Twentieth Century Design

The most famous designs of the twentieth century are not those in museums, but in the marketplace. The Coca-Cola bottle and the McDonald''s logo are known all over the world, and designs like the modernistic `Frankfurt Kitchen'' of 1926, or the 1954 streamlined and tail-finned Oldsmobile, or `Blow'', the inflatable chair ubiquitous in the late sixties, tell us more about our culture than a narrowly-defined canon of classics. Drawing on the most up-to-date scholarship (not only in design history but also in social anthropology and women''s history), Jonathan Woodham takes a fresh look at the wider issues of design and industrial culture throughout Europe, Scandinavia, North America, and the Far East. He explores themes such as national identity, the `Americanisation'' of ideology and business methods, the rise of the multi-nationals, Pop and Postmodernism, and contemporary ideas of nostalgia and heritage, and sets the proliferation of everyday design against the writing of critics as di