Description: "British Design brings together a collection of essays from international scholars, designers and journalists, offering new perspectives on the significance of British design in the last sixty years. The book reacts and responds to the changes that have taken place in the recent history of British Design, with case studies looking at, among others, domestic interiors, retail spaces, schools, universities and objects of transport. Chapters include investigations into a variety of significant historical and social moments from the rise and fall of the English Country House style and the Brutalist architectural boom of the 1960s to the modern shopping space and key contemporary designers such as Thomas Heatherwick. British Design provides the contemporary study of the developments within British design and provides new criticism and analysis on how design, from post-war Britain to today, has developed and changed how we live and interact with the spaces in which we live"--
Brief description: Fiona Fisher is a researcher in the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at Kingston University, UK, where she is a member of the Modern Interiors Research Centre.
Review Quotes:
"This compact volume represents good value for money with many fresh ideas and perceptive overviews. As a handbook of ideas about the history of British design from the post-war years to the 2010s, it is useful and thought provoking and gathers together leading experts, emerging and established researchers and polemicists." --Journal of Design History
"Anyone who's wondered how the Britain of utility furniture and wartime rationing managed to evolve into 'Cool Britannia' will find this a remarkable book. The authors work from case studies, achieving a remarkably nuanced portrait of a country in transition. From the trend setting crafts for sale at the London boutique Primavera to the "fun furniture" available at Mr Freedom, the examples presented in this edited volume are like a breath of fresh air; they also provide a counterweight to older, decorous studies of British "good taste." The interiors of post-war country house decorators like John Fowler and modernist architects like Mary Crowley and David Medd receive equal treatment. British interior design emerges as transgressive and eccentric, romantic and--at its best--ingenious." --Elizabeth Guffey, State University of New York at Purchase, USA