Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1221422 in Books
• Published on: 1993-05-12
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 160 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Plastics evoke an ambivalent response. Hailed on the one hand as liberating materials of the modern age, with close links to technological advances in photography, film, electronics and computers, plastics, on the other hand, are seen as symbols of vulgarity, inauthenticity and low quality. With 16 essays by Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Ezio Manzini, Barbara Radice, John Gloag and others, this eye-catching, copiously illustrated anthology charts the varied cultural meanings plastics have acquired. Beginning with the first semi-synthetics used in the 1860s as substitutes for ivory and tortoiseshell, the contributors examine objects ranging from portable irons to dresses and compact-disc players. They identify a late 1950s aesthetic of organic curves and sleek surfaces, pioneered by European product designers, which gave way to today's multiplicity of styles, with plastics proving to be a flexible material well-adapted to postmodernist pluralism. Sparks is a professor at London's Royal College of Art.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

A Brief Overview of Technology That Touches Us All
As an engineer working in the plastics field for two score years, and as an amateur historian of the subject, I was attracted to Sparke's edited book, hoping to learn more about my chosen field. And I did. First off, the book is filled with gorgeous photos, surrounded, as it were, by easy-to-read text.

To me, Part One, on prehistory through 1914, is most fascinating, quite accurate and replete with excellent photos.

Beyond that, however, I was disappointed, because the book emphasizes consumer products to the almost exclusion of industrial products. Now of course, we technical guys know all about how plastic pipe and siding carpeting has revolutionized the construction industry and about how plastics packaging has reduced produce spoilage and product pilfering. But these aren't as glitzy as lamp shades and plastic furniture and "Tupperware."

I guess this book fulfills a need if you're only interested in consumer products made of plastics. But this book offers little help to one who needs to know how plastics have revolutionized the world economy.