The Cranbrook Principle
Mining
every human impulse from lust to alienation, Peter Stathis's
students design objects that are critical of the world they
inhabit.
By Christopher Hawthorne
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As
Peter Stathis
can tell you, running one of the graduate programs at the Cranbrook
Academy of Art is a little like managing the New York Yankees. Ex-pectations
are always sky-high, and the storied history of the outfit never
slips far from anybody's mind.
Even the Cranbrook
campus itself, though it's spread across 350 leafy acres in Bloomfield
Hills, Michigan, can be intimidating, at least for the sheer level
of its architectural achievement. Built in the 1920s and 1930s with
money from a Detroit newspaper magnate named George Booth, the campus
is Eliel Saarinen's masterwork--Cranbrook's version of Yankee Stadium.
In the industrial-design
program Stathis heads, known officially as the Department of 3-D
Design, the pressures of history are even more keenly felt. There,
of course, the legacy that counts is that of Charles and Ray Eames,
who met at Cranbrook in 1941. (He was the head of the design program;
she was a young painter-turned-graduate student.)  Along
with Eliel and Eero Saarinen and Florence Knoll, the Eameses helped
Cranbrook gain its reputation as the cradle of American Modernism.
The Eameses were followed by Michael and Katherine McCoy, who jointly
headed the design department for nearly a quarter century, from
1971 to 1995. They pioneered the so-called "semantic" approach to
design, which was interested in process as well as product and relied
heavily on metaphor. Well-known examples include Michael McCoy's
interior for an aerospace executive's office, in which a conference
table was made to resemble a tapered runway, and a toaster shaped
like two pieces of bread by Van Hong Tsai. While a lot of semantic
design looks dated today, it's hard to overstate the influence it--and
its avatars--had two decades ago. To return to the baseball analogy,
if the Eameses are Cranbrook's Babe Ruth, the McCoys are its Reggie
Jackson.
Now, as the
39-year-old Stathis begins his sixth year in charge, his department
is again taking its place among the heavy hitters of the design
world--and with work that is tied less and less directly to the McCoys,
under whom Stathis studied in the late 1980s.  The
department's new prominence became clear at this year's International
Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF), held in New York in May. While
other top design programs (including Parsons and the Royal College
of Art) showed up with the usual student mix of the impressive and
the tentative, the Cranbrook group brought a unified, ambitious
presentation that cohered around a theme: the seven deadly sins,
with Stathis and his six students each designing a project based
on one sin. (Like most departments at Cranbrook, this one is small.
About 75 applicants vie for six or seven spots in the two-year program.)
Stathis himself chose pride, something Cranbrook graduates rarely
lack.
The Cranbrook
project, which took home the top honor in the ICFF Editors Awards'
Design Schools category, was full of the social critiques that Stathis
encourages. One student,
Carla Murray, created TechnoLust, a futuristic gaming device that
would help users reawaken their capacity for carnal lust, which
she says has been superseded by object lust in our commodity-driven
society. She designed a body suit that would measure the wearer's
"emotional frequencies" and communicate them to others who were
in the same mood, much as chat rooms gather people with similar
interests. "Our project at ICFF was about a lot more than just the
students' aesthetic sensibilities," Stathis says. "It also allowed
the students to say something about their belief systems--how they
want the world to work, as opposed to how they want it to look.
For me, it's the relationship between these two ideas that's key."
Stathis's own
relationship with the McCoy legacy is a tricky one. Stathis will
tell you that he still finds the semantic model useful, and certainly
a commitment to conceptual and highly theoretical design persists
at Cranbrook, at least in the instruction process.
But thanks to the advanced computer software that Stathis's students
use so comfortably, the work they ultimately produce is attractively
fluid, quite the opposite of what came out of Cranbrook in the Seventies
and Eighties. Much semantic design seemed to revel in Post-Modernism's
eclectic, even cacophonous mix of influences--and that was always
apparent in the objects themselves. Graphic designer Lorraine Wild,
who studied under the McCoys in the 1980s, once described the sensibility
by saying, "You take great pleasure in the struggle, and then you
move on." Today, while the struggle may../oct_images/oct_tilebar.jpg
of the pedagogical process, it's much less likely to be visible
in the students' final products.
"I think that
semantics was a way to find a new language for design," says the
designer Karim Rashid, "but Peter's work now has little to do with
language and much more to do with experience. The process, from
my removed view, is about how a great deal of cultural conditions
and issues impact society and everyday life." Rashid, who has helped
lead a two-day charrette at Cranbrook for several years, refers
to Stathis's teaching style as "cultural dissection" and says Stathis
is obsessed with exploring "how form is informed."
"It's inconsequential
to me what the students want to work on, whether it's a dining-room
 table
or a PDA [personal digital assistant]," Stathis says. "What's significant
is their approach. I expect students to come to projects with some
sort of agenda. For instance, if they did want to work on a dining-room
table, I might begin by asking them to think about the divorce rate.
Or the decline of the nuclear family. Or the phenomenon of latch-key
children. I want them to explore what it means, now, to build a
dining-room table."
