Period rooms are a staple of museum decorative arts collections: they are carefully-curated, almost theatrical, sets offering authentic snapshots of the tastes that reigned in decors of times gone by. For those who appreciate design of more recent vintage, however, such rooms are often frustratingly fixated on the deep past. The “youngest” period room in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, for example, is a 1914 “Prairie-style” space by Frank Lloyd Wright. Magnificent, but, still, a touch moldy.



Fortunately, for aficionados of mid-20th century design, there is a period room on view through February 10th that perfectly recaptures the culture-and-cocktail-fueled (although in this case probably exceptionally art-minded) brio of a living space from the 1950s and ‘60s. The exhibit, titled “Mid-Century Style and Studio Pottery,” on view at the pottery school of the venerable New York social services organization Greenwich House, serves as much of a celebration of an era of art and design as is does to the vibrancy of the ceramics school, now entering its second century, and its parent institution.

The idea of context was the engine behind the exhibition. As the pottery school’s director, Sarah Archer, puts it, “2009-10 is our centennial year, so we wanted to showcase artists from our past, and demonstrate how our heritage dovetails with other aspects of art and design from that era.” The first idea that came to mind was “to reconstruct a domestic environment.” Members of the Greenwich House Pottery community responded enthusiastically, and loans were cheerfully offered by such galleries as Rago Arts in Lambertville, N.J., ReGeneration Furniture of Manhattan, and Astro-turf Antiques in Brooklyn. The show, arranged on the second floor of the pottery school’s red-brick building on Jones Street is Greenwich Village, is much more welcoming than the period rooms at the Metropolitan or the Brooklyn Museum: no guard rails or velvet ropes bar off the pieces, allowing visitors to feel at home in a room that appears unchanged from the post-war era.





Studio ceramics, naturally, take pride of place. On display are works by Peter Voulkos, Gertrude and Otto Natzler, Beatrice Wood, Edwin and Mary Scheier, and other celebrated ceramists, some of whom also happen to be tied to the history of the institution. Voulkos—who, with his Abstract Expressionist verve that celebrated the very act of creation, almost singlehandedly elevated ceramics to the realm of fine art, rather than mere craft—taught at the Greenwich House pottery school in the early 1960s. His work is represented in the exhibition by a wood-fired stoneware tea bowl.

The pottery together with the furniture exemplifies the striking contrast found in mid-century modern style between sleek and organic handmade forms. The room is laid out like a living-dining room. An Eero Saarinen “Tulip” table, flanked by two William Katavolos designed “T” chairs, is arranged against the far wall between two street-facing windows. In front of the fireplace sit a George Nakashima couch upholstered in Knoll fabric along with a pair of small Harvey Probber lounge chairs with walnut frames. These bracket a rosewood and aluminum side table topped with vintage copies of lamentably long-lost magazines such as Look, Life, House & Garden, and Holiday. Textile hangings, posters, and photographs from the era decorate the walls.

The best piece of design in evidence at the fifth installment of Design Miami may have been the fair itself. Developer/impresario Craig Robins, Ambra Medda, the event’s director, and her equally chic brigadier general Wava Carpenter, and their staff all managed to pull off a feat of legerdemain: Design Miami appeared to be growing, even as it was actually shrinking.

—by Arik Levy.

Members of OK Go perform on mutant Gibsons. Photo by James Harris

Other sponsor-driven exhibitions included an installation by architect Greg Lynn hanging from the rafters: a trio of huge sail-like carbon-fiber panels studded with thousands of Swarovski crystals. Last year—in a fit of pique over slow sales—designer Tom Dixon heaved one of his thick metal Flame chairs into Biscayne Bay. He fished the chair out this year, and it sat—salt-pitted, and festooned with a bit of seaweed and a buoy—atop a platform in a space sponsored by Veuve Clicquot. Dixon says he reasoned that the year underwater would add to the “narrative” (and therefore the value) of the chair. He promised to submerge it again if no one bought it this year. There’s been no word on a sale, though it’s to be hope someone bought the ratty thing.

As final bits of filler, a large area was given over to an exhibition of mostly contemporary designs from Latin America, and, in what appeared to be an effort to meld performance art with the blogosphere mentality, the fair organizers made room for “Workshop Workshop.” Described as “a salon and ‘zine”—does anyone use that word anymore?—“making factory,” the space consisted of a warren full of detritus—chairs, a broken table, bits of plywood—adjacent to a raised booth in which people were tapping away on computers. The main product of this workshop, it seemed, was confusion.

