My son and I went to see The Incredibles last weekend. It’s very, very good. Contrary to what you might be expecting, I’m not going to add anything to the numerous comments already published elsewhere about the styling and set design. Whatever needed saying has been said and, let’s face it, I’ve been banging on enough about furniture design over the last few weeks anyway. If you want to get into the discussion about the 50’s design references I suggest you start at the Design Observer article: The Designables.
I’m going to offer something a little different. In the car on the way home I suddenly remembered a book that I bought from Hay-on-Wye a few years ago; salvaged from the bottom of a damp box left outside one the town’s many bookshops, it’s called How to Build Modern Furniture by Mario Dal Fabbro.
First published (in Great Britain) in 1959, it contains numerous plans, diagrams and instructions to help you make your very own 50s furniture. So if you want to be the envy of all your friends and turn your house into a scene out The Incredibles, you need only visit the set of drawings I’ve uploaded to my flickr.com account and put the tool set you got for Christmas to good use.
But please, have some respect and don’t use any MDF.
