Furniture Design Ideas

Gallery exhibitions on furniture design at the local, regional, national, and international levels have become common occurrences, and they serve a significant purpose in educating and evolving contemporary paradigms about design. The International Arts and Crafts exhibit in London, Indianapolis, and San Francisco in 1996; the London exhibit focusing on Italian furniture design entitled "Icons" […]

The industry arose during the nineteenth century. Selective furniture companies have promoted the culture of design by publishing books, sponsoring gallery exhibitions, and coordinating international conferences. As industry has grown in political and economic strength, it has assumed a greater academic and cultural responsibility. Contemporary fur­niture companies renowned for educating and evolving the culture of […]

Important distinctions were made between the architect and the artisan (head and hand) in the 1400s during the rise of the Renaissance. Leon Battista Alberti’s writing gets right to the point in articulating distinctions between thinking and making in architectural theory. Four hundred years later, the Industrial Revolution furthered the polemic gap between "head" and […]

Digital milling machines, high-end computer technologies, intuitive three-dimensional com­puter-aided design drawing (CADD) modeling programs, new synthetics, and smart materi­als are helping designers and fabricators realize new furniture products. In addition to the assimilation of digital technologies, green design has become a significant, almost an inher­ent, aspect of design. We have seen and will continue to […]

In many interior and building projects, the design or selection of furniture has significant value in the generation and development of architectural and interior work. Academic and professional environments reinforce the notion that furniture design is a significant com­ponent of interior spaces. However, furniture design encompasses disciplines extending beyond architecture and interior design. In the […]

Furniture craftsmen emerged in the United States soon after World War II, seeking to create works of beauty using handcraft technologies. They were somewhat resistant to the industri­alization and mechanization in which the country was immersed and were often associated with studio furniture, which was crafted using machine and hand tools. George Nakashima, Wendell Castle, […]

How did modernism affect society? Modernism was not broadly accepted until after World War II, when society began to look to the culture of design for leadership in social change. Exceptionally talented designers worked closely with artisans and craft shops throughout the United States and Europe during this time to bring the modern ideal into […]

Walter Gropius (1883-1969) founded the Bauhaus school in Dessau, Germany, in 1919. It precipitated a revolution in art, design, and architectural education whose influence is still felt today. In the words of Wolf von Eckardt, the Bauhaus "created the patterns and set the standards of present-day industrial design; it helped to invent modern architecture; it […]

In 1901, American architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1869-1959) gave a talk at a meeting of the Chicago Society of Arts and Crafts entitled "The Art and Craft of the Machine." He declared that the furniture he designed was suitable for machine production and that machines should be abhorred only when they were set to replicate […]

The Arts and Crafts movement was inspired by a crisis of conscience. Its motivations were social and moral, and its aesthetic values derived from the conviction that society produces the art and architecture it deserves.9 The American segment of the Arts and Crafts period (1895-1915) was marked by a structural expression of simple form and […]