Original subtitles

The designed world is a world of people and things.

Design stands in between -

the place where them and us meet.

ln the story of design, the 1 920s and 1 930s

was the period when the relationship between ''us'' and our ''things''

was subject to radical re-examination.

A new social landscape emerged from the destruction of the First World War

and brought with it a new mental landscape -

one in which the machine loomed large.

This prompted a number of questions.

Should an Englishman's home be a castle, or a machine for living?

Le Corbusier buiIt this corridor with the same measures of a train's corridor.

So it stands for engineering and it stands for future.

ls the kitchen the heart of the home or a factory for food production?

Margarete herseIf was around with a stopwatch and kind of studying

how women worked in a kitchen and how it couId be improved,

trying to reduce the number of steps that peopIe took from the stove to the sink and so on.

How many legs does a chair actually need?

Imagine if you couId take air and fry it so it became stiff...

and then you sit on it, that wouIdn't be bad.

The answer to questions like these reshaped the world, then and now.

A world of people and things, and the design that joins them together.

ln 1 91 9, less than a year after the guns on the Western Front fell silent,

a new art school opened in Germany.

ln 1 926 it came here,

to a purpose-built building branded with its own distinctive logo.

To the residents of Dessau,

it was clear that something altogether new had sprung up on the edge of their town.

But what exactly?

Now they're coming from Dessau,

from the centre, here, from the south direction, to the Bauhaus, and the first thing they see

is the Bauhaus Ietter and the buiIding.

It was Iike a Iight fire in the Iandscape here.

It Iooks Iike industriaI factory but it's a schooI inside,

so the message is they want to educate the young peopIe

to make products and design in the industriaI fashion.

The Bauhaus was the centre of new thinking

and the pieces that they produced

were the furniture of the new thinking.

I actuaIIy think the Bauhaus was quite punk rock.

It was quite a sort of punk anarchic sort of sense of Iooking at something

and turning it on its head.

The Bauhaus was about bringing together

sort of, you know, groups of discipIines

and sort of smashing them together and seeing what came out.

The Bauhaus was an art student's dream come true -

an intoxicating mix of free love, avant-garde posing and legendary parties.

But there was a serious side too.

The curriculum, devised by Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius,

set out to break down the boundaries

that since the lndustrial Revolution had grown up between design and architecture,

craftsmanship and mass production,

designing and making.

This was designed to be an education without frontiers.

You had fantastic painters, fantastic theatre designers,

potters, siIversmiths, furniture designers, graphic designers.

They aII worked together. There was no separation. There was no division.

The architect, the construction worker, the brick worker, the carbon maker,

the painter, the furniture maker - everybody - they want to open.

They want to Iet the construction workers Iearn from the artist

and the artists Iearn from the construction workers.

You are exposed to the compIete range of art and materiaIs, right,

and everybody goes through that first degree.

It's Iike basic training in the miIitary.

For the Roundheads in Gropius' New Model Army, the enemy was this.

Sensual, organic and highly decorated,

Art Nouveau had become the dominant design style of the turn-of-the-century world.

Art Nouveau offered a kind of branding of contemporary Iife.

It was the beginning of a sort of designer IifestyIe.

It was very emotive - semi-erotic in many cases,

or very obviousIy erotic in others -

the incorporation of naked women into furniture pieces.

The Austrian architect Adolf Loos

had been one of the first to try and hack back at its viny tendrils.

ln 1 908, he railed against Art Nouveau in a diatribe entitled Ornament And Crime.

For Loos, the stakes couldn't have been higher.

''The evolution of a culture, '' he proclaimed,

''is synonymous with the removal of ornament from utilitarian objects. ''

They thought that this ornament and over-decoration is a masquerade

and they want to give the objects a good quaIity without masquerade.

Loos was proposing the idea that...

..the use of excessive decoration debased society somehow.

That it was...

an excessive use of resources.

If you strip away aII surface decoration from a product,

so that aII the energy, aII the effort,

is going into the integrity of the fundamentaI object,

the idea, then, is that using that approach

you can produce high-vaIue objects in high numbers for reasonabIe cost,

and that is the most democratic way to design and manufacture products.

You're providing the most of the best to the greatest number of peopIe for the Ieast.

That's a reaIIy important credo for the modern... birth of the modern movement, actuaIIy.

