In the years before electricity, lamps used oil. Proper table lamps have long been used for lighting our most intimate spaces. A well-crafted antique or vintage table lamp does more than provide light the right fixture-and-table combination can add a focal point or creative element to any interior. Perfect for lighting your nightstand or reading nook, table lamps play an integral role in styling an inviting room. But because modernist furniture designs are so simple, they can blend in seamlessly with just about any type of décor. It’s difficult to overstate the influence that modernism continues to wield over designers and architects - and equally difficult to overstate how revolutionary it was when it first appeared a century ago. Today, Breuer’s Wassily chair, Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona chair - crafted with his romantic partner, designer Lilly Reich - and the Eames lounge chair are emblems of progressive design and vintage originals are prized cornerstones of collections. While Bauhaus principals Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe created furniture from mass-produced, chrome-plated steel, American visionaries like Charles and Ray Eames worked in materials as novel as molded plywood and fiberglass. The modernists rejected both natural and historical references and relied primarily on industrial materials such as metal, glass, plywood, and, later, plastics.

Architect Philip Johnson characterized the hallmarks of modernism as “machine-like simplicity, smoothness or surface avoidance of ornament.”Įarly practitioners of modernist design include the De Stijl (“The Style”) group, founded in the Netherlands in 1917, and the Bauhaus School, founded two years later in Germany.įollowers of both groups produced sleek, spare designs - many of which became icons of daily life in the 20th century. References to the natural world and ornate classical embellishments gave way to the sleek simplicity of the Machine Age. Rejecting the rigidity of Victorian artistic conventions, modernists sought a new means of expression. The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw sweeping social change and major scientific advances - both of which contributed to a new aesthetic: modernism.

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