Industrial aesthetics and design -- interior decorating I picked this book up at the local used book store the other day: Joan Kron and Suzanne Slesin, High-Tech: The Industrial Style and Source Book for the Home, (New York, Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1978), 286 pp. foreword by Emilio Ambasz designed by Walter Bernard Yes, here it is: how to furnish your home, industrial style. Here's the info from the jacket, including author bios. Let's just say it's a combination of RE/Search and Better Homes & Gardens. Enjoy: _______________________________________________________________________ HIGH-TECH The Industrial Style and Source Book for the Home How to outfit your home with paraphernalia originally developed for factories, battleships, dry cleaners, laboratories, Chinese restaurants, and hundreds of other commercial and industrial users. _CONTENTS_ THE INDUSTRIAL AESTHETIC STRUCTURAL ELEMENTS SYSTEMS STORAGE FURNITURE MATERIALS LIGHTING THE WORKS FINISHING TOUCHES plus the High-Tech Directory, a 42-page illustrated buying guide, listing hundreds of hard-to-find industrial sources. Gym lockers in the bedroom, factory lamps over the dining table, detection mirrors over the dressing table, movers' pads for upholstery, Con Ed guardrails for towel racks, I beams for end tables, steno chairs for dining chairs, supermarket doors swinging into the kitchen, warehouse shelving in the living room, scaffolding beds, test tubes for bud vases -- something exciting is happening in home furnishings and it's called high-tech. If you haven't heard about it yet, you will soon. And its meaning will soon become as familiar as art deco or art nouveau. A play on the words "high-style" and "technology", "high-tech" is a term being used in archtectural circles to describe an increasing number of residences and public buildings with a nuts-and-bolts-exposed-pipes technological look or to describe residences made of prefabricated components more commonly used to build warehouses or factories. Authors Joan Kron and Suzanne Slesin, two infuential home-furnishings reporters, have expanded this definition to include a parallel trend in interior design -- the use of commonplace commercial and industrial equipment in the home. HIGH-TECH is a breakthrough book about a revolution in design that is sweeping the country -- in fact, the world. It is the first in-depth look at the industrial aesthetic as applied to architecture and home furnishings. Whether you live in a split-level, a loft, a penthouse, a carriage house, or an efficiency apartment, this book will change the way you look at the world and inspire you to explore the commercial and industrial landscape. Why limit yourself to what is offered in traditional furniture outlets when there is a wealth of underutilized equipment that can moonlight residentially? In his foreword to HIGH-TECH, Emilio Ambasz, prizewinning architect and designer and former curator of design at the Museum of Modern Art, explains how many of these alternative artifacts are noble pieces of anonymous design unencumbered by the artificial need to reflect status. In HIGH-TECH you will see, beautifully illustrated, how top designers and architects have used ordinary, basic assembly-line products -- prefabricated mezzanines, dry cleaners' racks, pallets (right off forklift trucks), beakers and fleakers, Sonotubes, and Colorlith laboratory counter tops -- with style and panache, and how you can follow suit. Neither funky nor pie in the sky, HIGH-TECH is meant to do more than sit there on the coffee table looking pretty. It is organized logically according to your design problems, from structural elements for renovations to systems, storage, furniture, materials, lighting, hardware, kitchen and bathroom appliances, and finishing touches. In the 32-page Storage chapter, for instance, you'll learn how to use lockers and wardrobes, file cabinets and art supply drawers, pick racks, doughnut baskets, small parts bins, revolving warehouse racks, and electric conveyor systems to organize and simplify your home environment -- and that's just the beginning. More than the first comprehensive book about the industrial revolution in design, more than a history of the genre, more than an interior design book with hundreds of color pictures showing innovative uses for many familiar industrial and commercial products and materials -- HIGH-TECH is a source book. Unlike any previous design book, it includes estimated prices (ranging from $1 to $10,000) for many of the products illustrated as well as the names and addresses of their manufacturers and distributors throughout the world. HIGH-TECH is _the_ guide to the new industrial revolution in design. Joan Kron is a former reporter for the Home section of the New York Times, former senior editor and home furnishings writer for New York magazine, and associate editor at Philadelphia magazine. She has also written for the Ladies' Home Journal and Town & Country. Suzanne Slesin, a senior editor at Esquire, writes about design and home furnishings. She is a former contributing editor of New York magazine, where she covered home furnishings. She has also contributed to American Home, Industrial Design, Architecture Plus, Abitare, and Domus. Walter Bernard is the art director of Time magazine, which he redesigned last year, and the former art director of New York magazine. He has won numerous art direction awards and is a visiting professor at Cooper Union. _Jacket photo_: In an East Hampton living room by Bray-Schaible Design, a high-tech hearth/coffee table combination is surfaced in "deck plate," a common industrial material often used on the floors of battleship boiler rooms. The fruit bowl is a concrete birdbath. ______________________________________________________________________