Learn about postmodern furniture. Read about postmodern furniture design and history. Understand postmodern decor, interior design and furniture style.
Updated: 11/21/2023
Postmodern Furniture History, Design & Style
Table of Contents
- Postmodern Furniture
- Postmodern Furniture History
- Postmodern Furniture Vs. Modernist Furniture
- Postmodern Furniture Designers
- Postmodern Furniture Design
- Postmodern Furniture Style
- Postmodern Interior Design
- Lesson Summary
Frequently Asked Questions
What is postmodernism in interior design?
Postmodernism is interior design was the realization that not all aspects of spaces needed to serve a purpose. It broke free from the restraints of modernism and incorporated unconventional ideas.
What years are postmodern furniture?
The postmodern furniture emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. This period was between the 1960s all through to the 1980s.
What are the characteristics of postmodern design?
Postmodern designs had a lot of interesting characteristics. A big feature was the use of bright colors and combining various shades. These designs also had a lot of whimsy and light-heartedness.
Table of Contents
- Postmodern Furniture
- Postmodern Furniture History
- Postmodern Furniture Vs. Modernist Furniture
- Postmodern Furniture Designers
- Postmodern Furniture Design
- Postmodern Furniture Style
- Postmodern Interior Design
- Lesson Summary
Postmodernism is a period that marked the European movement of art, philosophy, movement, and architecture in the last few years of the twentieth century. Postmodern art essentially made its mark in the second half of the twentieth century. It also highlights some parts of art and the style of thinking in this period.
Postmodern furniture was light-hearted and whimsical, meaning that the designers looked for form over functionality in their work to match the new postmodernist movement. Their idea was that after revolutionizing art and architecture, it was only fair that the couch matched the new era.
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The creation and adoption of the postmodern style in design developed due to the growing popularity of postmodernism in other areas such as literature, art, and architecture. From the beginning of the 1960s to the 1980s, an increasing movement opposed the modernist movement that dwelled on the simplicity of the form. The postmodern designers were more daring and explored new textures, colors, and aesthetics.
Unlike the modern designers that looked for inspiration from architecture and art, their postmodern counterparts, including the furniture designers, got inspiration from pop culture, primarily magazines and comic books. Even though the postmodern movement first originated in the United States, postmodern furniture developed in Milan, Italy. Between the late 1970s and 1980s, many designers visited the city to look into this postmodern concept to create their furniture designs. The two most famous designer groups were the Alchimia Studio and The Memphis Group.
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Modernist designers had very different approaches to how they created their furniture pieces. There was a vast divide between the two ideologies based on their slogans alone. According to American designer and architect Louis Sullivan, modernist designers believed that form followed function when designing. This idea meant that when creating furniture, the functionality of the design was much more important than the form, meaning that simplicity was prominent at the time. Post-modernists were much more daring and explored different designs based on their inspirations. According to German designer Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, modernists believed that less is more. This idea meant that modernists thought no ornamentation meant a better design.
On the other hand, post-modernists felt that the lack of ornamentation made the design boring and too simplistic. Lastly, postmodernism rejected the division between high and commercial art. Instead, they thought that all art deserved to be great and unique, whether mass-produced or one-of-a-kind.
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The postmodern design was a movement that lasted a short time in the last few decades of the twentieth century, but its designers are widely recognized to date. Moreover, these designers were the inspiration for most postmodern furniture existing.
Alessandro Mendini was a Milan-based designer and architect. This multi-talented man significantly contributed to the development of postmodern design and was primarily recognized as Italy's most excellent designer. He renewed the ''Made in Italy'' design production. He was also credited with designing the Corsi Design Factory and Post design with very colorful collections.
Ettore Sottsass was an Austrian-born designer of the Postmodern Era who is famous for his work. His most notable work was The Memphis Group, a design collective he headed in the 1980s. However, the real force of his work was his character, which was more significant than any other movement and greatly revolutionized a lot of career moments. Sottsass desired to go beneath the surface of every work he undertook, and his designs had a poetical inclination.
Michael Graves was one of the most prominent artists of the postmodern movement. In 1960, he was gifted the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. Between 1960 and 1962, he studied ancient edifices in Italy. However, while he started as a modernist, he shifted to postmodern design and adopted more diverse architectural forms that he hoped to make accessible to the public.
