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Irish-French designer Eileen Gray was one of the most prominent figures in early modernist design. She was born in 1878 in Wexford County, Ireland, but spent most of her life doing artistic work around Europe. Gray was mainly homeschooled when she was a child, but received formal art training at the Slade School in London in 1900, when she was 22 years old. She moved to Paris in 1902 and studied …

It’s been a while since we talked about a designer that wasn’t entirely American or European. The mid-century modernist movement spanned the entire world in many different ways, as we have mentioned before. In Australia, particularly, there were a lot of furniture designers and architects that adhered to mid-century trends and breakthroughs, even though most of them are now almost unk …

German designer and architect Peter Behrens was an influence to many in the modernist movement, including Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius and a large group of the school’s most notable alumni. He was born in 1868 in Hamburg, North German Confederation. Like Gropius, he was born a wealthy man, and he attended prestigious European schools. Nonetheless, he would start his design career with an …

It seems that finally our Designer of the Week series has led us to the source, the one person that started it all (at least at the Bauhaus). Walter Gropius is, to many people, the patriarch of European modernist design, and there are many reasons why, so let’s start digging. Walter Adolph Georg Gropius was born in 1883 in Berlin, at the height of the German Empire. There’s a much-rep …