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Modernism Week comes to Palm Springs from February 13th -23rd, 2025.

The event is 20 years old and expected to be attended by more than 100,000 people, according to William Kopelk, the event's chairman.

Since the event began in 2006, it has aligned with the Palm Springs Modernism Show, featuring the best of twentieth-century furnishings and accessories. I enjoy the event as an artist and appreciator of design art.
Modernism Week home tours take visitors to homes with butterfly roofs (left) and Swiss Miss homes with A-frame roofs. Photos by Matthew Bamberg

The week also features numerous Palm Springs home tours that take attendees to the most significant mid-century modern marvels in the desert of the Coachella Valley.

To fathom the breadth and value of mid-century modern items from this show and inside the homes, thousands of people will walk through, an education on the design of that era might help to understand the unique shapes, forms, and colors of the furniture and matching accessories provided.

Floor-to-ceiling glass in Palm Springs homes allowed for inside-outside desert living, offering views of designer furniture and accessories in the living room and pool area.

As various design constructs have interested me for a long time, I decided to share my academic research, artistic experience, and consumer perspectives in this story. First, I’d like to give a brief historical background.


Twentieth-Century Design History

The twentieth century led to innovation in furniture and technology — sleek, grand forms in simple colors that made their way into office buildings and homes in the 1920s and 30s.

The new mid-century modern designs replaced earlier sinuous, organic shapes in architecture and design.

European “Moderne” (pronounced modairn), furniture that debuted in the 1920s (as opposed to modern, which usually is associated with the 50s and 60s) was streamlined and functional, setting the stage for future minimalist design. It contained sculptural elements such as decorative “knuckles” that protruded slightly up and down the furnishings legs.

Ruled by the masses who, in a new industrial world, had now acquired what was once only the bastion of the rich, the designers conjured up practical products to fill the homes of an expanding suburban population.

Streamlined, minimalist yet functional furnishings and accessories emerged from the international design battlegrounds that resulted from competition among the brightest furniture innovators of the twentieth century.

Modernism was to become the name of the game for decades. Its offshoots — Art Deco, Bauhaus, deStijl, Streamline American and ’50s International style and 60s pop — dared to be different but never looked back at the intricate moldings and organic detail of earlier Art Nouveau and Victorian eras.

Throughout the next 50 years, designers of new products for the home swung within a pendulum that ranged from extreme minimalism to the avant-garde, an all-show-and-no-frills package of goods meant for everyone.

At the end of World War II, a near-magical style was carved from one of the era’s design geniuses. Isamu Noguchi introduced the three-piece coffee table — plate-glass top balanced on two curved, solid walnut legs in 1944. The piece was manufactured by Herman Miller Furniture, bringing wood and glass together for the modern age.

Modernist buildings, homes, and furnishings were constructed with unique designs in the architects’ minds. To determine this list, I used the OpenAI database (2022) as a reference to list the top six architects of the mid-twentieth century, according to Architectural Digest and other publications.

And then there was kitsch, the sidekick of minimalism. The modernist star of this design was Tiki, a Polynesian God whose popularity exploded when the mid-century modern movement matured in the 1950s.

A collections specialist at Indiana University states, “Tiki can be both the representation of the human form and its related motifs, from the full figure to the depiction of eyes. Through three figures from the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, we can begin to understand the use of the human form in the arts of Polynesia and the cultures that created them” (Fulce, 2020).

Polynesian furniture and culture have aligned with mid-century modern because of its contrasting aesthetic. Rattan furniture never misses the mark of Polynesian chic. The number of abaca (palm) strands indicates value. More strands, such as six in the image above, indicate a very valuable piece of furniture.
The Late Twentieth Century

It wasn’t until the 1980s, when postmodernism etched itself into the mainstream, that modernism was pushed aside. Styles with pastel colors, smoky glass, and highly polished stone came of age among expressive forms and a Miami Vice vibe.

