  |
Starck is best known for his erotic forms and his bizarre, often disingenuous public pronouncements. His designs are unmistakable -- saucy amoebic minimalism with and irreverent twist -- and revealing. |
click here to see the photos and
captions for this article
| If Philippe Starck is the world's most prolific designer; why
doesn't anyone take him seriously? by Philip Nobel "Philippe is what he seems to be." Ian Schrager is in his office at the Paramount hotel, looking for a way to explain the complexities of his favorite designer, Philippe Starck. The room is filled with reminders of their past work together -- drawings and photographs of four signature "boutique" hotels, beginning with New York's Royalton in 1985 -- and blueprints for a future project lie unrolled on the floor. Last summer, Starck began to consider designs for 11 new hotels, including Schrager's first projects in Europe and five more in New York City, where Schrager is now the largest private hotel operator. He relies on Starck to be the form-giver in this growing hospitality empire. "Philippe's a little bit like a poet who has something to express, or a singer who opens his mouth and notes come out." Reconsidering, Schrager takes a grander tack: "If he lived in the eighteenth century and someone wanted a revolutionary flag that really talked about what they were trying to accomplish, he would have been the perfect person to design it." In a windowless conference room one floor down, the poet-singer himself is at work. Philippe Starck, in his black-on-black uniform, slimmer than he's been in years, sits slouched in a chair next to glamorous Anda Andrei, the architect in charge of Schrager's design department. With two other staff designers, they are looking at a primitive chipboard site model of the Miramar resort in Santa Barbara, one of the company's recent acquisitions. The room is deadening and Starck looks tired. Lately, he has been exhausted trying to complete what he calls his biggest project to date, the design and selection of 200 so-called "nonproducts" for a special edition of La Redoute, a chic French Sears catalogue. "It is a nightmare because it is huge, huge, huge, huge," he says, "a big, big, big project. Two years of work, night and day." It is the end of June and the September release of the catalogue is still distant, but the events of the last few days have added to Starck's fatigue. Forty-eight hours earlier he was plucked from a retreat in Morocco and flown in a private jet to Frankfurt by a consortium of German bathroom fixture companies. He spent the next day at the center of a lavish press frenzy celebrating his new line of upscale porcelains -- he gamely posed in a tub for photographers -- until he was jetted off again to Paris and put on the Concorde, which deposited him in New York that evening in time to begin this charrette with Schrager's team. Now Starck and the other designers are deep into design-process banality (they are trying to figure out if they should be working at a larger scale) when Schrager interrupts them with a visitor. Despite the circumstances, Starck has some impishness in reserve: How are you? "I am perfect, as always. Perfect." Philippe Starck is the world's first and only rock star -- caliber designer and, at 49, he is at the center of a whirlwind of projects -- and, as usual, some self-constructed controversy. In addition to the mobilization chez Schrager, which would leave him with seven hotels in New York alone; the La Redoute catalogue, which could extend his popular reach into more homes than ever before; and the new line of big-ticket bathroom equipment, which should further pad his fortune with sizable royalties; this year Starck produced his usual outpouring of lower-profile products -- including a water bottle for Eau St. Georges, a sofa for Cassina, a Flos lamp, and yet another sexy toothbrush -- while he continued his coy game of hide-and-seek with the press and the public. He manages this huge business -- if that word could be stripped of its businesslike overtones -- from a tiny office of six people in Issy-les-Moulineaux, just outside Paris, but more often than not he is shuttling between one of his 12 houses, each more remote than the last, or dropping in on the legion of friends, supporters, and collaborators whom he invariably refers to as his tribe. The madness of this lifestyle supplies the raw material for his public persona. Starck delights in his wild hair and his diva pull on the spotlight, but he also fights to avoid making appearances; more than any other designer, he exhibits a star's needy impatience with the press. At the bathroom rollout in Frankfurt, Petra Gerster, a German television host moderating the event, asked Starck how he works. His reply was typically playful and evasive: "Well, first of all, you have to find the time to calm down, to relax. And so you have to come to press conferences. This is very important. I've tried everything in order not to come here. Yesterday evening I was in Morocco with some other people and they sent a plane to get me here -- to force me to