Thirteenth International Conference on Design Principles & Practices

Abstract

Not a single exhibition of modernist art, including architecture or design, is complete without the reconstruction of objects created by the legendary masters of the 1920s. Both physical and digital reconstructions, full-scale reconstructions of models and prototypes based on works by Malevich and El Lissitsky, Rodchenko and Tatlin, Klutsis, Popova, and Stepanova are often created specifically for exhibitions, opening new pages of design history. From graphic and conceptual works of art, this heritage passes into the category of physically existing, tangible objects. Realizing the nature and strategy of reconstruction one has to consider the special character of most of the designs of the 1920s: manifestation of the design and architectonic principle (Rodchenko’s newspaper kiosk of 1919 representing the use of surfaces both as graphic and constructive elements), agitation for multifunctional and folding principles of furniture in Rodchenko’s sets for the play “Inga” of 1929 and furnishings of the room of a protagonist of the scientific organization of labour (sets for film “The Journalist”, 1928) announce the object as an instrument in the intellectual profession, for which the Swedish-American office furniture served as a prototype. In all these examples structural elements of these objects were as if unfolding into space from the two-dimension origin of a draught. Both the theater and the cinema for Rodchenko and his colleagues, the pioneers of the design of the 1920s, turned into a place for the manifestation of new relations between a man and an object, between the unique the person and the industrial product.