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45-511: American Modern was a distinct American design aesthetic formed in the period between 1925 and World War II . American Modern was created by a pioneering group of designers , architects and artists , among them were Norman Bel Geddes , Donald Deskey , Henry Dreyfuss , Paul T. Frankl , William Lescaze , Raymond Loewy , Gilbert Rohde , Eliel Saarinen , Walter Dorwin Teague , Kem Weber and Russel Wright . This design sensibility impacted on

90-661: A blue plaque was erected by English Heritage at Wildwood Terrace, Pevsner's home since 1936. In 1984, the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles acquired the Nikolaus Pevsner Papers, an archive that includes 143 boxes of typed and handwritten notes, clippings, photographs, books, lecture notes, and manuscripts. Research notes by Pevsner (and other editors) for the Buildings of England series are held in

135-478: A design is called a design process, with some employing designated processes such as design thinking and design methods . The process of creating a design can be brief (a quick sketch) or lengthy and complicated, involving considerable research, negotiation, reflection, modeling , interactive adjustment, and re-design. Designing is also a widespread activity outside of the professions of those formally recognized as designers. In his influential book The Sciences of

180-404: A focus on the development of both particular and general skills for designing. Traditionally, its primary orientation has been to prepare students for professional design practice, based on project work and studio, or atelier , teaching methods. There are also broader forms of higher education in design studies and design thinking . Design is also a part of general education, for example within

225-560: A lifelong interest in Victorian architecture, also influenced by the Architectural Review , appeared in a series written under the pseudonym of "Peter F. R. Donner": Pevsner's "Treasure Hunts" guided readers down selected London streets, pointing out architectural treasures of the 19th century. He was also closely involved with the Review ' s proprietor, H. de C. Hastings , in evolving

270-558: A manifesto for Bauhaus (i.e. Weimar ) modernism, which it was not. In spite of that, the book remains an important point of reference in the teaching of the history of modern design, and helped lay the foundation of Pevsner's career in England as an architectural historian. Since its first publication by Faber & Faber in 1936, it has gone through several editions and been translated into many languages. The English-language edition has also been renamed Pioneers of Modern Design . Pevsner

315-455: A million copies. In 1942 Pevsner finally secured two regular positions. From 1936 onwards he had been a frequent contributor to the Architectural Review and from 1943 to 1945 he stood in as its acting editor while the regular editor J. M. Richards was on active service. Under the AR ' s influence, Pevsner's approach to modern architecture became more complex and more moderate. Early signs of

360-524: A multi-volume series providing an overview of the history of European art. He taught at the University of Göttingen between 1929 and 1933, offering a specialist course on English art and architecture . According to biographers Stephen Games and Susie Harries, Pevsner welcomed many of the economic and cultural policies of the early Hitler regime . However, due to Nazi race laws he was forced to resign his lectureship at Göttingen in 1933. His first intention

405-411: A range of applications both for the term 'art' and the term 'design'. Applied arts can include industrial design , graphic design , fashion design , and the decorative arts which traditionally includes craft objects. In graphic arts (2D image making that ranges from photography to illustration), the distinction is often made between fine art and commercial art , based on the context within which

450-586: Is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Design People who produce designs are called designers . The term 'designer' usually refers to someone who works professionally in one of the various design areas. Within the professions, the word 'designer' is generally qualified by the area of practice (for example: a fashion designer , a product designer , a web designer , or an interior designer ), but it can also designate other practitioners such as architects and engineers (see below: Types of designing). A designer's sequence of activities to produce

495-490: Is based on an empiricist philosophy and broadly consistent with the agile approach and methodical development. Substantial empirical evidence supports the veracity of this perspective in describing the actions of real designers. Like the rational model, the action-centric model sees design as informed by research and knowledge. At least two views of design activity are consistent with the action-centric perspective. Both involve these three basic activities: The concept of

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540-487: Is complicated by varying interpretations of what constitutes 'designing'. Many design historians, such as John Heskett , look to the Industrial Revolution and the development of mass production. Others subscribe to conceptions of design that include pre-industrial objects and artefacts, beginning their narratives of design in prehistoric times. Originally situated within art history , the historical development of

