Abstract
Most of the time, when it comes to furniture developed until the early 20th century, furniture is referred to as a piece of Decorative Arts. However, when furniture is produced industrially it is already considered an object of Design. This division between furniture as a Decorative Art or as a work of Design is little discussed, although some manuals on history of design already cover periods prior to industrial production, putting that furniture and the one that is considered Design together in the same definition. A piece of furniture is constituted by several components that are organized in a system. That system can be analyzed on several domains, such as constructive, formal, functional, socio cultural, economic, semantic and symbolic. In one or more of these domains we can find a decorative art, but not in the piece of furniture as a whole. This study results from the observation of different pieces of furniture from different periods. Each piece of furniture is studied in its different domains allowing an intrinsic synthesis. Using this method of studying the piece of furniture we intend to question if furniture should be seen as a Decorative Art object or as a Design object.
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Notes
- 1.
“One of the attractions of the history of furniture, lies in the fact that its perspectives are constantly changing”.
- 2.
“Joze Aniceeto Raposo has made this table, Loureto, Lisbon”. (José Aniceto Raposo, a well-known Portuguese master-carver was one of the few Portuguese masters that signed his work).
- 3.
“Decorative art was in the doldrums”.
- 4.
“The machine, a modern phenomenon, operates in the world a reformation of the mind”.
- 5.
“Yet, intact, the human factor remains, the machine being designed by man, for human needs”.
- 6.
“Objects of use intended to facilitate the unpleasant tasks of everyday life”.
- 7.
“At first objects are answers to a necessity, thereafter they define a way of living”.
- 8.
“In the case of pieces of furniture that have as purpose to contribute to the accomplishment of physiological functions like the bed to sleep, the seats to rest, the tables to eat, or to the performance of certain tasks like the office desks and the school desks, the furniture becomes an extension of the human body to the point of constituting with it a single whole…”.
- 9.
“A great incertitude about styles”.
- 10.
Interforma was a Portuguese furniture factory.
- 11.
Olaio was a Portuguese furniture factory.
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Pedroso, G. (2020). Furniture as a Piece of Design and as a Piece of Decorative Arts. In: Raposo, D., Neves, J., Silva, J. (eds) Perspective on Design. Springer Series in Design and Innovation , vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32415-5_26
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