Modern Swedish Design

by Kenneth Frampton, Lucy Creagh, Barbara Miller Lane, Helena Kaberg

Overview

Although modern Swedish design has exercised an extraordinary influence on international architecture and interior furnishings since the early twentieth century, some of the crucial generative writings on the subject have not been widely translated, and the movement's intellectual background is not well known. Modern Swedish Design collects three of Swedish design's founding texts for the first time in English. In Beauty in the Home (1899), philosopher and critic Ellen Key (1849-1926) promotes simplicity and clarity of purpose with the goal of social reform. Art historian Gregor Paulsson (1889-1977) was instrumental in the spread of ideas such as Key's; in Better Things for Everyday Life(1919) he contends that design should be true to its time and available to all, and calls for a modern design language reflecting new materials and methods. Finally, acceptera (1931), cowritten by Paulsson and architects featured in the famous Stockholm Exhibition of 1930, engages in a debate between the proponents of handicraft and those of design idioms emerging from industrial mass production. Lively illustrations and near-facsimiles of the texts' original publications, scholarly introductions by the editors, and an essay by architectural historian Kenneth Frampton, accompany the translations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780870707223
Publisher:	The Museum of Modern Art
Publication date:	08/01/2008
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	7.36(w) x 10.52(h) x 1.13(d)

Table of Contents

Preface Peter Reed     7
Acknowledgments     9
General Introduction   Lucy Creagh   Helena Kaberg   Barbara Miller Lane     11
The Untimely Timeliness of Swedish Modernism   Kenneth Frampton     15
An Introduction to Ellen Key's "Beauty in the Home"   Barbara Miller Lane     18
"Beauty in the Home"   Ellen Key     32
An Introduction to Gregor Paulsson's Better Things for Everyday Life   Helena Kaberg     58
Better Things for Everyday Life   Gregor Paulsson     72
An Introduction to acceptera   Lucy Creagh     126
Acceptera   Uno Ahren   Gunnar Asplund   Wolter Gahn   Sven Markelius   Gregor Paulsson   Eskil Sundahl     140
Selected Bibliography     348
Index of Names     350
Trustees of The Museum of Modern Art     352