Oliver Bradbury

Ten years in the making, An Alternative Seventies: the last age of Radicalism is a revisionist look at design and styling in the 1970s and sets out to demolish the long-established fallacy that all is hideous from this decade. Diligent research and the author’s long-term interest in this radical period of cultural history has a revealed a lost world of bold and exciting design which in many ways is far less conservative than today’s post-Minimalist landscape. One of this survey’s central arguments is that once the political and societal reforming energy of the 1960s had been expended by about 1971, this nevertheless irrepressible momentum found alternative outlets in brazen design and for that matter also pioneering music during the 1970s. Early 1970s radicalism would then see its last chance saloon with Punk during 1976-78, a final act of defiance in the face of a second half of the decade return to conformity, a state of existence consolidated by the 1980s. 

An Alternative Seventies : the last age of Radicalism is a revisionist reading of 1970s design; based on a non-parodic appreciation, parody still being the mainstream perception of the decade. This survey strives to show that high-calibre design did emerge from a long misunderstood and still-underexplored decade in design history.

This book is probably the first ever attempt at identifying and codifying the formal traits of 1970s design from architecture to product design.

The 1970s might now be ‘in’ but if a developer can make money from a site, 1970s architecture and interior design faces very likely destruction, from London to Milan. This survey therefore aims to guide conservationists in terms of what to look for and then protect.

One hundred and fifty years ago citizens of and visitors to Cheltenham enjoyed free access to a distinguished collection of old master paintings larger in size and scope than the national collection in Trafalgar Square.' The edition of Hours in the Picture Gallery of Thirlestaine House published in 1858, a year before the death of its ownerJohn Rushout, the second Baron Northwick (1769-1859; Fig.23), listed over nine hundred paintings in that house, then a short walk from the town centre.' There were in addition over five hundred paintings at Lord Northwick's family seat, Northwick Park in Worcestershire (now Gloucestershire; Fig.25), which was also, if less easily, accessible to the public. But the size of these collections is less remarkable than the catholicity, and at times daring novelty of taste that characterised them.

Contents: Preface Introduction Imitation: a survey of Soane's influence on his pupils and contemporaries in Great Britain, North America and Australia, 1791-c. 1850, with a case study The survival of Soane? Wilderness years: collapse of Soane's influence and reputation ridicule and critical nadir, 1850-1884 Transmutation: Soane's influence on late 19th- and 20th-century Classicism, beginning with Beresford Pite, and the revival in interest and a new appreciation of Soane's achievements, 1885-1956 Soane and modernity: the influence of Soane on 20th-century Modernism and Classical revivalism, 1953 until now Select bibliography Index.

This study, the first ever of its kind, on automobile Colour and Trim Design, 1960-1995, is a fully illustrated expansion of an essay of the same title published in Aspects of Motoring History, The Journal of the Society of Automotive Historians in Britain, issue 17, 2021.

RON DOUD'S life reads like a film, but with a tragic ending. Doud grew up and studied interior design at Seattle, graduating in 1970. Decades before Grunge rock, Seattle did have an active counter-culture in the 1960s but for young Doud by the early Seventies, another city was calling... New York and bright lights beckoned and he moved here in 1972. By the mid-1970s he was in independent practice and in 1977 Doud rose to fame as the interior designer of the most famous nightclub of all time: Studio 54. Fame even lead to an interior designer advertising luggage for Samsonite. During 1977-79 Doud consolidated his position as 'a leading New York interior designer' (The New York Times, 1983). We might know what Studio 54 looked like but what was the rest of Doud's work like? This is the first profile of this much overlooked designer: Doud would probably be well-known today if he was still alive, able to speak up for himself but alas his life was snatched away from him as a quite early victim of AIDS, dying aged only 35 in 1983, several months before Klaus Nomi and Glam Rocker/cabaret artiste Jobriath's death in the same year. Best known for his Studio 54 work, by the time Doud-openly gay at a time when this was highly unusual-died in February 1983 he was treated like a leper.