10 Books on Mid-Century Modern Design

A Designers & Books Holiday Gift Guide Selection

From the Publisher. Renowned designer Todd Oldham and writer Kiera Coffee have created this massive monograph on seminal designer Alexander Girard as the ultimate tribute to this design icon. This 672-page book covers virtually every aspect of Girard's distrinctive career. As one of the most prolific and versatile mid-20th century designers, Girard's work spanned many disciplines, including textile design, graphic design, typography, illustration, furniture design, interior design, product design, exhibit design, and architecture. Exhaustively researched and lovingly assembled by designer Todd Oldham, this tome is the definitive must-have book on Girard's oeuvre.

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From the Publisher. Filled with beautiful photographs and informative essays, this volume presents the genius of A. Quincy Jones, whose collaborative nature provides a timely example for today’s architects.

While the architect A. Quincy Jones is most recognized for his glamorous homes for Los Angeles’s cultural elite, he was equally dedicated to postwar Southern California’s rapidly expanding middle class. As this fascinating book reveals, Jones and his collaborators were truly ahead of their time. Their vision of creating affordable, aesthetically pleasing structures prefigured the advent of several important architectural trends, such as sustainable building designs, maximization of available space, and sensitive site planning. Filled with images by noted photographer Jason Schmidt, as well as period photographs by Julius Shulman and others, this volume looks at every aspect of Jones’s career. Original drawings, models, and furniture designs from the architect’s personal archives illustrate a wide variety of projects featuring the hallmarks of Jones’s style: soaring interior spaces, the blurring of indoors and out, laminated timber construction, angled walls, and innovative use of concrete, redwood, and glass. Essays explore Jones’s quintessentially collaborative nature as he consulted with other noted architects, landscapers, interior designers, developers, and city planners to create buildings of lasting beauty and importance.

From the Publisher. No one captured the midcentury modernism of the Mad Men era better than Balthazar Korab. His iconic photographs for master architects immortalized their finest works, while leaving his own indelible impact on twentieth century visual culture. In this riveting illustrated biography, the first dedicated solely to his life and career, author John Comazzi traces Korab's circuitous path to a career in photography. The book includes a portfolio of more than one hundred images from Korab's professionally commissioned architecture photography as well as close examinations of Saarinen's TWA Terminal and the Miller House in Columbus, Indiana.

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From the Publisher. In 1951, designer Greta Magnusson Grossman observed that California design was “not a superimposed style, but an answer to present conditions. . . . It has developed out of our own preferences for living in a modern way.” California design influenced the material culture of the entire country, in everything from architecture to fashion. This generously illustrated book, which accompanies a major exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is the first comprehensive examination of California’s midcentury modern design. It begins by tracing the origins of a distinctively California modernism in the 1930s by such European émigrés as Richard Neutra, Rudolph Schindler, and Kem Weber; it finds other specific design influences and innovations in solid-color commercial ceramics, inspirations from Mexico and Asia, new schools for design training, new concepts about leisure, and the conversion of wartime technologies to peacetime use (exemplified by Charles and Ray Eames’s plywood and fiberglass furniture).

The heart of California Design is the modern California home, famously characterized by open plans conducive to outdoor living. The layouts of modernist homes by Pierre Koenig, Craig Ellwood, and Raphael Soriano, for example, were intended to blur the distinction between indoors and out. Homes were furnished with products from Heath Ceramics, Van Keppel-Green, and Architectural Pottery as well as other, previously unheralded companies and designers. Many objects were designed to be multifunctional: pool and patio furniture that was equally suitable indoors, lighting that was both task and ambient, bookshelves that served as room dividers, and bathing suits that would turn into ensembles appropriate for indoor entertainment.

California Design includes 350 images, most in color, of furniture, ceramics, metalwork, architecture, graphic and industrial design, film, textiles, and fashion, and ten incisive essays that trace the rise of the California design aesthetic.

Catalogue of the exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “California Design, 1930–1965: ‘Living in a Modern Way,’” October 1, 2011–June 3, 2012.

From the Publisher. Eva Zeisel was one of the 20th century’s most influential ceramicists and designers of modern housewares. Her distinctive take on modern industrial design was inspired by organic form and brought beauty and playfulness to housewares, earning her designs a beloved place in midcentury homes. This richly illustrated volume—the first-ever complete biographical account of Zeisel’s life and work—presents an extensive survey of every line she ever created, all captured in gorgeous new photography, plus 28 short essays from scholars, collectors, curators, and designers. The definitive book on the grande dame of twentieth-century ceramics, this is an essential resource for anyone who appreciates modern design.

