The age of contradiction

The decade is a study in contradiction: austerity and decadence, drab earth tones and campy colors, nature-loving hippiedom, and high-tech futurism. The two main strands co-existed in harmony and tension. The first one was broadly called "Anti-design", with designers taking their creations to the extreme in order to express their frustration against society, diverging themselves from the quest for refinement and perfectionism in modernism. Bright, clashing colours with cartoon-like forms were their attempt to appeal to the customers.

The other strand was "High Tech", named after a book of the same name by Joan Kron and Suzanne Slesin. This was a homecoming to the severe, rational principles of early Modernism, prompted by the belt-tightening going on within the furniture industry. Designers also claimed that their pursuit of timeless, durable designs would counter the culture of disposability that was destroying the earth.

The 'High-Tech' style of the 1970s had nothing to do with computers and more to do with construction and engineering. Its development was partly a response to manufacturers' demands for a skeletal style that cut back on materials and was easy to mass-produce. The Swiss architect Mario Botta (an ex-employee of Le Corbusier) began producing furniture from perforated sheet steel that resembled machine parts, while in Britain Rodney Kinsman worked on a range of terse, rational design also made in metal.

Craft-based style

Running counter to the High-Tech style was the Craft Revival movement. In Britain, John Makepeace opened his Parnham House Workshops in Dorset in 1977 and created meticulously crafted objects, often highly ornamented, which sold for vast sums of money. Makepeace's Ebony and Nickel Shiver chair (1978) was representative of his philosophy on design: it was made of 2000 separate pieces of ebony.

On the other hand, this decade's style was greatly influenced by the back-to-nature movement, which arose from both a hippie rejection of consumerism and materialism and a renewed environmentalism following the 1973 oil crisis.

Éléments du style

Characteristics

The 70s is indeed an interesting phase of cultural, social impacts with designers trying to figure out their way towards making their marks. It represented a reaction against sleek mid-century modernism in favour of "playful embellishment and radical experimentation with form. Self-expression and individuality were hallmarks of the time.