In their test, our cookery team, Grace and Georgie, pitted four of the most common types of lemon squeezer against each other, including a Mexican elbow press (£7.99), an industrial juicer (£28), a tabletop squeezer (£3.49), a wooden reamer (£3.50) and, of course, their hands. This week, we’ve tried four different lemon squeezers to find the best of the bunch – and our fave is a purse-friendly £7.99! So kitsch in fact helps us understand, in its silly, devious way, exactly what good design is.įind more of Colin's iconic designs on the ABC Listen app or on the Iconic Designs page.We’ve kicked off our new Test Kitchen series here on Good Housekeeping, where our cookery team puts handy tools through their paces to find those that really deserve a spot in your cupboards. Perhaps we need to know about one to appreciate the other. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder but a plastic chair shaped like a throne has as much right to a room as an Alvar Aalto plywood recliner. The best of kitsch makes us smile, the worst makes us shudder. It echoed the elaborate Victorian pumping stations by Bazalgette and despite all its ornamentation it’s not kitsch because it celebrates its purpose and adds to the built environment. With brightly coloured columns, striped brickwork and a huge central turbine set in its pediment, it was dubbed the Temple of Storms, given it housed stormwater pumps. Like a pumping station in the London docklands, designed in the 1980s by John Outram. But colour was back, along with historical references and sometimes the result was simply wonderful. It was certainly a shock to see Philip Johnson, famous for his minimalist Glass House of 1948, produce a skyscraper shaped like a Chippendale cabinet in 1980. This is true kitsch design, being both bland and lazy, aiming to trick the owner into thinking they’re living in real architecture.Ĭompare that to Post-Modernist buildings which many think of as kitsch. It doesn’t matter a jot whether a house is built in Hobart or Darwin, or what its landscape and climate is like, it uses all the same mix of elements. While that may sound fun, this is deadly serious. Here you find all manner of fakery, with buildings that aim to evoke a Hamptons cottage or a Tuscan villa, occasionally mixing everything up to create a hybrid. It’s certainly alive and kicking in the housing developments that ring our towns and cities. This is familiar territory for Australians, of course, happy to buy banana-related items from the Big Banana in Coffs Harbour or knitwear from a shop deep inside the Big Merino in Goulburn. Ducks, they wrote, had their place and they gave examples such as a hot dog stand shaped like a hot dog. The 1972 book ‘Learning from Las Vegas’ by architects Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour proposed the idea of ducks and decorated sheds, where a decorated shed was a building that needed signs to tell you what it did, and a duck was a building whose shape made it clear what it did. It’s a long way from designer Dieter Rams and his ‘less but better’ philosophy that’s still considered a benchmark for contemporary design but it urges us to lighten up and be silly. Like Michael Graves’s 9093 kettle of 1985 with its plastic whistling bird on the spout, or Stefano Giovannoni’s Magic Bunny toothpick holder, which involves pulling a plastic rabbit from a top hat to access the toothpicks. The Italian company that commissioned it, Alessi, has made a business out of designers injecting a shot of fun into ordinary items. That’s part of its charm and we’re invited to be in on the joke. This failure makes it the perfect piece of kitsch, except that it was designed to be absurd. ![]() And a gold-plated version doesn’t work at all given that the citrus juice erodes the gilding. While it looks credible, with the ridged juicer set high on three spidery legs, it doesn’t actually work very well. Like designer Philippe Starck’s citrus squeezer of 1990, the Juicy Salif. We’re wise to such fakery and tolerate it, understanding the real thing would be more expensive. ![]() Like a cheap plastic statue pretending to be bronze, or those fake carbon fibre panels used in cars. ![]() It’s often about something pretending to be something else. It appears to be related to a German word of the 19 th century for ‘smear’ but by the 20 th century it was used for anything that was seen as poor taste. And yet maybe kitsch has its place in the design world. Its flipside is kitsch, which is usually overly fussy.
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