Lunch with the Critics: Cronocaos

In the latest installment of Lunch with the Critics, Mark Lamster and Alexandra Lange visit “Cronocaos,” an exhibition curated by OMA/Rem Koolhaas at the New Museum in New York City, which was first shown at the 2010 Venice Biennale. The focus is the “increasingly urgent” topic of preservation, which OMA argues, via texts, charts, maps and photographs, is an under-examined and growing “empire” with dire consequences for the future of the built environment and the architectural profession. Lamster and Lange toured the show, then adjourned to a nearby café for iced coffee (the New Museum’s Birdbath Café has no wireless).

Going Back Outside (Again)

Sometimes it takes a midcentury modern dream team to create a chair: Alexander Girard, visiting Charles Eames, talks about the J. Irwin Miller House he has just completed with Eero Saarinen. But he has a complaint: while there are Saarinen chairs for the dining table, and he has devised a conversation pit to replace the pedestrian sofa, he can’t find outdoor furniture for the patio. “As we were trying to analyze the reasons why there was nothing on the market to suit him, why we were of course starting to write a program for designing the object to fill this void,” Eames told Interiors magazine in 1958. The object that resulted is the Eames Aluminum Group, a set of furniture in continuous production since that date—albeit primarily for indoor use.

Herman Miller aims to right that historical wrong by reintroducing the Aluminum Group for outdoor use with textured mesh seats and powder-coated bases in white, off-black, and clear. The outdoor chairs won’t be available commercially until September, but Herman Miller wanted to capitalize on the recent opening to the public of the Miller House, in Columbus, Indiana; its booth at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair last month was inspired by the house’s flowing indoor-outdoor spaces.

An Atlas of Possibility

Crowd-sourced urbanism sounds like it might bring out the worst in people: either pie-in-the-sky dreams of boroughs connected by monorail, or parochial desires for more trash pickup on Court Street. But the Institute for Urban Design‘s By the City/For the City, which asked New Yorkers to share and map ideas for fixing their city, has produced a fair number of concrete, pragmatic suggestions. Reading them, as I did, via the Institute’s Twitter feed (#bythecity), I felt proud of the scale of my fellow citizens’ thoughts. The project cleverly employs what I would describe as a Twitter-like interface which, for those who tweet, makes contributing almost impossible to resist.

Why Are Car Seats So Poorly Designed?

My husband and I are good at putting things together. IKEA, no problem. LEGO, just for fun. (This is not to brag, as we have almost a decade of combined architectural education.) So when we had a baby, it was a shock to find that we couldn’t install the car seat. The base for the Graco Snugride swung ominously from side to side, even after one parent sat on it and the other buckled the belt. The counter on the underside, meant to show you when the seat was flat (and terribly hard to see in a car with a dark interior) wouldn’t cooperate, no matter how hard we tried. Fifteen minutes, a half an hour, more, we struggled, buckling and unbuckling, and still we weren’t sure if it was in right.

Vicarious Thrifting, via Twitter

In many halls of design, it seems like an uphappy time for the object. ICFF is same old, same old. Or same old and sustainable. The Museum of Modern Art has to be careful its design galleries don’t look too much like the store, which means more molecules, less Memphis. When I went to graduate school ten years ago the Institute of Fine Arts was one of the last art history programs to emphasize connoisseurship. Yet if the powers that be had known my dissertation would include an appreciation of the Selectric, they might not have accepted me.

Manhattan Museum Musical Chairs

If I weren’t so behind the 8 ball these days, I would have posted yesterday about the not-so-shocking news that the Metropolitan Museum of Art will soon take over Breuer’s Whitney (after that museum decamps to the High Line) and the sad news that the Musuem of Modern Art will be buying the Museum of American Folk Art. The first seems the best case scenario for the Whitney, since its current leadership doesn’t seem to respect the architecture (link is to my post, “My .02 on the Whitney”) and is chasing the contemporary dream, and the Met has plenty of the big mid-century paintings the Whitney was made for. Ellsworth Kelly, please.

Science Gets Around to Architecture

Jonah Lehrer’s April 30 “Head Case” column in the Wall Street Journal, “Building a Thinking Room,” is the kind of mainstream reporting on architectural matters that always makes my blood boil.

For thousands of years, people have talked about architecture in terms of aesthetics. Whether discussing the symmetry of the Parthenon or the cladding on the latest Manhattan skyscraper, they focus first on how the buildings look, on their particular surfaces and style.

If this were a student paper, I would circle that people. Which people? In which decade, much less century? All people until you, Jonah Lehrer, decided it was worthy of your interest? The substance of the article is new research by scientists that show that “architecture and design can influence our moods, thoughts and health.” To which anyone involved for the past thousands of years in architecture and design can only respond, No duh. Nice of science to finally catch up.

In T: High Fiber

It sometimes feels as if no aspect of American midcentury modern design has been left unconsidered, unexhibited, unreissued. But there is undiscovered territory. You’re sitting on it.

