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Is there a word in English that stops just shy of
hedonistic, suggesting the exuberance and joie de vivre of the term without its
tinge of self-indulgence? If so, then that would be the way to sum up the
approach of Alexander Girard (1907-93), whose work is the subject of a modest
yet visually rich retrospective running at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design
Museum through March 18. Girard was one of the designers most responsible for
suffusing Modernism with joyful color in the 1950s and '60s. Color, in this
sense, was much more than a literal term--it meant enlivening a design
philosophy that had always struggled to escape its dour Germanic origins. The
arrival on the scene of Girard and his friends Charles and Ray Eames was a
revelatory one. For those less than thrilled by Modernism's more austere
conceits, it had an effect similar to that moment early in The Wizard of Oz
when Dorothy throws open her front door and a Technicolor world floods in.
It's sometimes
said that the Modern movement loosened up as it aged, moving through
three distinct phases: from the Euclidian forms of Gropius and Mies,
to the curvilinear work of Aalto and Saarinen, and finally to the
quirky mass production-meets-DIY aesthetic represented by the Eameses.
In this admittedly oversimplified progression, surely Girard--who
reached a level of mastery in a wide variety of media, including
textiles, graphics, and tableware--qualifies as one of the most underrated
avatars of the last, eclectic period. In that sense The Opulent
Eye of Alexander Girard, curated by Donald Albrecht, is overdue.
But in another
sense its timing is just right: the show arrives at a moment when
curious optimism is beginning to make a reappearance in America's
design culture. Like most museum shows that resuscitate the reputation
of an artist in the years after his death, this one says as much
about our present circumstances as it does about those in which
its subject operated. The contemporary message seems to be that
a good economy, new technology, and fatigue with endless variations
on the ironic cynicism that ruled the 1990s have opened the door
for a return to an almost childlike fascination with the possibilities
of design. In other words, joy has made a comeback. And Girard (along
with the Eameses, of course) is an appropriate godfather for the
new sensibility, because his approach never fattened around the
middle or grew pleased with itself--instead it retained a young man's
hunger for new inspiration.
I first visited
the show on a gray September afternoon, just as the tail end of
Hurricane Gordon was lashing New York City. Rain pounded on the
roof of the museum, and big drops shook the petals of the flowers
in the garden along its southern edge. But on the second floor of
the museum, where the show is installed, it was a different story
altogether. There all was brightness and smiles. Girard's work--ranging
from textiles, furniture design, interiors, and graphics to a few
educational films made in collaboration with the Eameses--occupies
a kind of perpetual springtime. Even the textile pattern that Girard
named January has a decidedly sunny disposition. It's accompanied
here by a number of other examples of Girard's irrepressible style:
the paper taco holder in the shape of a bird from La Fonda del Sol
Restaurant, in Manhattan; the matchbooks collected and arrayed with
the fastidious delight of an 11-year-old; the goofy party hat Girard
made for his wife, Susan, which consists of a wire frame supporting
a swarming collection of birds and butterflies.
The globe-trotting
bio is easy enough to condense: Alexander Hayden Girard, known
to friends as Sandro, was born in 1907 in New York City to an American
mother and an Italian father. The couple traveled to New York in
the weeks before Sandro's birth so their son would be guaranteed
Ameri-can citizenship. He was raised in Florence and studied architecture
in Italy and London. He moved to New York in 1932, then relocated
with his wife to Detroit in 1937. There he broadened an already
diverse design practice and was named head of Herman Miller's newly
created textile division, in 1952. Soon the couple moved to Santa
Fe, where they renovated an ancient adobe house and began collecting
folk art, primarily from Latin America. They eventually amassed
one of the world's largest collections.
The Cooper-Hewitt
show, which includes textile samples, photographs from Girard's
interior design work, furniture, and a seemingly endless array of
other objects, is light on curatorial intervention. Though I would
have liked to see more, there are flashes of Girard's playful spirit
in the show. In the opening room the introductory text is displayed
on a handful of brightly colored plastic circles suspended from
the ceiling on steel cables. Each about two feet in diameter, together
they look like a string of lollipops. In the center of the exhibition
the museum has recreated one of Girard's "conversation pits," the
sunken spaces lined with couches and pillows, often with coffee
tables in the center, that were a trademark of his interiors for
private homes. This is a low-budget version; not actually sunken,
it sits about two and a half feet above the floor. A sign attached
to it encourages visitors to climb in and talk, but on the day I
was there only a few takers approached timidly, dutifully removing
their shoes before sliding in. Those who stood outside the pit all
turned to one another with arms crossed and said the same thing:
"That is so sixties."
