Black & white

Four artists met as young students at Glasgow School of Art in the mid 1890s. Charles Rennie Mackintosh, James Herbert McNair, Margaret Macdonald, her sister Frances Macdonald. They experienced their ideas and the “Glasgow Style” had born. They improved Art Nouveau with Japanese style, exploiting the linearity, the natural materials mixed to oriental influences.
This group of architects and artists used ornament sparingly and, with the exception of few pastel tones, preferred black and white, a preference that was to become a hallmark of the modern.

Some of their ideas are now incorporated in modern design, especially in the synthesis between modernity and oriental influences. We came back to linearity especially in recent years of minimalism, while rigidly geometric furniture, preferably black and white, reported to a great decorative effect. The Arts and Crafts Movement supported Charles Rennie Mackintosh because the design art is a free art that distinguish her from the impersonal and uniform industrial production. These ideas today translate themselves in industrial customized production reassembling the craftsman work, but that give you the sense of a distinguishable social role.
And prices make them distinguishable too.

The Magis Chair was created by Konstantin Grcic in 2003. Legs are made in glossy anodized aluminium (red, white, anthracite) Legs of black chair are made of black anodized aluminium in a matte finish. Seat made of die-cast aluminium, treated with sputtered fluorinated titanium and painted in polyester powder. Magis writes “With its anodized aluminium legs and skeletonised aluminium seat, Chair One might not look comfortable, but looks can be deceiving”.

This is a black and white minimalistic outdoor chair. It seams natural but is made of high quality polymer resin woven wicker, the bodies are completely weatherproof and the cushions are made of quick-drying dense foam with removable.

Dutch designer Danny Fang projected this “Matryoshka Chair”. Produced in collaboration with the Malaysian furniture company Kian, this set of outdoor furniture includes two chairs and two stools made from woven polyethylene fibres and an aluminium frame. The materials make for an amazingly lightweight set; all the pieces stacked together only weigh 22kgs.

And these are the latest Cassina chairs:

Black and white composition are really minimal but no more “natural”…resins, aluminium, plays a key role. Circles or ovals, compact shake, are coming back.
Can the Glasgow School speak to contemporary design and still teach something new on use of the line and wood for decorating the in-door and out-door environment? Can teach something about mixing western culture with indigenous symbolic cultures?
What lies beyond the line?