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"Today, utopia is on the side of people who use objects as instruments..."
"Political utopias are collective utopias which concern society..."
"If you log on to the Internet, you are in communication with the whole world..."
" At the beginning of the century, Le Corbusier believed in design for everyone..."
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Design and Utopias 2000

Paperback
16.5 x 24 cm
156 pages
Bilingual text : French and English
Illustrations: 130 colour, 20 black and white

What were the great design Utopias of the 20th century: total art, design for everyone, 'tabula rasa', dematerialisation? And what has become of them: 'Dream products', virtual reality, Moral Market?
Design has a privileged relationship with utopia in many ways. Because it often has a tendency to deny functional, industrial and commercial principles of reality. For better and for worse. Because it has embodied and still conveys all kinds of hopes: in technical progress, in democracy and in a 'better' future. De facto, design has largely relayed industrial utopias. Which ones does it relay today? 'We are lucky to have a symbolical date that will force us to carry out a kind of inventory of our society,' said Philippe Starck when the Good Goods (Bonne Marchandise) catalogue was published in September 1998. And we have been lucky to have been able to use the Bonne Marchandise catalogue to carry out a kind of audit of utopia in the design world at the close of this millennium.

 

Contents :


Forward by Henri Griffon, Président des Industries Françaises de l'Ameublement, texts by Christine Colin (Good Goods or utopia in 8 T-shirts), Thierry Chabanne (The Total Work of Art), Michel Buisson (Utopia in works), Pierre Doze (Is this where we live?), Catherine Geel (Inflatable, deflatable, and profitable too), interviews with Giulio Cappellini, Eugenio Perazza (Magis), Antonio Citterio by Brigitte Fitoussi, Elsa Francès (Thomson), Nick Hayek (Swatch), Serge van Hove (Renault), Elisabeth Laville (Utopies) by Florence Michel, Paul Virilio (Utopia to a Tee) by Odile Fillion, projects and work by Philippe Starck, Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, Jasper Morrison, Xavier Moulin, Jean-Marie Massaud, TimThom, François Azambourg, Frédéric Ruyant, Archizoom, Yona Friedman, Actar Arquitectura, Asymptote Architecture, MVRDV, Ilya Kabakov, Kyoichi Tsuzuki, Inflate, Yohji Yamamoto, Jean-Paul Jungmann, Valvomo. Graphic design : Grégoire Gardette, copy editor : Pierre-Michel Rainon, translation : Ronald Corlette Theuil.