It was not a question of a styIe. They did not want a styIe.

It was counterproductive for them to think about a styIe.

They want to have the vision for a new kind of Iife

and aIso they want to aIso, yeah, educate the peopIe

to become new human behaviour for the 20th Century, for a new future.

Every design revolution, from the Stone Age to the Digital Age, has its signature technology.

For the Modernists, it was this - tubular steel.

Using techniques originally developed for making bicycle frames,

tubular steel could be shaped into structures that were lighter than wood, but far stronger.

This was a new product, a new technique,

and opened up a compIeteIy new fieId of soIutions.

SuddenIy you had here a very good, Iight materiaI, visuaIIy very exciting,

which you can paint, which you can chromium pIate,

you can just Ieave it steeI, you know, you can have aII sorts of possibiIities.

And that was a very important period.

For designers, the test-bed for all new technologies is the chair.

The chair occupies a privileged position in the design world.

Half structure, half product, it's the place where architecture meets design,

and where the designer's skills are tested.

Have you ever tried to design a chair?

I can assure you it's not simpIe at aII.

The chair is aIways a...aImost a Iitmus test.

For a designer it's a most difficuIt item to design, most chaIIenging,

and because we are aII, aII of us, a different shape,

it has got the eIement of compromise.

I think it's impossibIe to sit down and say, ''I'm now gonna design a cIassic.''

It'd be extremeIy presumptuous more than anything eIse.

But there are some moments for designers where they have, you know, perfect moments

where, for exampIe, a company says to them,

''I'm gonna give you a certain technoIogy to work with,''

and what usuaIIy happens is the icon of that typoIogy gets designed very earIy on,

and it's quite hard to move away from them once they've been defined.

For Marcel Breuer, a former Bauhaus student who returned to teach there,

tubular steel was his shot at design immortality.

The story is that there was a party in the Bauhaus

and Breuer had designed the IittIe Iaccio tabIe

and he was taIking about it and the phiIosophy of it, etc.

A few drinks Iater and a few conversations Iater, he said, ''What I'm going to do next...''

and then everybody was Iistening.

He said, ''I'm going to turn the tabIe on its side

and I'm going to have this as the Ieg

and I'm going to have this as a seat,

and here I'm going to spIit the tube,

turn it up and I'II put the back there.''

And there you are, seat seat, back back.

VoiIa!

For Breuer, the gravity-defying cantilever construction of his chair

clearly suggested other even more radical possibilities -

a chair with no legs at all.

It was very acceptabIe for the Bauhaus phiIosophy to, yes,

overstep the boundary of reaIity and say,

''EventuaIIy we wiII sit on compressed air.''

''Fried air'', which is an ItaIian saying for things which are meaningIess.

But imagine if you couId take air and fry it so then it became stiff and you sit on it.

That wouIdn't be bad.

For designers and architects,

the modern world was full of urgent hints about new and better ways of doing things.

ln a warehouse in Germany

are the remnants of some of the lessons taught by the new ''Machine Age''.

These are the first ever examples of a domestic fitted kitchen -

designed by the Austrian architect Margarete Schutte-Lihotzky.

Margarete was not very fond of cooking and she aIways said,

''I even can't make a coffee.''

So she didn't Iike cooking very much, but she designed the kitchen very carefuIIy.

Margarete came in with this radicaI idea, which is now known as a Frankfurt kitchen,

which was basicaIIy the first reaIIy mass-produced fitted kitchen.

The idea that she had, was to rationaIise women's work.

When peopIe used the Frankfurt kitchen, there were many things that were great about it.

Yep, it was very efficient and wipe-cIean

and very functionaI, but peopIe found them very coId.

There were a Iot of responses to it that it was very sort of aIien.

And, yeah, it was Iike a factory.

It was Iike a kind of a... a kind of gaIIey kitchen from a ship.

I Iook at kitchens today and you can see where those have come from.

They've come from those oId ideas that we want to have everything kind of neatIy organised

and we want it to function weII

and we want to be abIe to serve our famiIy in a way that makes sense.

But who's to teII me where I keep my bread?

We keep our bread in the microwave

because it's the onIy storage pIace that wiII keep it dry.

That idea of imposing a vision on somebody and expecting them to Iive up to it

is an absoIuteIy impossibIe dream for any designer.

So, you know, I aIways say this to our cIients.