It was just
one sign that our new design era may ring with a few echoes of the
1960s, but we haven't come close to the swinging heights of that
era. An even better clue stands just a few feet away: a sofa Girard
designed for Braniff International. The couch is badly stained--perhaps
from martini overflow and cigarette ash. It could have come straight
from the set of an Austin Powers movie or a cocktail party hosted
by Norman Mailer, circa 1966. It's pretty clear that none of its
users were polite enough to take off their shoes off before climbing
on. (Shirts, maybe.)
On the whole
this is a carefully assembled survey, if sometimes too deferential
to Girard, and denser than it appears at first glance. Some of the
projects on view--particularly the corporate apartment for Hallmark,
in Kansas City, and the designs for wealthy clients in exclusive
locales around the country--suggest a designer increasingly tempted
by big-dollar commissions, but there is also plenty of evidence
to counteract that notion. Nearly an entire room is dedicated to
the Textiles & Objects shop, whose interior Girard designed for
Herman Miller as a kind of Modernist bazaar. The store, a vehicle
to bring design objects to the middle classes, opened on 53rd Street
in 1961. The goal was the same for the exhibition For Modern Living
that Girard curated at the Detroit Institute of Art in 1949, as
well as for the Good Design show that ran at the Merchandise Mart,
in Chicago, and at MoMA. Albrecht also offers enough photographs
of the work Girard did on his own residences to make it clear that
the designer had few pretensions. Clearly, his priority was to be
surrounded by remarkable objects--and mostly modest, handmade ones
at that.
And if those
images aren't enough to convince you that Girard was unusually able
to resist jaded self-importance, consider this story. Girard, who
thanks to his Italian upbringing was always interested in the rituals
of making and eating food, collaborated with the Eameses in the
1950s on the screening of their film called Bread. Pretty basic,
its cinematography is closer to Sesame Street than de Sica: the
film shows a hand breaking a piece of bread in half, spreading butter
on an English muffin, taking bread from the oven. For a showing
of it at UCLA, Girard and Ray Eames figured out a way to pump the
smell of baking bread into the auditorium: Sandro himself, nearing
his 50th birthday, crouched in the bowels of the building as the
film began, holding a fresh loaf of bread and directing its vapors
into the air-conditioning ducts connected to the theater. I'd like
to see Philippe Starck or Michael Graves do that.
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By
James Howard Kunstler
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One
Track
Mind
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In
Review
How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Roads Not Taken
By Alex Marshall
University of Texas Press; 288 pp.;
hardcover, $50.00; paperback, $24.95
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Urbanist
Alex Marshall argues that transportation systems largely determine
the shape and frorm of cities.
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Alex
Marshall's family goes back five generations in Norfolk, Virginia,
a city of 230,000 that has gone through the awful wringer of twentieth-century
urban renewal, suburban expansion, and the reckless destruction
of its downtown, leaving the city a gutted wreck. Marshall covered
the terminal phase of this process as a reporter for the Virginian-Pilot
newspaper, and he obviously feels the losses deeply. The life he
led in Norfolk, as described near the end of this book, sounds exemplary.
He and his wife lived in a hundred-year-old row-house neighborhood,
and conducted a monthly poetry and music salon in their home to
make up for the nearly complete absence of community life in what
was left of their city.
As an analysis
of the urban condition, the rest of How Cities Work is a patchwork
of non sequiturs, platitudes, and tautologies. Its general theory
is a one-dimensional preoccupation with transportation. As a discussion
of particular places--Portland, Silicon Valley, Jackson Heights--it
doesn't get beyond the self-evident. Along the way it takes cheap
shots at the few figures on the contemporary scene who have tried
to do something to alleviate the fiasco of the human habitat in
our time.
Marshall opens
with guns blazing to mow down New Urbanism, in particular Andres
Duany, the Miami-based town planner who with his wife Elizabeth
Plater-Zyberk has been at that movement's forefront. He tries to
achieve this in a chapter about the Disney Corporation's Celebration
development, in Florida. It's a strange choice for several reasons.
