Fin de Siecle

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In Eugene Ionesco's absurdist play "The Chairs", chairs stand in for characters at the brink of the world's end. Artist and curator Andreas Angelidakis pays homage to Ionesco at Swiss Institute with "Fin de Siecle", a fantastical and idiosyncratic narrative of design after modernism. Inspired by Ionesco's play, Angelidakis reanimates a number of important chairs from design history and popular culture, casting them in dramatic roles. As a document of Swiss Institute's inaugural Architecture and Design show, this volume includes a conversation on late-modernist design between Angelidakis and Beatrice Galilee, Associate Curator of Architecture and Design at the Met; a dialogue on AirBnB's approach to space with Alessandro Bava, Aaron Taylor Harvey, Sean Monahan and Rachael Yu; an essay and specially created artist's book by Angelidakis; and a glossary of the chairs selected for the exhibition.