The Space Age aesthetic is one of the most widely known; the highly distinct tactility of its bubble-like curves, glossy plastic, and sleek chrome transports us back to the post-war excitement for the ‘futuristic’.
Googie style was playful, flamboyant and angular, and mostly seen on American roadsides.
The defining Space Age designs of the 1960s and 70s took root in the ‘Googie’ architecture of 1940s California – a styled named after a 1949 coffee shop in Los Angeles designed by architect John Lautner. Googie style was playful, flamboyant and angular, and mostly seen on American roadsides; gas stations, motels, and diners were eye-catching, super-sized neon-decked beacons for the bright hopes of the American Dream.
From the post-war consumer boom there emerged ‘mid-century modern’ mass production, and a trends-focused mood grew within interior design, and along with this, an appetite for ‘newness’. When long-wearing wooden furniture was replaced by the fashionable, futuristic white-on-white or colour pops of Space Age, it communicated ultra-modernity; being tapped in to what’s ‘cool’ via all the exciting promises of the cosmos.
It was the innovative materiality that made Space Age so instantly iconic. While today, the Space Age aesthetic is honoured by designers much more sustainably, it was the 1960s’ new wave of plastics that originally facilitated its pioneering legacy. Designer Verner Panton’s monobloc shape for the iconic Panton chair, which is still produced by Vitra today, was only made possible with the use of high-tensile fibre-glass-reinforced polyester. Plastics came to signal that the designer was open to experimenting with completely unknown, unfamiliar materials to create novel texture and interaction.
As Cristina Bargna, head of the Plastic Design Collection at Design Museum Brussels says in Space Age Design: Icons of the Movement by Peter Martin; "In the 1950s, plastic represented possibilities, freedom, and joy. The freedom of shape; the possibility to create new furniture, to furnish new houses – a material that spoke to a new generation with the desire to live differently. Plastic was no longer a material that imitated what had come before. It started to embody the future; it created a completely new vision of reality."
The freedom of shape; the possibility to create new furniture, to furnish new houses – a material that spoke to a new generation with the desire to live differently.
The currency of plastics has since turned on its head, with most material innovations focused on reducing waste and slowing climate change – but the ethereal, hopeful mood and experimental tactility of Space Age design endures as a rich reference point for designers.
Image credits; Shutterstock, IKEA, Verner Patton Design AG