come here -- so you can see how I work." Still, he vamped side-stage as he was introduced -- he likes to strike the Heisman Trophy pose -- and as he stepped down to applause after wooing the crowd of 350 reporters, he shouted his usual salute, "Peace and love!" waving four fingers like Nixon. Starck is back at the Paramount, trying to sneak out of another encounter with the press. He's answering questions absently, one eye on Koyaanisqatsi, which is playing on a wide-screen TV at the end of the mezzanine bar. As part of his recent redesign of the space, he installed the screen and mandated that the movie run as a continuous loop. The film, with its images of progress gone awry, is a projection of Starck's current mood; he seems to be hit particularly hard by what Timothy Leary called "millennium madness." With his 50th birthday coming next January, just a year before the turn of the century, he has conflated anxieties about the path of his career and the year 2000 into a midlife crisis of global proportions. The La Redoute project is a direct result of this convergence. The 68-page "catalogue of honest objects" features items that approach Starck's ideal of "nonproducts for the nonconsumer in the new moral market." Starck named the new catalogue "Good Goods," which puts these items somewhere on the shelf between the Museum of Modern Art's Good Design program and Martha Stewart's Good Things. The products fall into categories such as children's toys, tools, linens, books, lighting, furniture, music, clothing, vehicles, and, mysteriously, "protection." (Those nonconsumers hoping for a Starck préservatif will be disappointed.) Starck introduces each product with an explanation of the qualities that led to its designation as a Good Good. A Rotomod kayak is included, he writes, because it is well made, stable, and because it avoids the "screaming colors" that reduce other vessels to "visual pollution in the environment." About 60 of the 200 products are Starck designs, including the StarckNaked dress and an organic champagne -- a very important beverage for him. (An employee of Starck's in the mid-1980s, at the time his career took off with the opening of the Café Costes in Paris, remembers him herding his "angels" out of the design studio each afternoon to drink pink champagne in the courtyard. More recently, Starck cited indulgence in champagne as the reason he has not lost more weight on his new, ideologically motivated vegetarian diet.) The limited edition Champagne Brut Biologique, like a number of the Good Goods, was conceived with the catalogue in mind, but most are recent products that were included because they already met his criteria. What makes a nonproduct? "Nobody knows," Starck hedges, "because the main parameter of a nonproduct is that it is difficult to describe. But if a product is honest, respectful -- loving, if I can say that -- then you start to have a way." Starck's caginess is telling; he seems to have no consistent criteria for identifying nonproducts. Good Goods began with Starck's feeling that the arrival of the year 2000 is a rare opportunity to reflect on the fate of consumer culture. Starck worries that veneration of progress for its own sake has resulted in a world where things take precedence over people. The popularity of the term "consumer," which he would swap for citoyen, is one symptom. To turn the tables, Starck says, designers should define their role broadly as agents of good in the world, and limit their work to "legitimate" products: those that are needed, and those that can be made without damage to nature or -- through the unethical actions of manufacturers and investors -- damage to people. His point is simple, perhaps even cliché, but to Starck's credit he recognizes his duty to shock and entertain; he has spun the explanation of his philosophy into a gorgeous saccharine confection. A typical run through the ideas leading to the Good Goods catalogue begins somewhere in prehistory with mutating amphibians discovering maternal love, covers the formation of a partnership between Starck and God, and ends after the "fiesta" of the millennium with the triumph of the moral market -- a strangely utopian trajectory for someone so wary of progress. In his talk at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York last May, he delivered an unforgettable description of the influence of motherhood on his new design strategy:
