Designs which endure

Press, 7 December 1988, Page 21

Designs which endure

What do the Volkswagen beetle, the Coca Cola bottle, Levis jeans, the map of the London Underground and the Aga cooker have in common? At first glance not a lot, but all are considered classics of their type and each is the subject of a programme in “Design Classics,” a 8.8. C. series beginning on One tonight at 7.

The series uses archive film, period commercials and interviews with key figures associated with each design to demonstrate the impact these products have had on twentieth-century lifestyles. One key fact is evident about all of them: each was so pure in its original concept that it has changed little over the years. The Coca Cola bottle is a good example and so too is the Volkswagen beetle — when it finally went out of production in its native Germany in the late 70s it differed only in detail from the original, designed in the 1930 s by Dr Ferdinand Porsche at Hitler’s behest. Porsche’s name lives on in a range of sophisticated, powerful and expensive sports cars — very different from the basic, utilitarian “people’s car” of Hitler’s Germany. The first programme in the series looks at the Aga cooker, a symbol of English country life for the last 60 years, and familiar to a great many New Zealanders as well. Created by Dalen, a blind Swedish designer in the 19205, this remarkable appliance was dubbed “the Rolls Royce of the kitchen.” It too has resisted “improvements” over the years. As John Naughton, television critic for • the “Observer” said, “Part of the cooker’s charm is that the product hasn’t changed perceptibly in the last 60 years. No fancy-pants punk from a design school has been able to put go-faster stripes on it, and no one ever has to wait for the oven to heat up.”

Its other virtues are described by Sir Roy Strong, Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum.