I'm starting with this image of a factory in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.
This picture is from the 1880s, and it's a factory that made chairs.
This represented something really different because before
industrialization, chairs were made by a local carpenter or furniture
maker in a town or village or city, and people knew where the chairs came from.
But now, since mass production and mass communication,
all those advances that were brought on by the industrial revolution that increased
the way that things were made in the world and increased their availability,
you also had, of course, the use some machines to make things.
Again, that old village craftsman was probably using hand tools.
Now a factory used power driven lathes and different
kinds of mechanical tools in order to make things that then went out into the market.
However, the interesting thing when you look at design during this period
is sometimes, those new techniques which really were
the introduction of mass production into the modern world,
were used to actually produce things that looked just like the old things.
For instance, this is a catalog page from that chair company in Sheboygan, Wisconsin
and you see a group of four chairs here, some with arms, one with a rocker.
You can tell that they're using interchangeable parts that have been made
in the factory, like the way the backs of all those chairs are the same.
And yet, the design is a vernacular design,
by that we mean a design that is handed down through the ages.
It's a design that everybody recognizes.
It really is no different, in fact,
it's derived from the kind of design that would have been produced
by the village woodworker making furniture before industrialization.
Now there were some interesting deviations from this and
that is what is considered really modern by historians of the period.
These are parts for something called the Thonet chair.
Now the Thonet chair was a simple wooden chair made by a company in Austria
that used new power tools and a steam process for creating bent,
tubular wood that's been steam pressed into curvilinear forms.
This chair that Thonet designed was sold in the millions.
You get a sense of the interchangeability of the forms.
Again, the factory is producing parts, they're thinking about them modularly,
but they're actually making chairs that now have a new interesting form.
Now it falls into an aesthetic that we call Art Nouveau,
an exaggerated curvilinear design, in this case,
really enabled by this new steam pressing.
Literally, you have two factories producing chairs in the same way but
the Thonet factory was actually thinking about innovating the design
as a response to the mechanization of the process.
In other words, the form follows the way it was made.
You might have heard of an old phrase called âform follows functionâ,
meaning that the form tells you something about the way that a design is created and
this is a really good example.
It's one reason why when you look at standard
design histories of even architecture that started in the 19th Century,
they often look at the chairs made by this company as a perfect example of
the machine and designers acting with technology symbiotically.
The truth was, during the later half of the 19th century,
a lot of people blamed the bad design on the machine.
They thought that it was mechanization that had created a lot of
new meaningless products that were shoddy in their making.
But if you look carefully, you realize that it's not the fault purely
of the machine and technology, but instead it is about how all of those things,
the designers, the businessmen who were commissioning the design and
the technology itself interact to answer the market.
Louise SandhausFaculty, Program in Graphic Design
Lorraine WildFaculty, Program in Graphic Design
