The Design Journal

An International Journal for All Aspects of Design

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Iconic Designs: 50 Stories about 50 Things, edited

by Grace Lees-Maffei

Deyan Sudjic

To cite this article: Deyan Sudjic (2015) Iconic Designs: 50 Stories about 50 Things, edited by
Grace Lees-Maffei, The Design Journal, 18:3, 463-466, DOI: 10.1080/14606925.2015.1059602

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14606925.2015.1059602

Published online: 06 Oct 2015.

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Book Review

Iconic Designs: 50
Stories about 50
Things, edited by
Grace Lees-Maffei
London: Bloomsbury 2014, 240pp.,

DOI: 10.1080/14606925.2015.1059602
Hardback ISBN 9780857853523, £25.

Deyan Sudjic

+
A very long time ago, 1985 in fact, when I was still
a young and impressionable journalist I wrote a
book called Cult Objects. It was my first exercise
in long form writing, moving from 1000 words at most for a
newspaper to seven chapters and 60,000 words involved
going through the kind of pain barrier that a sprinter experi-
ences when they attempt to run a marathon.
I can’t pretend to any great originality in the conception.
And 20 years later I wrote The Language of Things to some
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extent as an act of expiation. But I did spend quite a lot of time

cudgeling my brains to find a way to write 3000 words about
the Willys Jeep, Havana cigar packaging, and the Burberry
trench coat. Six years earlier, Stephen ­Bayley had published
a book called In Good Shape that as I r­emember, like mine,
featured accounts of the Parker 51 pen and the Citroen DS
463

19, albeit at a shorter length. It was c ­ ommissioned by Sir

 Book Review

Paul Reilly, the director of the Design Council when it was still pub-
lishing critical writing, and it served as a very successful job applica-
tion that won Bayley the role of the founding director of the Design
Museum. And 20 years before that, a well known French writer had
published a collection of his journalism, that included one particular
essay on the Citroen DS that had attracted a great deal of attention
over the years. There was also somebody called Reyner Banham,
with his work for New Society, in which he explored the finer points
of clip boards, ice cream vans, surf boards and Jaguars. And there
was Adrian Forty and Objects of Desire, an impressive book with a
title so brilliant that it was overwhelmed and stripped bare of mean-
ing by the unwelcome attentions of countless headline writers.
Iconic Designs is in this tradition of these books, a set of closely
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observed readings of the familiar objects that form the backdrop to

everyday life. Some reflect popular culture: Barbie Dolls, Coca Cola,
and others are rooted in what is sometimes called high culture, such
as Wedgwood.
The writing burden in Iconic Designs has been shared among an
impressive range of academics. Not all of them have managed to
complete the full 3000 words without veering off their chosen icon.
The Eiffel Tower piece for example morphs into an exploration of all
expos beginning with the Crystal Palace.
I confess I was a little disconcerted to see how much Iconic
Designs covered the same ground that I had looked at, innocently
enough, on my own – in Cult Objects. In my list, I had a Marcel
Breuer cantilever chair, explored in Iconic Designs by Clive Edwards,
a pair of Levis, analysed by Christopher Breward and a Coca Cola
bottle seen through Finn Arne Jorgensen’s eyes. I did not have a
Valentine typewriter, analysed by Penny Sparke, but I did talk about
Mario Bellini’s portable electric golf ball typewriter for Olivetti and a
Sony Walkman and a Swiss Army penknife, both of which feature.
The writing includes the elegant brilliance and research worn
lightly of Glenn Adamson’s account of Wedgewood, Ellen Lupton’s
sharp exploration of Isotype, Neurath and his collaborators, and
­Alice Twemlow who is really good on exactly who did what on the
cover art for Sgt. Pepper. But occasionally it is clouded by the con-
ventions of academic discourse.
The question to ask is why make this particular selection of
­objects at this particular time? Are they really telling us something
about the nature of ‘iconicity’, the ugly word that surfaces more than
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once in the pages of this book? Or is this a packaged collection of

disparate subjects?
It is more the latter, though it is organized in related groups of
solid essays. In its range, and approach it tells us quite a lot about
the field of design history, the particular enthusiasms of some of its
adepts and some of their blind spots.
I had not previously read the assault on Jørn Utzon’s Sydney
464

­Opera House made by Frank Lloyd Wright, quoted by D.J. Huppatz.

