Design Classics
Season 1
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The Aga Cooker
It's hard to imagine anything more at odds with the hi-tech, microwave, designer-kitchen age than the Aga cooker. It's formidably heavy. It's far from cheap to buy and install. And yet its popularity has grown and grown since it came to England from Sweden in 1929. More than just a commercial success story, it has come to symbolise the quintessence of upper-and middle-class rural life. In Chiswick and the Isle of Dogs it suggests the warm heart of the English country home. How did it happen?
The Coca-Cola Bottle
Coca-Cola started out as a syrup into which you squirted carbonated water. The bottle designed to contain the resulting fizzy drink became one of the most famous pieces of packaging in the world. It was designed in 1916 as a result of a competition. Despite changes of flavour, the introduction of cans and relentless global competition from rivals, the heavy glass bottle with the archaic-looking trademark still symbolises the American dream. Accordingly it inspires approval or hostility - depending on taste.
The Volkswagen Beetle
Hitler called it the 'strength through joy' car and he meant it to be one of the engineering triumphs of the Third Reich. But it was the British Army who put it into production after the war. Rootes and Ford turned the car down; they didn't think it had a future. Twenty million Beetles later, it's still being produced - in Mexico. How did the noisy, heavy, distinctly odd-looking motor car, with its roots in a Nazi past, become regarded as lovable, a family friend - the sort of car Walt Disney made films about - so that it really did become a 'people's car'?
The Barcelona Chair
It was designed for the King of Spain to sit on during the Barcelona World's Fair in 1929. When the designer, Mies Van Der Rohe, found a casual passerby sitting on one, he ordered him towards the more appropriate benches which he'd designed outside for people like him. The elitist image has never worn off. Expensive, austere, it's as much a work of architecture in its way as Mies's influential if stark buildings. It's a chair to admire rather than settle back in. It's still very much in production, an icon with its roots in the Bauhaus and the heroic age of modern design.
The London Underground
By the early 1930s, the London Underground had become exceedingly complicated. The classic map used today was an unsolicited attempt to make the system easier to understand and use. It became one of British graphic design's greatest triumphs. It helped give London Transport an identity, and has been copied by transit systems throughout the world. It has absorbed all the additions to the system since it was first sketched out in a school exercise book not by a designer, but by an obscure draughtsman, Harry Beck.
Levi's 501 Jeans
They were designed by a tailor in Reno, Nevada, for a customer who was a miner. Levi-Strauss and Company patented them in 1873. They have powerful competitors in the jeans war, but the company spent millions persuading the world that their product is the authentic, legendary jean.
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