collection |
Design for computer workstation for IBM, elevation, 1956. Crayon on tracing paper. Gift of Ada Louise Huxtable and L. Garth Huxtable, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2013.M.2) © J. Paul Getty Trust |
An attractive catalog for the exhibit features essays about the aforementioned 'ambivalence' as well as on the socioeconomic context of the Cold War and the emerging counterculture, the use of landscaping to soften Modernist architecture, and postwar design education at Stanford.
De Wit says the new showing at the 126-year-old Arts Center profiles the evolution of the early Design Conferences having an "underlying theme" of tension between creativity and marketing research, up to the point when few corporate leaders attended anymore and some factions of the design community "revolted" against the old guard. It was discontinued in 2004.
Other sections of the exhibit examine the Bauhaus influence on modernism, packaging and product design, and "the two companies that everyone was looking at" to set the pace—Olivetti and Container Corporation of America.
The latter's CEO, Walter Paepke, helped start the conference because, de Wit says, "He had this idea that design could be part of business. He wanted to convince other people."
And sell things to them, of course.
'Creativity on the Line: Design and the Corporate World, 1950-1975' is being presented at Cantor Arts Center. Admission is free. Open Wednesdays through Mondays 11am to 5pm; Thursdays until 8pm.
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