Colin Bisset's Iconic Designs
Listing of content
Colin Bisset's Iconic Designs — the history of the comfortable chair
Design critic and writer, Colin Bisset tells the story of civilisational decline through the design history of the comfy chair.
Duration: 13 minutes 42 seconds
Published: with Colin Bisset
Colin Bisset's Iconic Designs: Corduroy
With its ridges of soft, tufted cotton woven onto a cheaper base cloth, it combined softness and warmth with strength, making it comfortable to wear and popular with farmers and factory workers alike.
Duration: 4 minutes 26 seconds
Published: with Colin Bisset
Colin Bisset's Iconic Designs: the cruise ship
While some of today's cruise ships are as bulky and graceless as factories, many of the smaller vessels follow a similar blueprint to the ship that started it all, the SS Prinzessin Victoria Luise.
Duration: 4 minutes 14 seconds
Published: with Colin Bisset
Colin Bisset's Iconic Designs — Norma Merrick Sklarek
Architecture is a man's profession. That's what a young African American girl in Harlem, New York, grew up thinking.
Duration: 5 minutes 23 seconds
Published: with Colin Bisset
Iconic Designs: The match
It's hard to imagine how revolutionary the arrival of the match was. Now we can't imagine life would without them. In this week's Iconic Designs Colin Bisset looks at the invention of the match.
Duration: 5 minutes 13 seconds
Published: with Colin Bisset
Colin Bisset's Iconic Designs — 12 icons of Christmas
An assembly of twelve festive icons and Colin Bisset's reflections on how the world's great designers might re-imagine them.
Duration: 9 minutes 30 seconds
Published: with Colin Bisset
Colin Bisset's Iconic Designs: The dishwasher
Penury is often the mother of invention. Just look at the inventor of the dishwasher, Josephine Cochrane.
Duration: 4 minutes 14 seconds
Published: with Colin Bisset
Colin Bisset's Iconic Designs — Yoyogi gymnasium
Kenzo Tange is often seen as the father of Japanese modernism and the Yoyogi sports halls stand as perhaps his finest moment.
Duration: 5 minutes 14 seconds
Published: with Colin Bisset
Colin Bisset's Iconic Designs — The mason jar
The Mason jar has become a cliché, perhaps, but it remains a symbol of comfort, providing a homespun element in our hard-edged, clinical kitchens.
Duration: 5 minutes 15 seconds
Published: with Colin Bisset
Colin Bisset's Iconic Designs: Thorncrown Chapel
Forests are places of otherness. Which is why they've long been used for human rituals of all kinds.
Like the weddings that take place in Thorncrown Chapel, a magical structure nestled among the trees of the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas.
Duration: 5 minutes 22 seconds
Published: with Jonathan Green
Colin Bisset's Iconic Designs — Ebenezer Howard
A precursor to the 15 minute city, Ebenezer Howard's Garden City privileged the idea of proximity and was based on the assumption that easy access to everything from workshops and offices to schools and social life makes it a happier, easier place…
Duration: 5 minutes 27 seconds
Published: with Colin Bisset
Iconic Designs: Glass House
Glass is the material of fantasies. It's the nearest one can get to building with nothing but air.
Duration: 4 minutes 29 seconds
Published: with Colin Bisset
Colin Bisset's Iconic Designs: the monocle
As the New York Times wrote in 1888, they were 'invented by a fool to diminish the visual capacity of an idiot'. They were, it added, 'the sign of a weak head, not a weak eye.'
Duration: 4 minutes 12 seconds
Published: with Colin Bisset
Colin Bisset’s Iconic Designs: The (disappearing) grille
The radiator grille is the face of a car. It's been an important design feature for over a hundred years, a defining element that helps identify the brand of vehicle while giving a hint to the car's character.
Duration: 5 minutes 14 seconds
Published: with Colin Bisset