Other authors include Pat Moore, and Pirco Wolfframm. Introduction by Eva Zeisel. Photographs by Brent C. Brolin.

From the Publisher. The first monograph of the artists Evelyn and Jerome Ackerman whose oeuvre was critically influential and is now seen as the epitome of California mid-century modernism. With a preface by Jonathan Adler, the book tracks the couple's careers in the decorative arts from their beginnings to the creation of Jenev Design Studio and its eventual shift to ERA Industries, as well as their involvement in every prestigious California Design exhibition from 1954 to 1976. Additionally, after almost 30 years of work they continued to create and develop their styles. The Ackermans became known for their uses of a wide spectrum of mediums including weaving, ceramics, wood carvings, and mosaics.

The Ackermans' individualistic and innovative techniques also ensured that great design be both accessible and affordable. Featuring many never-before-seen preparatory drawings and color guides, this book tells the heartening story of a successful collaboration and celebrated partnership, in not only design, but in life.

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From the Publisher. Mid-20th-century California offered fertile ground for design innovations. The state’s reputation as a land of unlimited opportunity, its many institutions of higher learning, and its perpetually booming population created conditions that allowed designers and craftspeople to flourish. They found an eager market among educated and newly affluent Californians, and their products shaped the material culture of the entire nation. This book, a companion to the popular 2011 MIT Press/LACMA publication California Design, 1930-1965: "Living in a Modern Way," reveals the complex web of influences, collaborations, institutional affiliations, and social networks that fueled the California design economy. This book offers more than 140 illustrated biographical profiles of the most significant mid-century California designers, including such famous names as Saul Bass and Charles and Ray Eames as well as many lesser known but influential practitioners. These designers, craftspeople, and manufacturers worked in the full range of design media, creating furniture, fashion, textiles, jewelry, ceramics, and graphic and industrial design. Each entry includes a succinct biography, a portrait of the designer or image of an important design, cross-references to other entries, and a list of sources for further research. Significant examples of California design and craft objects are featured in more than 180 illustrations and rare photographs. Created by internationally renowned graphic designer Irma Boom, the book is a beautifully crafted object in its own right. It will become an indispensable resource for all those interested in modern design.

From the Publisher. New and vintage photography of America’s modernist architectural mecca. A visionary artist who has achieved worldwide fame, Julius Shulman transformed architectural photography. From his earliest photographs to those taken today, his work demonstrates a profound sensitivity to and appreciation for the spaces in which people live. These spaces, as seen through his lens, are at once luminous and profoundly shadowed, becoming spaces of intrigue and extraordinary beauty into which the observer longs to enter. This volume focuses on Shulman’s Chicago work. This town is America’s First City of Architecture, and its modern architecture is the ideal subject for Shulman’s lens. Featured here are the elegantly modern Minsk House, designed by Keck & Keck in 1955; the 1960 Burton Frank House, a mid-century modern gem; architect Harry Weese’s inspired modernist home and studio of 1957; and many other modern masterpieces.

From the Publisher. Gleaned from thousands of images, this companion set of books offers the best of American print advertising in the age of the “Big Idea.” At the height of American consumerism magazines were flooded with clever campaigns selling everything from girdles to guns. These optimistic indicators paint a fascinating picture of the colorful capitalism that dominated the spirit of the 1950s and 60s, as concerns about the Cold War gave way to the carefree booze-and-cigarettes Mad Men era. Also included is a wide range of significant advertising campaigns from both eras, giving insight into the zeitgeist of the period. Bursting with fresh, crisp colors, these ads have been digitally mastered to look as bright and new as the day they first hit newsstands.

A Designers & Books Online Book Fair Holiday Gift Guide Selection

From the Publisher. They are architecture's most famous father-son duo: Eero, the younger Saarinen, designer of such masterpieces as the TWA Terminal Building at Kennedy Airport, and his father Eliel, celebrated for triumphs such as the art nouveau railway station in Helsinki. Lesser known, but no less impressive, are their houses, which, regardless of style, share a belief in architecture as a total work of art. Featuring carefully designed interiors, often with custom-made furniture, they effortlessly merge with the landscape, and reward residents with exciting views, inviting nooks, and opulent furnishings. For the first time, Saarinen Houses presents seventeen remarkable houses built over a span of six decades, in Finland and the United States. From Eliel's early twentieth-century Villa Pulkanranta, an eclectic mix of local Finnish design traditions and international influences, to Eero’s Miller House, one of the most significant examples of modern domestic architecture in the United States, each project features original drawings and archival photos, as well as new interior and exterior shots. This book is a revelation for the Saarinen family faithful and an inspiration for anyone captivated by beautifully designed homes.