Picture 3 in the third row from the top looks like a precursor to Shepard Fairey's Obey the Giant.

On the gorgeous, newly redesigned Los Angeles Review of Books site, Hua Hsu writes about the history of office chair designs. In his piece, he mentions the legendary Italian designer Bruno Munari’s 1966 book, Design as Art. An excerpt from the book about the house of the future:

“The private house of the future (some are already lived in) will be as compact and comfortable as possible, easy to run and easy to keep clean without the trouble and expense of servants. A lot of single pieces of furniture will be replaced by built-in cupboards, and maybe we shall even achieve the simplicity, the truly human dimensions, of the traditional Japanese house, a tradition that is still alive.

In the house of the future, reduced as it will be to minimum size but equipped with the most practical gadgets, we will be able to keep a thousand ‘pictures’ in a box as big as a dictionary and project them on our white wall with an ordinary projector just as often as we please. And I do not mean colour photographs, but original works of art. With these techniques visual art will survive even if the old techniques disappear. Art is not technique, as everyone knows, and an artist can create with anything that comes to hand.”

••••••••••

Munari sharing design lessons with schoolchildren on Italian TV, 1976: