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Downloadable Deco: Art Archive Puts 200 Graphic Design Classics Online

09 Aug

[ By WebUrbanist in Technology & Vintage & Retro. ]

Some great institutions are becoming even greater in the digital age — places like museums continue to scan high-quality paintings and photographs for distribution and agencies like NASA put vintage pictures and video footage online for everyone to access.

Joining the cool kids’ club, the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD) has taken its Art of the Poster collection from the Golden Age of graphic design (late 1800s through the early 1900s) and put it up on the web for anyone to share.

“Featuring over 200 printed works, Art of the Poster 1880-1918 presents a look at lithography’s rise in popularity during La Belle Époque,” reports MyModernMet. “It was during this time that artists like Alphonse Mucha, Jules Chéret, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec popularized the art form, which gained public prominence thanks to new methods of production.”

In the late nineteenth century, lithographers began to use mass-produced zinc plates rather than stones in their printing process. This innovation allowed them to prepare multiple plates, each with a different color ink, and to print these with close registration on the same sheet of paper. Posters in a range of colors and variety of sizes could now be produced quickly, at modest cost.

At the time, many of these masterpieces were essentially commercial in nature, designed to promote products, stores and restaurants. Today, they have made their way into the archives of art history, helping to bridge the gap between popular culture and the closed-door art world of museum exhibits.

[ By WebUrbanist in Technology & Vintage & Retro. ]

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Posted in Creativity

Afterglow: Luma Tower, Glasgow’s Shining Art Deco Icon

25 Jan

[ By Steve in Architecture & Houses & Residential. ]

Rising from the trashes of vandalism and neglect, Glasgow‘s former Luma Light Bulb Factory has recaptured its Art Deco glory as the residential Luma Tower.

The “Dirty Thirties” were especially gritty in Scotland but as the dark clouds of war gathered, from Glasgow’s mighty Sheildhall Manufacturing Complex there emanated a brief shining moment of brilliant light. The British Luma Co-Operative Lamp Company was the source – opening in 1938 in conjunction (though not part of) the Empire Exhibition held in nearby Bellahouston Park, the Anglo-Swedish joint venture company was housed in a strikingly beautiful Art Deco edifice which featured a glazed “conning tower” soaring 84 feet into the Scottish sky. Kudos to Flickr user Andrew Lynch for our lead image and the Glasgow City Archives for the circa-1939 photo above..

The combined factory/office building was designed by Cornelius Armour, an architect employed by the Scottish Cooperative Wholesale Society. Armour’s signature flourish was the tower: a visually riveting architectural feature that powerfully melded form and function. Flickr user Ben Allison captures the restored glory of the Luma building in the above series of shots.

Mounted inside the windowed room were a plethora of testing equipment that allowed employees to test light bulbs of all types. That each bulb glowed with superior brilliance was no accident: testing was conducted using electrical voltages above and beyond the lamps’ designed capacity in order to explore longevity issues.