Decorative Art 70s

by Charlotte Fiell (Editor), Peter Fiell (Editor)

Looking forward.  A decade marked by adventures in futurism
  Published annually from 1906 until 1980, Decorative Art, The Studio Yearbook was dedicated to the latest currents in architecture, interiors, furniture, lighting, glassware, textiles, metalware, and ceramics. Since the publications went out of print, the now hard-to-find yearbooks have become highly prized by collectors and dealers.

This volume spotlights the futuristic, experimental aesthetic of the 1970s. After the revolutions of the ’60s, the world of design and architecture became an increasingly exciting and fast-moving hotbed of ideas, rife with vehemently opposing schools and movements. In many ways it was a more extreme era for design than the previous decade. Experimentalism was everywhere, and many projects, thought not practical, were forward-thinking visions of a new kind of decorative art and design. Various groups advocated returning to natural methods, rejecting style in favor of craft or pushing the logic of industrial living to its concrete, high-rise extreme. Decorative Art 1970s includes the work of the decade’s brightest stars, such as Afra and Tobia Scarpa, Luigi Colani, Ettore Sottsass, Achille Castiglioni, Kisho Kurokawa, Norman Foster, Richard Meier, and Theo Crosby.

Genres: Design, Nonfiction, Art, Architecture

574 pages, Hardcover

First published April 8, 2000

About the author

Charlotte Fiell is a leading authority on the history, theory and criticism of design and, to date, has written 60 books on the subject.

Charlotte initially studied at Heatherley School of Fine Art in London and then later at the British Institute in Florence. She subsequently took a BA(Hons) degree in the History of Drawing and Printmaking with Material Science at Camberwell College of Arts (UAL), London. Following on from this, she trained at Sotheby’s Institute of Art in London.

Reviews

[Erik Erickson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Valuable as a historic resource, the introduction being more engaging than the presentation. Part of it is the fact that so much of the photography was in black and white. But a bigger part, I think, is the lack of organization around the different schools of design. I still enjoyed it and value being able to have a first-hand account of what was considered peak design at the time across a range of products and design schools. But I was hoping for more of an embedded narrative than just being organized around the different decorative mediums (architecture, furniture, glass, textiles, lighting, etc…). And the selections being contemporaneous with the time period there is a bit of a lack of capturing what was particularly emblematic or enduring and some selections that are less interesting from today’s perspective.

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

The 1970s volume was definitely easier on my eyes than the 1950s. For sure the greater number of color photographs helped. Also the version I had of this was physically larger so my eyes had less straining to do. And, honestly, I'm closer to stuff in this era and it struck me that it seems like more wacky shit was happening - or at the very least there seemed to have been more textures and fewer cold lines.

Definitely a ton of fun to flip through and ponder!

[Leonard · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like looking at art and architecture and perhaps this book would have captivated me more if it had been a large format book with much larger images, but since it's nearly 600 pages long, that would have been a formidable undertaking and a little too large to be easily portable. As it is this seems to be merely a visual record of the art of the 70s, just so we have a record. That makes it worthwhile. Those who are particularly interested in that era will probably be excited by this volume. I didn't read all the text or captions in this one.