The Genius of Design: Designs for Living, BBC Two

Does form always have to follow function? Is ornamentation really such a heinous crime? Or is Modernism itself the enemy of the people? The second part of this excellent five-part series – fab archive footage, great interviews with designers young enough to no longer be beholden to the Modernist creed – focused on the founding of the Bauhaus and the Modernist aesthetic. And after juggling a lot of questions, it gently guided us towards more or less the same position as Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House, though in a far more respectful, design-conscious way: Modernism worked in theory but wasn’t so hot, nor so user-friendly, in practice. Furthermore, it was inevitable that it would be the consumer rather than the theoretician who would, in the end, hold sway.

Does form always have to follow function? Is ornamentation really such a heinous crime? Or is Modernism itself the enemy of the people? The second part of this excellent five-part series – fab archive footage, great interviews with designers young enough to no longer be beholden to the Modernist creed – focused on the founding of the Bauhaus and the Modernist aesthetic. And after juggling a lot of questions, it gently guided us towards more or less the same position as Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House, though in a far more respectful, design-conscious way: Modernism worked in theory but wasn’t so hot, nor so user-friendly, in practice. Furthermore, it was inevitable that it would be the consumer rather than the theoretician who would, in the end, hold sway.