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Internationally known furniture designer and writer Jeremy (Jez Broun argues the case that modern is best at a one-day multi-media lecture he gave on 6th March at Bath University.
The furniture being designed and made in Britain today equals if not surpasses the quality of furniture of any previous era, yet few people seem to know about it. We tend to associate modern design with cheap IKEA furniture and clichés such as 'they don't make it like they used to' or 'you can't mix old with new' (especially here in Bath) are tiresome in their falsity. How many people can recognize a veneered or solid piece of furniture let alone differentiate whether one is better than the other ? Television has turned us into a nation of wine, food and gardening experts but how many people imagine there is life beyond MDF !
Quietly a revolution has been stirring in Britain over the past 30 years or so in craftsmanship and design. Indeed Britain probably leads the world. The recent appearance of showrooms in our city such as Shannon and Apostrophe (both in Walcot Street) mark a long starvation of contemporary design in the city since the 80's and that now, nervously, Bath is waking up to the present. But it is not just Bath, during the "dark ages" of the 90's there was hardly an interior magazine nationwide that dared venture from the theme of "heritage" and "tradition" !
They say the only certainty is change and I somehow suspected it would take the new Millennium to spark this change.
Furniture like architecture is a barometer of social, economic and spiritual change and the furniture of today is a continuum of tradition. If old cannot mix with new then how is it that many antiques created centuries apart co-exist quite happily and unquestionably ? The perfect TV advert backdrop for a prestigious new hi-tec car is …. a stately home ! This prejudice is particularly absurd in Bath when modern furniture has more in common with clean lined understated Georgian architecture than any other architectural period.
The past hundred years or so has seen some of the most exciting and innovative furniture ever made from world architects and designers such as Le Corbusier, Marcel Breuer, Charles Eames, Alvar Aalto and Robin Day. It is probably true to say that it was here in Britain that it all started by the socialist William Morris towards the end of the 19th Century. The Arts and Crafts Movement sparked the most important Design movement of the 20th Century - the Bauhaus (form follows function). Many of the "modern" designs of the 1920's are familiar reproductions sold today in stores like Habitat and IKEA. Indeed Concorde was a perfect example of this design philosophy.
Whereas in Post war years Scandinavia (particularly Denmark) was able to embrace handcraft traditions with mass production, Britain never really recovered from the onslaught of furniture made for profit under the Victorians, which boasts some of the worst examples of furniture design ever ! A flicker of the Arts & Crafts movement flame survived in Britain (under Ambrose Heal and Gordon Russell) and this has been slowly re-kindled with the emergence since the 70's of a new breed of 'graduate furniture makers' existing despite little serious patronage.
At this time I found myself amongst a handful of designer makers such as John Makepeace, Alan Peters, Ashley Cartwright, Martin Grierson, Fred Baier and John Coleman, giving momentum to The New Golden Age of British Furniture today. There are now tens of workshops nationwide creating simply breathtaking contemporary work that only a few people seem to get to see via exhibitions and a handful of galleries.
This unique one day jam packed lecture explored contemporary furniture, taking a snaphot tour from Art Nouveau through to Italian and Scandinavian to the British 70's Furniture Craft Revival and current IKEA revolution. It included films on topics such as "The Chair" with examples and discussions. The main aim was to inspire a greater appreciation and understanding of modern design and what good design really is in order that people can make better informed choices.
Jez Broun
January 2004
Buy the Furniture Today 2 DVDs £39.95
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