An Introduction to Design and Culture, 3rd Edition

4    Modernism and design

Theory and design at the turn of the century

We realised that the product made by machines could possess an ‘aesthetic’ properly derived from a confrontation between function and form.¹

The transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century witnessed a new approach towards the design of the visual, material and spatial world. The growing dissatisfaction with conspicuous consumption on the part of an international group of progressive architects and designers, and their belief that the rationalism of engineering provided a better basis on which to move forward than the commercial pragmatism of the capitalist marketplace, underpinned a sudden and dramatic revision of the principles that had long determined the role ...