After an early morning doctors appointment, in need of caffeine, and in a rush to complete a thousand little errands before a flight out of town, I stopped at a McDonalds downtown to pick up coffee.  I was just about to run out with it, dishing the depressing breakfast crowd, when I spotted an unoccupied cafe table with two big, fawn-colored Swan Chairs near the front door.  Enticed, I sat down, and then I stayed, watching people walk up and down Broadway for the better part of an hour.

I’m not big on the whole revival of “Mad Men,” mid-century modern style.  The furniture looks great but it doesn’t typically work great.  There’s something insubstantial and decorative about so many of the pieces.  But this chair is something special; it felt good to sit inside of.  A classic, designed by Danish architect Arne Jacobsen in 1959 for the Royal Hotel in Copenhagen, and still produced today by its original manufacturer Fritz Hansen, it’s sympathetic with pop, postmodern, and eclectic, contemporary Jonathan Adler-type styles.  This is an inspired choice of seating for a fast food restaurant.  It slows things down.

Last week I finally made it to “Savage Beauty,” the Alexander McQueen show at the Met, which is just as sensational as everyone says it is.  I’ve seen other great fashion exhibits, like the Met’s AngloMania in 2006, which featured several McQueen ensembles, and this year’s Balenciaga retrospective at the Spanish Institute, but I’ve never been moved the way I was by this one.  McQueen’s clothes are very literally fantastic; they evoke fear, pride, lust, violence, amazement and, because of his death last year, incredible sadness.

To see McQueen’s clothes in person is something different than seeing them in photos and videos from runway presentations.  His shows were so deeply theatrical (with inventive makeup, styling, lighting, choreography and narratives) that the dazzling technical virtuosity and dreamy baroque sensuality of the garments weren’t easily apparent.  Even when his work moved far from what high fashion is (and what clothing is), as with his punkish “tribal” collections, it possessed an astonishing precision in both image and execution.  He wasn’t flailing around or experimenting.  He was pulling visions out from the air and into the world.

It’s fairly simple to get to commodity and firmness, and rather tricky to get to delight.  So I was pleased to stumble across this image of Frank Gehry when searching for images of his iconic Santa Monica house.  It’s a 1972 photo that has the young architect demonstrating how sturdy his new Easy Edge line of cardboard furniture, specifically this desk, is.  It’s an image I have never seen before, an image of architecture and joy.

Of all contemporary architects Gehry might be the only one who is able to express pleasure in his work: pleasure in materials, pleasure in construction, and pleasure in form-making.  There’s a playful, kinetic freedom in his most memorable buildings (his own house, the Norton House, the Dancing House, the New York Tower) that might be its defining characteristic.  Key in all this is that Gehry lives and works in America (he’s Canadian by birth), and specifically in southern California.  It’s hard to imagine a European sourpuss like Rem Koolhaus, or an east coast American sourpuss like David Childs, posing for this kind of picture, or making cardboard furniture in the first place.  The joy comes from the man.

Is expanded polystyrene (EPS) foam the new black?  A recent visit to a contemporary furniture showroom in SoHo left me feeling that way.  There were a number of (very expensive) chairs, lamps, tables and tchotchkes on display, all made from this material, which I can’t help but associate with new toaster ovens and bad takeout coffee.  Just as environmental organizations are fighting to outlaw the recyclable but non-biodegradable plastic, it’s been taken up by industrial designers.

Massimiliano Adami makes unique hand-crafted pieces, including cabinets and standing lamps, from the foam and embeds it with cheap, bright things like ski poles, spray bottles, pencil sharpeners, and traffic cones.  Sometimes he mixes clouds of glitter into the foam.  Cheng Cheng makes  vases by wrapping glassware in fabric netting and injecting foam in between.  The results are menacing, as if the foam is some sort of uncontrollable, disease-carrying bio-matter.  And there are other pieces, like Tokujin Yoshioka’s chair wrapped in moving blankets, and Gaetano Pesce’s brightly-colored resin vases, that have the same toxic, liquid aspect.  Designers traditionally want to control the materials they work with; now they’re letting go, dramatically.