Washington DC's Textile Museum, is up to its usual effusive "We Are Wrapped in Beauty, Are We Not?" revelry as it announces the screening of the documentary, "Contemporary Days: Robin and Lucienne Day Design the UK."
The ninety-minute film premieres at 7:30pm on May 15, 2010 at the National Geographic Museum’s Grosvenor Auditorium in Washington, DC. Tickets are only gotten on-line and in advance.
Here is the site for tickets and a little about the designers R and L Day post-WWII British furniture designers who brought modern design to everyday life, which one can imagine, would have been rather grey in 1951.
But these two were not daunted and carried the light and hope of bold prints, plastic, steel, and plywood (materials no body had used before) into our homes, offices, and schools.
Sixty years later, like illuminated letters, their "accessible elegance," their wipeability-meets-modernist-sensibility twinkles most obviously in our own grey little worlds in the form of those liquidly-curved, plastic chairs with aluminum legs and, if you're lucky, the chair is turquoise or mango or lime. So iconic, the British put it on a postage stamp. Lovely.
In fact, for many of us, when we think "cafeteria" it is those Day chairs we think of: wipeable, bash-able, quickly stack-able when clearing the floor for dances or neighborhood association meetings. Designed designed with that hole - low in the back both useful as a handle, and (horribly, but humanly) as a drain. If you're anything like me, circa '62, when you think of those chairs, you think simultaneously: "What a lovely curve...Are we having Tater Tots today?....Shiny legs....oooh grapes..."
Ah modernist sensibilities.
The film has not much to do with Tater Tots (although....one might argue...), but everything to do with the pleasure of form and the beauty that surrounds us.
Much love and bold print to you, L
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