You can find information here about professional organizations, addresses of art stores and centers, articles related to interior design and numerous links to useful web pages.
Also, we will acknowledge of some of the world's seminal designers and architects with brief biographies.
LEARN ABOUT DESIGNERS !
Arne Jacobsen bought a plywood chair designed by Charles Eames and installed it in his own studio, where it inspired one of the most commercially successful chair models in design history. The three-legged Ant chair (1951) sold in millions and is considered a classic today. It consists of two simple elements: tubular steel legs and a springy seat and back formed out of a continuous piece of plywood in a range of vivid colors.
Jacobsen began training as a mason before studying at the Royal Danish Academy of Arts, Copenhagen where he won a silver medal for a chair that was then exhibited at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Art Decoratifs in Paris. Influenced by Le Corbusier, Gunnar Asplund and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Jacobsen embraced a functionalist approach from the outset. He was among the first to introduce modernist ideas to Denmark and create industrial furniture that built upon on its craft-based design heritage.
First among Jacobsen’s important architectural commissions was the Bellavista housing project, Copenhagen (1930-1934). Best known and most fully integrated works, are the SAS Air Terminal and the Royal Hotel Copenhagen for which Jacobsen designed every detail from sculptural furnishings such as his elegant Swan and Egg chairs (1957-1958) to textiles, lighting, ashtrays and cutlery.
During the 1960’s, Jacobsen’s most important work was a unified architectural and interior design scheme for St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, which, like his earlier work for the Royal Hotel, involved the design of site-specific furniture. Jacobsen’s work remains appealing and fresh today, combining free-form sculptural shapes with the traditional attributes of Scandinavian design, material and structural integrity.
How does one sculpt space? How do objects give form to the surrounding emptiness? This puzzle, posed both by Europeans like Giacometti and Brancusi and the Zen artists of Japan, creates a theme that runs through the work of Isamu Noguchi. It is not one he attempted to solve, but like the Zen master, posed the question in different ways.
One of the great sculptors of the 20th century, Noguchi created "lived spaces" for the theater, interiors gardens and playgrounds. He also sought to bring sculptural qualities to the many objects he designed for common use. As a young man, Noguchi studied medicine at Columbia University, but abandoned medicine to pursue painting and sculpture and in 1927, a Guggenheim fellowship took him to Europe. In Paris, he had the great good fortune to be apprenticed in the studio of Constantin Brancusi, whose investigations of form and space recalled the art and architecture Noguchi knew from childhood years spent in Japan.
Back in America, Noguchi met choreographer Martha Graham and began a long friendship with Buckminster Fuller. Graham and Fuller provided Noguchi with inspiration, ideas and opportunities TO create new forms like the sets he designed for Graham's dance programmes. In 1939, he designed a free-form dining table for the president of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, A. Congers Goodyear. The table's seductive organic form presaged the coffee table Noguchi would design for Herman Miller in 1944
Noguchi Prismatic Table
and the wide range of products that he would design all during the 1940's, furniture informed by the biomorphic imagery of his sculpture.
From his sculpture to his garden design to the Akari lamps designed in the 1950's, Noguchi's work sought always to resolve life and aesthetic practice, the art object and the utensil, just as he sought to reveal the essential unity of form and space.