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Postmodern furniture design was looking to embrace everything flashy, unconventional, and complex and opted for form over function. The postmodern era was very controversial in all its designs. Some examples of postmodern furniture include:
In an exhibition, the Proust chair by Alessandro Mendini was created in 1978 and was used for the Palazzo dei Diamanti. This postmodern piece captured the attention of all designers on an international level.
Michael Graves's tea kettle was a creation by the American architect. The Alessi 9093 debuted in 1985 and remains one of the most recognized design icons. Its most distinct feature is the bird-shaped whistle that always signals with a whistling sound when it boils.
The Murmansk fruit bowl is a striking piece of art designed in 1982 by Ettore Sottsass. It is made of silver-plated brass with a rounded base. Additionally, it has a zig-zagged stem made of six elements that hold up the round tray at the top.
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There are a lot of characteristics that started in the Post-modernist period, which vary from today's postmodern furniture styles. Some standard features include the following:
- Bright color palettes: This is the most common way to recognize these designs. The color combination is wild and does not follow any specific rules. Instead, solid and vibrant colors are combined, using up to six shades in one piece of furniture.
- Shapes: Postmodern furniture also has a combination of various shapes, creating a unique product. The particular shapes range from asymmetrical to paired with straight lines to give the distinct look of postmodern furniture.
- Whimsy: Another prominent feature is the contradictory factor of the movement, which was not present in modern styles. The main reason for these conflicting designs was that the new movement did not follow the rules that previously applied to art and design. However, it also evidenced the whimsy these designers and artists had.
- Materials: The materials used in postmodern furniture are mostly plastic, concrete, glass, and metals. However, in most cases, wood is the preferred option.
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Postmodern interior design held unusual façades such as both simple and complex designs. An example is a roof that could give the house a shape like a drawing. It also includes functionless features such as a fake chimney going through the house and out to the roof. Unlike modernist principles, the windows have asymmetrical sizes, with interrupted lines and shapes.
Exposed structural studs also surround postmodern furniture. Chain links and plywood replaced the exterior. Postmodern interior design also uses corrugated metal panels to decorate the outside walls, especially for barn-like homes.
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Postmodern Décor
There is a lot of postmodern décor that gained popularity with the postmodern era. Some of the standard décor designs include:
- Empty frames that hang on the wall
- A fireplace mounted to seem like a wall painting
- Hanging pendant lights that are exaggerated in size
- French neoclassical chairs with acrylic material
- Mix of different materials and textures
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Postmodernism was an era in the second half of the twentieth century that featured new design characteristics and opposition to the modernist movement. Postmodern furniture, for instance, was light-hearted and whimsical to reflect the emotion that designers looked to express in their work. Having started as a movement in Milan, a classic example of postmodern furniture is a chair broken into random patterns of bright colors. Postmodern furniture is also noted for rejecting divisions between high and commercial art.
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Video Transcript
Postmodernism & Furniture
Between the 1960s and 1980s, the world of art and architecture was beginning to change. The traditions and assumptions that had sustained the world of design for nearly a century were under attack as new colors, textures, and aesthetics burst onto the scene. This new wave was called postmodernism.
Postmodernist architects created buildings that were distinct from anything that had come before. Designers of these buildings found postmodernist paintings to hang on the walls and postmodernist sculptures to sit on the tables. . . wait, what tables? Somewhere along the way, postmodernist designers realized that their movement hadn't yet extended to furniture.
Postmodernist furniture appeared quickly and sporadically, as designers tried to create functional items that complimented the new postmodernist movement. After all, what good is revolutionizing architecture and art if you have to enjoy it from a non-revolutionary couch?
Modernism: Background
At this point, you may be realizing that we still haven't really defined postmodernism. You're right, we haven't, and that's because there's really only one good definition for postmodernism: it's a rejection of modernism. So, that's where we have to start!
Modernism, as a movement, began in the early 20th century by rejecting the traditional rules of art that came before, in which artists broke apart the rules of Western art, and architects stripped structures down to their simplest and most honest forms. Modernism was highly idealistic, believing that utopian societies could be created by rejecting old values and embracing new, serious morals.