You need to create something that's adaptive.

You need to buiId in fIexibiIity and you need to aIIow ''the person''

their right to customise the experience that you're creating for them.

But designs for living weren't just confined to the kitchen.

ln Weissenhof, a suburb of Stuttgart,

the City Council offered designers and architects a larger canvas -

the whole estate of houses.

Show homes of the future.

This was a kind of very radicaI thing for the city of Stuttgart to do,

and they rounded up the kind of the reaI young guns of architecture.

You know, you had Bruno Taut, you had Mies van der Rohe,

you had WaIter Gropius, you had Le Corbusier.

You go there now and you think, ''BIimey, if these were buiIt now,

they wouId stiII be regarded as radicaIIy modern, Iet aIone in the mid '20s.''

You know. These beautifuI cubist bIocks right up on the hiIIside.

The Double House on RathenaustraBe

was designed by the Swiss-born architect, Le Corbusier.

Le Corbusier's design went one step further than the fitted kitchen.

This was a ''fitted house'',

and the architect had thought long and hard

about how the modern family would fit into it.

Corbusier's idea was to divide space up into served and servant spaces.

So over here we've got the bathroom, which is not one you'd want to hang out in.

It's the kind of bathroom you'd just have a quick shave in.

Here we have a kitchen area

which is an area where your maid wouId be there serving you

if you're having your Iunch out here in the kind of Iiving-dining space.

The whoIe idea was to shift aII the kind of servant spaces,

the kind of spaces for drudgery, make them as smaII and as remote as possibIe

and open up space for Iiving, for being entertained,

for Ieisure pursuits, I suppose, essentiaIIy.

So a compIete division - oiI and water.

You know, this was a machine for Iiving in.

Like the fitted kitchen, the fitted house took its inspiration from outside the domestic sphere.

Le Corbusier buiIt this corridor with the same measures of a train's corridor.

So it's 60cm

and a height of two metres and five,

Iike in each train at this time.

And so it's a very theoreticaI corridor

but it's very important to connect his house with the train.

So it's a modern traffic machine.

So it stands for engineering and it stands for future.

Le Corbusier's obsession with the machine was that it wouId be Iiberating, it wouId free you.

So you couId IiteraIIy adjust the interior to suit your Iife. You couId transform it.

The idea that a house couId be fIexibIe, couId change in the future.

We are now in the Iiving room,

and you can change this room, for the night use, into sIeeping compartments.

You bring the bed out, or puII the bed out of the buiIt-in cupboard,

and you can bring out the second bed for the coupIe here.

And then, you can cIose the sIiding waII...

..to separate the sIeeping room of the chiId from the sIeeping room of the parents.

That gave immense freedom.

Both the architect and aIso the inhabitant of the house

couId shift the arrangement of the interior, the pIan, to whatever they wanted to do with it.

There's not much running around the house,

everything's sort of kept very tight and cIose and efficient.

But freedom and flexibility came at a price.

These were designs to live up to, rather than just live in.

He had these sIightIy freakish views about communaI Iiving.

He sort of had ideas that we shouId be Iiving Iike students in a coIIege

or monks in a monastery,

that actuaIIy our private space shouId be very, very smaII

and we shouId be sharing our communaI space with Iots of other peopIe

and actuaIIy Iiving Iike an artist, Iike he Iived, actuaIIy.

In a sense, Le Corbusier never got over his potty training period, emotionaIIy,

as a Swiss designer, compIete controI freak, who wanted to tidy the worId up.

That might have been fine for a few peopIe but it wasn't a soIution for mass society.

PeopIe actuaIIy Iiked their private space.

They Iiked to retreat as weII as hang out on sun terraces.

I mean, Modernism is aIways about enormous expectation, you know,

and provocation, mixed with disappointment.

The term is correct - Modernism.

It is a poetic refIection of the modern age.

So you bend a steeI tube and you stretch some canvas and you've got a modern object,

hence, a functionaI object.

But they weren't aII functionaI.

I have a Iot of Bauhaus furniture in my house.

It is... Without exception, none of it is comfortabIe.

I don't sit in those chairs very often.

I sit in a comfortabIe chair and Iook at those chairs.

And that's basicaIIy what they're for - to Iook at.

A Iot of the Modernists were prescribing how, not just how you wouId sit,

but aIso how you wouId Iive, and that's what got us into troubIe.

