In 2002 Red Sox owner John W. Henry invited A’s General Manager Billy Beane to lunch and made him an offer that he couldn’t refuse, but did. As as preamble Henry led Beane through the august stands at Fenway Park, a scene that’s recreated gorgeously in the movie Moneyball. We see the men strolling through the empty stadium in the rain under a big umbrella, like young lovers in Paris. (In the movie Beane is played by Brad Pitt and is, unbelievably, single.) Beane turns down the Red Sox and their 12.5M offer, but remains appropriately enchanted. He says, “It’s impossible not to feel romantic about baseball.”
Well it’s impossible not to feel romantic about Fenway Park. The little wood seats, the great green fence, and the lopsided, low-lying field shape what might be the most singular sports venue in the country. If the old Yankee Stadium felt like it was raised in the sky, and the old Shea Stadium felt like it had been dropped in a parking lot, then Fenway Park feels like it’s embedded in the earth, as if it’s geological. A great deal of its charm comes from the outrageous and also, somehow, gentle irregularities of the field, especially the way Landsdowne Street tears through the stands and clips left field. The resulting asymmetries leave spectators feeling as if they’re steeped in the realities of history and the city rather than detached, omniscient spectators, as they do at some of the new stadiums. Fenway, instead, makes a peculiar picturesque.
How many lectures and receptions have been made more insufferable than they really are by folding chairs? Regardless of the locale, a painted aluminum folding chair sends the message This event is not fancy and neither are you. The Flux folding chair sends an altogether different message. It certainly doesn’t look like a folding chair. Instead it resembles an origami zoo animal, the blossom of some hothouse flower, and, a little bit, Frank Gehry’s Flintstones-style molded plastic furniture. It certainly doesn’t feel like a folding chair. It’s made from a stiff grade of plastic that offers a sturdy seat, and its boxy base gives it a substantial mass. This folding chair sends the message on over and take a seat.
At the design fair where I first saw them, Flux had secured an unadorned corner booth and crowded it with white chairs. A tired-looking woman, thinking it was a cafe, came over and took a seat. The product rep cheerfully brushed aside her coffee order and seized the occasion to demonstrate how the chair folded, simply, into a flat package the size of a card table, and to explain how it could be slipped into the trunk of a car, underneath a bed, and into a closet. The woman closed her eyes and waved him away, which made it clear that the chair had passed the greatest test of all. She simply didn’t want to get up out of it.
The folks over at Google have far-ranging obsessions, something reflected in the unique splash pages they create every month or so to celebrate anniversaries and events. Some of these graphics, which are called, officially, “doodles,” are enlightening (Heinrich Rudolf Hertz’s 155th Birthday), some are super cool (Freddy Mercury’s 65th Birthday) and some, in their unabashed obscurity, baffling (300th Anniversary of Spain’s National Library). Commemorating the 126th Birthday of Mies van der Rohe last week seemed like a perfect idea.
But when I saw the Mies doodle online I groaned inwardly, and then outwardly. The cartoon showed the crayon-colored Google letters stuffed inside a long glass box that’s loosely modeled after Crown Hall at IIT, an icon of postwar American architecture. The doodle, with its flattened proportions and heavy mullions, inadvertently mocked the refinement and luxe of the great architect’s work. Mies never would have crafted a volume so bluntly inert and opaque. It’s especially disappointing because the default Google splash page, with it’s super-clean, super-clear configuration, might be the most brilliant page on internet. (Compare it to the aspatial clutter of the Bing splash page.) If Google is going to invoke the memory of a master like Mies they need to come up with similarly disciplined graphics. Their 2008 doodle celebrating the 125th birthday of his contemporary Walter Gropius – each of the Google letters rendered as a cubish, International Style bungalow – was clunky, but so was Gropius’ work. Mies, on the other hand, was snobbish about form. He would have taken one look at his doodle and refused it.
Sometimes designers take on problems that are very, very big, and sometimes designers take on problems that are very, very small. When I saw Stamp Rugs, which are designed, very simply, to resemble Royal Mail postage stamps commemorating Queen Elizabeth II, I couldn’t help but feel that the brand’s designers had done something small just right. They took one idea and executed it perfectly.
These candy-colored rugs, lining the walls of a small booth at the AD Home Design Show, lit up the place. Unlike a lot of the other goods being peddled there, high-tech and high-minded luxury goods, the rugs were lighthearted. Their blooming colors mirrored the lovely, unexpected, spring weather that had just arrived in the city. It takes just an instant to see the rugs and “get it” and yet they’re not kitsch. They’re hand-woven from wool and have rich textures and irregularities that come to life as you look at them closely. In their absolute clarity of intention – making rugs that reproduce postage stamps featuring the Queen of England – the rugs honor that lady perfectly.