 Book Review

But I was surprised to read his view of Sydney in the 1950s as

­Australia’s premier city, a role that in those days Melbourne –a city in
which he now works – would have taken for granted as its own. And
it is impossible to accept Huppatz’s claim that the Sydney Opera
House was the first modern architectural icon; a title for which there
are all too many claimants, from the Bauhaus to Ronchamp to the
Seagram Tower.
The Mobility Scooter earns its place alongside Concorde if for
nothing else than that it is unexpected. Incidentally, it would have
been fascinating had the author of the essay on Concorde pursued
the line of thinking that is only hinted at in the way that the aircraft is
described as ‘she’ throughout.
I had forgotten that the London Eye began as a competition orig-
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inated by the Architecture Foundation, but I would have expected to

be told if I didn’t know already how hostile the Royal Fine Art Com-
mission had been to its building, and even more to have heard about
the mortifying early failures in front of CNN’s cameras to raise the Eye
from its prone position on the Thames to a fully erect posture.
I enjoyed the fleeting comparison of Harry Beck and his tube map
with Mondrian’s pursuit of abstraction, but I was less convinced by
the suggestion that reading Guy Debord had something to offer in
our understanding of an electrical engineering draftsman.
I would have expected more from an academic reading from Clive
Edwards of Breuer’s cantilever chair. The mythology he tells us is
that it was inspired by his bicycle. But why can’t he be more definite,
was it or wasn’t it a myth? And why could he not have told us more
about the famous patent wars that were waged on cantilever chairs
of all types on behalf of Mart Stam?
Penny Sparke, who knows more about Ettore Sottsass than
most, is a little economical on the Valentine typewriter. I am sur-
prised that she does not mention the part that Perry King played in
its creation, or the mixed feelings that Sottsass himself had toward
his creation. He described it later as a failure, angry that the type-
writer that he wanted to make had been watered down by Olivetti’s
caution, and had, he thought, distracted attention from all the many
other things he had done. It might have been significant to men-
tion King’s interpretation of the design as the product of Sottsass’s
­determination to sexualize the object with its nipple-like twin spools,
picked out in orange to contrast with the red body of the machine.
Juliette Kristensen presents Sony’s Walkman as the first
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space-defining portable consumer electronic product. It is possible

to describe the transistor radio in the same way. She suggests that
Akio Morita tested the prototype while playing golf, that it had two
headphone jacks as residuals from its original incarnation as a Dicta-
phone, and that Morita wanted a mute button to be introduced to
replace the redundant record button. But there are so many other
official versions of the foundation of the myth of the Walkman. In
465

some versions the second jack was introduced on the suggestion of

 Book Review

Morita’s daughter, in others it is his wife. What Kristensen does not

mention is how many Sony products were launched with remarkably
similar myths; the executive who took a Handycam prototype skiing,
and pointed out that the controls need to be robust enough to use
with gloves for example. It is the presence of such corporately cre-
ated myths that seems a defining characteristic of Sony, one that
might have been worth further investigation. And she missed the
Walkman’s alleged patent infringement settlement altogether, and
Morita’s determination to bring the price within reach of a student
market.
Louise Crème on Dyson does not discuss the early sex toy pink
version of his machine made in Japan, as well as Dyson’s own
­remark that one of the reasons to manufacture vacuum cleaners was
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that it was the highest ticket item that consumers might buy without
using credit. She is also somewhat unclear about his r­esignation as
­chairman of the Design Museum, which she suggests took place
when the Conran Foundation collection was closed and replaced
with an exhibition on Constance Spry. The Conran Foundation
Collection was in fact a temporary annual exhibition.
This is a collection of writings that holds a mirror to its writers,
almost as much as it casts light on its ostensible subject matter. It
gives us a valuable introduction to the contemporary landscape of
academic inquiry into design. It provides an argument for the tradi-
tion of using objects that were born for purposes of utility, but have
lost it, as the subject of a continuing inquiry into the meaning of
things.

Biography
Deyan Sudjic has been the director of the Design Museum since
2006, and is leading its move to a new home in the former
Commonwealth Institute. He studied architecture at Edinburgh
­
­University. He has taught at the Hochschule fur Angewandte Kunst
in Vienna and at the Royal College of Art. He was the founding editor
of Blueprint, the director of Glasgow 1999, UK City of Architecture
and Design, and the director of the Venice Architecture Biennale in
2002. He has edited Domus, and worked as a critic for the Sunday
Times, The Guardian and The Observer. His most recent book, B is
for Bauhaus was published in paperback by Penguin in 2015.
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