Monument Man: The Life and Art of Daniel Chester French
The definitive biography of Daniel Chester French, the sculptor of the Lincoln Memorial, John Harvard in Harvard Yard, and The Minute Man in Concord, Massachusetts.Read More →
Michael Taylor (1927 – 1986) American Interior Designer – The “California Look”
Michael Taylor (1927 – 1986) was an American interior and furniture designer. He was known for the “California Style” and made his homes showplaces of the unexpected.Read More →
Ray Komai (1918 – 2010 ) American Graphic, Industrial and Interior Designer
Ray Komai was a Japanese American; he was a graphic, industrial and interior designer. He studied in Los Angeles at the Art Center College.
He settled in New York in 1944, where he worked in advertising and set up a graphic design and advertising office (with Carter Winter). J.G. Furniture created Komai’s 1949 moulded plywood chair with a split seat and bent metal legs. They produced his other designs of chairs, tables and upholstered seating as well.Read More →
A Field Guide to American Houses (Revised)
Now in paperback: the fully expanded, updated, and freshly designed second edition of the most comprehensive and widely acclaimed guide to domestic architecture: in print since its original publication in 1984, and acknowledged everywhere as the unmatched, essential guide to American houses.Read More →
Dakota Jackson American furniture designer
Dakota Jackson is an American furniture designer best known for his Dakota Jackson furniture line. He was a magician’s son, and by the time he was six, he became a professional magician. He performed in public until his early 20s.Read More →
Paul Tuttle (1918 – 2002) American furniture and interior designer
Paul Tuttle (1918 – 2002) was an American designer best known for his furniture designs and his work in interior design and architecture. Tuttle had no formal design education and instead drew inspiration from his own life and the mentorship of well-known artists like Alvin Lustig, Welton Becket, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Tuttle worked as a furniture designer for over 50 years, producing a body of work that included mass-produced and custom-made pieces.Read More →
George Washington Maher (1864 – 1926) American furniture designer and architect
George Washington Maher (1864 – 1926) was a furniture designer and architect from the United States.
He worked as an apprentice in Joseph Lyman Silsbee’s architecture office alongside Frank Lloyd Wright and George Grant Elmslie.Read More →
Hendrik van Keppel (1914-1987) American interior designer
Hendrik Van Keppel was an American interior designer who lived from 1914 to 1987. He was professionally active in Los Angeles.Read More →
Charles Pollock (1930 – 2013) American industrial designer
Charles Pollock (1930 – 2013) was an American industrial designer who created sleek furniture, most notably an office chair held together by a single aluminium band that became known as a Pollock Chair. Read More →
Vance Packard (1914 – 1996) writer and critic of consumerism
Vance Packard (1914 – 1996) was an American writer who brought many of the less favourable effects of consumerism in the developed world to the public’s attention in a straightforward manner. After graduating from Pennsylvania State University in 1936, he started his career as a journalist writing for several newspapers and the Associated Press before becoming the editor of American magazine from 1942 to 1946.Read More →
Marc Harrison (1936 – 1998) American Industrial designer
Marc Harrison (1936-1998) was an industrial designer from the United States. Harrison sustained a significant brain injury in a sledding accident when he was eleven years old. He had to relearn simple functions like walking and talking as a result of the crash. Harrison gained experience and motivation for his future work as an industrial designer due to this incident and his lengthy recovery.Read More →
Keith Haring (1958-1990) art that danced
Keith Haring was best known for his graffiti-like painting, initially on the black paper used to cover discontinued billboard advertisements in the New York subway. After after a feverish 1980’s style career of surging popular success and grudging critical attention, Haring died of AIDS in 1991 at the age of 31.Read More →
Angelo Testa (1921 – 1984) American fabric designer
Angelo Testa (1921 – 1984) was an American fabric designer. He studied at the Institute of Design, Chicago, to 1945. As well as being a fabric designer, he was a painter and sculptor.
He designed the 1941 Little Man abstract floral fabric, widely published and hailed as a new direction in textile design. It all began, in fact, with a doodle. A free-form sketch with a dancing shape that intrigued its artist.Read More →
Eliot Noyes (1910 – 1977) American industrial designer
Eliot Noyes (1910 – 1977) was an industrial designer from the United States. From 1928 to 1932, he studied architecture at Harvard University, followed by stints at the Graduate School of Design from 1932 to 1935 and 1937 to 1938. Read More →
Walter Kantack (1889 – 1953) – American Lighting Designer
Walter Kantack was an American Lighting Designer born in Meriden, Connecticut. He completed his studies at the Pratt Institute in New York.
