#MODERN SECTIONAL SOFA SERIES#
The architect Robert Venturi had already begun a series of plywood chairs for Knoll Inc. After the initial Memphis show caused an uproar, postmodern design quickly took off in America. Memphis works remain icons of postmodernism: the Sottsass Casablanca bookcase, with its leopard-print plastic veneer de Lucchi’s First chair, which has been described as having the look of an electronics component Martine Bedin’s Super lamp: a pull-toy puppy on a power cord leash. That it did: the first Memphis collection appeared in 1981 and broke all the modernist taboos, embracing irony, kitsch, wild ornamentation and bad taste. The Memphis Group saw design as a means of communication and they wanted it to shout. Sottsass and Michele de Lucchi, in 1980, gathered a core group of young designers, which would come to include Michael Graves, Marco Zanini, Shiro Kuramata and Matteo Thun, into a design collective they called Memphis.
In the next decade in Milan, a cohort of designers led by Ettore Sottsass and Alessandro Mendini brought the discussion to bear on design. Starting in the 1960s, a small cadre of mainly American architects began to argue that modernism, once high-minded and even noble in its goals, had become stale, stagnant and blandly corporate. Postmodernism began as an architectural critique. The fact that, decades later, postmodern design still has the power to provoke thoughts (along with other reactions) proves they were not entirely correct. The characteristics of postmodern furniture and other postmodern objects included hot-colored, loud-patterned, usually plastic surfaces strange proportions and weird angles and a vague-at-best relationship between form and function.Ĭritics derided postmodern design as a grandstanding bid for attention and nothing of consequence. Strictly speaking, postmodern design was a short-lived movement that manifested itself chiefly in Italy and the United States in the early 1980s.
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