Furniture Reporter

Instances of the word 'diseño' in La Vanguardia, 1881-2008

Barcelona’s major broadsheet newspaper, La Vanguardia, has opened up its archives (Hemeroteca) and now offers free online access. The full content ranges from 1881 onwards, can be searched by keyword, topic or date and downloaded as .pdf files.

As an interesting feature to note, the results interface offers a detailed interactive visual timeline of the number of occurences of the search word throughout La Vanguardia’s archives. A search for ‘diseño’ (design), for instance, reveals a striking development in the use of the word.

Its first noticeable appearances coincide with the 1920s / 1930s and the rise of Spanish modernism, and diseappear by 1936, at the start of the Civil War. The 1950s see a very slow, small but steady return of the word, whit its use growing noticeably from the mid 1960s. Between 1976, the start of the Spanish political transition, and 1989, the surge in the appearance of ‘design’ in the newspaper is extraordinary, from 1,194 instances in 1976, to 4,670 in 1989. After a short trough, usage peaks by the late 1990s, with 5,597 appearances in 1999.  Perhaps most surprisingly, there is a very sharp drop from 2000, and current levels of usage in 2008 are only equivalent to those of 1986, the height of the Barcelona design boom.

As I’ve suggested in La Barcelona del diseño, design and the city had a special relationship between the late 1970s and the late 1990s, which seems to have now lost some of its historical relevance.

And here is some eye candy from the archives:

Advertisement for clothes and underwear manufactured with synthetic fibers. May 1952.

Advertisement for Muebles Malda, one of Barcelona's furniture retailers. June 1966.

'We can't all use the same furniture'. Advertisement for Muebles La Favorita, one of Barcelona's furniture retailers. October 1973.

The FAD Industrial Design Delta Prizes of 1976. Images of designs by Miguel Mila, Jose Bonet and Studio Per.

January 1977. Barcelona Design Centre (BCD) moves to larger premises.

Colour supplement, July 1992: ‘The Games of the imagination. The Olympic project becomes the inspiration for the design of hundreds of objects’. In the main picture, Andre Ricard, designer of the olympic torch.

In light of this weekend’s trip to Ikea with Ashley and El Cyd (which is Spanish for The Cyd, if you didn’t know), I decided to put together a list of my favorite items from Ikea. These are items that, for various reasons, I do not own and possibly never will. Some are impractical, some are unnecessary. All of them are the things I use baby talk to discuss and swoon over the way most ladies do with shoes. I’m not really a shoe fan (I pretty much only wear my 8 year old Doc Martens and a variety of slip-on sneakers from Payless). I love furniture though. When I was in college, I wanted to be an interior design major, until I discovered that you had to take all the intro art classes. I’ve never really been much of a drawer or painter, and I saw via a friend’s roommate how hard it was to get through those classes without, you know, artistic talent. So instead, I subscribe to many furniture catalogs and spend half my day (so a lot of time, since I’m still unemployed) reading design websites and blogs. But as much as I love the plates at CB2 or whatever, my heart will always belong to Ikea. I love Swedish design in general, but there’s just something about the giant blue and yellow building that sets my heart aflutter. The straightforwardness of the packaging, the random extra pieces when you put your bookshelves together, the meatballs: I love it all.

5. POANG chair and footstool

The Poang is my favorite thing of all time. It’s just that I already have one. BUT. I don’t have it in orange (mine is dark blue, but I want to recover the pad to match the fabric that I put over my other furniture), and I don’t have the footstool. I so want the footstool. I love the Poang set. I think it’s basically the greatest thing ever. It’s up there with the polio vaccine and marshmallows. It’s better than snow days and 30 Rock.

Read more…

Mies Van der Rohe, Barcelona Chair

Mies Van Der Rohe, Barcelona Chair

“The chair is a very difficult object. Everyone who has ever tried to make one knows that. There are endless possibilities and many problems – the chair has to be light, it has to be strong, it has to be comfortable. It is almost easier to build a sky scraper than a chair.” – Mies Van Der Rohe 1930

He knew that what he designed had to be “an important chair, a very elegant chair and costly. It had to be monumental. ”- Mies Van Der Rohe 1929

The Barcelona chair served as thrones for the King and Queen of Spain in the German Pavilion at the World Arts Fair in Barcelona, 1929.

Barcelona Chair And Pavilion By Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

In an attempt to broadcast to the universe that I am desperate to get what some may call a ‘real, actual, career’ job and finally move out of home I have invested in my first piece of furniture.

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Okay, so, this person designed their home to look like Moonbase Alpha from the 1970′s British television series, Space:1999. Don’t worry, the site does include instructions on how to make Alphan wall panels.

Moonbase Alpha