Space Age Onion

Some time ago I mentioned getting in a book from the library called Where's My Space Age? and I was able to read it cover to cover. I'm still reeling from the disappointment a week later. By reading this book I had hope to pick up some quick inspiration, and learn about a design aesthetic. What I got was how these designs reflected the hopes, dreams, and fears of the society that spawned them, and how quickly the Space Age movement of the 1960s was crushed by reality; in this case the tumultuous decade of the 1970s.

As nice as it is to know how what the public thought about space and the future when it was a new frontier, it doesn't help from a design perspective. The book told me that synthetics were big, using old materials in new ways was big, (paper dresses anyone?) and so were impractically curved forms and mass produced modularity. But, the book never really told me any of the why, or the how for that matter. Why does this curve and that sphere mean "it's the future!" and not others? How come one leg or three legs or no legs on a chair automatically make it "modern" Space Age design?  I wanted hard compositional design analysis instead of interpretations about what these pieces mean. Perhaps I'll have to look elsewhere...

I guess the book was something like an onion, layer upon layer of disappointment the further I got into it. Speaking of which I've come home for spring break where we made an... interesting discovery in the basement:

Yep, an onion sprouted in the basement all by its lonesome self, just chilling in the bag with the rest of them. So, I decided to plant it in a pot for now, and I guess this summer we'll have lots and lots of onions!