As for the work on sale, here are some notes and observations:

*Everything Old is Somewhere Else
Contemporary material ruled the pavilion—and notably contemporary work that seemed gauged to appeal to the sensibilities of art collectors. To wit: vases made of animal bones found on the banks of the River Thames (Gallery Libby Sellers, London); New York art dealer Paul Kasmin presented material conceived by the ever-fertile, often crazy mind of designer Mattia Bonetti; there were rope-covered pendant lights by Kwangho Lee and Greg Lynn’s seven-foot in diameter fiberglass chandelier, which looked like a punctured monster puffer fish as envisioned during an acid trip (Johnson Trading Company, New York); and a maple table with better than 20 slumped-glass decanters seared into its top, covering the entire surface (Droog, New York).

If you discount Patrick Seguin of Paris—who came to Miami to sell three restored modular buildings designed in the 1940s and ‘50s by Jean Prouvé--just two dealers presented predominantly vintage material in their booths. Paul Donzella of New York’s inventory included such mid-century pieces as a sleek console by Ico and Luisa Parisi, a Paul Laszlo table with a sculptural ebonized wood base and a clear Lucite top, and a pair of lush Parisi club chairs. Seeing such work amid the razzle-dazzle of the contemporary pieces felt like having a warm bowl of Mom’s split-pea soup after a week-long diet of foie gras.


The Donzella Gallery space

The other vintage-oriented gallery was New York’s Sebastian + Barquet, which presented an enlightening show of Mexican modernist design. While the work of several familiar names were on view—Pedro Friedeberg, designer of the iconic hand-shaped chair; the architect Luis Barragán; artist/architect Juan O’Gorman—a number of works came as a revelation. Don Shoemaker, an American expat, developed a diverse repertoire in the Sixties, making both sensuously-lined wood-and-leather pieces as well as minimalist X-shaped chairs. S+B presented a pair of white resin chairs that would have looked at home on the set of “A Clockwork Orange” and were, to my surprise, designed by Arturo Pani—a “society” decorator whose work was usually elegant and tradition-inflected.


Sebastian + Barquet looked south of the Rio Grande for the exhibition

R 20th Century Gallery of New York deserves a mention here. Their space was divided between vintage Brazilian design—standouts included mammoth solid-wood dining table by Jose Zanine Caldas, as well as an equally-impressed pair of wood-and-glass insert sliding doors—and new seating by Hugo França and recent artful glassware by Jeff Zimmerman.



*Holland Funnel

Design Miami offered a demonstration of the primacy of Dutch work in the world of contemporary design. Start with the naming of Maarten Baas as “Designer of the Year.” Cocksure, provocative, and creative, Baas, who is only 31, has already—thanks in no small part to the patronage of influential gallerists such as Murray Moss of New York—created several series that have entered the design canon of the new century.


Baas poses with a steel-clad wooden cabinet created for Design Miami. Photo by Red Eye Productions/Maar

The keynote of Baas’s work is transformation. His “Where there’s Smoke …” series—in which Baas sets iconic pieces of traditional and modern furniture afire and, once they are well-charred, seals the surface with a clear polymer coating—is his best known. In his “Clay” furniture series, Baas played with the notions of art and craft, by hand-molding a ceramic paste around a metal frame. His “Treasure Chairs” mock the idea of symmetry, in that no two structural components of the chair are the same shape. All interesting pieces, which is not to say that Baas is without his misfires. At Design Miami, gawkers stared at some poor schnook sitting in a tiny box, painstakingly drawing moving hour and minute hands that were projected onto the face of Baas’s “Real Time Clock.” Didn’t Dante describe something like this in “The Inferno”?