In terms of furniture, modernist designs were minimalist, monochromatic, and often focused on the use of new, synthetic materials. Since modernist homes were supposed to be pretty bare, they actually didn't have too much furniture anyway. For years, this was the de facto principle of high art and design. Of course, eventually, somebody would decide to break the new rules!
Postmodern Furniture Design
In the 1960s, artists and architects started rejecting modernism. Rather than focusing on serious, objective designs free of subject, they started breaking rules. Which rules? Any and all of them! Postmodernist art and architecture started celebrating color, texture, and subject, all with a hint of whimsy and irony. They also rejected the modernist devotion to high art, looking for inspiration in items of popular culture, like comic books, magazines, and fast food.
So, how did this translate into furniture? Postmodern architects needed things to put inside their structures, and artists, architects, and designers together started developing their own canon of postmodernist furniture. While postmodernism itself is traditionally seen as originating in the United States, some of the most important movements in postmodernism furniture started in the global capital of interior design: Milan.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Milanese artists brought designers together to explore the concept of postmodernist spaces. Two groups stand out for their efforts. The Studio Alchymia was led by designer Alessandro Mendini. Mendini was a leader in early postmodernist furniture, most recognized for his Proust Chair.
Picture living in a world of high design where chairs are geometric, minimalist, colorless, and reject the traditional structures of furniture. Then, picture a chair modeled on a Baroque sofa (the height of opulent design), exaggerated in size beyond normal proportions and covered with a close-up of a pointillist painting by the early 20th-century French painter Paul Signac. That's the Proust Chair, and that's postmodernist furniture!
However, Mendini was not the only one interested in the irreverent use of color and style to mock the world of high design. The other Milanese studio to participate heavily in the foundation of this movement was the Memphis Group, led by Ettore Sottsass. One of Sottsass' first designs to capture the international imagination was a piece called the Murmansk fruit bowl. This sleek, silver-plated brass bowl sits atop six zigzag-shaped legs, inspired by the Russian city of Murmansk. For decades, fine art was supposed to reject drawing inspiration from the physical world, so this was a strong departure and one of the earliest uses of subject in postmodernist furniture design.
Finally, we have to talk about Michael Graves, the architect designer who did more than nearly any other in bringing postmodernist furniture into the United States. Graves had interacted with the Milanese groups and even worked for one of them: a design studio called Alessi. Graves' designs were whimsical and lighthearted, perhaps best illustrated through his famous kettle that has a red bird on the spout which whistles when the water boils.
Graves also embraced the postmodernist ideology of rejecting the boundaries between high art and commercial art. In something like furniture design, which is inherently commercial, this distinction seemed particularly arbitrary. Graves demonstrated that by not only embracing popular culture in his designs but also by working with the superstore Target to design low-cost furniture items.
The Postmodernist Style
So what is the postmodernist furniture style? Postmodernist furniture embraces a wide range of styles and attitudes, but we can very loosely categorize it under a few common traits. For one, it tends to be colorful, rejecting the stoic monochromaticism of modernist design. Secondly, it tends to embrace texture, especially in terms of natural materials like textile and wood. Third, it employs non-traditional shapes and configurations, bending expectations of commonplace forms. Finally, it's always irreverent and whimsical, often poking fun at the status quo and the world of design. It's a style that's truly unlike any other!
Lesson Summary
All right, let's now take a moment or two to review. As we learned, postmodernism is a movement in which the traditions and assumptions that had sustained the world of design for nearly a century were under attack as new colors, textures, and aesthetics burst onto the scene. Postmodernist furniture is based in the colorful, lighthearted, and irreverent attitude of the postmodern movement.
Its characteristics include:
- It tends to be colorful.
- It tends to embrace texture.
- It employs non-traditional shapes and configurations.
- It's always irreverent and whimsical.
This entire style can only be understood in terms of rejecting modernism, a style of high ideals and minimalist design. It emerged in furniture design in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when designer groups like Studio Alchymia, led by Alessandro Mendini, and the Memphis Group, led by Ettore Sottsass, brought designers together to contemplate the meaning of postmodernist spaces. In the United States, the movement was largely introduced by Michael Graves. Together, these designers combined forms, textures, and colors from across time, across the world, and across the boundaries of high and low culture to create a furniture style that was truly revolutionary and also just a bit comical!
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