585-466: Is informed by research and knowledge in a predictable and controlled manner. Typical stages consistent with the rational model include the following: Each stage has many associated best practices . The rational model has been widely criticized on two primary grounds: The action-centric perspective is a label given to a collection of interrelated concepts, which are antithetical to the rational model. It posits that: The action-centric perspective

630-465: Is no longer topical. Although Pevsner oversaw the publication of the initial volumes of the Scottish, Welsh and Irish counterparts of The Buildings of England (and in each was credited as "Editor-in-Chief", "Founding Editor" and "Editorial Adviser" respectively) he did not write any of them. As with the revisions of his earlier works, many of these volumes were the work of several contributors. Coverage of

675-589: The Dresden Gallery between 1924 and 1928. He converted from Judaism to Lutheranism early in his life. During this period he became interested in establishing the supremacy of German modernist architecture after becoming aware of Le Corbusier 's Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau at the Paris Exhibition of 1925 . In 1928, he contributed the volume on Italian baroque painting to the Handbuch der Kunstwissenschaft ,

720-579: The King Penguin series , to suggest ideas for future publications, he proposed a series of comprehensive county guides to rectify this shortcoming. "The volumes of the Buildings of England—and now Scotland, Wales and Ireland as well—will be written by, revised and expanded by others, but they will always be known as 'Pevsners'. They are his memorial" Work on the Buildings of England series began in 1945, and

765-400: The design cycle is understood as a circular time structure, which may start with the thinking of an idea, then expressing it by the use of visual or verbal means of communication (design tools), the sharing and perceiving of the expressed idea, and finally starting a new cycle with the critical rethinking of the perceived idea. Anderson points out that this concept emphasizes the importance of

810-502: The Artificial, the interdisciplinary scientist Herbert A. Simon proposed that, "Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones." According to the design researcher Nigel Cross , "Everyone can – and does – design," and "Design ability is something that everyone has, to some extent, because it is embedded in our brains as a natural cognitive function." The study of design history

855-797: The English national character. His A. W. Mellon lectures in Fine Art at the National Gallery of Art , Washington, D.C., were published in 1976 as A History of Building Types . Pevsner was a founding member in 1957 of the Victorian Society , the national charity for the study and protection of Victorian and Edwardian architecture and other arts. In 1964 he was invited to become its chairman, and steered it through its formative years, fighting alongside John Betjeman , Hugh Casson and others to save houses, churches, railway stations and other monuments of

900-510: The Modern Movement: from William Morris to Walter Gropius , his influential pre-history of what he saw as Walter Gropius ' dominance of contemporary design. Pioneers ardently championed Gropius's first two buildings (both pre–First World War) on the grounds that they summed up all the essential goals of 20th-century architecture; in England, however, it was widely taken to be the history of England's contribution to international modernism, and

945-660: The Victorian age. He served for ten years (1960–70) as a member of the National Advisory Council on Art Education (or Coldstream Committee), campaigning for art history to be a compulsory element in the curriculum of art schools. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1965 and awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1967. Having assumed British citizenship in 1946, Pevsner

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990-600: The curriculum topic, Design and Technology . The development of design in general education in the 1970s created a need to identify fundamental aspects of 'designerly' ways of knowing, thinking, and acting, which resulted in establishing design as a distinct discipline of study. Substantial disagreement exists concerning how designers in many fields, whether amateur or professional, alone or in teams, produce designs. Design researchers Dorst and Dijkhuis acknowledged that "there are many ways of describing design processes," and compare and contrast two dominant but different views of

1035-454: The daily lives of ordinary Americans through an array of objects including furniture, glassware, ceramics, textiles, metalwork, household appliances, automobiles, airplanes and graphic arts. American Modern is distinguished by the absence of traditional ornament, the use of new technologies and materials, and the application of mass-production techniques to create affordable objects for the expanding middle class . American Modern dinnerware

1080-671: The design process: as a rational problem-solving process and as a process of reflection-in-action. They suggested that these two paradigms "represent two fundamentally different ways of looking at the world – positivism and constructionism ." The paradigms may reflect differing views of how designing should be done and how it actually is done, and both have a variety of names. The problem-solving view has been called "the rational model," "technical rationality" and "the reason-centric perspective." The alternative view has been called "reflection-in-action," "coevolution" and "the action-centric perspective." The rational model