One is that Duany and Plater-Zyberk had little to do with the design
of the place. Their firm, DPZ, withdrew after producing early conceptual
sketches. Another is that Marshall simply has misunderstood what
Celebration represents, namely the co-opting of New Urbanism by
an especially venal corporation. What really happened was this:
Disney couldn't fail to notice the fabulous success of 80-acre Seaside,
the new town up on the Florida panhandle developed by Robert Davis
and designed by DPZ. Having 10,000 acres to play with among their
vast holdings near Orlando (plus legislative exemption from Florida's
land-use laws), Disney decided to ape Seaside's success on a gigantic
scale so as to line their corporate vaults with ever more bags of
money.
In other words,
Celebration is hardly representative of New Urbanism's intentions
or practices, but rather an inflated corporate caricature of it--and
is therefore an easy target. Yes, its scale is gargantuan, the style-based
house typology is silly, its fake dormers and screw-on vinyl shutters
embarrassments, its pretensions to democracy laughable, and its
relation to the nearby Magic Kingdom and the many ancillary entertainment
fiefdoms of Disney Inc. a little sinister. One can legitimately
criticize Celebration until the manatees come home, but it's a little
bit like criticizing Sara Lee for selling oven-ready pies. In any
case, the pros really in charge of the project were Robert A. M.
Stern and Jacquelin T. Robertson--and neither of them are even mentioned
in Marshall's book.
I hasten to
add for the sake of fairness that Marshall disses me and my book
The Geography of Nowhere, characterizing it as "basically true,
but also basically beside the point." Well, I'd rather be called
irrelevant than a liar and a thief, which is more or less what Marshall
calls Duany in disagreeing with him on the nature of urbanism.
The trouble
is that Marshall does not present a coherent counterargument, except
to say that he knows urbanism when he sees it. And a very strange
omission is any discussion of the public quarrel he picked with
Duany in Norfolk in the mid-1990s over a charrette that occurred
there involving the redesign of a downtown waterfront neighborhood.
Until then Marshall had been a fan of Duany's. But when Duany suggested
the demolition of some crummy Section Eight housing (i.e., 1960s
government projects), Marshall repeatedly denounced him in the newspaper
as being against the poor.
Whatever its
finer points pro or con, the Norfolk charrette was manifestly an
inner-city effort, and one with which Marshall was intimately familiar.
So it's a little weird that his chief criticism of New Urbanism
is that it ignores the cities for the suburbs. In fact, the Norfolk
incident, and Marshall's role in it, illustrates exactly why it
is so difficult to rescue inner-city neighborhoods in the current
political climate: any proposal to improve conditions is branded
as gentrification by the left-progressive axis. Understandably,
the urban catastrophes of the postwar period conditioned the public
to regard any "renewal" ideas with the most extreme suspicion.
From Celebration,
Marshall moves on to his discussion of general principles. His big
beef about the American urban scene is that our transportation system
sucks and that nobody understands this--and therefore nobody understands
how cities work. I think a lot of people understand this (most notably
the New Urbanists). Our extreme overdependence on cars has given
most of the inhabited reaches of America the quality of a universal
parking lot. This adds up to thousands and thousands of places that
are not worth caring about or living in. However, Marshall is only
tangentially interested in this facet of the issue. And his inattention
to the spiritual rewards or punishments of urbanism good and bad
mars his attempt to explain the special atrocious character of an
environment like Silicon Valley--and the innumerable drive-in wastelands
like it across our land. True, the enormous government subsidies
that support all the necessary infrastructure and accessories of
cars have left us with a railroad system unworthy of a civilized
country. But Marshall also says that the traditional city is an
obsolete antique, "an ornamental world," a luxury that only a minority
can appreciate because the economic action is all in the suburbs.
It's a little
strange, then, that one of Marshall's chapters is a paean to the
city of Portland, Oregon, one of the few cities in America to overcome
this national neurosis--and to retain a live-in population of all
social and economic ranks. Portland proves a number of things: not
everybody in America wants to live in a split-level on a cul-de-sac;
not all businesses want to locate next to an off-ramp; people of
all classes will ride good public transit if it's available; population
density is not the same thing as traffic congestion; and crime is
not an inevitable by-product of urbanism. But Portland is also a
special case, having grown out of special circumstances--a consensus
decision taken a quarter century ago to protect the limited supply
of excellent farmland in the Willamette Valley that would have been
decimated by the typical course of suburbanization. So Oregon created
an urban-growth boundary (UGB) and a regional government ("Metro")
to regulate it. The UGB has had mixed results. It was originally
set very far out, and little was done to reform zoning laws within
the boundary, so a lot of the land inside filled up with typical
suburban schlock. Both the UGB and Metro have been under continual
assault ever since by the Oregon political right, and the boundary
has been pushed further out in some contested areas.
