Happiness by design : modernism and media in the Eames era / Justus Nieland.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Nieland, Justus, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Eames, Charles--Influence.

Eames, Charles.

Eames, Ray--Influence.

Eames, Ray.

Motion pictures--Art direction.

Motion pictures.

Motion pictures--Setting and scenery.

Modernism (Art)--United States.

Modernism (Art).

United States--Civilization--20th century.

United States.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (441 pages)

Place of Publication:

Minneapolis, Minnesota ; London : University of Minnesota Press, [2020]

Summary:

A cultural history of modern lifestyle viewed through film and multimedia experiments of midcentury designers Charles and Ray Eames For the designers Charles and Ray Eames, happiness was both a technical and ideological problem central to the future of liberal democracy. Being happy demanded new things but also a vanguard life in media that the Eameses modeled as they brought film into their design practice. Midcentury modernism is often considered institutionalized, but Happiness by Design casts Eames-era designers as innovative media artists, technophilic humanists, change managers, and neglected film theorists. Happiness by Design offers a fresh cultural history of midcentury modernism through the film and multimedia experiments of Charles and Ray Eames and their peers--Will Burtin, László Moholy-Nagy, and György Kepes, among others--at a moment when designers enjoyed a new cultural prestige. Justus Nieland traces how, as representatives of the American Century's exuberant material culture, Cold War designers engaged in creative activities that spanned disciplines and blended art and technoscience while reckoning with the environmental reach of media at the dawn of the information age. Eames-era modernism, Nieland shows, fueled novel techniques of culture administration, spawning new partnerships between cultural and educational institutions, corporations, and the state. From the studio, showroom floor, or classroom to the stages of world fairs and international conferences, the midcentury multimedia experiments of Charles and Ray Eames and their circle became key to a liberal democratic lifestyle--and also anticipated the look and feel of our networked present.

Contents:

Happy furniture: on the media environments of the Eames chair

The scale is the world: designer pedagogy and expanded cinema

Management cinema: film, communication, and postwar world-making in Aspen

Memories of overdevelopment: the vision conferences and the fate of environmental design

Designer film theory: techniques of happiness

Designer film theory, II: media pedagogy and modernist information aesthetics

Coda: the Norton chair, circa 1970: trilling or Eames?.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

1-4529-6017-8