Space Odysseys
The 'space race' was the most dramatic sphere of Cold War competition. Man's journey into space required tremendous ingenuity - from the powerful rockets which fired satellites into orbit to the suits which sustained life in the dark vacuum of space.
Hi-tech innovations were not the only results of the space race. It triggered profound reflections on humanity?Äôs relationship with the cosmos and growing dependence on technology.
Space Age Living
The house of the future was a preoccupation of architects in the period. In 1956, British architects Alison and Peter Smithson designed a 'House of the Future' for the Ideal Home Exhibition in London. The house was a prefabricated space-age unit furnished with the latest concepts of labour-saving devices. Sound-proof and fire-proof, the house was like both a spaceship and atomic bunker.
Many other designers were inspired by new materials, such as stretch fabrics and moulded plastics, and new vocabularies of form.
Teletowers
Satellite transmissions of radio, telephone and television signals wrapped the globe in a force field. These pulsing microwaves required a new kind of building: the television tower.
Built on both sides of the East - West divide, telecommunications towers were not merely hi-tech instruments or symbols of Cold War competition. Welcoming the public to their viewing platforms and revolving restaurants, they were places where the future could be experienced.
Technotopias
In the late 1950s and 1960s, architects and engineers began to imagine an entirely new scale of architecture. Future cities might hover in the air like spacecraft, move around on mechanical legs or plug in like giant computer components.
Many of these schemes captured deep anxieties about modernity. New cities were proposed for inhospitable settings such as the frozen lands of the arctic. But what kind of future faced humanity when it needed to colonise the edges of its planet?
Space Age Bodies
Research into space and military technologies provided new materials and new conceptions of the body in the 1960s.
The spacesuit was a complex synthesis of life-support and communications equipment which would, in 1965, enable Soviet cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov to make the first space walk.
In the mid-1960s, the space race also inspired designers to create terrestrial fashion which mirrored the futurism of the age. Metallic fabrics, helmets, visors, jumpsuits and body armour were all employed to create 'uniforms' of tomorrow.
Using the timeline
- Click and drag the grey slider below the dates to advance the timeline.
- Click any yellow dot to see information about an object.
- Click one of the yellow exhibition section titles below the timeline to filter the visible objects.
- Click the same section title a second time to clear the filter.
Your Comments
great web page, can't wait to come and see it. And say hello to Tina
I can remember having an Airfix model kit of the Vostok spacecraft when I was a child in the early 1970s. I think my father helped me to assemble it, but I can clearly remember the strange curled antennae at the front. Seeing Vostok in the exhibition brought that memory back with startling clarity.
My dad insisted we stay up to watch the moon landing - I'm pretty sure I dozed off during the whole thing, but I do remember him explaining that this was history in the making!
Great web page! Merci pour votre site intelligent qui donne envie de courir à Londres pour voir l'expo. Merci de mettre en ligne certains contenus de l'expo, c'est courageux et désintéressé et par les temps actuels suffisamment rare pour être noté et apprécié!
nice pictures of objects on time line; shame there is no annotation of who they are designed by or where they are from...
Thanks for your feedback Robert. We did try having captions on the objects which form the backdrop to the timeline, but they made the whole thing a bit visually cluttered, given that the yellow dots were also expanding with object names. We decided that as everything featured in the background was also going to feature on the timeline, it was better to retain as much clarity in the use of the pictures as possible.
I am trying to remember the name of the Japanese architect whose spectactular design for a city of tree-like appartment blocks was displayed as a wooden monument in the exhibition. Was it Isogara ? It was one of the highlights for me as I hadn't seen it before and, unlike many of the other building designs, seemed practical and not a dated curiosity. A good exhibition - anything which gives more publicity to the work marvellous and entertaining of Ken Adam is worth seeing.
Des, The architect is Arata Isozaki and the wooden model you are referring to is for "Cluster in the Air".
I am chasing the details of both the designer and the jewellery work in the exhibition: czech maker, I think his name was kasaly Svatopluk? The work was made of metal and a mirror and was displayed in the section with Gijs Bakker work and the fashion. I unfortunately did not buy the catalogue as I was traveling and it was too heavy. This exhibition was one of the best I have seen in a long time. I visited it three times. It was an elegant installation with great depth to the the ideas at hand.
Dear Susan, Thank you for you question about the jewellery exhibited in Cold War Modern at the V&A. I am the curator of the exhibition. The jewellery you describe is designed and made by Vaclav Cigler, a Czech artist most well known for his glass (some of which was in the exhibition). Cigler lives in Prague - he is still alive and working - and his jewellery work is in the collections of the Decorative Arts Museum in Prague (and the Jablonec Jewellery museum - who have his work in plastic). I think he's one of the most interesting (and overlooked) artist-designers of his generation. There are 2 exhibition catalogues of his work - one of which features the work of his students from the Bratislava Academy of Arts in the 1970s, who did interesting experimental work in glass, metal and quasi-product design. They were only published in Prague and are hard to find, I'm afraid (although they do have English texts). I did not include the jewellery piece in the exhibition catalogue, but wrote about it in another book written for the exhibiiton called Fear and Fashion in the Cold War (Jane Pavitt, V&A Publishing, 2008) - which you can find online. Interestingly, Gijs Bakker knew Cigler in the 1960s - they took part in a jewellery conference together - and Gijs apparently 'smuggled' some of Cigler's work out to Holland from Czechoslovakia, pretending it was his own if questioned. Gijs told this story to a colleague of mine - he was delighted to see their work together in the same case! I hope this answers your queries. Jane Pavitt, Curator - Postmodernism - Victoria and Albert Museum