Start the 2022 Year of Glass with a modern glassmaker inspired by ancient Roman models.

Walter Dorwin Teague was a well-established industrial designer by 1928, when the Eastman Kodak Company, engaged him to modernize their line of cameras. Kodak sought Teague based on recommendations by curators from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Having no prior experience in camera design, Teague undertook the assignment after Kodak agreed that he could spend...

During the height of the Great Depression, Libbey Glass Company, a commercial glass manufacturer based in Toledo, Ohio, released several new lines of stemware including this Knickerbocker set. The 1933 Libbey Glass catalog heralded this introduction of products as a “New Era of Glass” and promoted these objects as “the highest point that has yet...

Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, the design team and one-time couple Gideon Löwy and Lone Lindinger-Löwy created a series of telephones called BeoCom, made for the Danish consumer electronics manufacturer Bang & Olufsen. The prefix “beo” is standard for all of Bang & Olufsen’s major products and the ending references the device’s purpose:...

In 1953, Dan Fuller, president of Fuller Fabrics, invited five of the 20th century’s most distinguished artists: Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Marc Chagall, Joan Miró, and Raoul Dufy, to collaborate on a line of textiles to be called the Modern Master Series. The concept was unique in that the artists were not commissioned to produce...

The concept of “eternal” style is a bit of an oxymoron, after all, many of today’s producers and designers roll out new and improved models on a regular basis. Thinking about cars, phones, and electronics it is easy to fall prey to the idea that everything is expendable and that each new item is better...

This object was featured in Object of the Day on Feb. 10, 2015, and has been recently updated with new cataloging information. Fillìa was the adopted name of Italian Futurist artist Luigi Colombo (1904–1936). Fillìa’s association with the Futurists began with the second generation that rose to prominence during the 1920s. This next wave of...

To celebrate the opening of Saturated: The Allure and Science of Color (May 11, 2018-January 13, 2019), Object of the Day this month will feature colorful objects from the exhibition.  Elsa Rady, an American ceramicist, created works in porcelain that bridge craft and fine art, recalling Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus philosophy that the craftsperson and artist are one-in-the-same....

Labyrinth is from a collection of murals ranging from traditional ruins and landscapes to more modern styles, or should I say mod? I love all the different wall surfaces, each decorated with a different pattern, and the circular cutouts that really open up the design. This page from the book is a miniature of the...

Sarah D. Coffin and Cynthia Trope discuss this lavish yet modern sharkskin desk, now on view in The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s.

A pioneer of modern design, Ruth Reeves was at the forefront of American textiles throughout her career, perpetually interested in the discovery of a national American voice in design. After studying at Pratt and the San Francisco School of Design, Reeves traveled to Paris, where she lived between 1921 and 1927. In America, the field...

Hans J. Wegner was a pioneer in modern Danish design in the 1950s and 1960s. Having designed more than 500 chairs throughout his career, with 100 of them being mass-produced, he has been affectionately known within the design world as the “Master of the Chair”.  His ingenious use of natural materials, in particular his admiration...

Echoing the larger artistic vision of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, this chair was designed for the hotel’s Peacock banquet room in the early 1920s. Amongst the 700 drawings that exist for the hotel, most are for its interior, showing how significant its design was.[1] The chair’s hexagonal back and square seat reflect...

This Austrian tea service was designed in a thoroughly modernist style. Forms have been radically simplified to their stark geometric essence. The pieces have no applied ornament, adhering to the principle of “form follows function”, one of the central tenets of modernist industrial design. Following the First World War, new economic and social conditions made...

In 1953, Dan Fuller, president of Fuller Fabrics, invited five of the 20th century’s most distinguished artists: Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Marc Chagall, Joan Miró, and Raoul Dufy, to collaborate on a line of textiles to be called the Modern Master Series. The concept was unique in that the artists were not commissioned to produce...