Mid Century Modern Designers

Jean Prouvé never trained as an architect. He trained as a metalworker, ran a workshop, and designed chairs, buildings, and prefabricated houses using the same logic: honest materials, visible structure, nothing that didn't need to be there.

Gio Ponti designed furniture, buildings, espresso machines, tiles, cutlery, and a chair so light it could be lifted with two fingers. He also founded Domus magazine in 1928, which is still publishing. He did this while being prolific in a way that most designers manage in a lifetime.

In 1936, Eva Zeisel was arrested by the NKVD and accused of plotting to assassinate Stalin. No plot existed. Alone in a Moscow cell at age 30, she kept her mind from breaking by designing pottery she couldn't touch.

In 1922, Eliel Saarinen came second in the Chicago Tribune Tower competition. Louis Sullivan publicly declared his design the better one. That review changed Saarinen's life, brought him to America, and built Cranbrook — the school that trained half of mid-century design.

In 1927, Le Corbusier looked at Charlotte Perriand's portfolio and said 'We don't embroider cushions here.' She went home, built a chrome bar from scratch, and changed his mind. Then spent a decade designing furniture everyone attributed to him.

In 1980, Ettore Sottsass hosted a meeting at his apartment in Milan. Bob Dylan's 'Memphis, Tennessee' was playing. They named the movement after the song. Memphis changed everything about what design was allowed to look like.

Charles Eames died on August 21, 1978. Ray Eames died on August 21, 1988. Ten years to the day. She had spent the decade running the Eames Office alone, and the decade before that being called 'Charles's wife.

Joe Colombo died in 1971 at age 40, ten months before his biggest show opened at MoMA. He had a degenerative heart condition and roughly a decade to work. That explains everything.

The Italian-American sculptor who made chairs that are 80% empty space, then discovered that the sculptures he built with his royalties made music when the wind hit them.

The Finnish architect who designed a chair specifically to help patients breathe, invented a manufacturing process for bent plywood that nobody had tried before, and created a glass vase that became the most copied object in Finnish design history.

The architect who used only curves because straight lines 'belong to men' while curves belong to the mountains and rivers. He joined the Communist Party in 1945 and stayed a member for the rest of his very long life.

The designer who won a Rome Prize, interviewed Le Corbusier, invented the family room, and built the most influential furniture studio in American history, mostly by letting other people do the designing.

The Japanese-American artist who made a coffee table out of revenge, voluntarily entered an internment camp when he didn't have to, and spent forty years arguing that sculpture belonged in living rooms, not just museums.

The Finnish-American who grew up on a Modernist construction site, declared war on table legs, and died nine months before his greatest building opened its doors.

The Braun design director who wrote ten principles, influenced every Apple product ever made, and spent the last decades of his career worried that he'd contributed to a throwaway society.

The Swiss architect who rejected Charlotte Perriand for 'embroidering cushions,' then hired her to design the furniture the world now credits to him. Also: he nearly demolished central Paris.

The Russian abstract painter who arrived at the Bauhaus at 55 and spent eleven years writing the rulebook that mid-century designers followed without necessarily knowing it existed.

In 1956, Arne Jacobsen designed an entire hotel in Copenhagen, creating the Egg Chair, Swan Chair, and Drop Chair for the project. The Series 7 has since sold over five million units.

How a 1947 cocktail-fueled design session produced over 130 clock designs that transformed American interiors and established new manufacturing approaches for decorative timepieces.

The orphaned baker's daughter who convinced Mies van der Rohe to license the Barcelona Chair, doubled a company's revenue in ten years while running it solo, and taught corporate America that diagonal desks were ridiculous.

Charles and Ray Eames transformed furniture from utilitarian objects into sculptural statements. Discover how a architect and a painter created the most coveted chair in modern design history.