Kantack worked in the drafting room of the Edward F. Caldwell decorating firm in New York. In 1915 he began working at sterling Bronze as a designer. In 1917 he set up his design firm and became a specialist in custom lighting until 1932. He was the vice president of Architectural League of New York, honorary member of American Institute of Decorators, and member of the Hoover Delegation to the 1925 Paris ‘Exposition International des Arts Decorate des Industries Modernes.Read More →
Frederick Hurten Rhead (1880 – 1942) British Ceramicist
Frederick Hurten Rhead was an English-born American potter and ceramic artist. He was born into a family of potters and designers. He received his English pottery training before moving to the United States in 1902. Read More →
Don Albinson – American furniture designer
The 1965 stacking Albinson chair produced by Knoll was similar to British Designer’s Robin Day trendy chair for Hille, although Albinson’s was more sophisticated. They stack, hook together side by side and comfortable to sit in. After Knoll he became a consultant designer to Westinghouse on office seating and furniture systems.Read More →
In the Pink: Dorothy Draper – America’s Most Fabulous Decorator
Has there ever been an American decorator as famous as Dorothy Draper? Like Martha Stewart, Draper was a preacher and teacher whose how-to books and Good Housekeeping columns provided middle-class homemakers with affordable ideas for making their homes more functional and comfortable. Thanks to her originality as a stylist and her daring as a businesswoman,Read More →
Geoffrey Beene (1927-2004) an American Fashion Designer
Geoffrey Beene (1927 – 2004) was an American fashion designer; born Haynesville, Louisiana. He was a premed student at Tulane University when he found himself sketching gowns when he became bored during his lectures. Along with Bill Blass, he was regarded as the Godfather of American sportswear. Studies Between 1941-44, he studied at Tulane UniversityRead More →
Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) American sculptor and designer.
Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988), was an American sculptor and designer. He was born in Los Angeles and professionally active in New York. He was influential and well-received in the twentieth century. He produced sculptures, gardens, furniture and lighting designs, ceramics, architecture, and set designs throughout his lifetime of creative experimentation. His work, both subtle and bold, traditional and modern, set a new standard for reintegrating the arts.Read More →
Thomas Molesworth an American furniture designer
Molesworth ranch style furniture has inspired contemporary Western furniture designers such as Jim Covert, Jeff Morris and Marc Tagesger with its large brass pads, Native American motifs and wildfire imagery.Read More →
How Paul Rand influenced Steve Jobs to accept the the visual identity for NeXT.
During Steve Job’s time at NeXT he commissioned graphic designer Paul Rand to create the visual identity for NeXT. Rand had the reputation for exerting great influence on his clients, he created a 100-page branding book to help Steve Jobs understand the entire design process hidden behind the NeXT identity. Read More →
Jay Spectre (1930 – 1992) American Interior and furniture designer
Jay Spectre (1930 – 1992) was an American Interior and furniture designer. He was born in Louisville, Kentucky. He was professionally active in New York.
He began his interior design career in 1951 in Louisville. In 1968, he established the design company Jay Spectre, in New York. He designed interiors for luxury homes, private jet aircraft, yachts, and offices, which showed Art Deco, Asian, and African influences with high-tech and hand-carved elements. Read More →
Florence Koehler American artist, craftsperson and designer
Florence Koehler was an American artist, craftsperson, designer, and jeweller, professionally active in Chicago, London and Rome. She was one of the best-known jewellers of the Arts and Crafts movement that flourished in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In Chicago, Koehler’s jewellery in a crafts style was fashionable in artistic circles. Koehler became one of the American crafts-revival leaders in jewellery, related more to French than English styles.Read More →
Raymond Loewy – an American Designer
He arrived in the United States in 1929, just in time for the great depression. As it happened the beginning of the depression was a fortuitous time for a talented designer with new ideas to arrive in the United States. The old design aesthetic was disappearing with the collapsing economy. Manufacturers wanted to stimulate demand for their products by offering customers new designs, and Loewy had an abundance of them with the ego to match. His mother had always told him, “It is better to be envied than pitied.”Read More →
William Van Alen (1883 – 1954) American architect (Chrysler Building)
William Van Alen (1883 – 1954) was an American architect born in Brooklyn, New York. He was professionally active in New York.Read More →
End of WWII a revolution in furniture design
End of WWII a revolution in furniture design. Womb and shell chairs, biomorphic tables, cat’s cradle pedestals, and architectural shapes are reminiscent of the Second World War’s fertile furniture design era.Read More →
Charles Eames American designer, filmmaker and architect
