学術雑誌論文

本学関連学会

text

The Journal of the Asian Conference of Design History and Theory. 2024, 5, p. 36-46

Commercial Interior Design as Irony : A Case Study of Japan in the 1960s and 1970s

Hashimoto, Keiko

The ACDHT 2023 TOKYO Executive Committee

英語

text

2024-03

Session II : Post-War Japan

In Japan, commercial interior design, or the interior design of boutiques, retail stores, and restaurants, used be the subject of art criticism. From the 1960s to the 1980s, the major design magazines Japan Interior Design, Shoten Kenchiku, and Design frequently carried interior design reviews by up-andcoming art critics. Under such circumstances, ‘ironic design’ became one of the main concerns of avant-garde designers in the 1970s. It was the design concept mostly argued by critic, Koji Taki on Shiro Kuramata’s interior design. One of Kuramata’s shop interior used fluorescent tubes in place of columns for display shelves. According to Taki, it expressed an ‘irony’ against the ‘system of things’ in which the showrooms always had separate lighting fixtures and display shelves. ‘Ironic design’ was practiced especially in the early 1970s but it went out of style soon after. The purpose of this paper, therefore, was to examine the role played by the concept of ‘irony’ in commercial interior design from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s. It was assumed that what the ‘irony’ of the 1970s brought to interior design in Japan was an attitude that viewed interior design as rhetoric. The concept of ‘irony’ was popularized with avant-garde designers probably because ‘irony’ was a convenient concept for giving a meaning to the minimalist interior design. Then, as a reaction to this attitude, the commercial interior design in the postmodern era of the 1980s, was stripped of its ‘meaning’ such as ‘irony’ and turned into a search for the sensual. Unlike Italian and American postmodernism, there was no semiotic manipulation in the ‘postmodern interior’ in Japan in the 1980s. For Japanese designers, the ‘postmodern interior’ seems to have meant a departure from the semiotic manipulation represented by the ‘ironical design’ of the 1970s.

10.18910/95344

95344

Commercial Interior Design as Irony : A Case Study of Japan in the 1960s and 1970s

Hashimoto, Keiko

The ACDHT 2023 TOKYO Executive Committee

英語

2024-03

The Journal of the Asian Conference of Design History and Theory

5

36

46

https://hdl.handle.net/11094/95344

10.18910/95344

https://doi.org/10.18910/95344