Industrial aesthetics and design — interior decorating
I picked this book up at the local used book store the other day:
Joan Kron and Suzanne Slesin, High-Tech: The Industrial Style and
Source Book for the Home, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1978), 286 pp.
foreword by Emilio Ambasz
designed by Walter Bernard
Yes, here it is: how to furnish your home, industrial style.
Here’s the info from the jacket, including author bios. Let’s just say
it’s a combination of RE/Search and Better Homes & Gardens. Enjoy:
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HIGH-TECH
The Industrial Style and Source Book for the Home
How to outfit your home with paraphernalia originally developed for
factories, battleships, dry cleaners, laboratories, Chinese restaurants, and
hundreds of other commercial and industrial users.
_CONTENTS_
THE INDUSTRIAL AESTHETIC
STRUCTURAL ELEMENTS
SYSTEMS
STORAGE
FURNITURE
MATERIALS
LIGHTING
THE WORKS
FINISHING TOUCHES
plus the High-Tech Directory, a 42-page illustrated buying guide,
listing hundreds of hard-to-find industrial sources.
Gym lockers in the bedroom, factory lamps over the dining table,
detection mirrors over the dressing table, movers’ pads for upholstery,
Con Ed guardrails for towel racks, I beams for end tables, steno chairs
for dining chairs, supermarket doors swinging into the kitchen, warehouse
shelving in the living room, scaffolding beds, test tubes for bud vases —
something exciting is happening in home furnishings and it’s called
high-tech. If you haven’t heard about it yet, you will soon. And its
meaning will soon become as familiar as art deco or art nouveau.
A play on the words “high-style” and “technology”, “high-tech” is a
term being used in archtectural circles to describe an increasing number of
residences and public buildings with a nuts-and-bolts-exposed-pipes
technological look or to describe residences made of prefabricated components
more commonly used to build warehouses or factories. Authors Joan Kron and
Suzanne Slesin, two infuential home-furnishings reporters, have expanded this
definition to include a parallel trend in interior design — the use of
commonplace commercial and industrial equipment in the home.
HIGH-TECH is a breakthrough book about a revolution in design that is
sweeping the country — in fact, the world. It is the first in-depth look
at the industrial aesthetic as applied to architecture and home furnishings.
Whether you live in a split-level, a loft, a penthouse, a carriage
house, or an efficiency apartment, this book will change the way you look
at the world and inspire you to explore the commercial and industrial
landscape. Why limit yourself to what is offered in traditional
furniture outlets when there is a wealth of underutilized equipment that can
moonlight residentially?
In his foreword to HIGH-TECH, Emilio Ambasz, prizewinning architect
and designer and former curator of design at the Museum of Modern Art,
explains how many of these alternative artifacts are noble pieces of
anonymous design unencumbered by the artificial need to reflect status.
In HIGH-TECH you will see, beautifully illustrated, how top designers and
architects have used ordinary, basic assembly-line products —
prefabricated mezzanines, dry cleaners’ racks, pallets (right off forklift
trucks), beakers and fleakers, Sonotubes, and Colorlith laboratory
counter tops — with style and panache, and how you can follow suit.
Neither funky nor pie in the sky, HIGH-TECH is meant to do more than
sit there on the coffee table looking pretty. It is organized logically
according to your design problems, from structural elements for renovations
to systems, storage, furniture, materials, lighting, hardware, kitchen and
bathroom appliances, and finishing touches.
In the 32-page Storage chapter, for instance, you’ll learn how to use
lockers and wardrobes, file cabinets and art supply drawers, pick racks,
doughnut baskets, small parts bins, revolving warehouse racks, and electric
conveyor systems to organize and simplify your home environment — and that’s
just the beginning.
More than the first comprehensive book about the industrial revolution
in design, more than a history of the genre, more than an interior design
book with hundreds of color pictures showing innovative uses for many
familiar industrial and commercial products and materials — HIGH-TECH
is a source book. Unlike any previous design book, it includes estimated
prices (ranging from $1 to $10,000) for many of the products illustrated as
well as the names and addresses of their manufacturers and distributors
throughout the world.
HIGH-TECH is _the_ guide to the new industrial revolution in design.
Joan Kron is a former reporter for the Home section of the New
York Times, former senior editor and home furnishings writer for New York
magazine, and associate editor at Philadelphia magazine. She has also
written for the Ladies’ Home Journal and Town & Country.
Suzanne Slesin, a senior editor at Esquire, writes about design and
home furnishings. She is a former contributing editor of New York
magazine, where she covered home furnishings. She has also contributed
to American Home, Industrial Design, Architecture Plus, Abitare, and Domus.
Walter Bernard is the art director of Time magazine, which he
redesigned last year, and the former art director of New York magazine.
He has won numerous art direction awards and is a visiting professor at
Cooper Union.
_Jacket photo_: In an East Hampton living room by Bray-Schaible
Design, a high-tech hearth/coffee table combination is surfaced in “deck
plate,” a common industrial material often used on the floors of battleship
boiler rooms. The fruit bowl is a concrete birdbath.
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