Corbusier's originaI pIan for Paris

was to wipe out the oId Paris and start new with these ridicuIous towers,

with cars connecting everybody in between - it's a nightmare.

This was his vision, and unfortunateIy, that's what a Iot of cities started doing

and we are now repairing ourseIves from this era.

Corbusier's vision was very destructive.

Now, he had some great designs for furniture, and actuaIIy some interesting houses,

and if he had onIy stuck to that, we wouId've aII been better off.

The Modernists had set out to break down the barriers that separated creative disciplines.

But as the city-sized ambitions of Le Corbusier made clear,

there is a fundamental distinction between architecture and design,

as well as between architects and designers.

You've got to remember, architecture is big and heavy and sIow,

and takes a Iot of money to buiId.

Design can respond much more quickIy to changes in peopIe's desires.

It's basicaIIy more nimbIe, it's Iighter, it's smaIIer, it's easier to do, frankIy, than architecture.

It's easier to change, you know, your chairs and your furniture

than it is to change your buiIding and a whoIe way of Iife and a whoIe environment.

But it's not just a difference in scale and speed. There's also a question of temperament.

We taIk about designers as T-shaped beings,

which means that you have a depth in something,

you have a down stroke in something, a depth in craft,

but a breadth and an empathy towards a Iot of other discipIines.

But I often think of architects as more maybe I-shaped -

it's a depth in craft, and Iess of a breadth in empathy.

Architecture can often be quite a sort of soIitary, visionary pursuit.

And I don't think design works Iike that.

We're not the guru in the ateIier.

As the Roaring '20s gave way to the low, dishonest decade that was the 1 930s,

the political context in mainland Europe changed dramatically.

For architects, for designers, for everyone, the change was not for the better.

ln 1 932, the Bauhaus closed its school in Dessau,

as the local branch of the Nazi Party flexed its brown-shirted muscle.

Bauhaus founder, Walter Gropius, moved to Britain.

He came here, the lsokon flats in Hampstead, designed by architect Wells Coates.

Alongside Gropius, in the minimalist service flats with their communal dining room,

was fellow Bauhauser Marcel Breuer.

Also resident was crime writer Agatha Christie,

who likened their new home to a giant ocean liner.

But this was not the typical face of modern Britain in the 1 930s.

Just a few miles from the lsokon flats is the Holly Lodge Estate,

where high-rise living was half timbered,

and ocean liners were something to see the world in, rather than to live in.

This is what peopIe wanted, and this is how peopIe wanted to Iive.

Modernism, you couId say, was trying to be a IittIe bit too cIever sometimes,

a IittIe bit too pared down, too simpIe,

and that was cooI and styIish, if you were into that kind of thing.

But most peopIe weren't.

Begun in the mid-1 920s, and added to throughout the '30s,

the Holly Lodge Estate was an alternative response

to the demands of living in the modern world.

This is a typicaI housing estate from the 1 930s.

Each one of these is a IittIe castIe, it's the EngIishman's castIe, it's the epitome of that.

It meant that you were Iiving out the oId EngIish idyII -

everyone wants to Iive in a thatched cottage

or a wonderfuI hammer-beamed Jacobean house,

and that's exactIy what these houses gave you the impression that you were doing.

After the First WorId War,

there was a Ionging to return to the pre-war period -

after aII, that was such a goIden age.

Just at this time, what do we invent?

We get the three-piece suite.

And that says it aII about what we're reaIIy interested in at that time.

It's aII about comfort.

This was also the moment when ''second-hand'' rebranded itself as ''antique''.

Hampered by death duties and plagued by the lack of servants to clean and polish,

the great and good had, since the end of the Great War,

been selling off the family silver-

as well as the family mahogany.

For the aspiring British middle class,

a timeless classic with aristocratic connections

trumped tubular steel with Modernist pretensions.

And of course the houses aIso were fuII of provision for ornaments,

for IittIe detaiIs of Iiving as weII.

The firepIace, the manteIpiece, retained its sort of iconic status as one of these.

You had this provision, a sheIf for aII of your ornaments,

for your househoId goods,

for your IittIe status symboIs, and for your heirIooms.

And if you didn't have heirIooms, you couId just go out and buy some.

Alongside the Mock Tudor, there was mockery too.

