Joe Colombo

Friday, April 24th, 2009

Joe Colombo, 1930 – 1971, a prolific Italian architect, designer, artist and filmmaker, produced a substantial, instantly recognizable body of work before dying far too young at 41. 60s space age design owes much of its look to Colombo, who seemed to innately understand the capabilities of new injected molded plastics and other contemporary materials and who innovated with them to explore ergonomics and a kind of space age psychedelia. The Tube Chair above, like many of his pieces, is an art object as well as furniture. The small selection of his work below is from Flickr. Joe of the futur Chair

Tags: 1960s, 60s, architect, artist, biomorphic, curved, decor, design, designer, favorite, favourite, filmmaker, furniture, furniture design, injection-molded, interior design, Italian, Italy, Joe Colombo, machine, mod, modern, modular, module, plastic, retro, space age, spaceship, utopian, why are things so boring now?
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Hi! 1. To read about my book project on Vancouver's Habitat Forum event of 1976, concerning sustainable urban settlements, click here. 2. Vancouver: We thought we beat the predatory, state-run mega-casino the BC government tried to force on downtown Vancouver, but now it turns out City Hall has given the gaming company and PavCo a loophole. The fight continues. Please stay tuned. The gambling industry is powerful, makes huge political donations, and never ceases trying to coerce gov'ts into permitting expansion. Learn about our ongoing fight here. Ask Windsor/Atlantic City/St. Louis Melbourne how they're feeling about the gambling-based urban planning choices they made. It causes untold problems and is not nearly as lucrative as advertised and promised charity contributions are always clawed back. ____________________________________ This site is a messy photo essay on design. It likes the modern, the ancient, the space age, the futurist and the rustic, the utopian, the anti-utopian, the unstuffy and the unstaid, the green, the possibly not entirely lost promise of the 1960s and 70s, the creative, the practical, the ingenious, the mixed, the unorthodox, and the way people actually live in real spaces. It has an interest in bricolage, making do and the way necessity mothers invention, as well as the sheer level of cultural borrowing evident in design, the impurity of design traditions long considered pure, and just generally the wild miscegenation of everything. Note: not all mixing is good. I'm not talking about the faux-historification of our cities, demolishing the past and replacing it with faux nineteenth-century 'originality.'". Sometimes you get elements of the past and the future, combining to make something not quite as good as either. Because design is not divorced from anything else, this essay is also about urban planning, philosophy, art, political economy, architecture, sociology, geography, neurology, pyschology and anything else that pertains to design, which is everything. The word "ouno" is a name in both Finnish and Japanese, it contains the symbols for both zero and one, and it's the same right side up as upside down. This site makes no attempt to avoid being nerdy or critical. There are plenty of nicey-nice design blogs out there and if that's what you're looking for, go for it. But without critique and complaint, the design of cities and dwellings in North America won't get any better, and it needs to get a lot better than it is-- less creatively impoverished and much more pleasurable. We do after all spend almost all of our lives in buildings and towns and cities and altered landscapes, all of which have a overwhelming impact on our conscious lives, our unconscious lives, our health, intelligence, creativity and our social interactions, whether we're aware of it or not. Not only do we need more humane spaces in which to live, we need above all to ensure affordable housing for all. Dear Canada and the USA, quit letting developers run - and ruin - this show.

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