Jochen Gros

Volker Albus

Matteo Thun

"This richly illustrated volume covers the entire range of design today. In recent years design has developed greater variety than ever before: anything goes, seems to be the motto. This book shows that what at first sight appear to be little more than chaos is actually a handful of styles, each with a place in the kaleidoscope of modern design. Sobre functionalism coexists with colorful sculpture-objects of Alchimia and Memphis. Post-modern design with its historical references flourishes alongside futuristic High Tech. Trans High Tech uses High Tech materials as if they were archaeological artifacts. Minimalism and archetype design share a reductive aesthetic. The individual essays on these contemporary styles are preceded by a history of 20th-century industrial design using chair and lamp designs as examples. One essay focuses on the increasingly dominant role of architecture in design: micro-architecture can be found in tableware, where coffee pots resemble highrise buildings, for instance, and in furniture. Common objects are given a new cachet by presenting them as miniatures of formidable designs. The evolution of design is shaped by individual designers as much as by stylistic movements and this book includes chapters on the work of influential German designers Rams, Wewerka and Scheel.This richly illustrated survey demonstrates that the avant-garde does after all exist in industrial design today."--book jacket.

Industry Or Art?

Design Now

As a co-founder of the design group Memphis (with Ettore Sottsass, Andrea Branzi, Aldo Cibic, Michele de Lucchi, and Michael Graves), Italian designer and architect Matteo Thun (born 1952) has been responsible for some of the most instantly identifiable product styles of recent times. The Memphis group's colorful postmodern furniture, with its wacky amalgam of kitsch and futurism, helped define product design of the early to mid-1980s; in the early 90s, Thun took his upbeat aesthetic to Swatch, where he was Creative Director until 1993. Campari, Illy coffee, Philips electronics and Porsche are just a few of the brands Thun has enlivened with his inimitable touch, and in his architectural work, his Side Hotel in Hamburg was chosen as Hotel of the Year in 2001, and in 2004 his Vigilius mountain resort won the Wallpaper Design Award. "Matteo Thun: The Index Book" takes a thorough inventory of his career, from 1980 to the present, in an A to Z format. It looks at all aspects of his output, from architecture to product design--from coffee cups to restaurants, from mountain resorts to wristwatches, from saucepans to villas. Reproducing plans, watercolor drawings, photographs and sketches, the book approaches Thun's work through themes such as sustainability and environment, economy and aesthetics, energy saving and contemporary luxury.

Matteo Thun

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