This almost surreal Polished Steel Coffee Table by Italian architect and designer Gabriella Crespi looks like a metal crystal formation of some kind. Ca. 1970s. Very beautiful, and also multifunctional. The staggered leaves are retractable, as you can see, and it’s covered with a mirror-finish steel. It’s unfortunate that Crespi’s work never went into mass production – she did a lot of custom work – and that she eventually pulled away from design altogether. Read her bio by clicking below, via Todd Merrell Antiques. If I could have anything on his website, and I like most of it, it would probably be this.

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Ada Lovelace Day is an international blogging event instituted to draw attention to women who excel in the area of technology. Who is Ada Lovelace? From here:

Ada Lovelace was one of the world’s first computer programmers, and one of the first people to see computers as more than just a machine for doing sums. She wrote programmes for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, a general-purpose computing machine, despite the fact that it was never built. She also wrote the very first description of a computer and of software.

See also the Wikipedia entry, where we discovered Lovelace was also, oddly, the only legitimate child of the poet Byron. On Ada Lovelace Day, bloggers are asked to write about a present-day woman in technology. Since this is a design blog and not a tech blog, I’m going to arbitrarily include architecture and design under technology, since they are technical fields. As in other technical fields, woman have excelled in architecture and design but have had a very tough time gaining recognition thanks to the fact that these fields have been extremely male-dominated. When Charlotte Perriand asked Corbusier for a job, he said “We don’t embroider cushions here.” Perriand convinced him to hire her anyway, and went on to become an important figure in design whose star is now rising long after her death. (By the way there is nothing inferior about embroidering cushions, and the textile arts ought to be angry about that remark.) Recent evidence shows that women need female role models much more than men need male role models, and that is why this blog is jumping into the fray. Please also see previous posts on Eileen Gray, Charlotte Perriand, Nanna Ditzel, and many other women designers of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Charlotte Perriand:

Eileen Gray:

And finally, I love this recent Annie Liebowitz photo of SANAA architect Kazuyo Sejima holding a model of her New Museum design:

English textile designer Barbara Brown produced these superb textiles in the 60s and 70s. We found her designs by chance on The Textile Blog, a well-written site out of England covering “the history of interiors and interior furnishings over the last three centuries.” The writer is John Hopper, a trained textile designer from Cornwall. As he has also written here, Brown is one of his favourite designers. Brown was quite a prolific designer, and it’s odd that her name isn’t better known. Perhaps it has to do in part with the lingering stigma attached to the geometric prints of the 60s and 70s, a stigma we’ve never been able to understand.

The Textile Blog is one of those small islands of historical information in a sea of blogs that simply collect good design. Collecting is great, but it’s sometimes a relief to be provided with some historical context for design traditions and innovations. Perhaps it’s because objects are so decontextualized these days that there’s a strange kind of thrill when they begin to make sense again. Or maybe we’re just textile nerds. In talking about the short-lived 1960s flirtation with bold, futuristic design, Hopper argues

Brown embraced the new optimism and confidence that swept through Britain in the 1960s… This small period in British design history was a brief moment when Britain embraced the future… The oil crisis and following economic slump put paid to Britain’s flirtation with a confident future, and with the likes of Laura Ashley leading the way, Britain started looking backwards again to a nostalgic rural past that existed largely in the imagination.

Hopper’s post on Annie Albers is interesting too.