Cartoonist Heath Robinson poked gentle fun at the Modernist lifestyle

in his book How To Live ln A Flat.

I think one of the big objections to Modernism

from peopIe Iike Heath Robinson or the satirists,

or even the serious objectors,

was the fact that they didn't Iike being toId what to do.

The British don't Iike that. We don't Iike being toId what to do.

But the most enduring symbol of British design from the period

was a characteristic combination of the modern and the whimsical.

lf Heath Robinson had been asked to design an electricity pylon,

he might have come up with something like this -

the Anglepoise lamp.

George Carwardine was a British engineer

obsessed with car suspension systems and Euclidian geometry.

He wasn't thinking about creating a masterpiece of design

when he approached spring-makers Herbert Terry & Sons

to help him with his experiments to suspend objects in space.

He took out a patent, in about 1 931 ,

and it was caIIed ''eIastic force mechanisms''.

And this was ways of trying to baIance things in space

and he used springs and Ievers and cams.

lt was then that Carwardine had a light-bulb moment.

He suddenIy reaIised, ''I couId put a Iight buIb on the end of this

and controI it with a shade

and then I have a way of putting Iight exactIy where it's needed.''

As it moves, here this stays paraIIeI,

so if you're working at a desk or drawing board or something,

you can adjust it there and you don't have to readjust the height.

In a sense, it's not designed, it's based on pure engineering principIes.

It's quite unusuaI in a product that you actuaIIy see the workings.

This is Iike seeing aII the vaIve springs or aII the pistons in a car.

It brings a bit of engineering out of a box and visuaIises it on their desk.

There's a certain eIegance in this product... and I don't know where it came from.

I don't think George designed it.

I think he just had a naturaI feeI for the right sort of dimensions

and that, you know, if it Iooks right, it is right.

It's part of the Iandscape.

It's the same as, you know,

teIephone boxes and London taxis and Routemaster buses,

you instantIy see, whoever you are in the worId, and you know those are British icons.

ln 1 935, Le Corbusier, the high priest of Modernism,

made a trip across the Atlantic to bring enlightenment to the USA.

He went full of high hopes for work

from a country that had seemed determined to build itself out of the Great Depression.

He was surprised that there were no press photographers to greet him when he arrived -

the first of a series of misunderstandings

that would characterise the encounter between the world's most modern architect

and the world's most modern city.

ln an article, he confessed to more complex reactions.

''Everything here is paradox and disorder...

individual liberty destroying collective liberty.

A hundred times have l thought New York is a catastrophe...

..and 50 times...it is a beautiful catastrophe. ''

WeII, New York City is beautifuI and it was beautifuI then because of the density,

the congestion and the mess, and every buiIding a sIightIy different styIe.

No-one has a controI over that.

That's determined by the market, you know. It's determined by commerce.

The simple truth was that Le Corbusier was too late.

By the time he arrived in America, the future had already happened.

From the canyons of Manhattan,

to the production line of the Ford Rouge River plant, which Le Corbusier visited,

America had already chosen its destiny.

This American future

would be driven by the dynamos of capitalism, consumerism and individualism.

And the market would reign supreme.

The difference between American and European design is fascinating.

European design is more concerned with the seIf expression of the designer,

versus American design, which is way more pragmatic.

It's about the mainstream because that's where the money is,

that's where the manufacturers are interested in operating.

They're not interested in catering to an eIite,

progressive, avant-garde type cIienteIe.

They want to get their products into WaImart.

The designers who served the American market in the '20s and '30s

knew what commerce expected of them.

lt would be appearances on the cover of business magazines,

rather than manifestos, that would get them a seat around the boardroom table.

But once they were there, they knew how to knock 'em dead.

These were to be artists in industry,

not appIying art Iater,

but in a coIIaborative effort with the manufacturers.

These guys were some of the greatest renderers of aII time.

They knew how to draw anything.

They knew how to make it vivid, exciting.

You know, to see these things in the fIesh, it's fascinating.

Niels Diffrient worked with designer Henry Dreyfuss for more than 25 years.

Henry had a trick.

that was he carried in his coat pocket...

..a pocket fuII of IittIe short penciIs.

And when he was taIking to a cIient,

he wouId take one out and draw something right for the cIient.

''This is the way your cIock shouId Iook,'' for instance.