The Designer of the Year exhibit of Maarten Baas Work

The “Designer of the Year” exhibit of Maarten Baas work

Some new Baas “Smoke” pieces were on view at the Moss booth, including a burnt Frank Lloyd Wright “Taliesin” lamp and an Ettore Sottsass “Carlton” room divider. And there are Dutch design around every corner. VIVID Gallery of Rotterdam devoted its space to the “Farm” series by another au courant name in design, the duo Studio Job. The series centered on humble country implements—a bucket, tankards, a milking stool, and a cooking pot, for example—rendered in gleaming bronze. Droog, which was founded in Amsterdam in 1993, trotted out work from a roster of The Netherlands’ finest: Jurgen Bey ‘s log bench, a child-size version of the Joris Laarman “Bone”, Iris Nieuwenberg’s precious brooches, and Droog’s greatest hit, “Cabinet,” the belted clutch of drawers by Tejo Remy. The best of the Dutch design galleries, to this eye, is Priveekollektie, which is based in the town of Heusden, but seems to have a recruitment office at the famed Eindhoven design academy. The gallery fosters young designers whose work is not meant to shock and defy convention. Rather, the pieces are both practical and attractive. The chromed steel-and-leather “Ocho” by the design team Kranen/Gille was a standout, along with buoyant lighting pieces, designed by Emmanuel Babled, composed of black and white Murano glass spheres.


Priveekollektie’s enticing space

*Korean Creativity

One of the more provocative presentations was made by the Seomi Gallery of Seoul. Contemporary Korean represents a synthesis of influences and materials that is at once startling and sublime. The use of concrete and the organic forms of many of the pieces seem drawn from Western models, but the allusions to nature and the use of ceramics stem from ancient Asian cultural traditions. In some works, ceramics are used as a base for concrete bench, creating an amalgam that is counterintuitive: we think of ceramics as fragile and concrete as crushingly heavy. Shouldn’t the construction be the other way around? It’s a koan of design.


Seomi Gallery’s space: A place to ponder

*Bright Lights

Last, a tip of the cap to Ayala Serfaty. New York dealer Cristina Grajales devoted almost all the space in her booth to the Israeli designer’s lighting pieces, and it was an honor well deserved. Serfaty builds her pieces around a framework of toothpick-thin glass rods. The interstices are covered in a thin polymer skin. The construction is incredible, and the effect is mesmerizing: the lamps seem otherworldly, like glowing coral reefs.


(right) Ayala Serfaty’s wondrous sculptural lights at Cristina Grajales Inc.

It is pieces like Serfaty’s that make you look forward to Design Miami 2010—unless that barnacle-encrusted chair shows up again.








--Gregory Cerio

The Winter 2010 issue of MODERN features a story on the two monumental sculptures-cum-buildings that André Bloc, an artist, architect, and magazine editor, built in the 1960s in the garden of his home in the Parisian suburb of Meudon. As breathtaking as the structures are—one is a tall, spindly brick tower with stairways leading to parapets that afford sweeping vistas of the city; the other, built of whitewashed brick, resembles an enormous chalk boulder that has been carved by wind and rain—two black-and-white movie stills that accompany the article point to an intriguing sidelight to Bloc’s work.

On November 3^rd, the final in a series of lectures at the 92Y “Dialogues with Design Legends”, two stalwarts of the design world, Gaetano Pesce and the generation younger Karim Rashid, spoke and debated voicing thoughts not only about their own work but about the future of design, and in particular the role of plastics. Moderated by New York Times critic, former editor at House and Garden, and contributor to MODERN Magazine, Martin Filler seamlessly bridged the gap between Pesce and Rashid, whose perspectives, while seemingly different, ended up being strikingly similar. Filler introduced both designers without letting on that Pesce and Rashid were already old acquaintances. Other unexpected connections also populated the lecture, as Filler mentioned that Pesce and he currently live in the same building in New York, whose lobby’s interior is indebted to Pesce’s chance idea for countering a recent and potentially disastrous lobby redesign.

Pesce, the influential 70 year old Italian born designer, who is best known for his furniture and objects produced using various resins and plastics, discussed the idea behind his seminal “Up” (1969) collection of inflatable furniture manufactured by B&B Italia, and now also part of MoMA’s permanent collection. He then went through several slides illustrating important pieces spanning the breadth of his career, along the way sharing key ideas about his design philosophy such as his belief that “the future is done by originals, not by copies”. He spoke of returning to the pre-industrial idea of “old” art, where each piece was unique.

