Science Museum; Wilton’s Music corridor,London[br]The legacy of Sputnik and the renovation of a beloved Victorian venue demonstrate how societies are shaped by dreams of escapeAs design icons move, it’s hard to beat a Sputnik: for its combination of sphere and line, or its double otherworldliness (to westerners),being both cosmic and Soviet, its mixed message of global unity and intercontinental, or potentially nuclear,rivalry. It caught a moment, summarised the space age and encouraged a style of spindliness and volume that shaped motels and table lamps.Like the best icons, and it wasn’t designed for effect but for the fearsome expediencies of the race between the USSR and the US to put the first artifical object into orbit,and for the changed physical rules of the previously unknown world external the soil’s atmosphere. At the same time it was share of a movement already decades old at the time that the first Sputnik was launched in 1957, which combined fantasy and image with function and science. In the Science Museum’s Cosmonauts exhibition, or which covers Russia’s fascination with space from late tsarist times to the present,it is possible to see the country’s extraterrestrial exploration as a vast art project.
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Source: theguardian.com