Mid-Century Modern

When the Second World War ended, the modernist project — Bauhaus method, De Stijl reduction, Le Corbusier's architectural principles, the entire European avant-garde program of designing the rational, machine-aged twentieth century — arrived in North America as both a refugee and a victor. The refugee, because so many of its leading figures had fled European fascism: Gropius and Breuer to Harvard, Mies to Chicago, Albers to Black Mountain and Yale, Moholy-Nagy to the New Bauhaus in Chicago. The victor, because the United States, untouched by bombs and flush with industrial capacity, was the country most able to put modernist ideas into mass production. The fusion of European modernist thinking with American manufacturing scale, in the two decades after 1945, produced what we now call Mid-Century Modern.

It was not, in strict art-historical terms, an avant-garde movement. The avant-garde had done its work in the 1910s and 1920s; Mid-Century Modern was the application of that work to ordinary life. Where the Bauhaus had designed a few hundred Wassily chairs for an enthusiast market, Knoll and Herman Miller — the two American firms most associated with the movement — produced Eames chairs by the millions, for offices and middle-class living rooms. Where Le Corbusier had designed a few houses, the postwar American suburb adopted a softened version of his principles at a scale of millions of dwellings.

The key designers — Charles and Ray Eames, George Nelson, Eero Saarinen, Harry Bertoia, Florence Knoll, Hans Wegner and Arne Jacobsen in Denmark, Isamu Noguchi (a uniquely transnational figure) — shared a commitment to clean lines, biomorphic curves alongside rectilinear forms, new industrial materials (molded plywood, fiberglass, steel rod), and a domestic warmth that the European Modernists, in their more austere phases, had often refused. The Eames Lounge Chair (1956), with its walnut shell and leather cushions, is the iconic object: machine-made, but inviting; modernist, but luxurious; reductive, but soft. It is what Bauhaus might have looked like if it had been allowed to relax.

Architecturally, the movement produced the Case Study Houses in Los Angeles (1945–1966), a series of experimental homes commissioned by Arts & Architecture magazine that demonstrated modernist principles for ordinary suburban builders. Case Study #22 (the Stahl House by Pierre Koenig, 1960), perched over the lights of Los Angeles with two glass walls and a flat roof, became one of the most photographed houses in modern history — Julius Shulman's famous 1960 photograph of it, with two women in cocktail dresses sitting in the corner over the city, is essentially the visual brand image of the entire Mid-Century Modern moment.

Graphic design under Mid-Century Modern took distinct national directions. American magazine and corporate design in the 1950s and 1960s — Paul Rand at IBM, Saul Bass for film titles, Alvin Lustig for book covers, the legendary Push Pin Studios — combined Swiss discipline with American playfulness and a willingness to use illustration alongside typography. Italian design (Olivetti under designers like Marcello Nizzoli and Mario Bellini, the work of Achille Castiglioni) achieved a similar warming of modernist principles. Scandinavian design — Wegner, Jacobsen, the Finnish work of Alvar Aalto — added a tradition of fine cabinetry and woodworking to the modernist vocabulary, producing some of the most enduring furniture designs of the century.

What Mid-Century Modern accomplished, and what distinguishes it from its avant-garde parents, was the domestication of modernism. The Bauhaus had been a school for the design of a future society. Mid-Century Modern was the design of the actual postwar middle-class home — the chair you sit in, the lamp on the table, the corporate logo on the typewriter, the house you live in. The aesthetic that resulted has had an extraordinary half-life. The movement officially ended in the late 1960s — overtaken by Pop Art, postmodernism, and the political upheavals that broke the optimistic technocratic mood it depended on. But its visual signature has been revived continuously since the 1990s. Mad Men (2007–2015) reintroduced the look to a global audience. Restoration Hardware and West Elm now sell Mid-Century furniture-shaped objects at scale. Apple's product design (under Jony Ive) is recognizably descended from Mid-Century Modern as much as from Bauhaus. The Eames Lounge Chair is still in production, identical to its 1956 form, six decades later. Few design movements in history have demonstrated such a continuous, decades-spanning afterlife.