Charles Eames, a distinguished American designer, filmmaker and architect, studied architecture at Washington University in St. Louis in 1924. In the early 1930s, having worked in private practice, he received a fellowship in 1936 to study architecture and design at the Academy of Art in Cranbrook, which proved to be a valuable experience. Read More →
John Mascheroni American furniture and industrial designer
John Mascheroni is an American furniture and industrial designer. He studied at the Pratt Insitute in Brooklyn New York. He opened his own design office and furniture factory in New York. Mascheroni designed furniture for manufactures in High Point, North Carolina. From 1990, his furniture designs were produced by Swaim and, from 1991, others by Jeffco.Read More →
Danny Ho Fong – Chinese American furniture designer
Danny Ho Fong was a Chinese American furniture manufacturer. He was born in Canton and professionally active in San Francisco and Los Angeles.Read More →
Sam Maloof American furniture designer and maker
Sam Maloof, whose simple, elegant wooden furniture he designed and handmade, made him a central figure in the American post-war craft movement. Read More →
Oscar Onken and the ‘The Shop of the Crafters’
Oscar Onken (1858 – 1948) was an American entrepreneur. He was professionally active in Ohio. Onken was a prominent businessman and philanthropist. Impressed with the Gustav Stickley and Austrian stands at the 1904 St. Louis ‘Louisiana Purchase Exposition,’ he founded The Shop of the Crafts in Cincinnati in 1904. Read More →
Elbert Green Hubbard American furniture designer
Elbert Green Hubbard (1856 – 1915) was an American furniture designer. Hubbard met William Morris in 1894 and the following year inspired by Morris’s Kelmscott Press, founded the Raycroft Press’ East Aurora, near Buffalo, New York. He was the founder of the Roycrofters, an Arts and Crafts community; he organized workshops, lectured, and wrote as a highly effective champion of the Arts and Crafts philosophy.Read More →
Dorothy Draper American interior designer
Dorothy Draper (1889 – 1969) was an American interior designer. She was born in Tuxedo Park, New York. Draper’s upper-crust upbringing, Tuxedo Park was one of the first gated communities in the United States. Dorothy’s parents were part of an old New England family with longstanding social connections. Dorothy’s childhood was spent playing in high-ceilinged ballrooms.Read More →
Faience Manufacturing Company – the heart of American ceramics
The Faience Manufacturing Company was an American manufacturing company that operated between 1880 – 1892 in the Greenpoint area of Brooklyn, New York. There is little evidence of the remains of the Company as it failed in 1892.Read More →
Ulrich Franzen (1921 – 2012) German-born American architect and designer
Ulrich Franzen, the German-born American architect, was a leading figure in the first post-war generation of American architects; including Paul Rudolph, Harry Cobb, John Maclane Johansen, and Philip Johnson. Read More →
Herbert Bayer American painter, photographer, architect, designer and sculptor
Herbert Bayer was an American; painter, photographer, architect, designer, and sculptor. His unspecialised approach to art and design reflected his Bauhaus training emphasizing basic principles of visual communication. He emerged as a veritable one-person band of modernism, able to address problems of form in practically any medium. Read More →
Paul Bacon – created looks for books
Paul Bacon was not a household name, but anyone who has a passion for books will have seen his works. Bacon was an artist, who used minimal imagery and bold typography to sell famous novels such as, “Catch 22” by Joseph Heller, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest’s and Phillip Roth’s “Portnoy’s complaint? Joseph HellerRead More →
Ray Eames an American Designer
Ray Eames (b. Bernice Alexandra Kaiser 1912-88) was an American designer. She was born in Sacramento, California. She was the wife of Charles Eames. Read More →
Donald Deskey an American industrial, furniture and interior designer
Donald Deskey was an American industrial, furniture, and interior designer. He was born in Blue Earth, Minnesota. He was professionally active in New York. He may have lacked the European sophistication and architectural training of his friend Paul Frankl. However, he created a uniquely American modern style that combined streamlining with French Art Deco taste.Read More →
Eugene Schoen (1880 – 1957) was an American architect and designer
Eugene Schoen (1880 – 1957) was an American architect and designer. He was born and professionally active in New York. He was one of the few American born designers during the 20s and 30s to achieve success. Education He studied architecture, Columbia University, New York, to 1901; Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna, under Otto WagnerRead More →
Charles Pfister (1938 – 1990) was an American interior and furniture designer
Charles Pfister (1939 to 1990) was an American interior and furniture designer and architect. He was professionally active in San Francisco. After earning a B.A. in Architecture from the University of California, Charles Pfister worked as an interior designer at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill for 15 years. It was during this period that he createdRead More →
