Design

A BRIDGE TOO FAR


Reading about Venice’s new Ponte della Constituzione I was reminded—again—of the dangers of architectural experimentation. The bridge, designed by Santiago Calatrava, is full of novelty: irregular steps, illuminated glass treads, and a beautiful but very flat arch. All these innovations have created problems. The irregularly-dimensioned steps cause people to trip, steps make the bridge inaccessible to wheelchairs (a strange-looking mechanical pod has been added), and the flat arch has created structural stresses on the foundations. As for the glass treads—they become slippery when wet, and the glass gets chipped by tourists wheeling their luggage, requiring expensive replacement.

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SOMETHING BORROWED

serveimageWe recently replaced a kitchen faucet. The product is a typical example of globalization. The ceramic cartridge—the soul of a faucet—is made in Hungary, the aerator comes from Italy, and the rest of the faucet was manufactured and assembled in China. The company that markets the faucet, despite its name—Kräus—is not German but American, based on Long Island. I believe that the design is American, too, although the inspiration is German. It reminds me of the door and window handles that Walter Gropius designed in 1923. By the way, it’s an excellent faucet.

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BELLS AND WHISTLES

serveimageMy first car was a Volkswagen. It was a 1960 model bought in Hamburg in 1967, and it carried me without a hitch as far as Valencia (which is where it was stolen, but that’s another story). I’d never driven a VW before, but the simple controls required no advance knowledge. The only gauge was a large speedometer that included an odometer, turn indicators, and two (unidentified) warning lights, one for oil pressure and one for the alternator/generator. A third warning light lit up when the gas tank was empty, which required flipping a switch to access the reserve tank (about a gallon,

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IF IT AIN”T BROKE

Smart phones, iPads, and laptops are recent innovations, but their human interface is a Victorian technology that is almost 150 years-old. The QWERTY keyboard appeared first in an 1868 typewriter patent granted to Christopher Sholes, Carlos Glidden and Samuel Soule. The patent was acquired by E. Remington and Sons, a firearms and sewing machine manufacturer, and 5 years later, the so-called Sholes & Glidden, also known as the Remington 1, appeared. The machine was not perfect—it typed exclusively in caps, and the typist worked “blind,” that is, she could not see what she was typing since the keys struck the underside of the platen).

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SPECIAL CHAIRS

image007Isabella Lobkowicz kindly sent me a copy of her recent book, Almost 100 Chairs for 100 People. “It’s curious how many designers design chairs,” she writes in the Foreword, “but nobody seems to think about the characters who are going to use them.” Princess Isabella (she is married to a Bohemian prince) rectifies this situation with a delightful sketchbook—published by Moleskine—of imaginary chairs. The first, “a chair for the explorer,” is an extremely tall chair with a built-in ladder that allows the occupant to scan the vicinity with his ever-present binoculars. This chair reminds me of the tall chairs made by the pioneering balloonist and aviation pioneer,

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MY FAVORITE CHAIR

18-hepplewhiteIn connection with the publication of Now I Sit Me Down I’ve been touring around giving talks and readings. A common question from the audience is “What is your favorite chair?” I think that the implied question is often “What is your favorite chair design?” but I prefer to answer it literally. I believe that what makes a chair a “favorite” is not the way it looks, or the notoriety of its designer, but rather what it is used for. For me, and I suspect for many people, a favorite chair is the one you sit in to relax at the end of the day.

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DOM

small_RYBCZY_SKI__Dom_-_ok_adka_96_dpiThe Cracow publisher, Karakter, has re-issued a Polish translation of Home. This is the thirteenth foreign edition of the book, which originally appeared in 1986. The Polish translation was the work of my late aunt, Krystyna Husarska.

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THE CHAIR

I recently visited the Knoll Museum, which is in Knoll’s headquarters in East Greenville, Pa. “Museum” makes it sound grander than it is; it’s more like a showroom with 70-odd chairs on the floor. What makes it better than any design museum I’ve ever visited is that you can sit in the chairs. Simply looking at a chair is kind of pointless; about as useful as being shown photographs of food. So I sat. Mies’s Barcelona Chair was pretty comfortable, although hard to get up out of. Breuer’s B35 lounge chair, which I’ve always admired but never sat in, was disappointing—the top bar cut into my back.

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