Design in the Czech Lands 1900-2000

The development of the last decades has proved true for all those who have previously seen design work as an important integrating factor of modern or postmodern culture and pointed to its mediating role between the material everyday and the world of art. If design is becoming the subject of broad-based interdisciplinary research, it is because its importance in shaping the world in question, both in its practical, functional aspects and in its rhetoric and aesthetic values, is increasingly evident." The publication presents the history of design in the Czech lands through the prism of the institutions that influenced its development (schools, associations, manufacturing companies and cooperatives, etc.), understanding design in the broad scope of interior design, utilitarian objects, industrial and graphic design, fashion and textile design, applied photography and the design of new materials in the 20th and 21st centuries. In twenty chapters, institutions are contextualized in relation to the stylistic development of design alongside the periodization of art history. The work represents the first ever systematic assessment of the history of modern design in the Czech lands with such a focus and the first comprehensive grasp of the history of design in its multidisciplinarity. The manuscript of the publication was written as a result of a research grant from the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague, which also involved external collaborators from other museum institutions and universities.