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The story of aluminium – major exhibition in London
From the statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus to the Airstream, Aibo robot dogs by Sony and the Lockheed chair by Marc Newson – an exemplary mixture of the use of aluminium, an important material in modern design. The exhibition being held at the Design Museum in London with a spectacular installation by David Adjaye – and organised by the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh – describes the history of aluminium. From its early use in the mid 1800s to the beginning of the twentieth century when it became the material favoured by modernists, moving on to its current use in avant-garde cars and jets.
Beginning as a spectacular scientific discovery of an application, aluminium began to be used intensively during the mid twentieth century, when a French scientist resolved the problem of how to extract it. Whilst the decisive impulse in the definition of its role came after the second world war when it began to be used for everyday objects such as Coca Cola cans and baseball bats as well as in sophisticated automobiles such as the Aston Martin V12 Vanquish.
