Selling a different kind of ‘organic’

What makes design “organic”? In 1941, at the competition and exhibition Organic Design in Home Furnishings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the curator Eliot Noyes referred to it as the “harmonious organisation of the parts within the whole, according to structure, material, and purpose”. Today, however, it is mostly thought of as “something that evokes the natural world”, says James Zemaitis, the former director of 20th-century design at Sotheby&rsqu