Class of the Century

It is the design writer’s version of the hospital pass. To mark the millennium, select the ten designers who have shaped the 20th century – the most enduring talents internationally who have influenced the modern design business – from across the vast multidisciplinary landscape of professional design. We’ve all probably selected our A list in our private dreams or chosen our top creative team in the pub. But, at the risk of damage to limbs and reputation, here I am committing mine to public print.

To narrow the field to just ten names is a daunting task. If you just take the letter A, think who immediately jostles for attention: Josef Albers, Otl Aicher, Ron Arad, Alvar Aalto, Gae Aulenti and Gunnar Asplund, to name just six. All could easily make the top ten. None do so.

My choice is governed by the desire to create a thread running through the century, stretching from the AEG studio of Peter Behrens, through the Bauhaus and beyond to the lush pastures of American post-war design, where many of the techniques of today’s design industry were invented.

I want to reflect commercial as well as cultural influences, and to include links to and through as many design disciplines as possible – from the borders of engineering to the foothills of architecture. Above all, I want the shapers of the century to be practising designers with exemplary portfolios of work.

There is only one woman in my top ten: Florence Knoll, a controversial choice, but a major talent, a bridge between European Modernism and American big business who has been consistently overlooked. This single inclusion is not to say the past 100 years have not produced great female designers: Clarice Cliff, Marianne Brandt, Anna Castelli-Ferrieri, Lucienne Day, Andrée Putman, April Greiman and Charlotte Perriand all figured on my long list. But the inescapable conclusion is that men have held the power and taken the glory for the most part.

There is only one British designer in my top ten: Lord Foster, chosen for his prodigious output – he is truly by any measure the designer of this millennium – and as a representative of a group which includes Lord Rogers, Jim Stirling, Michael Wilford, Nick Grimshaw and Michael Hopkins, all renowned for making imaginative bridges between architecture and design.

Sir Terence Conran, Sir Gordon Russell and Misha Black have been British power-brokers in design this century, but narrowly miss the final cut. Pentagram veterans Alan Fletcher and Kenneth Grange have stronger claims than most – but if Saul Bass and Dieter Rams remain on the substitutes’ bench, then so do they. There is no space even for the British pioneers with their roots in the 19th century: Christopher Dresser, William Morris and Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

Marcel Breuer makes the top ten as the representative of a tradition in modern furniture which flows through the century from Charles Eames and George Nelson to Frank Gehry, Rodney Kinsman and Jasper Morrison. Breuer also represents the Bauhaus of Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe.

Detroit showman Harley Earl represents the powerful impact of the motor car on this century, relegating Porsche, Pininfarina and Giugiaro to the footnotes. I have included Henry Dreyfuss as the sole representative of the mid-century New York consulting business in preference to the more hyped, but less substantial Raymond Loewy.

Paul Rand is simply the pick of the bunch in graphic design, despite the rival claims of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Walter Landor, FHK Henrion, Abram Games, Milton Glaser and Javier Mariscal. Whatever has been done in recent decades, Rand probably did it first and did it better.

Arne Jacobsen has been chosen to represent the rich tradition of Scandinavian design – Poul Henningsen and Verner Panton could so easily have joined him. Ettore Sottsass is the sole representative of Italian design, another exceptional influence this century, with Achille Castiglioni, Vico Magistretti and Gio Ponti high on its roll of honour. And Philippe Starck? There is nobody quite like him in terms of superstar appeal outside the fashion world, whose top designers have been deliberately omitted from this selection

It is interesting to note how many of my top ten are multidisciplinary designers, unconstrained by discipline or technical boundaries, free spirits in a changing world. Then there are all the greats I didn’t mention. Why not let Design Week have your own list of the ten designers who share the century… let the arguments begin.

Jeremy Myerson, founder editor of Design Week in 1986, is co-director of the Helen Hamlyn Research Centre, Royal College of Art

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