Designers also used smoked glass and stone with natural Southwestern desert colors. Playboy illustrator Patrick Nagel created a new image of the postmodern woman (Dorn, 2023), and Wendell Castle (Botton, 2018) moved away from the space age, bringing back wood sculpting as a craft. Factory-produced items were out.

By the 1980s, mid-century modernism became passe, leaving many landmark properties, furnishings, and accessories abandoned.

Palm Springs, the focal point of the worldwide mid-century movement, took a hit for over a decade. Property values plummeted, and once valuable designer furniture and accessories made their way to dumpsters and thrift stores, mere shadows of what they once were.

A slow comeback of the style began in the late 1990s (Kurzius, 2023) as the Baby Boomers yearned for the stylized items of their youth. Since then, the value of any well-designed mid-century furniture or accessory has soared from saucer (as in flying) lamps to McCoy pottery.
Retro Design in the Twenty-First Century

A Twenty-First Century mid-century modern metamorphosis accelerated, becoming all the rage after a decade lull. The prices for these rebounded designs, now referred to as retro, have passed being economical for the working class, an ironical trend, as the furnishing and housing were initially manufactured to be affordable to all.

It’s not just the United States either, where mid-century modern and related designs have made a comeback and that the mainstream has taken to with kid-in-a-candy-store zeal. From Camden Locks in London to the Marais in Paris, vintage mid-century items and remakes inside gentrified storefronts rule.

Dependable, made-to-last-a-lifetime furniture and accessories from Deco to Retro are in vogue in the 2020s, striking up poses in homes from urban areas of the haute-international set to wealthy suburbs that extend dozens of miles from city centers.

The popularity of designer mid-century style furniture still being manufactured is booming. Sales of classic Herman Miller designer furnishings such as Eames, Noguchi, and others have risen from about 1.9 billion in 2014 to 4. 1 billion in 2023.
Wood chairs

Noguchi coffee table brought wood and glass together, and Eames molded plywood chairs. Photo by Matthew Bamberg

These modernist artifacts are ubiquitous today, as they have been remade to align with the mid-century modern design.

Additionally, the popular Herman Miller Company Ray and Charles Eames’ Molded Plywood Lounge Chair.

Run-of-the-mill-plywood formed into two large potato chip-like shapes. Time magazine selected this chair as their Best Design of the 20th Century.

Offbeat shapes of coffee and dining tables and lounge chairs evolved during the 50s and 60s. Eero Saarinen’s tulip chair and Pierre Paulin’s ribbon chair stepped beyond the original risks of couches that swerved around Heywood-Wakefield (1940) kidney-shaped coffee tables and that, at the time, wiped out more traditional furnishings from earlier eras.

What goes around comes around, and the earlier styles are becoming as ubiquitous as those from the 1950s, the peak of mid-century minimalism.
Purist versus Revisionist

There are two schools of thought about the fifty-year period in which modernism evolved, both driving the business of mid-century furnishings and accessories to a higher level each year — the revisionists and purists. The former mix-and-match styles mainly focus on mid-century modern but will use many equivalents — reproductions and, don’t mention this to a purist, furnishings from other periods.


Purists

Choosing only the less-as-more is the option for designers or homeowners who desire a makeover matching Mies van der Rohe’s purist view.


Between-the-war design is the era between World War I and II. Architecture purists drool with desire when pointed in the direction of South Beach, as it’s an Art Deco wonderland constructed during that time.

Travel there and discover the Art Deco divas lining Ocean Drive and Collins Av. The Gatsby era was a time when Paul Frankl, one of the designers who appealed to Art Deco design aficionados, used light wood to create streamlined designs of perfect symmetry.

The Art Deco decline saw a snapback in the 1990s when South Beach became an international destination for the many Art Deco edifices found there. Today, the beach is hopping with models, movie stars, and trendy bars and cafes housed in older buildings that Jewish seniors used to call home.

