Designs for life at the Serpentine

摘要

At 4am one morning in 1934, the late Philip Johnson was up drinking with his colleague Alan Blackburn. They were playing round with names for their new exhibition, which would display 400 items, including typewriter carriage springs, a self-aligning ball bearing, an outboard propeller and a cash register, at the then-fledgling Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)inNewYork. The seminal exhibition would be called Machine Art and 75 years later it is named as a major influence on Design Real by Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist, directors of the Serpentine.