1125-475: The discipline of design history coalesced in the 1970s, as interested academics worked to recognize design as a separate and legitimate target for historical research. Early influential design historians include German-British art historian Nikolaus Pevsner and Swiss historian and architecture critic Sigfried Giedion . In Western Europe, institutions for design education date back to the nineteenth century. The Norwegian National Academy of Craft and Art Industry

1170-464: The early hours of the morning to take [him] ... I managed, clutching my pyjama trousers, to catch them up with the best parting present I could quickly think of, which was an elegant little edition, a new edition, of Shakespeare's Sonnets ." Pevsner was released after three months on the intervention of, among others, Frank Pick , then Director-General of the Ministry of Information . He spent some time in

1215-578: The first of several broadcasts on the BBC Third Programme , presenting nine talks in all up to 1950, examining painters and European art eras. By 1977 he had presented 78 talks for the BBC, including the Reith Lectures in 1955 – a series of six broadcasts, entitled The Englishness of English Art , for which he explored the qualities of art which he regarded as particularly English, and what they said about

1260-555: The first volume was published in 1951. Pevsner wrote 32 of the books himself and 10 with collaborators, with a further four of the original series written by others. Since his death, work has continued on the series, which has been extended to cover the rest of the United Kingdom, under the title Pevsner Architectural Guides , now published by Yale University Press . After updating and correcting London 1: The Cities of London and Westminster for its reissue in 1962, Pevsner delegated

1305-675: The following observation is made by Pevsner on the boat to Dover in October 1933: "The second-class is almost entirely occupied by non- Aryans . Dreadful, dreadful – to think that's where I belong." Nonetheless, he was included in the Nazi Black Book as someone hostile to the Hitler regime. In 1940, Pevsner was taken to the internment camp at Huyton , Liverpool as an enemy alien . Geoffrey Grigson later wrote in his Recollections (1984): "When at last two hard-faced Bow Street runners arrived in

1350-515: The magazine's theories on picturesque planning. In the same year Pevsner was appointed a part-time lecturer at Birkbeck College , London; he would eventually retire from the college in 1969 as its first Professor of Art History. He lectured at Cambridge University for almost 30 years, having been Slade Professor of Fine Art there for a record six years from 1949 to 1955, and was also the Slade Professor at Oxford in 1968. Framing all this

1395-427: The means of expression, which at the same time are means of perception of any design ideas. Philosophy of design is the study of definitions, assumptions, foundations, and implications of design. There are also many informal 'philosophies' for guiding design such as personal values or preferred approaches. Some of these values and approaches include: The boundaries between art and design are blurry, largely due to

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1440-684: The memorial address being given by Alec Clifton-Taylor , a friend of 50 years. He is buried in the churchyard of the Church of St Peter, Clyffe Pypard , in Wiltshire , where he and Lola had a cottage. His elder son, Dieter, was an editor at Penguin Books and co-founder with Oliver Caldecott of the publishing company Wildwood House in the 1970s. His younger son, Tom , was a film producer and director who went on to work on several James Bond films . Pevsner had many notable students including Phoebe Stanton . In 2007,

1485-604: The months after the Blitz clearing bomb debris, and wrote reviews and art criticism for the Ministry of Information's Die Zeitung , an anti-Nazi publication for Germans living in England. He also completed for Penguin Books the Pelican paperback An Outline of European Architecture , which he had begun to develop while in internment. Outline would eventually go into seven editions, be translated into 16 languages, and sell more than half

1530-406: The revision and expansion of further volumes to others, beginning with Enid Radcliffe for Essex (1965). The gazetteer descriptions of revised volumes do not routinely distinguish between Pevsner's original text and any new writing, but more recent books sometimes supply his words in quotation when the revising author's judgement differs, where a building has since been altered, or where the old text

