dieter Rams. The essay concludes with consideration of the recent artist-driven design movements and moves towards consumer-oriented design. Aynsley will develop this comparative mode of analysis of national design cultures and the migration of modernism evident here and in his REF Output 2 as his next major research initiative
Developing a Language of Vision: Graphic Design in California
No full textThis essay was researched and published as a contribution to the exhibition ‘Living in a Modern Way. California Design 1930–1965’, curated by Wendy Kaplan and held at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2011–12). The exhibition received funding from The Getty Foundation and was part of the ‘Pacific Standard Time’ series of events. Within the bold remit of developing an interdisciplinary exhibition, Aynsley was invited to contribute to advise on how graphic design could be interpreted in a curatorial setting. This included guiding object selection for the exhibition. Supported by the Getty (US$6,017), Aynsley attended three curatorial discussions at LACMA and conducted research in London, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Rochester (NY). The question of Aynsley’s research was how graphic designers contributed to defining ‘living in a modern way’ in mid-century California. He argues that they manifested many of the styles and principles of Californian design in easily accessible visual forms, realised as magazines and book covers, posters and advertisements, and film-title sequences. Aynsley’s research offered a new interpretation of an under-researched field, identifying exhibits in archives, libraries and museum collections. Among designers interviewed were Lou Danziger, Jack Stauffacher and Deborah Sussman. The essay traces the origins of graphic design education in the state, designers’ migration from other parts of the US as well as Europe, and the embrace of experimental design by Californian business and cultural organisations, including Hollywood. It argues that California entered the field of modern design at a crucial moment for the development of a later stage of ‘informal’ modernism, through which the state became celebrated as graphic designers adopted new technologies and aesthetic ideas, moving from print to motion graphics. The exhibition, which travelled to Tokyo, Auckland and Brisbane, recorded 363,589 visitors to the LACMA installation and received extensive reviews
Designing Modern Germany
No full textResearch towards the book developed from Aynsley’s longstanding interest in design in Germany. The book investigates the cultures of German design from the late 19th to the end of the 20th century. It set out to provide an authoritative analysis which spans many types of design (interior, product, ceramic, graphic, architecture and fashion). The aim was to combine a body of new research with a reliable synthesis of secondary sources, mostly in the German language. The volume focuses on many designed objects that have not had scholarly attention hitherto. Previous interpretations of German design have concentrated on certain key areas, among them, the German Werkbund, the Bauhaus and Ulm Hochschule für Gestaltung. While considering these important structures, Aynsley’s study places such modernist landmarks within a far broader history to reveal other, co-existent tendencies and traditions. For example, historicism – usually associated with the late 19th century – is traced as an important characteristic of design in the 1920s, as well as under Nazism and within German postmodernism of the 1980s. Reviewers such as Baumhoff in the Journal of Design History (2010) and Hessler in Technology and Culture (2011) commended the book for providing one of the first considerations in the English language of design between 1948 and 1989 in both the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic. Hessler (2011) considered it ‘a brilliant overview of the history of German design’. The research was supported by a British Academy Small Grant award and the RCA Research Development Fund. On the basis of this project, Aynsley was invited to speak at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2007), the Bard Center for Graduate Studies, New York (2008) and the V&A Museum, London (2008), and to join a consultative panel on future exhibition policy at the Bauhaus Museum, Weimar (2013)
James Bond: international man of gastronomy
No full textThis article is concerned with the representation of food and drink in Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. In particular, it examines how the author uses Bond’s culinary knowledge and habits of consumption as an important constituent of his hero’s character. Similarly, the food choices of other characters, notably villains, are shown to be linked, by Fleming, to core aspects of their identity − principally their ethnicity. Bond’s impulse to observe and classify, very much in evidence in the novels’ food sequences, is examined in terms of the texts’ construction of Bond as a skilled identifier of signs
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