Bringing Modernity Home Writings on Popular Design and Material Culture

"This collection of key essays about the domestic environment appears at a moment when the home is no longer dismissed as an insignificant feminine area, but is increasingly recognised as one of the fundamental units of human culture and, as such, of immense importance as a site for the study of society. While attending to individual case studies it also offers a synoptic view of the culture of design from a variety of perspectives. These range from the history of design education, to the view of a dying breed of craft-based designer-makers, to changes within the carpet and furniture industries and consumers taking control of the design of their own homes through doing their own interior design. It shows how apparently insignificant everyday objects as the coffee table can be seen as a sign of shift in the balance of power from production to consumption at a particular historical moment in the middle of the twentieth century. And thus it is possible to see how consumers adapted to modernity that revolutionised their lives through their consumption choices of such commodities as domestic furnishings." "This volume collects under one cover some of Judith Attfield's previously published best writings, containing essays such as 'Inside Pram Town: a case study of Harlow house interiors 1951-1961', that have since become classics in the History of Design."--BOOK JACKET.