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 Page 2 And mousetraps were the least of it. The magazine's fifth anniversary issue in 1986 reported on a rug by artist Keith Haring (whose early work appeared in the subway) that could be had for "the price of a couple thousand tokens" and a plan for a 68-story Miami Moderne hotel--office tower to be built at South Ferry on a platform in the harbor. It was no surprise that three years later everyone seemed ready to let the eighties go. Design had fiourished, but it seemed fueled by a compulsive acquisitiveness. "We are in love with packaging, and we are up to our necks in garbage," wrote Karrie Jacobs in 1988. "The connection is clear." The 1990s were going to change those connections. In 1989 Andres Duany stated his hope that "a search for timelessness take the place of fashion." Tibor Kalman predicted that "saving the environment will really unite the right and left." Things didn't quite work out that way, but at least there was a morning-after pledge to sobriety and restraint. In the 1990s Metropolis covered not only the history of housing for the homeless, sustainability, and environmental issues but security and access--fiip sides to the same coin: one was about closing communities, the other trying to expand them. Meanwhile, the Americans with Disabilities Act passed into law in 1991, and Universal Design proposed that everything from carrot peelers to racing wheelchairs be designed not simply to be safer, easier, and accessible to more people but to serve as the building blocks for a barrier-free environment. Yet the theme percolating most consistently throughout the decade was the humanization of technology. John Hejduk--dean of architecture at Cooper Union, described alternately as a guru, monk, and oracle with a Bronx accent--issued directives that had a spiritual resonance for a fresh generation of designers struggling to learn how new technologies could transform conventional ways of thinking. Designers found myriad ways to do that--Thumbscript, for example, an alphabet interface for entering letters and words on a keypad using only one hand. But perhaps the most beautiful and evocative was the digital choreography of Merce Cunningham. In his 1999 "Biped," he collaborated with new media artists on a piece in which dancers, attached to sensors, performed before a camera. Their movements were recorded, then fed as data into software and converted into forms and rhythms. When the real dancers performed on stage, the image of virtual dancers was projected on a scrim behind them, creating a ghostly visual echo of space and movement. These spectral projections refiected a different perspective on design, a view later affirmed by Sottsass, who said: "I consider architecture not as a monument, not as a piece...just as the opening of a place of possibility." At the turn of the new century the definition of design has become, like Cunningham's phantom dancers, ever more elusive--an ephemeral calculation of what might be. A couple of years ago the magazine moved to a loft building on West 23rd Street, just up Sixth Avenue from its first office. For the last year, a 20-story office building has been under construction directly across the street. It will have a health club, retail space, apartments, and--like any other new building--the best thing you can say about it right now is that it may be a place of possibilities. Recently a construction worker hung a banner from a cement column supporting the eighth fioor. "Jesus Saves Me," he wrote in orange spray paint. It strikes me that this crudely lettered message echoes the sentiments of hope expressed by the calligraphy etched into those marble headstones three blocks to the south a century and a half ago. |
