Abstract

During the 1920s and 1930s, urbanization and industrialization were on the rise in Greece, following a series of major political, economic and social events. In this context, the need for design input to industry was identified by manufacturers and policymakers. This article explores the related educational and professional developments and shows that the applied arts domain was positioned between, and in a sense suppressed by, fine arts on the one hand and engineering on the other. Emerging craft and design professions were stigmatized as being of little social and professional status and design-related educational initiatives were fragmentary and unpopular. It is argued that the interwar years constituted for Greece a period of proto-professionalization or otherwise a time of incomplete formation of the design domain, which undermined the perception and development of design in the long run.

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