A Style Was Born: Design During the Fifties—Or the Triumph of Curvilinear Geometry

During the decade of the ‘Aesthetic Fifties’, architecture and home furnishings, as a reaction to the war years, began to have softer lines than in previous decades. This was expressed in curvilinear geometry with rounded triangles, paraboloids and hyperboloids, pebble shapes with natural polishings, and egg shapes. The use of primary colours again became fashionable: reds, blues and yellows, white ańd black. This style was strangely uniform throughout Western Europe: one cannot readily identify an object, if unsigned, as a product from Italy, France, Denmark or Germany, or even the U.S. or India.