These Modern American Design Icons Pay Homage to the Old—and Make It New

Some American contributions to the history of art and design were timeless in their perfection upon arrival. The first 501 jeans Levi Strauss & Co. fabricated around 1890 look fresh on the streets of today. DJ Kool Herc’s mechanical magic trick of connecting two turntables and a microphone some 50 years ago in the Bronx revolutionized how nightlife (and home listening) looks and sounds. Some American design movements coalesced around a few unimprovable objects such as Charles and Ray Eames’s charming chairs or Frank Lloyd Wright’s horizon-wide homes. Along the way they helped define what might be considered the better aspects of the nation’s character: industrious, thrifty, ambitious, and optimistic that, in fact, nothing is unimprovable. And so today’s designers are looking back at those objects, those local movements that hit the big time, to see what might be in store.

Shaker

In the first half of the 19th century, the Protestant United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing formed communal, utopian societies in Ohio, Kentucky, and throughout America’s Northeast. Their adherents came to be known as Shakers for the trembling they experienced while in worship—and the furniture they often sat on while worshiping established a particular, rigorous form of American minimalism. "Shaker beliefs regarding utility and efficiency informed their design constraints," says Savannah College of Art and Design furniture design professor Sheila Edwards, noting the Shaker precept that "beauty rests on utility." "This led to specific and consistent design choices like reduced or eliminated embellishment, wood knobs, [and] thin or tapered elements."

Alexandra Cunningham Cameron, curator of contemporary design at the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, says Shaker style is "tied to a complete philosophy of living that seeks spiritual redemption in addition to aesthetical, environmental, and cultural redemption." With its reliance on warm wood and friendly lines—the gentle curve of a chair back, the smooth expanse of a bench seat that simply goes with the grain—Shaker style has perhaps never been more influential. But its ongoing appeal might lay in the dichotomy of its light appearance and heft of authenticity. "Although there is some European fetishization of Shaker design," Cunningham Cameron says, "I think it’s resonated most with American audiences looking for fastidious historical models." And, perhaps, a bit of redemption.

Some chairs of note

Patchwork

Artisans, and laypeople, have of course been sewing cloth on other bits of cloth since textiles were invented—but Americans made an art of it. In the 19th century, the enslaved women of Gee’s Bend in Alabama made themselves experts of the craft, along the way inventing an improvisational form of quilting that prefigured the Abstract Expressionist and Op art movements. "The country was in a different economic state. It was really a developing country," at the time, says Lauren Cross, The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens’ Gail-Oxford associate curator of American Decorative Arts. "People didn’t have money to buy a big, long, fancy piece of fabric. So you had a piecing together. That kind of instinct is, I think, an American invention." Ever since, bohemians have demonstrated their own creative freedom by picking up where the women of Gee’s Bend left off while giving credit where it’s due. Now, says Cross, "it’s about celebrating their community, that resilience that they had to just keep pushing, keep doing this thing that you love doing, despite what the world is not doing for you."

A quilt of note

Teco Ceramics

As a material, terra-cotta, or baked clay, is as old as the day is long—it’s been used to create sculptures since before the Bronze Age, and architectural building tiles have been found throughout ancient Greece and beyond. Modern America offered the world a pair of innovations in this medium. First, we branded it: Illinoisan William D. Gates shortened the material’s name and took it for the identity of a new factory, Teco Pottery. In the early 20th century, Teco would produce hundreds of iterations of art pottery vases and vessels, in a distinctive matte green hue, becoming virtually synonymous with the form. Gates embraced Art Deco ornamentation, attaching stylized handles to vases and embedding floral decorative flourishes, thus abandoning the notion that form should follow function. And in the face of minimalism, Teco embraced the American maxim bigger is better, manufacturing vases some seven feet in height. Today, designers are finding beauty and mystery in Teco’s verdant tones, widening the colorways to give art pottery the blues and embracing whimsy in their geometric addenda—if still mostly keeping their handcrafted or small-batch vases and vessels resolutely table scaled.

Some vases of note

Tiffany Glass

New York City’s Louis Comfort Tiffany took stained glass windows and domesticated their grandeur into blockbuster lamps. (He also took the credit for them though artists like Clara Driscoll and her team of "Tiffany girls" often designed the most popular styles.) Regardless of authorship, Tiffany lamps made Art Deco style accessible, illuminating living rooms across the country, at least until the middle of the 20th century. "Modernism and the move to democratize design through mass production," says Cunningham Cameron, "depleted interest in expensive hand-wrought decorative objects associated with bourgeoise lifestyles." Even if their multicolored figuration has now fallen out of fashion, evoking the interior of a TGI Friday’s, they’re still valuable—just watch what happens when one in good condition turns up on Antiques Roadshow. But contemporary lighting designers are seeing the light once again. "A movement back to handcrafted workmanship has fueled recent interest," she says, "and a millennial trend toward something that I’d call the Cheers aesthetic, equal parts irony, nostalgia, and mimesis."

Some lights of note

The Management Chair

Before Frank Lloyd Wright designed his epochal executive chair for the Larkin Office Building, he made an early three-legged iteration lambasted as "the suicide chair" for its propensity to tip over and propel its user toward the desk or floor. These days, standing-desk advocates sometimes deride spending time in any office chair as dangerous, but that hasn’t stopped designers from updating Wright’s iteration—not to mention Charles and Ray Eames’s aluminum icons and Bill Stumpf and Don Chadwick’s mesh classic Aeron, both for Herman Miller. The concept of a chair built for office work, says Cunningham Cameron, might not "signify authority. But perhaps efficiency. To me, the form recalls therapeutic and assistive sitting." In the Eames’s era, she says, "the chairs were a product of experimentation with newly affordable, durable materials and the next decade’s effort to reshape corporate culture through design." Corporate culture continues to evolve: As it has spread into domestic spheres via home offices and work-from-home hybrids, the design of office chairs is morphing from easy-on-the-back toward easy-on-the-eyes. And as offices try to lure workers back into their cubicles and open-plan benching, better looking chairs might be better options. As Cunningham Camera notes, the old-school chairs "are so ubiquitous now that they are a nonchoice choice." Boring, if not deadly, but why not push further?

Some task chairs of note

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Top photo illustration by Oscar Duarte; product photos courtesy respective artists, companies, and designers

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