Published annually from 1906 until 1980,
Decorative Art, The Studio Yearbook
was dedicated to the latest currents in
architecture, interiors, furniture, lighting, glassware, textiles, metalware, and ceramics
. Since the publications went out of print, the now hard-to-find yearbooks have become highly prized by collectors and dealers.
This volume spotlights the
futuristic, experimental aesthetic of the 1970s
. After the revolutions of the ’60s, the world of design and architecture became an increasingly
exciting and fast-moving hotbed of ideas
, rife with vehemently opposing schools and movements. In many ways it was a more extreme era for design than the previous decade.
Experimentalism was everywhere, and many projects, thought not practical, were forward-thinking visions of
a new kind of decorative art and design
. Various groups advocated returning to natural methods, rejecting style in favor of craft or pushing the logic of industrial living to its concrete, high-rise extreme.
Decorative Art 1970
s includes the work of the decade’s brightest stars, such as
Afra and Tobia Scarpa, Luigi Colani, Achille Castiglioni, Kisho Kurokawa, Norman Foster, Richard Meier, and Theo Crosby
.