The strange part of Starck's idea comes much later, where his love for biology gives way to his love for science fiction. As he is quick to admit, the products in the Good Goods catalogue are merely leaning in the right direction; they are not yet full-fledged nonproducts. The next phase is to make the products disappear, as he tried to do in a 1996 project for a subcutaneous wristwatch. Starck is passionate about the possibilities of dematerialization: "It means that if people ask for 'warm,' you give them warmth but no heater. If they want sound, then sound without loudspeakers. If they want a toothbrush, the idea is to make the teeth clean without cleaning them, which exists today -- natural bacteria do it. We are working on it." Starck may have been inspired by the 1956 classic Forbidden Planet. In the film, a strapping Leslie Nielsen lands on Altair-IV and discovers the remains of a lost race, the Krell, who had nearly succeeded in creating a "civilization without instrumentality." Benevolent mental constructions -- powered by a machine that occupied 8,000 cubic miles at the core of the planet -- were supposed to replace all physical tools. In the end, though, when the great machine was turned on, it only unleashed savage "monsters from the id," and the Krell were destroyed in a single day. Starck's idea is the reverse of that process; he is proposing his "dematerialization strategy" as a reaction against the id monsters that he spent the first part of his career producing in such sensuous profusion. On this point Starck makes a show of contrition, even as he continues to churn out nonproducts by the dozen: "You never learn by success, you learn by mistakes -- even animals. In this way, I am like an animal. You realize that it is time to do less when you have made too much. That's why it is good when somebody says to the others, 'Don't make the same mistake.' " Starck is best known for his erotic forms and his bizarre, often disingenuous public pronouncements. His designs are unmistakable -- saucy amoebic minimalism with an irreverent twist -- and revealing. They suggest that one is looking at the work of a very imaginative and somewhat undisciplined man with a taste for science fiction (many of his products take their names from Philip K. Dick characters) and sex. Starck's sci-fi affinity comes out in force in his work for two electronics companies, Saba and Thomson. His Street Master FM radio walking stick, designed for Saba in 1996, is the kind of technological prosthesis celebrated in the 1997 Luc Besson film The Fifth Element. But Starck's signature product may be the Juicy Salif, a cast-aluminum lemon squeezer that he designed in 1988 and produced with Alessi in 1990. It hovers gingerly over the countertop on three space-insect legs and thrusts its juicing bulb up to meet the fruit. Most of his best designs -- the torch for the 1992 winter Olympics or the gracile, invasive W.W. Stool -- share this salacious quality. The theme continues in his architecture and interiors. The lobby of the Royalton hotel, completed in 1988, is a well-known Freudian landscape of horned wall sconces and bulbous, arcing handrails. This fall, all bets are off when Starck unveils an air traffic control tower outside Bordeaux. While sexuality rules in his work -- he cites it as the first pore in the "filter of exigence" through which products must pass -- in life Starck is fully domesticated. He is enjoying a long engagement to Patricia Bailer, with whom he has an infant son, Oa, and he raised a daughter, Ara, with Brigitte Laurent, whom he married in Las Vegas in 1977; she died of cancer in 1992. Laurent was trained as a lawyer, but she also worked as Starck's design partner, and some credit her with the public relations blitz that launched his career. Of course, domestication has its limits. A probably apocryphal but still plausible story has Starck greeting a client by asking, "Would you like to talk about design, or should we make love?" Starck would most likely prefer to make love; reticence about design is one of his favorite postures. Axor, Hoesch, and Duravit, the companies that lured Starck to Frankfurt, are capitalizing on this by distributing a promotional postcard with a comment he supposedly made at an early design meeting: "You want to talk about design with me? You'd better go back home." As part of his nonstop irreverence, Starck often distances himself from his work. Like a cagey student at a design review, the one who always escapes the jury unscathed, he has at one time or another disowned nearly all of his projects. In recent years he has started to preach against design itself. These antics may be coloring Starck's reception in the more serious corners of the design world. According to his standard biography, his work is held in museums in Paris, Munich, London, Chicago, Kyoto, Barcelona, and New York -- but in this case New York means Brooklyn. The Brooklyn Museum has a long list of Starck accessions, beginning with the Ara lamp in 1989, the year it was produced, but Starck is a noticeable omission in the large, prestigious, and increasingly heterogeneous design collection at the Museum of Modern Art. There seems to be some institutional resistance to collecting Starck, extending even to the inventory at MOMA's Design Store, but Terry Riley, the chief curator of the museum's department of architecture and design, says that there has never been any decision to exclude him: "There is no ban. Starck is on the radar." But he's also controversial, Riley says, citing Starck's outrageous remarks about design as a cause for "concern." Starck has repeated his charges against profligate designers in every interview and public appearance he has made since 1995, even as he has continued to design so profligately