Mid-century modern includes elements from the purist elements that one might see inside the homes of Palm Springs in February 2024’s Modernism Week. Favorites from that design era are a Mies Van De Rohe (designer) day bed and Barcelona chairs, all items on drawing boards in the 1920s and became trendy in the 1940s and 50s.
Red chair
The Heart Cone Chair offered by Vitra, a designer furniture company based in Denmark. Photo by Matthew Bamberg

The Heart Cone Chair Verner Panton designed was one of the many Denmark designs that found its way to choosy purists. Paton created the chair that is still offered by Vitra in 1959 as part of his innovative and influential contributions to modern design. Today, any purist Vitra chair is sure to put a dent in your wallet, costing $3000 to $6000.

Furniture by Knoll is a German husband-and-wife team whose biggest coup was acquiring the rights to her former teacher Mies Van De Rohe’s popular “Barcelona” series chairs that helped Knoll carve out a viable American market for the International Style.

In 1929, the Spanish Royal Couple sat in a pair, two thrones for the elite. “It is almost easier to build a skyscraper than a good chair,” said the chair’s designer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.


Revisionists

Revisionists choose furnishings from other eras; they also will use reproductions of original pieces from the twentieth century. Typically, they’ll settle for a reproduction or reissue knock-off if the vintage piece is too difficult or expensive to obtain. For example, The Heart Cone Chair can be cheaper, but it’s not the official Vitra brand.

Original pieces can be modified to suit certain decors. For example, two lime green velvet vintage pieces by designer Thayer Coggin, an American who specialized in upholstered furniture, can be reupholstered in contemporary-print fabric, a process that a purist would probably shun, but one that fits the needs of many interior designers.

If you want new but yearn for the old, you can accent rooms with original accessories for an extra shot of nostalgia in your home.
Mid-Century Modern Accessories or “Smalls”
smalls
Mid-century modern design accessories are often called “smalls.” Photo by Matthew Bamberg

Kitsch and pop, bright colors, and bold, daring designs began in the 60s and are especially hot for people who want to step into modern fun slowly by buying what the dealers call smalls.

Smalls are accessories from bright red portable typewriters with matching cases to rotary telephones, portable television sets, and pottery. Shawnee, McCoy, Haggar, or the likes in pink or baby blue radiate a 50s flavor. The bright colors of California pottery offer a 1960s retro powerhouse in one small free-form piece. A Bakelite (the first plastic made) clock radio with an oversized dial, 54 6 7 8 9 11 13 16 arched around it in a Norman Rockwell manner.

A small’s secret harrows in the senses — a new modern age quest to gather items that flash with camp, color, light, and sound and connect past generations to your life today.

The 1960s and 70s led to a blast of color and repetitive design. Photo by Matthew Bamberg

In 1968, one grooved to the Doors under the light of a chromed metal lamp with a revolving head, maybe relaxing, reading Rolling Stone in a black Globe chair with red cushions. With a swivel, a red cylinder, pre-formed plywood cabinet/table appears to launch at your side. Arm reaching out dangling with love bead bracelets, a pitcher of Kool-Aid is not far away.

In the 1980s, Steve Chase encouraged designers to use the natural desert landscape as a backdrop for interior design in new Palm Desert homes. This style was picked up in suburban living all across the Western United States.

Chase’s home in the Thunderbird Cove Club was a perfect example, with staircase squares and rectangles of adobe, the same shades as the boulders and mountains nearby. Inside, he used the same shapes inlaid with transparent materials for subtle desert views and muted light. Dr. Carol Soucek King's book Empowered Spaces classified Chase’s style as “Earth Spirits,” making Chase a key element in solidifying the back-to-nature trend.

Palm Springs, or “Mid-Century Disneyland” is filled with the spirits and works of great designers among majestic natural surroundings where you can find less being more and among camp and kitsch that’s never a bore.
Mid-Century Modern Takeaway

The cursory aforementioned mid-century furniture and home design trends illustrate just how popular the meticulousness and craftsmanship have advanced from being man-made to being manufactured, resulting in what is supposed to be affordable for the masses.

While one might not be able to purchase a purist mid-century product at reasonable prices, many people have opted for just a smattering of the design in the home by picking up one or two of the masterpieces.

If you are interested in design ideas, email me at matthew,bamberg@ gmail.com