DESIGN QUARTERLY 76
EASY COME EASY GO
Mildred Friedman [Curator and Editor]
and Daniel Solomon [essay]
Mildred Friedman [Curator and Editor] and Daniel Solomon [essay]: DESIGN QUARTERLY 76 / EASY COME EASY GO. Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, 1970. First edition [Number 76, 1970]. Slim quarto. Photo illustrated perfect bound wrappers. 28 pp. with many black and white illustrations. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. Light wear overall, but a very good copy.
8.25 x 10.75 perfect-bound magazine with 28 pages and many black and white illustrations: "What is the key word today? Disposable. The more you can throw it away the more it's beautiful. The car, the furniture, the wife, the children—everything has to be disposable."—From "The Price" by Arthur Miller.
Daniel Solomon's essay "Notes on Ephemera" is accompanied with work by Jensen-Lewis, Daniel Solomon and Barbara Stauffacher, Hirshen & Van der Ryn, François Dallegret, Ulrich Franzen, André Courreges, Christian Girard, Shigeo Tanaka, Paul Rudolph and Soichi Hata and Akira Saito among others.
Originally conceived as an issue dedicated to the phenomenon of “supergraphics,” guest editors and designers Barbara Stauffacher Solomon and Daniel Solomon broadened that charge to consider architecture in an age of disposability and ephemerality. Stauffacher Solomon designed the issue, bringing her revolutionary architectural-scale typography of the supergraphic to bear on the small-scale real estate of the magazine page. Daniel Solomon, who penned the text, argues for architecture to embrace the contemporary conditions of the ephemeral and even the fashionable, drawing parallels to the world of modern industrial design such as the automobile and to experimental works of architecture like modular or plug-in living units that can be changed over time as well as the period’s call for more a systems-based architecture. The specter of environmental degradation, however, seems oddly downplayed in the issue which was published the same year as the first Earth Day.
Design Quarterly began as Everyday Art Quarterly, published by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis starting in 1946. The editorial focus aimed to bring modern design to the masses through thoughtful examination of household objects and their designers. Everyday Art Quarterly was a vocal proponent of the Good Design movement (as represented by MoMA and Chicago's Merchandise Mart) and spotlighted the best in industrial and handcrafted design. When the magazine became Design Quarterly in 1958, the editors assumed a more international flair in their selection of material to spotlight.