Man Vs The Machine

Vintage Midcentury Handmade perseveres in the Twenty-First Century as Human Made.

Vintage Prototype Hour Glass Mug in Blue Tear Drop by Weston Neil Andersen

This mug is a vintage prototype decorated by my dad, Weston Neil Andersen, but it is also a prototype of the Andersen Design company philosophy of individualism. This mug pattern may evoke the calibrated order of geometry, but it is actually an intuitively executed orderly pattern that achieves a unity of field through the internal relationships of teardrops spontaneously responding to and resonating with each other. It is the individual relationships between the parts that create the holistic effect. This approach to decoration is counterintuitive to the standard practices of a mass production process and resonates across time and place, just as relevant in today’s public dialogue as it was in the midcentury, the Golden Age of the middle class when Andersen Design was established. The intuitive process depends upon faith that one good relationship begets another, rather than externally calculated coordination,…