Renate Menzi - Böcker

100 Years of Swiss Design offers a new perspective of Switzerland's achievements in furniture and product design. The book presents the essential historical designs in chronological sequence, from the regional roots of the early days around 1900 to the globalized network of today. Thirty essays by known experts shed light on themes typical of their times in word and image. Besides the design process, manufacturing techniques, distribution, and reception, the changing roles of the designer--from mediator between form and function, entrepreneur, social worker, to branding architect--are examined. Featuring one hundred key works from the Designsammlung, the world's largest collection of Swiss design, this reference work is the first to present and discuss a comprehensive show of Swiss designers' achievements, from the anonymous to the famous.

As a pioneer of modern design, Willy Guhl created world-famous furniture such as the Eternit garden chair or Europe’s first plastic shell chair. In the tradition of modernism and against the traditional Heimatstil, after 1945 he developed a holistic design approach oriented to human beings and their needs; functionality and reduction to the essential characterize his everyday objects. In collaboration with Swiss companies such as Dietiker, Eternit and Aebi, Willy Guhl designed seating furniture, planters and mowing machines.Willy Guhl’s designs, his teaching methods and his image archive bear witness to the innovationsof the booming design industry of the post-war period and the changing professional image ofthe industrial designer. As a teacher and later head of the class for interior and product design at the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts from 1941 to 1980, Willy Guhl influenced generations of Swiss designers, including Robert Haussmann, Kurt Thut and Andreas Christen. The trained carpenter and interior designer passed on his design knowledge “hands-on,” with illustrative objects, by model making and storytelling.This first comprehensive monograph illuminates Willy Guhl’s legacy in the context of this designand teaching practice as well as current theories of the design discipline. As a thematically structured catalog of works, it offers a complete index of all design projects, and illustrates in sketches, plans and photographs his exploratory working method and his passion for material and technology, which is equally evident in the selection of exemplary student works.