Marshall concludes
from the Portland example that the solution to America's city problems
is regional government, and lots of it. Apart from my sense that
this doesn't quite square with his belief that traditional cities
are antiques, I see two problems with this view. No other city besides
Portland has shown any appetite for regional governance. Second,
the suburban phenomenon in America, as we have known it, will not
be able to persist much longer. In fact, I see American life as
having to contract by necessity into the traditional forms of cities,
towns, villages, and neighborhoods with the devalued effluvia of
the suburbs partially vacated as a monument to the futility of perpetual
motion.
Anyway, that's
an argument better carried on in long form. For now, I simply cannot
find a consistent or coherent point of view in Marshall's long essay
on the question, or at the very least an explanation of how cities
work. What's missing is a recognition that the way cities have worked
in America for the last half of the twentieth century was a gross
aberration from the norms of human ecology that any civilization
with a desire to endure would do well to avert.
James
Howard Kunstler is the author of Home From Nowhere.
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Ken Coupland |
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Screen
Space
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A
monthly column of Web design and resources
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ClearType
Microsoft is touting ClearType--a proprietary application that improves
the legibility of fonts on LCD screens--as an antidote to the lack
of resolution in on-screen typefaces. Although the Web site is sponsored
by the Gibson Research Corporation, the technology builds on years
of display system research and development at Apple and other labs.
Programmer Steve Gibson has written many columns about subpixel
font-rendering over the last couple of years, but his comments reproduced
here remain the clearest explanation of the core technology. In
addition to photographs and screen captures, Gibson's written an
application that displays identical text, with and without the use
of this advanced rendering technique. You can also enter your own
text--varying font, size, and style--to see the results using various
on-screen typefaces.
Tomb
of the Month
Douglas Keister's photographs have graced
a popular series of books about elaborately decorated Victorian
mansions ("painted ladies") and American Arts and Crafts bungalows.
Although his Web site doesn't improve on the printed versions, it
does offer some clues to their contents. Keister is also an authority
on final resting places. He has sought out cemeteries around the
world because--their morbid appeal aside--graveyards can be said to
offer our best-preserved repositories of historic architecture.
A section devoted to his authoritative survey Going Out in Style:
The Architecture of Eternity (a sequel is in the works) features
such curiosities as the Davis Memorial in Hiawatha, Kansas. The
bizarre monument enshrines 11 statues of John Davis and his wife,
Sarah, at various stages of their lives and is surmounted by a granite
canopy.
Studio
eg
Office cubicles manufactured from used newsprint, sawdust, cardboard,
and rubber? A lot of furniture companies talk green, but Studio
eg walks the walk. The company's modular Ecowork system is made
from 98 percent recycled and reused materials with low-energy manufacturing
processes. Finishes are water-based and nontoxic, and--recognizing
that sustainability is a two-way street--the studio has designed
Ecoworks for maximum recyclability. But for a green product the
system is also surprisingly chic, and its design-savvy good looks
have propelled it into some of the hippest new office spaces. The
Web site's graphic elements evoke distinctive features of the furniture's
styling, rollovers cue you to an array of cubicle configurations,
and Flash animation diagrams the system's ease of assembly.
Comic
Book Resources
An exhaustive archive and meeting place for hard-core funnies lovers
and collectors, Comic Book Resources claims a visitor count of over
300,000 "unique fans" each month--and who are we to argue? Rife with
insider gossip and sometimes painfully detailed interviews, the
site looks pretty much like you'd expect: cluttered with visual
noise in the form of banner ads and such, and comic characters only
an aficionado could love. But the site's major draw--sure to keep
you coming back for more--is staff writer Scott Shaw's "Oddball Comics."
Updated every weekday, the feature in recent months has included
a learned discussion of the lovable Shmoos, drawn by Al Capp of
Li'l Abner fame. The ultimate food source, Shmoos "died of sheer
ecstasy whenever anyone looked at 'em with hunger in their eyes."
NewsMaps
It sounds like a swell idea. Cartia, Inc. developed its ThemeScape
information analysis and mapping technology to create displays that
summarize large volumes of textual data by representing them as
maps. Borrowing freely from the cartographer's toolbox, NewsMaps
depicts the day's news stories as hills, valleys, or snowcapped
peaks. The frequency of the topic determines its topography. Problem
is that the site's single-word descriptors don't give you enough
information to know what story to expect. For example, on a recent
map the word "prison" linked to a story about a pot bust rather
than, say, prison conditions, and "Smith" was the only clue that
you were linking to a story on Anna Nicole Smith. An amusing novelty,
but a lousy way to get your news.
