Juliet Kinchin

Aidan O'Connor

Did the twentieth century live up to what Swedish design reformer and social theorist Ellen Key, writing in 1900, envisaged as "the century of the child" ? This book, produced in conjunction with a major exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, takes both its title and its launching point from Key's landmark book, which presaged the coming century as a period of intensified focus on and progressive thinking about the rights, development, and well-being of children. It tracks the fascinating confluence between the cultures of modern design and childhood, through an introductory essay by Juliet Kinchin, sixty-five short essays, and more than four hundred illustrations. The resulting kaleidoscopic narrative of innovative ideas, practitioners, and artifacts examines individual and collective visions for the material world of children, from utopian dreams for the citizens of the future to the dark realities of political conflict and exploitation. Despite being the focus of intense concern and profound thought, children remain one of the most underrepresented subjects in the historical analysis of modern design. To address this lacuna, this book surveys more than one hundred years of school architecture, playgrounds, toys and games, educational materials, children's hospitals and safety equipment, nurseries, furniture, animation, propaganda, advertising, books, and clothing. The outstanding projects that emerge illuminate how progressive design has enhanced the physical, intellectual, and emotional development of children and, conversely, how models of children's play and pedagogy have informed experimental design thinking. As protean beings and elastic ideological symbols, children help us to mediate between the ideal and real: they propel our thoughts forward. But as we look back, they also reveal important new dimensions of modernism in the twentieth century.

Growing by Design, 1900-2000

Century of the Child

Automaniaexplores the ways in which motor vehicles reshaped how people lived, worked, and enjoyed themselves over the course of the 20th century, and the continuing positive and negative imprint on the design and organization of today's built environment. Published to accompany an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, the catalogue showcases ten cars in MoMA's collection: a Jeep (designed 1952), a Citroën DS23 (1973), a Volkswagen Beetle (designed 1938), a Fiat Cinquecento City Car (launched 1957), a Pininfarina Cisitalia 202 GT Car (designed 1946), a Formula 1 Racing Car, (1990), a Porsche 911 coupé (1965), an Airstream Bambi Traveler (1960), E-type Roadster (1966), and a Smart Car (1998). Presented alongside the vehicles are car parts, architectural models, films, photographs, posters, paintings, and sculptures, including Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's 1898 print L'Automobiliste, Lily Reich's 1930s designs for a tubular-steel car seat, photographs of American car factories (c. 1930-32) by Margaret Bourke-White, Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times (1963) by Andy Warhol, and Jorge Rigamonti's 1966-70 photocollage illustrating a dystopic view of environmental destruction in Venezuela.Organized into six thematic chapters, Automania includes an introductory essay by curator Juliet Kinchin and examines the car as a modern industrial product, transportation innovator, and style icon, as well as the generator of fatalities, traffic-choked environments, and ecological disaster in the oil age. "Cars have reimagined mobility, connecting us across great distances at ever greater speed, but this increased freedom and economic empowerment have come at the expense of tremendous human suffering and environmental damage," says Kinchin.

Automania

Discusses the history of the kitchen during the twentieth century, and describes how changes in technology, design, domestic life, space, organization, food, consumerism, politics, and gender role has affected its value in a home.

Design and the Modern Kitchen

Counter Space

Mark Bills

Edwin Longsden Long

Simon Olding

In his London heyday, Long's work adorned the central position at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition as well as being a permanent feature of the Bond Street galleries in London. Edwin Longsden Long RA is the first work to catalogue Long's prolific output and to give an account of his life and of the context within which he worked. Essays by Simon Olding and Juliet Kinchin focus respectively on The Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum's prominent collection of Long's work, and on his London studio houses.

Juliet Kinchin

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