21/02/11 – Ladislav Sutnar began designing toys while a student at the School of Applied Arts in Prague in the early 1920s. His use of simple geometric shapes and bright colours resonated with children as well as adults. His designs, though rooted in the rich heritage of Czechoslovak folk art, helped bring toy design into the 20th century.

His toys depicted modern everyday objects (cars, trains, factories) and were carefully designed to allow for mass automated or conveyor-belt production. As early as 1921, Sutnar’s toys began gaining wide acclaim, winning numerous awards and touring in international shows.

During the early 1920s he began work on a building block set called Modular City (Skládací město) for the Artěl Association. The design would win him a prize at the Toys exhibition held by the Prague Museum of Applied Arts in 1924. Between 1926 and 1929, he further developed his ideas and created more prototypes, including a building block set entitled Factory Town (Tovární město) this time winning significant recognition both in Czechoslovakia and abroad.

Through the 1930s, Sutnar looked beyond toy design and held positions in several notable applied arts and cultural organizations. He also worked on a great number of collaborative and solo projects ranging from book design and typography, to industrial and exhibition design. It was not until the early 1940s that he would once again return to his building block designs.

After traveling to the United States to help setup the Czechoslovak pavilion for the 1939 New York World’s Fair and subsequently being stranded due to the outbreak of war, he developed what would be the final iteration of his building block designs. He called it Build the Town. In an effort to see the set produced, he created designs for packaging, instructions and promotional artwork and, after unsuccessfully securing a manufacturer, himself commissioned the production of fifty sets.

Prototypes of Build the Town, as well as promotional material and working sketches, now reside in the collections of several major museums including the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, MOMA and the National Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague.

Modular City building block set (1922)

Building block set, 1927

Factory Town building block set 1927

Kit sketches, Build the Town building block set, 1942-3

Kit sketches, Build the Town building block set, 1942-3

Documentation: roofs, Build the Town building block set, ca. 1943

Documentation: blocks, Build the Town building block set, ca. 1943

Promotion kits, Build the Town building block set, ca. 1943

Promotion kits, Build the Town building block set, ca. 1943

Design of box, Build the Town building block set, ca. 1943

Design of box, Build the Town building block set, ca. 1943

Design of box, Build the Town building block set, ca. 1943

Prototype, Build the Town building block set, 1943

Prototype for Build the Town Building Blocks, 1940-43

Sources and more information

• Andel, J. et al. Ladislav Sutnar: Prague – New York – design in action, Prague: Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague & Argo Publishers, 2003.
• Images of Build the Town from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art//
• Build the town images courtesy of Daddytypes on Flickr//
• Build the Town Flickr set//

Many of the images included in Bill’s book come from the 1949 traveling exhibition Die Gute Form (Good Design) organized on behalf of the Swiss Werkbund. It includes everything from natural phenomena and industrial tools to sculpture and commercial goods, from architecture and urban planning to children’s toys.

From the introductory essay:
This is primarily a picture book laying no claim to completeness or balance. It illustrates things that evince a remarkable degree of perfection, or embody some idea capable of further development. In fact, it is really a kind of survey from the compiler’s personal standpoint of the evolution of form towards the middle of the Twentieth Century.

Sources and related information
Images from Max Bill’s Form on Flickr//

13/09/10 – Exhibition catalogue for Design in Scandinavia: an exhibition of objects for the home (1954), the first major exhibition of Scandinavian design to travel to North America. The exhibition showcased ceramics, furniture, glassware, metalwork and textiles from Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden and was pivotal in introducing modern Scandinavian design to North America. It opened in New York’s Brooklyn Museum April 20, 1954 and traveled throughout the United States and Canada until 1957. The show featured work by Alvar Aalto, Kay Bojesen, Kaj Franck, Finn Juhl, Henning Koppel, Timo Sarpaneva, Hans Wegner and many others.

Exhibition catalogue edited by Arne Remlov with cover and layout design by Tapio Wirkkala. Staple-bound, pull-out exhibition index included at the end of each volume.

Sources and related information
Images from the exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum 1954//
Design in Scandinavia exhibition catalogue on Flickr//

27/07/10 – Teak and limba wood toy monkey with articulated joints designed and produced by Kay Bojesen and his workshop in Denmark c. 1951. Available today complete with Henri Rousseau themed packaging through Rosendhal.

12/07/10 – Illustration by Aldo Rossi from the exhibition ‘La conica’ e altre caffettiere held September 8-11, 1984 in Milan.

A note about the show:

This exhibition illustrates the genesis of the “La conica” cofee-maker, named so after the conical shape of its lid.

It is an espresso coffee-maker developed for Alessi after research started in 1980 on the theme of coffee and tea, the rites and their instruments for preparation and service. Pots, pitchers, the New Orleans coffee-maker, espresso coffee-makers, percolators: notes, sketches, drawings, good photographs and “private” Polaroid shots on a subject so dear to the author that it has become a sort of obsession, a constant presence in many of his architectural drawings which eventually has transformed itself into a real object, to be touched and used.