himself, encouraging many to think that he is just out to épater the bourgeoisie of the design world. In May, typically, he stood up at the ICFF and told a group of 600 designers to cease and desist: "There are already thousands of really, really good chairs. There are thousands of good lamps. There are thousands of everything." Product designers may be annoyed with Starck's insincere dismissals of their work, but he is finding acceptance among architects, a group that is always hungry for new models of practice and historically weak to the lures of heroism. Last October, Starck accepted the first Harvard Excellence in Design Award from the Graduate School of Design. In a talk at the school, reprinted in the most recent issue of the Harvard Design Magazine, he gave his standard disarming performance, comparing himself at one point to a Christmas tree, because he's designed so many popular "Christmas gifts." Harvard was unfazed; even K. Michael Hays, a professor of architectural theory known for the opacity of his work, was charmed. Jude LeBlanc, an architect and design critic at Harvard, is one of many there who are looking at Starck with new respect: "He has a vision, a continuous intellectual operation that is much richer than a stylistic signature, but he's full of contradictions, like anyone good." A few months before his talk at Harvard, Starck added one more contradiction when, just as he was ramping up to his current period of high productivity, he promised a Domus writer he would stop designing and devote himself to public service when he turned 50. Philippe Starck may be the most famous and prolific designer alive, but nobody quite knows if he should be taken seriously. Shortly after a panel discussion during Starck's appearance in Frankfurt, the press corps splits in two: one half dashes inside the thirteenth-century Karmeliterkloster to get their first look at the new toilets, tubs, and sinks in the Philippe Starck Edition 2 collection, and the other stays in the courtyard for lunch: blood sausages, slabs of Parmesan cheese, and the obligatory champagne. Peter Zec, the unflappable president of the Design Center in Essen, Germany, has stayed outside. He sits at a long table under a white tent that looks like it belongs at a fashion show. Axor, Hoesch, and Duravit (a faucets and fittings producer, plastics company, and porcelain manufacturer, respectively) invited Zec to participate in this event in part because his institution awarded its coveted "red dot" seal of design excellence to the products in their first Starck line, released in 1994. That does not dull Zec's candor when he's asked what he thinks of Starck. "He's not a good designer. He's a perfect marketer. He didn't design what you see here. He has the ideas and does a few sketches, then his studio makes the design. He works with some very talented people. The awards are for the products -- the products of Studio Starck -- not Starck himself." To create the deluge of real projects for which his celebration of nonproducts is an apology, Starck has had to develop very streamlined, disciplined working relationships. He operates as a kind of mercenary dreamer, flying in to do his vision thing with one company before flying off to do it again with the next. His approach is not exactly hands-off, but it definitely puts him at more than one remove from the mechanics of the finished product, behind his studio team -- some of whom have been with him for 15 years -- and his clients' own in-house designers. Starck freely credits his studio with creating "links to concrete things" for him. "I cannot do some things: My daughter says I'm not modern, because I can't use the phone properly. But my team -- those people close to me -- they are closer to reality." The team member mentioned most often is Thierry Gaugain. All reports indicate that he is a talented designer who prefers to stay behind the scenes. In a sort of tribal family portrait at the back of his latest monograph, Starck labels Gaugain "my right eye." (Others are identified as "my right arm," "my right hand," "my conscience," "my Minotaur," "my Iranian beauty," and "her husband unfortunately.") Alan Heller, who worked with Starck's office to produce the Excaliber toilet brush in 1996, calls Gaugain "solid" and reports a smooth collaboration: after two meetings with Starck and Gaugain, one in Paris and one at Schrager's Delano hotel in Miami Beach, the design was sent to Italy for production. "It was a lot of fun. Starck designed it, and then we made a perfect prototype. We didn't need to go back and forth." Starck has spoken for years about his enthusiasm for making such lower-cost products. His pride in reducing the price of his bathtub -- now only $7,500 -- may be misplaced, but he has succeeded in steadily cutting the prices of his least expensive plastic chairs, from $300 for the Dr. Glob in 1991 to $50 for the Cheap Chic chair in 1996. Because of the Excaliber's low price, around $30, Heller says it is one of Starck's favorite products, a claim substantiated by its inclusion in the Good Goods catalogue. Against the