Pioneers (Products From Phaidon Design Classics, Vol. 1)

A 'design classic' is an industrially manufactured object with timeless aesthetic value. It serves as a standard of its kind and, despite the year in which it was designed, is still up to date. The collection presented in these three volumes has been put together by a group of experts following the above criteria. The objects are presented chronologically, beginning with an elegant pair of Chinese bonsai scissors from the early 1800s, still in production today, and ending with Jasper Morrison's recent 'brunch set', which is destined to become a 'classic'. Glancing through the volumes, the reader will gain an understanding not only of the history of design, but a history of taste and culture. The book is an extraordinary journey through the objects that have shaped our society, from the first attempts to combine function and beauty in the nineteenth century, through the machine aesthetics of the thirties, the advent of plastic and other new materials in the fifties and sixties, up to the 'classics'-to-be of the last ten years.