Tucker Viemeister American Product Designer
Tucker Viemeister is an American product designer. He was born in Yellow Springs, Ohio. He was professionally active in New York and was the son of industrial designer Read Viemeister. Education Tucker Viemeister graduated from Yellow Springs High School in 1966, went to two different colleges. He ended up studying industrial design at the PrattRead More →
Maya Lin an American architect and designer
Vietnam Veterans War Memorial Maya Lin is an American architect. She was born in Athens, Ohio, in 1959. Her parents had come from China to America in the 1940s. They both taught at the University of Ohio. Her father was a ceramicist and the art school’s dean. Her mother was a poet and a professorRead More →
Judith Leiber designer of handbags
Judith Leiber was a prolific designer whose fanciful minaudières had accessorised royalties, first ladies, and film stars, and entered the collections of art the Metropolitan Museum of Art. While her couture handbags—carried by celebrities such as Greta Garbo, Elizabeth Taylor, Claudette Colbert, Björk, and Barbara Walters—are widely regarded as works of art, Leiber preferred theRead More →
Candace Wheeler (1827 – 1923) American textile and wallpaper designer
Candace Wheeler was an American textile and wallpaper designer. She was born in Delhi, New York and professionally active in New York. Long before there was Martha Stewart, Candace Wheeler helped bring a woman’s touch to the male-dominated field of interior design in 19th century America by teaching wealthier women how to make their homes more comfortable.Read More →
Maya Romanoff American textile designer
Maya Romanoff was an American Textile Designer. He studied at the University of California at Berkeley. When he saw tie-dyed t-shirts at Woodstock Music Festival in 1969, Maya Romanoff discovered the magic of dying t-shirts. His profound fascination with colours and fabric led him to start the Skokie Corporation, a business that has grown into $18Read More →
Harvey Littleton American glassware designer
Harvey Littleton was an American glassware designer. He was born in Corning, New York. He was professionally active in the USA and Britain. Harvey Littleton Glass as a medium for artistic expression Between 1939-42 and 1946-47, he studied at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, receiving a bachelor’s degree in design. In 1941 andRead More →
Herb Lubalin renowned graphic designer
Renowned American graphic designer, Herb Lubalin, best known for his collaborations with Ralph Ginzburg on the magazines Eros, Fact and Avant Garde, is regarded as one of the seminal designers of the 20th century. The, 17 March 2018, will mark what would have been Lubalin’s 100th birthday.Read More →
William Dwiggins – Typographer and all-rounder
William Addison Dwiggins was an American type designer and typographer. He was well rounded and was loved for his prolific work as an illustrator, book designer, type designer, playwright, (puppets) and author. Dwiggins was born in Martinsville, Ohio in 1880, he had studied East in Chicago, and then he moved to Boston. Between the yearsRead More →
Francis H. Bacon American Furniture and Interior Designer
Francis H. Bacon (1856-1940) was the American designer of furniture and interior design; active Boston; architect Henry Bacon’s brother. He studied at the College of Technology of Massachusetts, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1877. He travelled to Europe from 1878 to 1879, working briefly as a draughtsman in the offices of McKim, Mead and Bigelow, New York,Read More →
Buckminster Fuller compared to Leonardo da Vinci
Buckminster Fuller was a preacher as much as an architect, a town crier as a scientist. He was among the first minds of the twentieth century to see that every aspect of a man’s physical environment was connected to every other. He believed that we could uncover entire worlds out of simple geometrical truths, andRead More →
William Gray Purcell American architect and furniture designer
William Gray Purcell was an American architect and furniture designer. He was active in Minneapolis and Philadelphia.Read More →
Paul Howard Manship – American Sculptor
Paul Howard Manship was an American Sculptor. He was influenced by Hindu and Buddhist Indian Sculpture.
He began his artistic education at the St. Paul School of Art in Minnesota, and he attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts before moving onto New York City’s Art Student League. Throughout his subsequent career, he created more than 700 sculptural pieces in stone and marble.Read More →
William Dwiggins – Typographer and all rounder
William Addison Dwiggins was an American type designer and typographer. He was well rounded and was loved for his prolific work as an illustrator, book designer, type designer, playwright, (puppets) and author. Dwiggins was born in Martinsville, Ohio in 1880, he had studied East in Chicago, and then he moved to Boston. Between the yearsRead More →
Saul Bass opening and closing titles.
Saul Bass Born May 8, 1920Known for Graphic Design, title designer, film directorAwards Academy Award, Best Documentary When the Frank Sinatra film on drug addiction “The Man With The Golden Arm” opened, a Saul Bass poster dominated the cinema billboards. No words, only artwork- a jagged arm. Saul Bass produced designs which were part of AmericanRead More →