PROBLEMS OF DESIGN
George Nelson
George Nelson: PROBLEMS OF DESIGN. NYC: Whitney, 1957. First Edition. A very good hardcover book with a good example of the scarce dust jacket. The front free endpaper has been trimmed [?]. The jacket is lightly rubbed with a chipped spine crown and a couple of short, closed tears to the edges. Interior unmarked and very clean. An very uncomon title in hardcover, especially with the dust jacket. Foreward by Arthur Drexler.8.5 x 8.5 hardcover book with 204 pages and over 100 b/w photographs, illustrations and diagrams. An anthology of 26 essays by the ever-erudite Nelson, culled from a variety of sources, including Interiors, industrial Design, Holiday, Fortune, Architectural Forum, house and Garden, American Fabrics, the Philips Academy Bulletin (!) and others.
Nelson tackles the problems of design in the following categories: Art, Architecture, Houses, Planning and Interiors. Every essay is a keeper, with Nelson arguing his positions with humor and insight that have not dated one iota in the half-century since they were first published. Contents:
- PROBLEMS OF DESIGN
- Design as Communication
- Good Design: what is it for?
- Art X -- the Georgia Experiment
- Captive Designer vs. independent Designer
- Ends and means
- Obsolescence
- A new Profession?
- Structure and Fabirc
- The Enlargement of Vision
- The Designer in the modern world
- High time to experiemnt
- ART
- Some notes on relations between the visual arts
- Venus, persephone and September Morn.
- ARCHITECTURE
- Classic holiday house
- Wright's houses
- Stylistic trends in contemporary architecture
- HOUSES
- Down with housekeeping
- the japanese House
- Prefabrication
- After the modern house
- The Second house
- PLANNING
- Planning with you
- Main Street
- INTERIORS
- The dead-end room
- Modern Decoration
- Notes on the new subscape
Contains work by the following designers, artists, photographers: Charles Eames, Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, Eero Saarinen, Philip Johnson, Hedrich-Blessing, Julius Shulman, Ezra Stoller and many others.
"George Nelson was an outstanding designer. We all know that. But my hunch is that, in a hundred years, he'll be even better remembered for his thinking and writing about design.'
-- Stanley Abercrombie, architect and writer
Even if he had never designed a single piece of furniture or a wall clock, George Nelson (1908 - 1986) would be remembered as one of the founding fathers of American Modernism. The Hartford native's writing celebrated American Design with messianic zeal and pedagogical insight. Every book Nelson authored is a true classic in every sense of the word.
Spreads from this volume can be viewed here.
Price: $150.00
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