SLEIGHT OF HAND

Modern American product designer Russell Wright proclaimed, “The hand of man should not be visible.” Wright’s house-studio in Hudson County, Dragon Rock, set high into the rock face of an abandoned quarry, conforms to this dictum. The structure can’t be seen or understood completely from any angle on the ground, and gives no clear image of itself. It’s a deft act of camouflage, one that even an accomplished architect might not be able to execute.

If Wright’s iconic midcentury dinnerware feel charmingly dated today, this house doesn’t. It has the rough, eccentric personal presence of those by Bruce Geoff and Bart Prince. It’s less an object of its time than a figment of its creator. It’s no surprise that Wright got his start in theater design; the house feels like a loose assemblage of moments rather than a cohesive structure. There’s a narrow passage that squeezes one from the studio into the main house, a twisting spill of rock stairs leading down to the dining room, and a low, skewed two-seat banquette in the center of the living room. Even on a sunny summer day the great room, framed with exposed wood beams and a tree trunk, felt shadowed and forlorn, as if the visitor were trapped inside its creator’s dark dreams.

Wright shared many ideas (building into the earth, the open plan, motifs derived from nature) with his extraordinary architectural counterpart, Frank Lloyd Wright. But the master architect’s contemporary houses, scaled similarly, offer experiences that are physically and psychically expansive. They can overwhelm but they can also, often, dazzle. The rhythm of the ornament, the spatial complexity, the sly spatial transitions, can transport. One never feels, as at Dragon Rock, that the finishes are rough, the proportions pinched, or the connections between materials unconsidered. Russell Wright’s home is best understood as a personal experiment. To consider it as architecture is unfair; that discipline requires a firmer, more coherent hand.

Photograph of Dragon Rock by Rob Penner.

September 14, 2019 by Nalina Moses

JUST TOO MUCH

So many everyday products are conceived without a drop of design intelligence (e.g. paper cups, hair clips, printers, windows) that it seems rude to complain about objects that are over-designed. But as consumers become more design-savvy, brands are putting extra efforts into product design that don’t always add up.

A few years ago, when Apple launched their smart watches, the company had reached a point of design fatigue. After a string of inventive, innovative devices (i.e. the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad) the Apple Watch felt unnecessary, as if had been developed in response to market research rather than genuine need. It looked less like a technological instrument than an expensive amulet strapped to the wrist.

Like Apple, Dyson uses product design to elevate their products to the level of luxury goods, but their design ethos takes the opposite approach. While Apple uses a restrained palette and flush joinery to create an aura of opulent, intelligent minimalism, Dyson exaggerates the joining of disparate materials and parts to create an image of advanced mechanical functionality.

That sensibility is now approaching caricature. The brand’s Small Ball Multi Floor upright vacuum cleaner is cartoonish, with parts in unharmonious colors and awkward proportions. The design calls the user to marvel at the suction mechanism with an enormous clear canister, and the swiveling brush with an enormous purple ball joint. The brand would like to present the vacuum cleaner as an iconic machine, like a small car. What does this repositioning accomplish, if the object is so ungainly that one keeps it hidden in the closet?

Dyson Small Ball Multi Floor upright vacuum cleaner.

May 30, 2018 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

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