Hostname: page-component-5c6d5d7d68-txr5j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-08-07T10:41:48.535Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Personality, consumption and architectural pedagogy in the UK, 1958–1968

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Alise Upitis
Affiliation:
1307 Phillips Ave, Las Vegas, NV 89104, USA, 00 1 617 909 0678, alise.upitis@gmail.com

Extract

The Pop-Art doyens of the Independent Group (IG) and the British design establishment were in two minds about burgeoning British consumerism during the 1950s. Members of IG were busy collaging images appropriated from American consumer culture while members of the British design establishment were fiercely opposed to adopting principles of capitalist consumerism, such as expendability of goods and planning for obsolescence. Protests against consumerist values were voiced by figures of the Modernist design establishment such as historian Nikolaus Pevsner and Michael Farr, then editor of the Council of Industrial Design's publication Design. Their views were reinforced by the stances of the British Standards Institution, the Molony Committee, created in 1959 to review and revise consumer law, and the Consumers' Association, publisher of the popular product-review magazine Which? These organisations held paramount design's durability, function and use. However, such institutionally-sanctioned concerns, in the tradition of the nineteenth-century preoccupation with social empiricism and consumer education, hardly stemmed a rising fascination with what an increasing consumption of goods could teach design.

Type
history
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)