evidence that he is grounded by his workaday collaborations, Starck likes to promote a romantic myth: that he works unharassed, surrounded by nature in places like the house he designed for himself overlooking the Mediterranean on Formentera in 1995, a double-barreled revision of the Casa Malaparte. Luc Arsène-Henry ("my perverse architect") offers one story that verifies this myth. When the two began to work together on architecture projects in the early 1990s, Arsène-Henry invited Starck to his summer house on the Bassin d'Arcachon, a tidal lake on the Bay of Biscay near Bordeaux. Starck fell in love with the lake's big sky and low dunes, and built a boat, the Ara III -- a hybrid of a local oystering boat and a boxy Venetian taxi -- as his base there. Now, Arsène-Henry says, "all I need is one hour on Starck's boat, or on the beach, to make a project work." If this idyll can be believed, the two have compiled an impressive record in architectural competitions by sketching on pads of A4 calque while they float about on the Ara III. In 1993, they beat Christian de Portzamparc in a competition for the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. The building, which opened in July, is centered on a giant, blind window of translucent marble panels. Arsène-Henry and Starck won a second competition in 1993, for the control tower at the Bordeaux-Mérignac airport. The tower opens this fall, but the design has already proven so popular with air traffic controllers that it is being duplicated at other airports, including the new Europort outside Paris at Vatry. Their design for an incinerator in Vitry -- with a smokestack that looks like a giant urn -- was selected in a competition over an entry by Jean Nouvel. Construction begins soon to meet the 2001 opening date. What does Starck, the self-described dreamer, bring to these technical projects? "Starck gives the projects a timeless image," explains Arsène-Henry. "For him, functionality is not the first concern. We give Starck very detailed information, and he gives us a form that we then have to accommodate." The technicians at Hoesch and Duravit also work hard to accommodate him. Starck at first challenged Hoesch with a design that could not be realized: an "invisible" shower that required butt-glazing of a sort that has yet to be invented. In the end, after long negotiations, Starck's office compromised on the elegant freestanding shower column that is part of the Edition 2 line. Duravit worked with Thierry Gaugain to sort out significant technical problems created by the designs before the new line could be produced. Starck, in a reductive mood, imagined the toilet as a simple truncated cone with a perfectly circular section. That circle was the rub. Porcelain fires at such high temperatures that the molds themselves deform as the mixture bakes. To make the shape as it was designed, engineers at Duravit had to find, through trial and error, the exact oval that would soften into a circle as the mold passed through the kiln. Albrecht Graf von der Groeben, export manager at Duravit, has some war stories from this work with Starck. "We are the highest royalty payers to Philippe Starck, and from time to time he treats us well. You have to be ready to cope with anything," he says. "You have to pamper him." Mostly, though, he emphasizes the benefits of Starck's distance from production realities, saying that it pushes his company to answer technical questions that someone who knows the medium might never dare to pose. Starck spent most of the 1970s designing nightclub interiors in Paris. This background prepared him well for his work with Schrager, who came to hotel development after making a name for himself with Studio 54 in New York. Despite their convergent evolution, Starck's good friend and primary interiors client must still plan carefully to get him at his best; echoing Starck's other clients, Schrager says that continuing success depends in part on his organization's ability to work with Starck on his own terms: "We have a real infrastructure built around Philippe's weaknesses and strengths. The system that has evolved here with Anda and everybody else down in the design department has been a direct response to working with Philippe." The key, Schrager says, is to keep Starck entertained, while insulating him from pedestrian design problems. Starck can work with limited direction, but he works better when he is given an exciting program, and best if it is a brand-new one. This quirk may help drive Schrager's development strategy. Each of the existing hotels has a distinct theme, based on the qualities of the property (they are all renovations) and on the particular design strategy that Schrager develops to keep Starck focused. The Royalton was the original Schrager-Starck lobby-as-theater hotel. The Paramount debuted in 1990 just off Times Square as its somewhat less expensive sister. The Delano, their first project outside of New York City, opened in 1995 as a study in minimalist tropicana: dark wood in the lobby, all white in the rooms. Most recently, in December 1996, the