Formless Furniture

In the mid-1960s, artists like Robert Morris, Joseph Beuys, Michelangelo Pistoletto and Lynda Benglis began to experiment with formlessness in their materials. The maxim Form follows material, however, was not only proclaimed in the era's avant-garde art: it had a distinct impact on furniture design as well--for example, on Gunnar A. Andersen's experimental polyurethane Portrait of My Mother's Chesterfield Chair of 1964 and Zanotta's famous Sacco beanbag chair of 1968. Edited by Peter Noever, Director of Vienna's MAK museum of applied and contemporary art, this volume is the first to concentrate on formlessness in furniture design. Featuring work from the 1960s through today by such revolutionary figures as Frank Gehry, Gaetano Pesce, Ron Arad and Karim Rashid, it illuminates connections between the historical avant-garde and the applied arts, and tracks the various manifestations of design formlessness to have emerged over the past half century--from Robert Dean's 1967 Sea Urchin chair to today's computer-assisted "blobjects."