1940s: wartime design, utilitarian aesthetics and post-war reconstruction shaping new ideas of comfort and functionality.
Los Angeles, 1949. In the hills of Pacific Palisades, Charles and Ray Eames complete their Case Study House #8, an architectural manifesto of postwar America. Steel, glass, and vibrant colors assemble into a lightweight structure open to the California landscape. While Europe laboriously rebuilds and the Bauhaus dissolves into emigration, America invents a new aesthetic…
Traditional Scandinavian design embodies much more than just a decorative style: it reveals a philosophy of life deeply rooted in Nordic culture. Born of the encounter between rigorous climatic constraints, ancestral craft heritage and social-democratic ideals, this aesthetic movement has conquered the world with its elegant simplicity, exemplary functionality and warm humanism. From Sweden to…
Ulm, Germany, 1953. On a hill overlooking the city, Max Bill inaugurates the Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG Ulm), a design school that aims to reconnect with the legacy of the Bauhaus closed by the Nazis in 1933. But Ulm will not be a simple resurrection: it will radicalize the rationalist approach, develop a scientific methodology…
Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1932. While the Great Depression paralyzes America and Streamline Moderne begins transforming the American industrial landscape, Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen founds an institution that will revolutionize American design: the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Far from the New York or California metropolises, in the affluent suburbs of Detroit, this school invents a unique…
New York, 1933. The “Century of Progress” World’s Fair in Chicago celebrated American technological progress at the heart of the Great Depression. While Europe sank into political tensions and Russian Constructivism faded under Stalin, America invented a radically new visual language: Streamline Moderne. This style, which would transform everything – from toasters to locomotives, from…
