Image from “Have a Seat (or Don’t),” by Sarah Catherine Firth.
Prof. Jan Michl, of Oslo, saw my post “My Modernist Parents,” with its trailers of a short Norwegian animated film Me and My Moulton, which was up for an Oscar this year for portraying the trials and tribulations of being raised in a modernist household. Sort of a “Growing Up Absurd” kind of a thing, Jan sent “Have a Seat (or Don’t): Growing Up in a Designer Chair Museum,” by Sarah Catherine Firth.
Professor Michl, who teaches design theory and history at Gjøvik University College and the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (emeritus), sent me a fat juicy book a while back. True, it is in Czech, but the volume includes hundreds of beautiful photographs whose captions are translated by Jan into English, and at the end of which all the chapters are summarized in English translation by Jan. I offer readers his website, which contains a list of papers, in English, whose titles are themselves worth a visit. I’ll just name a couple: Form follows WHAT? The modernist notion of function as a carte blanche [1995] and The metaphor of nudity in modern design thinking [2005].
Anyway, the cartoons by Firth are sure to send you into fits of hilarity.
Architecture Here and There 