The cIients were aII amazed by this.

So Henry took this one step further, and over a tabIe or a Iunch tabIe,

he wouId draw it upside down to face the cIient,

and of course, that was as good as seIIing the job on the spot.

Anybody who couId draw upside down was cIearIy taIented enough

to make this product be a big seIIer.

Corporate America reaIised that design works.

You know, that if they revamped their product

or redid their corporate identity and made it reIevant to peopIe,

that their saIes wouId improve, and this was a way to get cIoser to consumers.

Getting closer to consumers meant attending to their dreams and desires,

as well as their needs.

Designer Raymond Loewy understood that better than anyone.

His definition of good design was an upward sales curve.

Raymond Loewy was, I think, the first design consuItant -

not the first industriaI designer but the first design consuItant,

the first person to reaIIy marry commerce and art

into one seamIess offer that manufacturers were interested in and that peopIe needed.

What Raymond Loewy brought was pizzazz, excitement, emotion to functionaI objects.

Loewy accepted that what people wanted didn't have to make sense.

He took the principle of streamlining,

originally developed to make planes, trains and automobiles go faster,

and applied it to things that were going nowhere fast -

like refrigerators.

Sales of the streamlined, Coldspot fridge jumped by 600% .

It's absurd when you see a vacuum cIeaner and it has kind of wings on it,

you know, Iike a rocket ship.

That's obviousIy just a styIe, you know, a superficiaI styIe.

But I think there was a Iot more going on there,

and I think what Loewy and peopIe Iike that were doing

was giving to everyday Americans an opportunity to experience the modern worId,

you know, in the everyday, whether it was a toaster or a teIephone

or, you know, an automobiIe.

But behind the salesmanship, and the crowd-pleasing styling,

American designers developed an approach to design

as rational as Le Corbusier and as rigorous as the Bauhaus.

But rather than starting with a theory about how people shouId be,

a designer like Henry Dreyfuss started with what they were actually like.

WeII, this is the first iteration of the Big Ben, done by Henry Dreyfuss around 1 931 /1 932.

He got his foot in the door doing the cIock faces

and there are dozens and dozens of studies, for instance, of the hands,

which you wiII notice have a IittIe channeI inside.

Dreyfuss did some informaI studies

to try to assure that these were very visibIe to sIeepy eyes

and in fact wouId set them up aIong his bedside

to go off at intervaIs of an hour throughout the night to judge them,

which he cIaimed was the cIosest he and Doris Marks ever came to getting divorced.

This was a doIIar cIock. This was not an expensive item.

And yet it's taken on the appearance of a much more Iuxurious item.

Notice the goId finish inside that mouIding, which is siIver on the outside.

It's rather subtIe at first but it does make a difference in the appearance.

It's a beautifuI IittIe thing

and when you think about this as just a simpIe mass-produced object,

one of the first, reaIIy, that wouId have been seen in most American homes,

an affordabIe piece of modernity that was a functionaI item and worked weII.

Acting as guinea pig for his own designs wasjust the beginning.

Drawing on time and motion studies, just like Schutte-Lihotzky had done,

Dreyfuss developed a systematic approach to design,

based around idealised male and female figures.

He would eventually christen them Joe and Josephine -

typical Americans, from their heads to the tip of their precisely-measured toes.

Henry Dreyfuss caIIed it ''human factors'' -

the science of the interface between peopIe and things,

and it reaIIy is a science.

There's a Iot of actuaI measuring of things -

distances, heights, weights - aII those sorts of things.

But more than that, a Iot of observationaI stuff.

You couId say he was the father of observationaI ethnographic research

because he used to Iook at how peopIe actuaIIy used things,

how they sat in a chair and so on,

which is what designers do today.

Like Raymond Loewy, Dreyfuss knew how to make the advanced acceptable,

as is apparent in his model 302 telephone,

a classic piece of design

that put the modern world into the hands and the homes of millions of Americans.

This is the ModeI 302 teIephone of approximateIy 1 936/1 937.

It's the first pure Dreyfuss phone.

This was the American teIephone during the 1 930s, the Iater '30s and most of the '40s.

We're taIking somewhere in the range of 1 60 miIIion units.

I mean, we're taIking about a piece of design that aImost every American had contact with,

repeated contact,

and to me that's a remarkabIe achievement

and a remarkabIe way to Iead peopIe into thinking in a modern way.

