In 1956 the Gorham Manufacturing Company hired Donald Colflesh to bring a “contemporary dimension” to its product line. His most popular and successful design for the firm was the Circa ’70 series, designed in 1958 and introduced in 1960, which was intended to captured America’s fascination with space travel. The tea and coffee service was the most impressive item designed in the series.

The angled handles and sweeping vertical lines suggest speed and modernity. Gorham reinforced these associations in their pamphlets, which note the set’s “feeling of vertical motion . . . the upward look to space.” The company’s name for this 1958 design, "Circa ’70", speaks to the future and its possibilities, though today it perhaps seems a tad optimistic?  It was among the first luxury Space-Age-styled items designed for the home.  

The extraordinary tray, which was introduced by Gotham in 1963 and later approved by Colflesh, proudly incorporated Formica, a space–age plastic laminate that according to a sticker affixed to the underside--is “impermeable to liquids” and would not “crack or fade”.

Examples of this service (with the tray--now seen as the most important part) are rare, but are included in a variety of museum collections including the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Cleveland Institute of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Literature:
Jewel Stern, Modernism in American Silver, New Haven, 2005, pp. 260-261
A. M. Dehan, ‘Back to the Future: Gorham’s “Circa 70” Service’, Gastronomica, vol. 11, no. 4 (Winter 2011), pp. 11-13
Poppy Cannon, "Great Day in the Morning," Town & Country, December 1960, p. 137
The New Yorker, April 8, 1961, p. 27 (for a period advertisement).

Provenance: 
William Bunch Auctions, 9 Dec 2015