Design for Living: Furniture and Lighting 1950-2000

A lively and lavishly illustrated history of decorative arts from 1950 through 2000, this survey presents 130 key examples of later twentieth-century design in their cultural contexts. The primary focus is furniture-- both one-of-a-kind examples and mass-produced works-- by international designers and architects. Here are classic designs for chairs, shelving units, and lamps by well-known masters from Aarnio to Zanuso, as well as provocative works by newcomers. All the works in Design for Living are from the Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection of the Montreal Museum of Decorative Arts/Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

The furniture is presented in five chapters which establish decade by decade, the historical, artistic, and technical currents that led from Good Design and traditional Modernism to Pop Art and Post-Modernism, and to concerns for ecology, pluralism, and spirituality. Full-color photographs and entries on each object profile the design process and the designer, while illustrations show these works in their original period settings. All this recommends Design for Living to the general reader, as well as to the designer, collector, and scholar. Here is an accessible guide and resource to the fifty years of exuberant creativity that mark the second half of the twentieth century.