Typical of
the new Cranbrook approach is the work of Seok-Bin Yoon, a Korean-born
2000 graduate of Stathis's program. His thesis project is called
Sky, and it includes a camera (the Sky Cam, which looks a little
like a futuristic bike seat) and a clear, spherical projector that
sits on a doughnut-shaped dish. Stick the camera outside--on the
roof or a window sill--and it captures a live image of the sky. The
projector then sends that image onto your ceiling or wall. Formally,
the streamlined project looks like a lot of other work by young
designers. But conceptually, Sky has surprising weight: It says
a great deal about Americans' alienation from the natural world
and about our obsession with controlling and remolding reality by
filtering it through the lens of technology.
The biggest
difference between Stathis's department and other MFA programs in
design is its open curriculum. There are no formal classes or even
assignments for design students at Cranbrook--just a reading list
("everything from the French philosophers
to Douglas Coupland," Stathis says), studios that stay open all
night, and weekly critique sessions. Murray reports that during
her two years at Cranbrook she liked to sleep from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m.
each night, then work in the studio from 2 a.m. to 8 a.m. every
morning. While most students learn to love that flexibility, it
doesn't always help them on the job market. Often, former students
say, the very prospect of working for a large corporate design firm
becomes unthinkable. "The transition to the so-called real world
of design is hard for a lot of people," Murray says. "Cranbrook
graduates have essentially worked for themselves for two years,
and it's hard to let go of that. That's why you see so many of us
starting our own firms."
Indeed, there
is always the danger that Cranbrook graduates will take too naturally
to the conceptual approach. "Peter is producing these kids who come
out of Cranbrook self-absorbed and with completely unrealistic expectations,"
says one veteran of the field, who asked not to be named. "They're
just not interested in any commercial application for their work."
Still, there's
no shortage of Cranbrook alumni at the highest ranks of the product-design
profession.  Notable
graduates include Masamichi Udagawa of Antenna Design, Eric Chan
of ECCO, Paul Montgomery, and Lisa Krohn. A more recent success
story is frogdesign's Gary Natsume, who received his MFA in 1997.
His soft, translucent version of a laptop computer was included
in the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum's Triennial this year,
and he just got word that the museum has decided to acquire it for
its permanent collection.
The great flexibility
that Cranbrook's MFA candidates enjoy in their curriculum is only
furthered by the wide-open nature of the design world these days.
Virtually every strain of postmodern theory, from deconstruction
to historicism, has lost its grip on the imaginations of current
students. Even the irony that was pervasive just three or four years
ago has faded. The opportunities introduced by the wide availability
of powerful product-design software have only enhanced that sense
of possibility. The result, Stathis says, is that "the design world
is just more permissive now. It's far less dogmatic than it traditionally
has been." Which raises a question: How does Cranbrook keep students
from being engulfed, or even paralyzed, by that freedom?
The answer
is found in a rigorous spin on the critique process, in which students
present their work to their instructors and assembled peers. Of
course, every design student has experienced harsh critiques, but
at Cranbrook, extra scrutiny is essential in balancing out the laissez-faire
nature of the curriculum. "You have to have authorship of your work,"
says Tine Berentzen, who will graduate in December. "If you have
a curve that goes one way, and [Peter] asks you why it doesn't go
the other way, you'd better be ready with an answer." She adds that
the critiques at Parsons, where she was an undergraduate, were a
fixed length: three hours, once a week. At Cranbrook, she says,
the critiques are not only tougher and more conceptual but also
open-ended. "Here there's no time limit. We crit until nobody has
anything else to say."
Gary Natsume
says the process works. For his first project as a Cranbrook student,
he wanted to design a television. "I began by approaching the problem
in a very systematic way," he says. "I thought about how I wanted
the television to look and work. But that was appreciated in critique
not at all. Everyone began asking me, eWhat does "television" mean
to you, exactly?' So I went back to the studio and started all over."
The comments, Natsume explains, had made him realize he was far
more interested in how we interact with the information coming out
of the TV than in the form of the thing itself. Natsume eventually
changed the TV into a laptop computer, an object more conducive
to the kinds of explorations about information that he wanted to
make. After two years of critique and reworking, it became the design
that was selected for the Cooper-Hewitt Triennial.
Stathis has
completed a tour of duty in nearly every significant design school
in America. He received his undergraduate degree at Pratt Institute
before moving to Cranbrook for his MFA. He's taught at the Rhode
Island School of Design and Parsons and, most recently, was chair
of the industrial design department at the University of the Arts
in Philadelphia. He also runs his own design practice; right now
he's collaborating with Beverly Fishman, the head of Cranbrook's
painting department, on a series of projects that includes jewelry,
lighting, and furniture.
Asked what he
brought back to Cranbrook from that outside experience, Stathis
answers in a way that's typical of the school's graduates. "It's
not that I brought back my experience at those other places to Cranbrook,"
he says. "What happened was that I brought the Cran-brook attitude
to all of those other places." Notice the pride, the sense of history,
the lightest touch of arrogance--it's exactly the kind of thing you'd
hear from the members of a certain pinstripe-clad baseball team.
Christopher
Hawthorne, a Metropolis contributing editor, lives in Brooklyn
and writes frequently on architecture and design. |
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