Living Design The Writings of Clara Porset

Cuban-born, Mexico-based designer Clara Porset is renowned for her mid-century modern furniture and interior design and for her collaborations with architects such as Luis Barragán and Mario Pani. She was also an accomplished critic and writer. Living Design collects Porset’s essays, reviews, and lectures to highlight her role as an influential thinker, educator, and practitioner. This volume insightfully contextualizes the politics that shaped Porset’s design principles, charts the influence of the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College on her work, and reveals the period’s fusion of local adaptations and modernist principles that made Mexico a major center of modernist design.At a time when many practitioners believed that design could only be modernized by replacing hand craftsmanship with mechanization, Porset valued both approaches for their distinctive qualities and urged others to do the same. Through her writings, she encouraged efforts to catalyze local design communities during a