#curule

Intensely handsome young man with a striped bow tie sits in a curule seat in front of a painted backdrop in this RPPC.

Communication Design - Week 7

During this week during our lecture we looked at the Bauhaus Movement and its influence on design in the 1920′s and how it still one of the key design influences today. From a design school in Germany came a design ideology that encouraged the efficiency of form, truth of materials, universality and reducing objects to their essential form. After delving a little deeper into this ideology, a key figure to really champion this movement has been Mies Van Der Rohe. He was a leading German avant-garde architect that lead with the idea that “less is more” as you can see above. Miles was coined as the ‘master of architecture’  and eventually joined Bauhaus as the schools last director before it’s forced closer in 1932. 

In 1929 you can see above another one of his famous designs the Barcelona chair. It is considered the most famous design of the 20th century. This chair gained a cult like status and was in-keeping with all of Bauhaus’s ideology. The chair remains true to it’s initial form of industrial materials and was in keeping with lots of the materials initial shapes. I really gravitated towards Miles as a designer as I can see his ideology of “less is more” translated into so many movements we know of today. This might seem like a stretch, but you can even see the influence in Netflix icons philosophy of Marie Kondo. Her philosophy is if it doesn’t spark joy get rid of it, it keeps coming back to the idea only need the essentials and “less is more” encourages humans to function at their best.

However like with everything, these moments don’t come out of thin air. So with a little more diggings it is suggested that this chair is thought to have been extrapolated from those of Roman folding chairs used by aristocracy. These chairs were called ‘Curule’. These chairs were a sign of elite status and like wise the Barcelona chair had a similar effect on society. 

Barcelona Chair :https://www.theartstory.org/artist/mies-van-der-rohe-ludwig/artworks/

Curule Seat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curule_seat