Alsop
& Störmer
The online portfolio for U.K. architects Alsop and Störmer grabs
your interest with a bizarre biomorphic site map that resembles
some sort of sea creature. Rollovers prompt the critter's tentacles
to bulge out, signaling project types, then link to one jaw-dropping
building after another. The studio's house style is characterized
by "ovaloid" volumes that make no obvious concessions to any conventional
building style, design schemes that raise the structure off the
ground so it can be viewed from all sides, and "an unsentimental
response to the client's needs and available resources." In today's
superheated climate of architectural one-upmanship, there doesn't
seem to be anything this firm won't try. That said, the site provides
only token views of projects, and the explanatory text is strewn
with typos.
QuickHoney
New York-based ex-Berliners Nana Rausch and Peter Stemmler promote
their illustrations from this vaguely disquieting site. Click on
one of the beehives on the splash page and you're sent to Rausch's
"Soap-Machine," a downbeat study of domestic malaise. Or view Stemmler's
extensive portfolio of magazine work (uncannily similar in style
to his partner's). Rausch's "Visit Our Small World" escorts viewers
through a 36-panel, text-free semi-autobiographical "novella" that
chronicles the mundane routines--eating, screwing, watching TV, riding
the subway--that constitute their lives. Stemmler's work focuses
on the figure; Rausch's deadpan renderings leach all the texture
out of their settings, leaving as their residue an outsider's take
on the familiar urban milieu. Don't miss the sushi-tray assembly
line.
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BOOK
SHELF
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In
Review
Design Details for Health: Making the Most of Interior
Design's Healing Potential
City Levels
Aldo Rossi: The Sketchbooks 1990-1997
40 Architects Under 40
300 Years of Industrial Design
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New
and notable books on architecture, culture, and design.
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Design
Details for Health: Making the Most of Interior Design's Healing
Potential
By Cynthia Leibrock
Designed by Gunther Petrarca with Spector Group
John Wiley & Sons Inc., 300 pp., $80.00
These design tips for health-care facilities aim to return authority
to patients. Leibrock makes her case with useful examples, such
as a lifetime care complex in Holland where medical service is available
to residents in their apartments. But patient comfort is only one
side of the equation: Leibrock's solutions also decrease costs and
increase efficiency for facilities.
City
Levels
Edited by Nick Barley and Ally Ireson
Designed by Anne Odling-Smee and Stephen Coates
August | Birkhäuser, 126 pp., $35.00
In histories of architecture, the metaphorical value of height has
traditionally been revered. This book examines, instead, the urban
landscape at different levels from deep underground, to street level,
to high overhead. With previously unpublished projects by Rem Koolhaas
and Zaha Hadid, the essayists look at the city as a series of layers.
Aldo
Rossi: The Sketchbooks 1990-1997
By Paolo Portoghesi
Thames & Hudson, 192 pp., $27.50
When Aldo Rossi was in architecture school, one of his professors
accused him of drawing like a bricklayer. Thank goodness. His rough,
lively contextual sketches may not please some, but they delight
those looking for ideas, expression, humanism, and urbanism. Portoghesi
has lovingly gathered Rossi's prodigious output during the last
seven years of his life in this small book that feels like a real
sketchbook.
40
Architects Under 40
By Jessica Cargill Thompson
Taschen, 576 pp., $39.99
It's exactly what its title says it is: 40 architects under 40.
Some, like Asymptote and UN Studio, are acclaimed; others, such
as Marc Barani and Aranda Pigem Vilalta, are on the verge. The profiles
of selected individuals and firms are arranged alphabetically--with
text in English, German, and French--and illustrated with photographs,
renderings, and floor plans.
300
Years of Industrial Design
Adrian and Ditte Heath, and Aage Lund Jensen
Watson-Guptill Publications, 272 pp., $35.00
A sort of The Way Things Work for industrial design enthusiasts,
this volume gives us the lowdown on some of the most important industrial
innovations of the last three centuries. The book--divided into sections
covering metal, wood, ceramic, and glass products--gives technical
details on materials, production methods, and historical background
for products ranging from the pulley block to the Bramah lock.
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