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Change Is Good
Whether he's shaking up tired office furnishings or pushing a radical design
theory called Massive Change, Bruce Mau is unafraid to tangle with the status
quo.
By Andrew Blum
Photography by Chris Wahl for Metropolis
July 2003
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Bruce Mau created two families of panel fabrics--Point and Structure--for
Maharam.
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Point comes in three scales (Nano, shown above; Mega, below; and Giga), and
Structure comes in two (Nano, bottom; and Mega, 2nd from bottom). Used in
combination, the fabrics give cubicles a sense of depth.
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Top, photograph by Chris Wahl for Metropolis; others Paul Warchol/courtesy Maharam
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PANEL TEXTILES
Mega Structure (above) and Mega Point (below) are paired with their Nano
counterparts to create additional patterns: MegaNano Point (3rd from bottom)
and MegaNano Structure (2nd from bottom).
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An illustration (above) shows how an installation of MegaNano Point
fabrics would give cubicles more visual volume than the typical all-beige
treatment.
Paul Warchol/courtesy Maharam
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Offsite:
Bruce Mau Design,
www.brucemau design.com; Maharam,
www.maharam.com; Herman Miller,
www.herman miller.com |
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"There was no way in a million years that I would have come into work
one day and said, 'You know what? Panel fabrics baby, that's where it's
at,'" Bruce Mau says, doing a little jig and sticking out his palm.
There are at least a dozen empty chairs in the library of Bruce Mau Design,
but we have both been standing for nearly 45 minutes while Mau paces back
and forth playing with a Slinky. He is in constant motion. I am here to
learn about the panel fabrics--used on office cubicles--that Mau has
designed for the contract textile company Maharam. But for Mau, talking
about panel fabrics means talking about everything else: the human genome,
the production of nature, the invention of peacekeeping. He is big and entrancing,
like Bill Clinton. "It's one thing to say, 'We should have new flatware.'
It's kind of a natural place for design to be," he says. "I'm
much more interested in all the other places--like panel fabrics--where
people wouldn't think, 'That's a great place to design.'"
Introduced in June at NeoCon, the trade fair for the contract furnishings
industry, the fabrics Mau and his studio designed for Maharam are a revolution
for an industry mired in beige. Installations of office cubicles typically
project no sense of depth; they are a fractured sea of flat panels.
Mau's big idea is deceptively simple: changing the scale of patterns on
the cubicle walls creates depth. The cubicle becomes cubic. "We approached
it from the very first sketches as something that was three-dimensional,
even knowing that ultimately it would be a two-dimensional product,"
Mau says. "The interesting thing about it is the social space--what
you end up with environmentally." Herman Miller was so attracted by
Mau's insight that the firm used the fabric on its Ethospace, Prospects,
and Resolve office system displays in the showroom at NeoCon. "It's
very difficult to find panel fabric that's intriguing," says
Wayne Susag, who designed the display for Herman Miller. "We were really
looking for something that shifted in scale enough so that from across a
room you can still appreciate and experience the patterns."
Almost all designers say they want to change the world, but very few embrace
mundane reality--like panel fabrics--to do it. But rather than seeing clients
and their demands as iron chains to drag toward design bliss, Mau crowns
them collaborators and places them at the center of his practice. "I
have a real fascination with reality," he says. "I'm much more
interested in intervening in a way that is going to affect more people than
in doing teapots that people who already basically agree with me are going
to say is a nice design."
Accordingly there are no designer teapots at the Toronto studio of Bruce
Mau Design. Instead the place exudes an energetic sense of creative disarray.
There's a bike parked outside the conference room and a golden retriever
trotting around. Groups of designers face each other across worktables littered
with art books and abstract sketches, while constellations of Apple logos
glow from the backs of beat-up PowerBooks. The whole place seems to occupy
a strange limbo between academia's earnest dreaminess and the design industry's
slick commercialism. When I first arrive Mau's assistant, Quinn Shephard,
invites me to peruse the library, where I stumble upon a shelf full of French
philosophy and a section labeled "The Sixties."
