MORE FUN IN THE NEW WORLD

Boscobel, the handsome nineteenth-century house-museum in Hudson County, New York, gives poignant testimony to the new American spirit. Built between 1804-1808 by farmers States and Elizabeth Dykeman, it was inspired by Boscobel Castle in Shropshire, England, where Charles II hid in a tree and then a priest hole after his defeat at the Battle of Worcester.

It’s instructive to compare Boscobel to the Neuer Pavilion, the delightful summer home Schinkel built for Friedrich Wilhelm III inside the gardens of Charlottenburg in 1824. Both homes are built with two stories in a nine-square plan, with the rooms settled around a central staircase. And both are rendered in a restrained neoclassical fashion, built from flat surfaces embellished with raised motifs and flat patterns.

The Pavilion, though originally a royal residence, is compressed and – because crafted by Schinkel – exquisitely proportioned and detailed. Its exterior columns and pilasters appear etched into its taut white stone skin. Boscobel, originally a working farmhouse, is about four times as large. It’s not perfectly symmetrical, with eccentricities in its plan. The columns, pilasters and festoons on its facade are cheerfully overscaled, like theatrical makeup. (Our guide suggested, kindly, that these motifs were designed to be seen from boats passing on the river below.)

But if Boscobel is brasher and noisier than the Pavilion, it’s also looser and freer. Large windows invite the eye to wander off into the landscape. There’s room to move about inside, to pass others on the stair, to hide in the corners, to linger for hours inside one of its rooms. Its architecture seems governed by pragmatics rather than proportion, and its ornament by personal preference rather than rules. And that might speak perfectly about America, then and now.

Photograph courtesy of Boscobel. House and Gardens.

January 19, 2020 by Nalina Moses

MACHINES FOR LIVING WITH

The Ettore Sottsass retrospective at the Met Breuer is subtitled Design Radical, and “radical” is correct for both its ideological and scientific connotations. Sottsass was a singular spirit who, like an atomic free radical, moved independently and reacted strongly with all the forces he encountered. Born in 1917 and trained in Viennese-inflected modernism by his architect father, he borrowed tenets and freedoms from every cultural movement afoot in postwar Europe: Bauhaus, Pop, Zen, Minimalism, Neo-Classicism. While his designs are typically filed under Postmodernism, they’re more personally-felt and eclectic than those of academic practitioners like Michael Graves and Robert Stern, whose references are mostly Classical. In addition, Sottsass worked in a far broader range of media. There are at the museum, in addition to Sottsass’ architectural drawings, glassware, jewelry, tableware, furniture, lighting, plastic laminate patterns, and textiles.

Sottsass remains best-known for his product design, in particular the portable red plastic typewriter he concocted for Olivetti in 1969. But it’s probably better to think of him as an interior designer. Not because he cared about finishing rooms, but because his sphere of influence is primarily the interior. His strongest works are large-scale furnishings (desks, armoires, etageres, totems) that possess dubious practical value and exceptional sculptural charisma. They overturn, effortlessly, the modern dictum that form follows function, suggesting instead that form intends to delight. Rendered with theatrical proportions and unorthodox materials in noisy juxtaposition to one another, these constructions have a playful mechanistic energy, like friendly robots. A standing cabinet with a glowing yellow stained maple finish has shiny, gold, cupcake-sized pulls. A wall divider with long canted shelves, its arms akimbo, is finished in a crayon-box assortment of lacquers. Each piece is strong enough to anchor an otherwise simply furnished loft or bedroom or conference room, charging the entire space. However eccentric, Sottsass’ designs are fit for living.

Ettore Sottsass, Tartar Table, 1985. Reconstituted wood veneer, plastic laminate (HPL print laminate), lacquer, plywood. Photo courtesy The Met.

September 05, 2017 by Nalina Moses

WHAT BEAUTY DOES

I had a remarkable art history professor in college, Sylvia Boone, who began the semester by asking each student to list five things that were beautiful. After sharing our responses she explained that what each of thought was beautiful revealed a great deal about us, and much less about those things themselves. The interior of Adolf Loos’ Muller House in Prague might be a litmus test for architects and interior designers, exposing their deeply-held cultural and intellectual leanings. Some will find it too rich and some too restrained. I found it poised – remarkable, precisely – between intellectual rigor and sensual abandon.

From the outside the house is famously austere, a white concrete cube with small punched windows. Their Braille-like groupings reveal its compressed inner structure, the way its rooms are impressed upon one another, like organs in the body. The Muller House is revered by architects as the finest exemplar of the raumplan, Loos’s idea that a building is organized by spatial relationships between rooms rather than a floor plan. The narrow, turning wood staircase at its center is the origin of the building, from which all of its rooms unfold. The Living Room, at the back of the ground floor, is its largest and most finely expressed space. It’s narrow and wide, with a row of tall windows overlooking the backyard, that slopes dramatically down to the main street.

The walls are finished with panels of dark stained mahogany and a richly figured green marble, the kind of materials that would be used theatrically in a McMansion. But here the wood and stone panels – undeniably voluptuous – are fiercely elegant. Their over-the-top textures and colors are, somehow, quieted by the disciplined symmetries and proportions of the room, and its modest furnishings: three battered oriental rugs, a loveseat, two tables, and half a dozen upholstered chairs. As preserved and maintained by The City of Prague Museum, the room rests right at the tipping point between Tasteful Bourgeois and Arriviste Splendor. Standing inside it, a visitor feels excited and also settled. The room is luxurious but no single feature is too bright or too large; nothing pulls the eye. This interior brings something close to inner peace.

Photo from Muller House.

August 27, 2017 by Nalina Moses

YOU DO YOU

After wrestling with a recalcitrant employee at a meeting last week, my boss told him, with a shrug of the shoulders, “You do you.” This could be the motto of the newest generation of product designers, whose work is represented handsomely at this year’s Collective Design Fair.

The overall mood is sophisticated and twee. I’ve thought before that our current moment in design is a throwback to the 80′s but, after walking through CDF I realize there’s something essentially different. Today’s design work isn’t principled formally; it’s casual and idiosyncratic. Each object is about realizing one small idea – about narrative, material, proportion – in hallucinogenic detail, but without an overarching set of beliefs. This is form-making without rules, personal design. Which isn’t to say it isn’t substantial or complex. All the objects and artwork here are immaculately crafted, curated and installed.

The mood is, almost always, playful, and the objects are like toys – whose only function is to amuse and delight. Even the most practical pieces (chairs, tables, drinking glasses) are overwhelmed by their idiosyncratic form, so that their everyday functions seem secondary. The most spectacular installation is the R + Company booth, which contains a balloon-shaped couch welded together from nickels, a six-foot-tall bead-encrusted mushroom, a hanging chair shaped like a wasp’s next, and spiked ceramic vases that look like exotic fruit envisioned by Dr. Seuss. Each object feels immediate, as it has been fabricated directly, without refinement or engineering, from a child’s crayon drawing.

Modernists defied formal conventions to challenge staid bourgeois notions about what a table was, what a window was, and what a house was. Now, perhaps because there is no authoritative dogma to rub up against, designers are defying convention simply because they have the freedom to, and because they’re bored doing ordinary stuff. The results are lovely to look at, and emotionally slight.

R + Company installation, Collective Design Fair, 2017. Photograph by Nalina Moses.

May 13, 2017 by Nalina Moses