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12 March 2009 16:19
Design icons that define how we live
As I sat down to write today, I realised how important beautiful design is to me. My MacBook Air, I'm sure, makes writing infinitely more pleasurable than might a soulless grey box of a PC would. And drinking tea from my chunky Emma Bridgewater mug is so much nicer than it would be from brown Pyrex. Good design is so much more important and elemental than just having something nice to look at.
While the technology within the AGA's beautiful cast-iron frame has moved forward with every decade, the simple, unadulterated lines that make the AGA so instantly recognisable have remained largely unchanged since it arrived on these shores in the late 1920s. And with good reason - the AGA was designed to work perfectly, without fuss, and that understated elegance has served it well, its simple good looks making it an acknowledged design classic.
But as I sit here typing away at the kitchen table - the warmth from the AGA at my back - I'm struck by how important to us are the design icons that define how we live. At the dawn of the new millennium a BBC survey voted the AGA as one of the top three icons of the 20th century, with the Coca-Cola contour bottle and the VW Bug car also up there.
And the AGA is in good company - a similar survey by the BBC's Culture Show revealed how we have also fallen in love with the sweeping lines of Concorde, the Jaguar E-type and the Aston Martin DB5. We feel, according to the poll, a real affinity with the distinctive red telephone box, the Routemaster bus, the timeless Penguin paperback book covers and the RAF's stalwart fighter plane, the Spitfire.
And, like the AGA itself, we like our design classics to be more than just good looks - which is why the London Underground map, the anglepoise lamp and the Sinclair calculator also featured highly.
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