An Illustrated Guide to Furniture History provides upper-level students and instructors with an alternative visual analytical approach to learning about furniture history from Antiquity to Postmodernism. Following an immersive teaching model, it presents a Nine-Step Methodology to help students strengthen their visual literacy and quickly acquire subject area knowledge.
Moving chronologically through key periods in furniture history and interior design, such as the Renaissance, the Arts and Crafts Movement, and Modernism, it traverses Europe to America to present a comprehensive foundational guide to the history of furniture design.
Part I addresses furniture within the context of the built environment, with chapters exploring the historical perspective, construction principles, and the categorization of furniture. In Part II, the author visually depicts the structural organization of the methodological process, a three-category framework: History, Aesthetics, and Visual Notes. The chapters in this part prepare the reader for the visual analysis that will occur in the final section of the book. The book is lavishly illustrated in full color with over 300 images to reinforce visual learning and notation.
A must-have reference and study guide for students in industrial and product design, interior design, and architecture.
Furniture is an integral part of architecture and interior design. An awareness of how fundamentally furniture is integrated into the built environment is crucial to understanding its design and developmentâremembering that at certain points in history, furniture was often designed apart from its need to function. Inseparable from social, political, and economic influences, furniture design and its history reflect the changing living conditions and lifestyles of developing civilizations.1 Exactly defining furniture styles can be arduous because furniture styles evolve in a historical continuum, each reflecting the one preceding it and incubating the one to follow, running concurrently and interweaving or overlapping in both time and place.2 For individuals interested in understanding furniture design and its history, placing furniture in a historical contextâtime period, social and political factors, including wars, religions, dynastic marriages, etc.âis important. The context allows one to see how each design grew out of a design that had gone before. The concept of designing began only 400 or so years ago.3 Design comes from the Italian noun, disegno, meaning drawing or design; itâs a term used during the 16th and 17th centuries to designate a form and discipline required for representation of the ideal form of an object in visual arts.4
Regarding furniture physiognomics in a historical continuum, this book uses a âpictorial timelineâ for reference. This chapter introduces the pictorial timeline in Timeline 1.1âthe complete timeline from Antiquity through to the 20th century. Timeline 1.1 provides the complete time range of the furniture covered in Chapters 6â13. On the subsequent pages, the pictorial timeline is enlarged and divided into three sections for visual clarity, Timeline 1.2, Timeline 1.3, and Timeline 1.4.
The pictorial timeline will assist the student or adult learner in understanding the evolution of furniture design and styles and is intrinsic to the premise of this bookâs nonconventional approach, immersion-learning model, and prescribed methodologyâthe Analysis of Form: Nine-Step Methodology. For the pictorial timeline, a small selection of furniture pieces that are indicative of the period and capture the aesthetic spirit of the time has been chosen. The timeline isnât extensive in the number of pieces chosen but selects what are deemed paramount examples. The pictorial timeline moves chronologically, but not century by century, spanning from Antiquity to the 20th century. This pictorial timeline consists of critical points in time that define the Western canons pertaining to furniture history and interior design; the goal, as mentioned in the Introduction, is for the student or adult learner to gain knowledge about furniture history through the use of visual notes (Chapters 6â14), simultaneously reinforcing visual literacy. Using this type of timeline for investigation of furniture design and history exposes the relationship between the physical form of furniture and social concepts of class, status, and gender. This indelible timeline should facilitate a visual understanding of design changes through history, a journey from Antiquity to the 20th century, noting furnitureâs evolution from functional and utilitarian to decorative-arts status, or âobject of desire.â By the end of the book, the reader will possess a basic understanding of furniture history and will have developed a foundation of knowledge that will facilitate continued learning of the subject if he or she chooses.
There will be some unevenness content-wise with respect to the canons. In-depth coverage will be dedicated to periods that have a stronger impact on furniture, such as the historical periods defined by monarchs, specifically 18th-century England during the reigns of George I through George III; in France, in the period of Louis XIV through Louis XVI; and comparable periods in American history. Briefer coverage will be given to AntiquityâEgypt, Greco-Roman classicism, Renaissance, and Baroque.
As mentioned in the Introduction, due to the bookâs premise, immersion-learning model, and nine-step methodological approach, all chapters pay particular attention to the visual images. Serving as guides and tools that reinforce this learning model, the images represent a range of delineation methods, techniques, and illustrative approaches, and include quick sketches, tightly delineated drawings, or refined rendered drawings. Examples representing a range of rendering techniques (e.g., watercolor, colored pencils, markers, oil pastels) are also included throughout the book.
Becoming familiar with 18th-century construction principles in Chapter 2 will provide the platform for understanding how to categorize a piece within a timeframe and place of origin. Chapter 3, Piece categorically, describes how to do this by examining 18th-century French, English, and American furniture examples to show how furniture can be categorized and identified by specific physical features. The chapter explores ubiquitous pieces of this period (e.g., chairs, bureaus, case pieces) and how certain pieces possess anthropomorphic qualities, such as a back, leg, arm, foot, or knee. Additionally, the importance of provenance and the impact it has on a piece of furnitureâs physical characteristics is discussed. These characteristic examples range from the form of a piece, type of joinery, material, and the finishâin essence, the overall aesthetic quality. This section emphasizes important questions to ...
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Normes de citation pour An Illustrated Guide to Furniture History
APA 6 Citation
Oats, J. (2021). An Illustrated Guide to Furniture History (1st ed.). Taylor and Francis. Retrieved from https://www.perlego.com/book/2555169/an-illustrated-guide-to-furniture-history-pdf (Original work published 2021)
Chicago Citation
Oats, Joclyn. (2021) 2021. An Illustrated Guide to Furniture History. 1st ed. Taylor and Francis. https://www.perlego.com/book/2555169/an-illustrated-guide-to-furniture-history-pdf.
Harvard Citation
Oats, J. (2021) An Illustrated Guide to Furniture History. 1st edn. Taylor and Francis. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/2555169/an-illustrated-guide-to-furniture-history-pdf (Accessed: 15 October 2022).
MLA 7 Citation
Oats, Joclyn. An Illustrated Guide to Furniture History. 1st ed. Taylor and Francis, 2021. Web. 15 Oct. 2022.