Born in Cairo and raised in Canada, Rashid is well known in the design world for colorful and futuristic visions of everyday products such as shoes and trash cans, to larger projects including furniture and restaurant and hotel interiors. Identified by Filler as Gesamtkunstwerk, which is the German word for totally integrated works of art, Rashid’s designs manage to combine utility and aesthetics in a way few designers have done before. Speaking of the origins of his ideas and designs, Rashid revealed that not only had Pesce taught him in a graduate design course in Naples 25 years ago, but that Pesce’s idea of the “non serialized object” became so ingrained in Rashid’s young mind that it has since grown to become one of the key ideas behind his own designs, which frequently incorporate plastics and various new forms of the material praised by Roland Barthes in 1972 as “the first magical substance which consents to be prosaic”.

Though Pesce’s and Rashid’s work can be separated by innovations in plastics and production methods, their similar views on medium further connect the two designers. Pesce reminded the audience that all architecture and design, though it may be constructed with an idea of legacy in mind, is bound to disintegrate and disappear with the passage of time, which is why in his own work eternity and permanency never cross his mind. However, as he pointed out, this question certainly appears to be on the mind of the conservation department at MoMA, which is currently studying ways to conserve his pieces. Agreeing with Pesce, Rashid explained how, especially in today’s rapidly changing consumer society, nothing is permanent, and the idea of making an object to last is hardly a key element to consider when making good design.

-Beatrice Thornton

Visual Acoustics, directed by Eric Bricker, is a reflective documentary with beautiful imagery on the life and work of Julius Shulman, the eminent architectural photographer of modernist homes and buildings. Most of the 84 minute film, which opened on October 9th in New York City and October 16th in Los Angeles, takes place in LA with Shulman visiting homes made famous by his photographs taken at the height of his career from the 1940’s through the 1960’s. While the film is narrated by Dustin Hoffman, much of the story is told by Shulman himself, who passed away July 15th of this year at the age of 98. Shulman comes forth as a determined and energetic individual, and commentary by architecture historians and influential figures from the art and design worlds, such as Ed Ruscha and Tom Ford, confirm the profound impact his photographs (which are primarily black and white) have had on the way people saw and continue to see modern architecture.
The Kaufmann House, Photogrpahed by Julius Shulman (1947), from VISUAL ACOUSTICS an Art House film 2009, copyright The J.Paul Getty Trust

Perhaps one of the most valuable anecdotes in the film comes from Shulman’s description of how he found his way into architecture photography. His family moved to Los Angles when he was 10, and he went on to attend college first at UCLA and then at the University of California, Berkeley, where after several years spent mostly auditing classes on subjects as diverse as geology and philosophy, he decided to return to Los Angeles without obtaining a diploma. Shulman explains that he knew whatever he was going to do with his life was back in LA. There, he continued to use the Kodak Vest Pocket Camera given to him for his twenty-third birthday along with skills taken from the single photography course he took in high school.
Stahl House, Photogrpahed by Julius Shulman 1960, from VISUAL ACOUSTICS an Art House film release, 2009, copyright The J. Paul Getty Trust
In a scene at the home office of his Raphael Soriano designed house in Los Angeles, Shulman reflects on the picture that started him down the path to photographing modern architecture. In 1936 a friend asked him to photograph the then unfinished Kun house designed by Richard Neutra. Shulman recounts that when Neutra saw the photograph taken with this Kodak Vest Pocket camera, he was so impressed that he quickly gave Shulman other projects. Through Neutra, Shulman was able to meet other influential modern architects, such as Rudolph Schindler, Pierre Koenig, and Frank Lloyd Wright, all of whose structures would become famous in part through Schulman’s iconic images. Shulman did eventually graduate to a professional viewfinder camera, though he quickly shied away from using a light meter and flood lights to give his compositions a more naturally alluring look.

Nostalgia is ubiquitous in the film, as Shulman recalls houses he once photographed only to revisit and find additions or new buildings obstructing the views his camera once so beautifully captured. Modern architecture, as presented by Shulman and his camera, was an entity in itself–an explosion of positive ideas and hope for the future. Shulman helped to communicate many ideas associated with the modern
architecture movement in the way he was able to frame buildings in the most ideal way possible, sometimes adding human figures, his own furniture, and bits of vegetation into his compositions, all with seemingly perfect perspective.
(above: Julius Shulman, from VISUAL ACOUSTICS, an Arthouse Films release 2009. Copyright Michelle Oliver. Courtesy of Arthouse Films)




- Beatrice Thornton