“Knoll Textiles, 1945-2010,” at the Bard Graduate Center in Manhattan from May 18 to July 31, flips the story line on the brand’s famous chairs (Womb, Tulip, Diamond, Platner) by focusing on the fabrics rather than the frames.

Those are the opening lines of “High Fiber,” my preview in this weekend’s T Magazine of the upcoming exhibition. I have long loved the brilliant colors used in Knoll interiors, and this show brings many new names and new fabrics to light. Many of the textiles on display were found in attics, some of those the attics at very famous museums. When acquisitions of famous furniture came in, the bolts and scraps of upholstery were stored, awaiting rediscovery as design objects in and of themselves.

High Fiber

It sometimes feels as if no aspect of American midcentury modern design has been left unconsidered, unexhibited, unreissued. But there is undiscovered territory. You’re sitting on it.

“Knoll Textiles, 1945-2010,” at the Bard Graduate Center in Manhattan from May 18 to July 31, flips the story line on the brand’s famous chairs (Womb, Tulip, Diamond, Platner) by focusing on the fabrics rather than the frames. “One of the major goals of this project was to shift the attention,” said Earl Martin, a curator of the exhibition. “People might save a Saarinen Womb chair but have it recovered because we don’t yet have a sensibility about the textiles being that important.” Among the vintage chairs on display with their original upholstery will be a 1945 Ralph Rapson rocker with a woven webbing seat and back, and a 1965 Eero Saarinen side chair covered in still-brilliant red Cato fabric by Paul Maute. Some of the reasons for textiles’ also-ran status are mundane: fabrics are ephemeral, faded by sunlight, dirtied by use. “We needed the conservators at the Museum of Modern Art to rescue some of these pieces and preserve the upholstery,” Martin explained. Because Knoll’s program was frequently experimental, a few early fabrics that incorporated fiberglass or rayon disintegrated within the first years of production and had to be discontinued or reformulated. Moreover, much of the company’s business was contract work, and office drones hardly paid attention to the provenance of their swivel chairs or curtains.

From its beginnings, the Knoll textile division was headed by Florence Knoll (now Bassett), the wife of the company’s founder, Hans Knoll. Initially she turned to men’s suiting fabrics for furniture coverings that would enhance the sofas’ long straight lines, rather than the “brocade and chintz with cabbage roses” she found in the marketplace. The Knolls soon decided that the company needed to create its own fabrics. Open-plan offices benefited from partitions in bright, long-lasting colors. The expanses of glass in Modernist office buildings called for a new type of curtain, with “small motif prints that create a rhythm and visual interest but don’t distract from the coherence of the room,” Martin said. “Or sheers or open weaves that are useful as a sun screen but allow the air-conditioning to come through.”

Knoll and its subsequent textile division heads, who included Eszter Haraszty, Suzanne Huguenin and Barbara Rhodes, relied on the same design and architecture networks for commissioning textiles that they used to recruit furniture designers. Marianne Strengell, the head of the textile department at Cranbrook Academy of Art, contributed a number of early, highly textural fabrics. Haraszty’s own Fibra print (1953) was in the line for nearly 20 years and was applied to linen, sheer cotton and fiberglass. Noémi Raymond, the wife of the architect Antonin Raymond, designed a series of Japanese-influenced prints. Evelyn Hill Anselevicius, later known as a fiber artist, added a series of unconventional hand-wovens in the 1950s: a thick chartreuse wool with shiny black plastic; pink with orange. The exhibition catalog, designed by Irma Boom, offers a comprehensive history of the brand’s textiles, about 80 percent of which were designed by women. This may be another reason for the textiles’ historically low profile. “Our exhibition has motivated a few museums to look at things in their buildings that may not be accessioned, and to decide they are worthy of being in the permanent collection,” Martin added dryly.

The experiments kept on coming well after Knoll’s midcentury heyday. Some of Martin’s favorite fabrics are from the 1970s, when Rhodes commissioned German designers to create a number of vibrant large-scale patterns that were printed on cotton velvet. Recently, under its creative director, Dorothy Cosonas, KnollTextiles (as it is now known) has turned to the fashion labels Rodarte and Proenza Schouler for its Knoll Luxe line, examples of which are also on display. These recent collaborations may best prove the exhibition’s point: Why would you think less of what’s upholstering your chair than what’s upholstering your person?

The Only Thing There's Just Too Little Of

Opening April 30 at the OTIS College of Art & Design’s Ben Maltz Gallery, the exhibition BROODWORK: It’s About Time foregrounds an issue rarely mentioned in discussions of architecture and design: family life. Sure, there are plenty of three-figure dollhouses for kids. And stylized families in Dwell. But we don’t talk about how having children affects our creative life, our work patterns, what we want to make and how much time we have to make it. That’s why time is the theme for this exhibition, part of an ongoing curatorial project by Iris Anna Regn and Rebecca Niederlander, an architect and an artist.