Page 140 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

Expanded Media - and the MediaPlex 140/206
Christopher Dresser: Studies in Design (1874) + Teapot (1879)
Dresser’s Studies in Design is the third of his influential books on design following The Art of Decorative Design (1862), The Development of Ornamental Art in the International Exhibition (1862). Both as design-theorist and practising designer, Dresser was a formative influence on the emergence of Modernist design - through his formative participation in the British Aesthetic Movement, his enthusiasm for the emerging Anglo-Japanese style, and in the longer term, his influence on the emergence of industrial design principles at the Bauhaus, and in Industry itself (see Peter Behrens: AEG corporate design 1906), in the 20th century. Dresser was awarded a doctorate in 1859 for his book on the aesthetics of botany (Unity in Variety as Deduced from the Vegetable Kingdom - ‘unity in variety’ became part of the emerging redefinition of the beautiful), and the influence of this passion for botanical science is visible in some of his ceramic designs - the Persia Pattern Soup plate of 1886 for example), but his principle influence I think was in the stripping-away of superfluous decoration, and the honing of simple form and the relationship between form and function - all of which became hallmarks of the revolution in design and architecture (and craft) that was heralded by Aestheticism, Arts and Crafts, and the Bauhaus. (See Widar Halen: Christopher Dresser, a Pioneer of Modern Design 1990.)
The range of influences that provided the context for the emergence of modern ideas of Design and Architecture included Japanese architecture and interiors, arts and crafts, the lessons derived from the ornamental excesses of early mechanisation, as witnessed at the Great Exhibition of 1851, the emergence of new materials (steel, industrial glass, early plastics, synthetic colours, etc), new industrial methods (machining, die-stamping, injection-moulding, chemical dyeing, etc), and the work of Dresser's contemporaries - most importantly: John Ruskin, William Morris, Augustus Pugin, Henry Cole, Emery Walker, Owen Jones, William Edward Godwin. To be a principle agent of change in the emerging Machine ethos of Design is no small achievement, and Christopher Dresser ranks among the formative Modernist designers.