Main entry:

Nieland, Justus, author, aut

Title & Author:

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

Publication:

Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2020]

Description:

417 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 23 cm

Notes:
Includes bibliographical references and index.
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?.

Summary:

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, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Gyoergy 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.0Eames-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.

ISBN:

9781517902049 hardcover alkaline paper
1517902045 hardcover alkaline paper
9781517902056 paperback alkaline paper
1517902053 paperback alkaline paper

Subject:

Eames, Charles Influence.
Eames, Ray Influence.
Eames, Charles
Eames, Ray
Eames, Charles 1907-1978
Eames, Ray 1912-1988
Bibel Philemonbrief
Motion pictures Art direction.
Motion pictures Setting and scenery.
Modernism (Art) United States.
Cinéma Direction artistique.
Cinéma Décors.
Modernisme (Art) États-Unis.
Civilization
Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.)
Modernism (Art)
Einfluss
United States Civilization 20th century.
États-Unis Civilisation 20e siècle.
United States
1945-1970

Holdings:

Location: Library main 308190
Call No.: BIB 253618
Status: Available