Design

‘All machinery may be beautiful, when it is undecorated even. Do not seek to decorate it. We cannot but think all good machinery is graceful, also, the line of the strength and the line of the beauty being one.’

Although ridiculed in his own day as a fashion victim in dress and manners, Oscar Wilde, the exemplar of the excesses of the Aesthetic Movement, is not normally quoted in design histories. Being Wilde, what he wrote above is probably not in praise of the machine, but its inclusion in Nikolaus Pevsner’s Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (first published in 1936) shows the breadth of reference in this excellent and now classic introduction to modern design and twentieth-century modernism.

Were she alive, Edna Walling would probably be delighted to know that another of her books has been reissued. She might also be astonished and just a little peeved. After a brilliant career as a garden designer, columnist and author – as well as photographer, cottage designer and ardent protector of the natural landscape – Walling’s fame had all but faded by the time she died in 1973 at the age of seventy-seven. Few noticed her passing. However, her renaissance began in the early 1980s, with new editions of selected works and with Peter Watts’s widely praised The Gardens of Edna Walling. Many more such publications followed.

Ours is not a visually literate culture – architects and designers are not the household names they are in countries such as Spain, nor is design understood or appreciated to any discernible degree – so it is always a particular pleasure when a publication appears that celebrates design. However, it is therefore also doubly important that such a publication should enliven or enlighten a public already so impervious to what design has to offer.