Remind me: When was MidCentury Modern?
People can’t agree on WHEN Midcentury Modern (MCM) actually WAS!
Architectural Digest magazine says MCM lasted from about 1933-1965. Encyclopedia Brittanica concurs, while Wikipedia says 1945-1960. I’m settling for fifteen years on either side of 1950: 1935 - 1965
What does MCM style look like?
Photo by Courtney Pickens, Unsplash
This interior photo of the Rosenbaum House (Florence, Alabama) shows many MCM concepts. Here’s a multitude of clean straight line: the furniture, ceiling levels, lines in the flooring and windows. The chair is low to the floor, with splayed spindle legs so small it almost seems to float - contrast this with the massive upholstered furniture of Victorian times!
There’s a combination of manufactured and organic materials: The brick, the upholstery fabric and the concrete floor are all fabricated, whereas all the wood and accents like the flowers on the piano clearly bring nature inside. The carpet combines both, being obviously human-made, and containing so many nature motifs!
Notice too the large windows, allowing a great view of the outdoors and providing lots of indoor natural light, a hallmark of MCM design. There was also an emphasis on making affordable designs so many people could enjoy them.
Was MCM the only style popular then?
Not at all! There a lot of overlap, with other styles waxing and waning during this time. Which makes it easy to get confused about what is and isn’t MCM.
Art Deco
Art Deco was named after its first major appearance appearance at the Paris Expo in 1925. It was a departure from the sinuous lines and intertwined flowing organic shapes of Art Nouveau. It was a breath of fresh air after these intricately ornate Art Nouveau designs.
Chrysler Building in Manhattan, by Dan Smedley via Unsplash
The Chrysler Building in NYC showcases the nested arcs and crown-like triangles that are typical of Art Deco design.
Art Deco-style necklace Van Cleef and Arpel Pendent Watch
generated by Canva Text to Image Photo by Tim Evanson
This necklace uses and arc of tapering lines along with nested chevrons. The pendent watch shows a more angular design, with multiple cross-pieces suspending the parts below. Again, we see a chevron-style motif at the very top.
Art Deco was transitioning out of style at the beginning of the MidCentury Modern era, but was still often used or even combined with the more organic shapes of MCM.
Googie Style
2006 photography by Googie Man. Googie Gas Station. Wikimedia Commons
This is one of my favorite styles, extending (according to Wikipedia) from 1945 to the “early 1970s”. It was used mainly for one-story commercial buildings like coffee shops, gas stations, and car washes.
If you’ve not heard of this style before, I bet when you see these examples, your mind screams 1950’s Southern California! And it’d be right! Googie was thoroughly contemporary, worshipping swooping roofs and lots of curves, like the gas station above. Growing out of the last bits of Art Deco (Streamline Moderne) style, important parts of this Googie were lots of windows and extensive use of neon lighting. Asymmetric soft shapes without straight lines were another feature, things like a funky rectangle with very rounded ‘corners’ or an artist’s palette.
The old TV show The Jetsons showed a lot of space-age Googie design, all built around the flying cars (rather than the extensive highways of SoCal car culture!
Kona Bowling Lanes, before and after 1980’s remodel. Photo by Victor Stapf Jr. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
Here’s a sad example of a remodeling removing all the character of the enthusiastic optimistic Googie Design.
Retro design
Retro style is often confused with vintage style, but they are different. Vintage style uses the original items, usually made decades ago. Retro (short for retrospective) means looking back, borrowing cool ideas from earlier times to incorporate into today’s designs.
Many people use retro to refer to iconic 1950’s design- the circles and other basic shapes, boomerangs, elongated cats and poodles. Many of the color schemes feature just two or three colors- often in muted nature tones like avocado green, harvest gold, mustards, reds and rusts.
West Side Diner, formerly '''Poirier's Diner,''' is a historic restaurant at 1380 Westminster Street in Providence RI. Photo by Kenneth C. Zirkel via Wikimedia Commons
Diners are an archetype of 1950’s retro style. Picture the black and white checkerboard floors and the bright vinyl counter seats. Where you could get a great home-cooked meal without being home. Real comfort food! The neon Coca-Cola sign- and don’t forget the jukebox!!
Cool boomerang formica tabletop I met recently at a diner-style restaurant!
How does this all fit together?
This has been a rapid trip through some of the styles impacting design in the middle part of the twentieth Century. We saw Art Deco yielding to the more organic MCM, while (especially in Southern California) architects explored the exuberant excesses of Googie architecture. Retro design was sort of a “low” to MCM’s “high” design, a more common and friendlier, sometimes even kitschy, version.
In this compact history of mid twentieth century styles, we’ve left out a lot. There was Bauhaus, Pop Art, Atomic Age, Space Age, vitalism, surrealism, abstract expressionism and more. There were a ton of interesting design schools during the twentieth century, and we’ll take a closer look at each of these in future blog posts.
Where can I go to learn more about MidCentury Modern?
I consulted a lot of websites while researching this blog post. Here are the some of the really good ones:
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