The people at Bruce Mau Design may capitalize on their playfulness, but
they also play with their capital--a fitting stance for a studio that
has managed to morph jobs designing books of Continental philosophy into
work that includes corporate logos and museum branding campaigns. Beginning
in the 1980s Mau's highly conceptual work for MIT's Zone Books imprint reimagined
the role of graphic designer with designs that were deeply inspired by the
texts themselves--a move that for Mau seemed a natural evolution of the
intertwining of form and content. In 1995 he tightened that knot, when he
received front-cover billing with Rem Koolhaas on S,M,L,XL. And
while it may have brought a new sense of responsibility to Mau's role as
a graphic designer, it only encouraged his sense of play. His own 2000 manifesto,
Life Style, brims with jokes both visual and textual, right down
to the option of purchasing the book in ten different colors.
So when Michael Maharam, the 43-year-old principal and co-owner of Maharam,
in New York, called to ask Mau if he would design a panel fabric, he responded,
"What's a panel fabric?" The question became the mantra for this
project, a statement of naiveté and the daring that results from
it--both on Mau's part for asking the question and on Maharam's part for
seeking the freshness of ignorance. But in Mau's world it is also a statement
of purpose: "What's a panel fabric?" is not only a practical question
but a platonic one, a logical lead-in to "What's an office?"
Or, more likely, "What's work?" It's all part of what Mau calls
"the context in which we are working"--the variety of projects
that sustain his studio, both fiscally and creatively. As Mary Murphy,
design director at Maharam, sees it, "Bruce has lots of pots on the
stove, and they're all bubbling and they're all boiling. But they're connected.
It's like he's cooking one big stew somewhere."
Both Murphy and her boss, Michael Maharam, are under Mau's spell. At Maharam,
the faith in design runs deep. In 1997 Michael joined his brother Stephen as a
principal of the textile company founded by their great-grandfather Louis
Maharam in 1902. "The trick," he says, "was transforming what
was a rather dusty old brand into a dynamic new business philosophy."
Maharam became, as we now say, "design-driven." The firm acquired the
rights to fabric patterns by the likes of Charles and Ray Eames, George Nelson,
Arne Jacobsen, and Alexander Girard, and relaunched them in a line called
Textiles of the Twentieth Century. The success of the line established Maharam
as the design leader in the industry. "But then we started getting a
little self-conscious about the fact that we were doing all this work with dead
designers," Murphy says, so they began to seek out people who would be
"the next icons of the century." Their collaboration with the Dutch
designer Hella Jongerius earned massive critical praise, encouraging Maharam to
partner with other designers. Panel fabrics in particular were in desperate
need of intervention. "It's the most challenged category we deal with
because it is so constrained," Maharam says.
Why choose Mau? As Maharam lays it out, "If the question is panel fabric,
and that is a two-dimensional question--more so than other textiles, which
have greater dimension--then the answer is graphic design. And if the environment
is labyrinthine, then the answer is somebody who works in designing high-stimulus
environments like museums. And Bruce is that person."
Interior architects choose panel fabrics after they've chosen an office
system--and once they've chosen them they last forever. As a result, Maharam
doesn't sell much in leopard skin. In fact, they don't sell much at all.
Office-system makers--like Herman Miller, Steelcase, or Teknion--mainly
offer their own fabrics, mainly in beige. An interior designer will come
to Maharam only for something a cut above--but not that far above, or else
they probably wouldn't be installing cubicles in the first place. In
the niche that results, the stakes are high: a cubicle might take 15 yards
of fabric, compared to a single yard for a chair. For an installation of
100 to 200 workstations, the yardage can quickly climb into the thousands.
The technical requirements are similarly huge--among other things, it can't
catch on fire, sag, or clash. As a result, "typically what has
happened is that by the time everybody's met the requirements, you end up
with pabulum," Murphy says. "It's so boring and boiled down."
But Maharam began by giving Mau complete freedom--"Otherwise, what's
the point?" Murphy asks. She recalls that the first time they
visited Bruce Mau Design in Toronto, "Michael started to say something
about, 'Well, gee, we should send Bruce all of our existing panel fabrics
and our competitors' samples so we can give him an idea.' But I said, 'No,
absolutely not. I don't want him to see what's out there because I don't
want him to be tainted in any way. I want him to not have any blinders on,
to just be able to brainstorm and do whatever he wants to do.'"
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