Link: The Overlooked Wonders of Soviet-Era Industrial Design
Phaidon has an incredible collection of design books, and they run a wonderful blog too. Atlas Obscura got their hands on a copy of Phaidon’s newest design reference, Designed in the USSR: 1950-1989. This is a pretty sweet book. I’d love to see all the space-race inspired gadgetry and appliances. My favorite is this macaroni box:
Anika Burgess writes:
“There were ‘sample product rooms,’ where Western examples of industrial products were displayed, often serving as prototypes for their Soviet equivalents,” writes Alexandra Sankova in the book’s introduction. Sankova is the director of the Moscow Design Museum, which first displayed these items in an exhibition in 2012. For her, the Soviet era from the 1950s onwards was an important period of design history, “when function and utility were the driving forces behind ideas but remarkable examples of innovation and creativity still flourished.”
Oddly enough, Anika previously reviewed more Soviet ephemera at the Obscura: The Artful Propaganda of Soviet Children’s Literature — fascinating relics.
You can pick up the Designed in the USSR, from Phaidon directly for $39.95.