Design

Charles and Ray Eames introduced their lounge chair with Herman Miller in 1956, and it has been in production ever since. Design is built around objects with that kind of staying power and the people who made them. Dieter Rams spent decades at Braun and wrote ten principles that product designers still quote. Arne Jacobsen drew the Egg chair in 1958 for the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen. Isamu Noguchi made his first Akari paper lamps in 1951 with lantern makers in Gifu. Fritz Haller and Paul Schärer created the USM Haller system in 1965, and Ettore Sottsass showed the first Memphis Group collection in Milan in 1981, furniture that looked like a prank on good taste. Architecture runs alongside, from the Bauhaus to Pierre Jeanneret's work in Chandigarh. The stories explain how things were made and how to tell an original from a reproduction.