Mondrian, a through-the-looking-glass fantasy, was completed in Los Angeles. The 11 new hotels -- the St. Martins, Sanderson, and St. Giles Circus in London, the Trémoille in Paris, the Clift in San Francisco, the Miramar in Santa Barbara, and the Henry Hudson, Mc-Alpin, Barbizon, Empire, and St. Moritz in New York -- will also be designed with Starck as loosely themed one-offs sometime before the end of 1999. Schrager calls his new cluster of Manhattan properties "Philippetown, NYC." Last summer, Starck and Anda Andrei began to design the Henry Hudson, an inexpensive "modern-day YMCA" to be built around a 90,000-square-foot health club on West 57th Street, and the McAlpin, planned as pied-à-terre apartments overlooking Herald Square. Schrager says he is likely to "park" the Barbizon, just renovated by the previous owners, although if the Henry Hudson proves successful, he would consider redesigning the Barbizon as an Upper East Side variation. Meanwhile, Schrager is thinking more actively of a design direction for the downtrodden but fortuitously sited Empire, just across from Lincoln Center: "It could be a performing arts center hotel, perhaps -- 'Balanchine Bar,' that kind of thing." Plans for the St. Moritz have already gone through some evolution. Originally, Schrager announced that he intended to develop the property as an inexpensive tourist hotel, giving young people a chance to enjoy the views of Central Park from its smallish rooms. Now, the plan is to exploit "a niche in the market for a super-luxury hotel that has a modern aesthetic and a modern approach. A cool hotel with great service." That is the new program that Starck will receive sometime in the coming year. "You give that to a guy like Philippe and right away he has his marching orders," Schrager says. "He's not going to look at any of the other hotels he's done with us before." Schrager's recent acquisition binge is fueled by a financial agreement that he made last March with the NorthStar Capital Investment Corporation. This partnership gives him access to a huge pool of funds with which he plans to purchase "many, many more" properties in the next few years -- he has a soft spot for a chain of cheap motels -- possibly with the goal of making his new company, Ian Schrager Hotels LLC, an attractive candidate for a stock offering or an eventual buyout. The NorthStar agreement also prompted Schrager to reconsider his relationship with Starck, whose vision amounts to the brand identity of the wealthy new company. At the time papers were being signed with NorthStar, Starck was working on a Four Seasons hotel project in London's Canary Wharf, backed by a group of investors from Singapore. Schrager, who didn't want to see 14 years of investment in Starck go over to the competition, announced a one-way exclusive services agreement with him last March, and in April Starck walked off the Canary Wharf job, citing "cultural differences" with the developers. As the new contract suggests, Schrager sees his fate tied closely to Starck's, but he is still leaving the door open to work with other designers if a future project -- and Starck's limitations -- demand it: "If any of the new hotels we do as we pick up speed doesn't have a strong enough idea, we'd be obliged to find someone new. Or we'd have to wait three or four years and let him get it going again." As in his product design, Starck's work for Schrager tends to be more than a little collaborative. Since 1985, Anda Andrei has acted as the bridge between Starck and Schrager, first as project manager for the Royalton and now as director of design for the whole company. "Definitely, we have a love affair, Anda, me, and Ian," Starck says. "But if you want to see the real, terrible truth, it is not so beautiful: Ian plays monopoly, I play with dreams, and Anda builds. It is very bad, because now it is impossible for me to make a project alone. Now I am obliged to do it with Anda because she is very, very, very good -- definitely better than me -- and more and more, I have the image and she has the talent." This confession -- though perfectly coy, as always -- pinpoints Starck as a willful divorcé from reality. Despite the smokescreen that his high-minded courtship of the "nonconsumer" may briefly provide, by taking on so many projects and limiting his role in them almost to cameo appearances, Starck is banking that he can continue to sell himself as a species of wild-eyed visionary: somewhat detached, somewhat debauched, but always quick with the singular products of his deep imagination. This faux-rogue persona may be Starck's most controversial creation; it may also be the reason he is loved by the architects at Harvard, shunned by the mandarins at MOMA, and tolerated by the many collaborators who are eager to cash in on his signature. His self-enforced distance from the mundane is what distinguishes him most from more sober, less successful designers. Anybody can learn to see the big picture, but it takes someone special to be blind to everything else. |
Keywords:
Philippe Starck, Good Goods, Ian Schrager, hotels, nonproducts