Decorative Art 70s

TASCHEN's Decorative Arts series, whose six instalments span the 20th century up through the 1970s, carefully reproduces the best of Decorative Art, The Studio Yearbook.

Published annually from 1906 until 1980, the yearbook was dedicated to the latest currents in architecture, interiors, furniture, lighting, glassware, textiles, metalware, and ceramics. Since the publications went out of print, the now hard-to-find yearbooks have become highly prized by collectors and dealers. Preserving the yearbooks' original page layouts, TASCHEN's Decorative Arts books bring you the authentic experience of each decade's design trends and styles. This volume spotlights the futuristic, experimental aesthetic of the 1970s. After the revolutions of the '60s, the world of design and architecture became an increasingly exciting and fast-moving hotbed of ideas, rife with vehemently opposing schools and movements. In many ways, it was a more extreme era for design than the previous decade.

Experimentalism was everywhere, and many projects thought not practical, were forward-thinking visions of a new kind of decorative art and design. Various groups advocated returning to natural methods, rejecting style in favour of craft or pushing the logic of industrial living to its concrete, high-rise extreme. Decorative Arts 1970s includes the work of the decade's brightest stars, such as Afra and Tobia Scarpa, Luigi Coltani, Ettore Sottsass, Achille Castiglioni, Kisho Kurokawa, Norman Foster, Richard Meier, and Theo Crosby.