April 2011 • Essential Designs
Highlights from the Collection
These ten picks from MoMA embody key moments and movements from the last 30 years of design.
By Paul Makovsky
Selecting the best designs of the last 30 years is no easy task. So we asked Paola Antonelli, the Museum of Modern Art’s senior curator of architecture and design, to lend us her expertise. In the midst of overseeing the reinstallation of the MoMA design galleries and working on the catalog for her next show, Talk to Me, Antonelli came up with ten picks she felt were representative of the different genres of design in the museum’s collection. “They might not all be seminal when it comes to the wide history of design,” she said. “I would need more than ten to describe thirty years!” Nevertheless, the range represented here—from a computer prototype and recently acquired digital typefaces to a plush atomic mushroom and a 2,136-page book of corporate history—reflects a period of design that has oscillated from populism to elitism, limited edition to mass production, and serious to just plain fun.
1 Verdana typeface
by Matthew Carter
1996
2 PIG 05049
by Christien Meindertsma
with Julie Joliat
2004–2006
3 AIGA Detroit poster
by Stefan Sagmeister
1999
4 SHV Think Book 1996–1896
by Irma Boom
1996
5 iPod
by Jonathan Ive and Apple
Industrial Design Group
1996
6 LifePort kidney transporter
by IDEO and Organ
Recovery Systems
1998
7 Priscila Huggable
Atomic Mushroom
by Anthony Dunne,
Fiona Raby, and Michael
Anastassiades
2004
8 DIAB DS-101 computer
by Richard Hamilton
1985–1989
9 Shadow Monsters
by Philip Worthington
2004
10 360° stool
by Konstantin Grcic
2009
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“The designers tracked and documented all the products made from ‘05049,’ an actual pig selected at random from a farm in the Netherlands. After its slaughter, Meindertsma discovered that the single pig was used in 185 different products, from Crayola crayons to brakes. It’s this very beautiful, slightly creepy, and yet very effective look at what happens to a pig and how it becomes product.”
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