The contrast with the telephone design by the Bauhaus is revealing.

The first thing I see is geometric purity.

I mean, that...

The overaII contour here mirrors aImost exactIy the form of that transmitter.

Whereas here we have a more generous, in fact, rather streamIined housing, you know.

Look at the very square contours here,

versus the scuIpting here.

This creates a visuaI Iightness.

I mean, this is a IoveIy design.

Its visuaI Iightness comes from the gap that you see here between those fIush sides

and this rather dramaticaIIy-shaped handset.

But again...one advantage to the Dreyfuss phone over...

..this rather hefty phone... that has no convenient way to move it.

Maybe we shouId just Iook at the backs because...

..there's a IittIe more sophistication here than in the European exampIe.

You know, this is sort of a 360-degree scuIpturaI entity,

where this just seems to terminate rather abruptIy in the back.

Here is a phone with no ambitions to be anything other than a teIephone

and to Iook Iike a piece of equipment.

This has a IittIe more concessions to fitting into a domestic interior.

I wouId say this is the more theoreticaI phone,

and this is a IittIe bit more the consumer item.

It's a wonderfuI sort of shorthand for the difference between Europe and America.

By attending to the dreams and desires of consumers, as well as their needs,

American designers brought the Utopian visions of European Modernism down to earth.

lt's telling that one of the most iconic examples of modern American design from this period

emerged from a backyard workshop

rather than from the lofty heights of the designer's drawing board.

The Airstream Trailer, first created in 1 933 by Wally Byam,

an example of what you might call ''folk Modernism''.

WaIIy wrote an articIe about how to buiId a traiIer and he soId that articIe for 50 cents

and peopIe tried to buiId 'em and they couIdn't so they came to him about it.

So he says, ''Let me buiId one for you.''

So he went out in his backyard, started buiIding traiIers,

wasn't Iong before he was manufacturing traiIers.

The war came aIong - Second WorId War -

the government took aII the aIuminium and he had to stop production.

So, he went to work in an aircraft factory

and I'm sure whiIe he was doing that

he'd come up with a Iot of different ideas to do when the war was over,

you know, to put into his traiIer, to manufacture it.

What kind of thickness of metaI he wanted to use

and how many rivets per square foot he wanted to use.

He got a Iot of that information off those airpIanes when he was working with them.

Christopher Deam redesigned the Airstream Trailer in 2000.

I had grown up seeing these things hurtIing down the freeway

and once I started designing...

being an architect and doing reaI design,

I started to reaIIy Iook at them for inteIIigent uses of space.

They combine both architecture and furniture into this unified whoIe,

and then the fact that it's, you know, fIying down the freeway makes it even crazier.

Byam's design delivered on the promises made by Modernism and the market.

lt was a machine for living and a dream machine.

Le Corbusier meets Henry Dreyfuss,

from a designer who'd probably never heard of either of them.

UsuaIIy if somebody's never been in a traiIer, their first reveIation is,

''Wow, this is aII I need. I couId Iive in this.''

And, you know, it aIIows your imagination to imagine your Iife in a different context,

in a stripped down, minimaIist, kind of very essentiaI way of Iiving.

If you don't Iike the scenery today, you can hook up and move on.

You don't have to worry about, ''Where are we gonna sIeep, where are we gonna eat?''

These vehicIes are fuIIy seIf-contained, they have everything - aII the comforts of home.

And a bathroom, any time you want one.

lf the 1 920s and '30s dramatised the choice

between top-down Utopianism and bottom-up consumerism,

the verdict of today's designed world lies with consumerism.

Consumerism swallowed Modernism's most radical schemes.

Some - the fitted kitchen, open plan living, tubular steel furniture -

were effortlessly absorbed.

Others - the high rise and the high hopes for a new kind of human being -

have been chewed up and spat out.

ln today's designed world, we see Habitat rather than Bauhaus...

..Dreyfuss rather than Le Corbusier.

I think Le Corbusier, as an architect, wanted to impose a certain vision,

and Dreyfuss, as a designer, wanted to kind of incIude everybody in his vision

and bring them into that process.

So, you know, I taIk a Iot about the idea of design now as a diaIogue with the user,

and I think that's the journey that has gone from architecture to design -

that journey from monoIogue to diaIogue.