British Design (MoMA Design)

As the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, Britain was inevitably the epicenter of the development of modern industrial design. This book―the fourth volume in the MoMA Design Series, featuring works in the Museum's extraordinary design collection―explores this legacy, tracing the growth of British design from the early stages of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century to the Millennium Dome and beyond. In its more than 200-year scope, British Design explores a variety of design products and movements, such as Wedgwood pottery, the Arts and Crafts Movement, the Spitfire and Hurricane fighter planes of World War II, the Mini car and Dyson vacuum cleaner, the “Cool Britannia” cultural explosion in the late 1990s and British designers' take on the digital devices that define entertainment and communication in the early twenty-first century. An introduction by Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art, provides an overview of design culture in Britain; an essay and timeline by Hugh Aldersey-Williams, former design critic for The New Statesman and author of The Most Beautiful Molecule and New American, illuminate the masterpieces of modern British design superbly reproduced in the volume's plate section.