2021-2022 Academic Catalog

Nov 24, 2024

2021-2022 Academic Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

ARTH 243 - Design in the 20th Century: Arts & Crafts to Ikea

A survey of modern design in the Western hemisphere, including furniture, textiles, appliances, logos and graphic design, and architecture. Throughout the 20th century, modernists have used design to promote various reformist agendas - reform of working conditions for the industrial laborer, reform for the lifestyles of individual consumers, and reform of the values held by society at large. This course examines the objects and buildings that were designed to be the vehicles of social change, and analyzes their aesthetics as well as their ideological agendas. The course begins with the radical Arts & Crafts movement in Britain and the United States, and then covers International Style architecture and Bauhaus design in the 1920s, biomorphic and atomic-age design in the mid-20th century, the design of appliances and automobiles in the postwar period, and postmodernism in the late-20th century. The course concludes with an analysis of our own contemporary, design-obsessed society, investigating the populist agenda of such enormous commercial empires as Target and Ikea.

Prerequisites: Prereq: A lecture class in modernist art strongly recommended.

Anticipated Terms Offered: Offered every other year