1575-580: The role of the designer in the industrial process, the research produced a generally critical account of design standards in Britain which he published as An Enquiry into Industrial Art in England (Cambridge University Press, 1937). He was subsequently employed as a buyer of modern textiles, glass and ceramics for the Gordon Russell furniture showrooms in London. By this time Pevsner had also completed Pioneers of

1620-515: The son of Anna and her husband Hugo Pevsner, a Russian-Jewish fur merchant. He attended St. Thomas School, Leipzig , and went on to study at several universities, Munich , Berlin , and Frankfurt am Main , before being awarded a doctorate by Leipzig in 1924 for a thesis on the Baroque architecture of Leipzig . In 1923, he married Carola ("Lola") Kurlbaum, the daughter of distinguished Leipzig lawyer Alfred Kurlbaum. He worked as an assistant keeper at

1665-650: The whole of Great Britain was completed in 2023, with the Irish series still in progress. As well as The Buildings of England , Pevsner proposed the Pelican History of Art series (which began in 1953), a multi-volume survey on the model of the German Handbuch der Kunstwissenschaft (English: "Handbook of the Science of Art"), which he would himself edit. Many individual volumes are regarded as classics. In 1946, Pevsner made

1710-450: The work is produced and how it is traded. Nikolaus Pevsner Sir Nikolaus Bernhard Leon Pevsner CBE FBA (30 January 1902 – 18 August 1983) was a German-British art historian and architectural historian best known for his monumental 46-volume series of county-by-county guides, The Buildings of England (1951–74). Nikolaus Pevsner was born in Leipzig , Saxony ,

1755-692: Was " more German than the Germans " to the extent that he supported " Goebbels in his drive for 'pure' non-decadent German art". He was reported as saying of the Nazis (in 1933): "I want this movement to succeed. There is no alternative but chaos... There are things worse than Hitlerism ." Pevsner's political leanings following Hitler's appointment as Chancellor in January 1933 are clearly revealed in several extracts from his diaries and letters that Suzie Harries includes in her 2011 book Nikolaus Pevsner: The Life . For example,

1800-500: Was appointed a CBE in 1953 and was knighted in 1969 "for services to art and architecture". Pevsner also received an Honorary Doctorate from Heriot-Watt University in 1975. Pevsner died at his home 2, Wildwood Terrace , in August 1983. His wife, Lola, predeceased him by 20 years. His memorial service was held at the Church of Christ the King, Bloomsbury , the following December, with

1845-571: Was designed by Russel Wright and was originally manufactured by Steubenville Pottery in Steubenville, Ohio . It is currently manufactured by Bauer Pottery Company of Los Angeles. The glaze colors of the line consist of coral, chartreuse, granite grey and seafoam. The dinnerware forms have distinctive curvilinear, streamlined shapes. American Modern dinnerware was the most popular and identifiable china pattern ever sold, with over 250 million pieces sold between 1939 – 1959. This design -related article

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1890-547: Was founded in 1818, followed by the United Kingdom's Government School of Design (1837), and Konstfack in Sweden (1844). The Rhode Island School of Design was founded in the United States in 1877. The German art and design school Bauhaus , founded in 1919, greatly influenced modern design education. Design education covers the teaching of theory, knowledge and values in the design of products, services, and environments, with

1935-424: Was his career as a writer and editor. After moving to England, Pevsner had found that the study of architectural history had little status in academic circles, and the amount of information available, especially to travellers wanting to inform themselves about the architecture of a particular district, was limited. Invited by Allen Lane , founder of Penguin Books , for whom he had written his Outline and also edited

1980-400: Was independently developed by Herbert A. Simon, an American scientist, and two German engineering design theorists, Gerhard Pahl and Wolfgang Beitz. It posits that: The rational model is based on a rationalist philosophy and underlies the waterfall model , systems development life cycle , and much of the engineering design literature. According to the rationalist philosophy, design

2025-598: Was to move to Italy, but after failing to find an academic post there, Pevsner moved to England in 1933, settling in Hampstead at 2, Wildwood Terrace , where poet Geoffrey Grigson was his next-door neighbour at No. 3. Pevsner's first post was an 18-month research fellowship at the University of Birmingham , found for him by friends in Birmingham and partly funded by the Academic Assistance Council . A study of

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