Why Mid-Century Design Is Still Popular

Written by Mark Jennings Wednesday, 11 May 2011 09:08

From time to time you can hear someone say that Mid-Century furniture is having a 'resurrection'. That's not because of a cheap nostalgia moment we're living. Pieces of furniture from the '50s are still resurging for around two decades at this moment and it shows no signs and symptoms of decreasing.

From time to time you can hear someone say that Mid-Century furniture is having a 'resurrection'. That's not because of a cheap nostalgia moment we're living. Pieces of furniture from the '50s are still resurging for around two decades at this moment and it shows no signs and symptoms of decreasing.

There are handful of things about which one can make so bound a pronouncement of eternity as a George Nelson bench a Noguchi table or Charles Eames lounge. Every time something attains that level of design purity, it will still be popular rediscovered again by every new generation.

Designer Paul Frankl once said: "Style is the external expression of the inner spirit of any given time." The truth is, that the exuberant style of the Mid-Century had much more 'staying power' than imagined. Its boundaries were not hard-edged, by having a virtual cut-off line at 1960.

Instead, it really is everlasting heartily into following millennium, still identifying modernism for our age. Its prototypical, streamline and modern form wasn't just the cutting edge of a single decade, but overaching appearance vocabulary that signifies the best part of a century.

The frank design and unusual shapes of the nineteen fifties that once caused scoffing in scholarly groups don't seem 'weird' anymore. In light of the post-modernist whimsies and brutal deconstructionism of the 1980's, '50s household furniture looks, in fact, sophisticated. That demand for this specific kind of household furniture is reflected in the number of completely new stores and website focused in retro, vintage and mid-century furniture and by the reissue -by the Herman Miller Company after years of customers' requestes- of the classics pieces of George Nelson, Charles and Ray Eames and Isamu Noguchi from the mid-century: the apex of '50s design in America.