Modern design in San Francisco.(Current and coming)(Calendar)

Many of those think-outside-the-box designers of the early modern period in Europe and the United States--Jean Dunand, Josef Hoffmann, Gerrit Rietveld, Mies van der Rohe, Paul T. Frankl, Frances Elkins, and others-got a lot of things right. They designed numerous up-to-the-second, cutting-edge objects that resonated with consumers because they were practical and creative, and took advantage of new materials that were intriguing and fresh. The inevitable flip side is that when some designers did not get it right, they produced junk, often in multiples. If only collectors of objects in the modern idiom all owned a copy of Edgar Kaufmann Jr.'s verbose but eminently useful pamphlet What is Modern Design? (which he wrote for the Museum of Modern Art in 1950), only the better material would survive in collections around the country today. As the curator of modern design at the museum and the son of the man for whom Frank Lloyd Wright designed Fallingwater--the most avant-garde house of its day-the younger Kaufmann had an influential voice in the design community. He outlined twelve tenets of modern design as he saw them and then addressed the age-old question "What is good design?" This pamphlet is ably cited by Jared Goss, guest curator, in the catalogue that accompanies this year's San ...