Design

DESIGN DREAMS

“I really do believe that the world can be saved through design, and everything needs to actually be ‘architected,’ ” Kanye West recently told Harvard students in a widely-repeated quote. Architects especially loved it, but Lucas Verweij, a Berlin-based writer, argues in Dezeen that claims such as West’s are excessive. Verweij writes that the expectations placed on design—“design can solve the smog problem in Beijing, the landmine problems in Afghanistan and huge social problems in poor parts of Western cities”—are overblown and cannot be met. “We are in a design bubble,” he writes, “it’s a matter of time before it will burst.” I’m not sure about the bubble—it seems more like a passing fashion to me—but the current idea that every problem is fodder for the design profession is certainly misguided.

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MUDDLING THROUGH

LTIJust returned from a brief visit to the UK. When you arrive in London, if you have £20 you can take the Heathrow Express (travel time 15 minutes) to the city; if you have £28 you can go first class. The spiffy train interior makes Acela look frumpy. When did the British get so good at design? The original London black cab was the Austin FX3, introduced in 1948. It had plenty of room for luggage, flip-down jump seats, and rear-hinged doors for the benefit of the passengers. The latest model of black cab, TX4,

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THE OTHER STYLE

The first international style in architecture was not the white-box style of Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius but Art Nouveau, modernism’s predecessor and in many ways its aesthetic and philosophical opposite. Art Nouveau flourished from 1890 to 1910, and along the way it produced a surprisingly large number of masters: Gaudí, Hoffmann, Horta, Mackintosh, Plečnik, Sullivan, Van de Velde, and Wagner. And that’s just the leading architects; there were also painters, designers and craftsmen: Beardsley, Klimt, Lalique, Moser, Tiffany. Thirty years is a good long run as architectural fashions go, indeed, the International Style lasted barely that long, nevertheless, modernist apologists have always pooh-poohed Art Nouveau,

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Lest We Forget

We remember the past in different ways. World War II produced memoirs (Frank, Wiesel, Tregaskis), histories (Churchill, Shirer, Keegan), novels (Mailer, Jones, Heller), and innumerable films and television documentaries. So did the Vietnam War (Dispatches, A Rumor of War, A Bright Shining Lie, The Best and the Brightest, as well as The Deerhunter, Apocalypse Now, and Platoon). Of course, there are also built memorials, which form the focus of wreath-layings and commemorative ceremonies, but our memory resides in many places. So I find the present custom of making so-called visitor centers an integral part of memorials odd,

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Schooldays

Antique.Ebay_-306x333

An article in today’s New York Times on classroom chairs reminded me of my schooldays. As far as I remember, we had wooden desks with a built in bench seats, attached to the floor. The desk-top, usually carved with a chronicle of interesting graffiti, was sometimes hinged with a storage space beneath that we never used. We didn’t used the hole in the top, which was made to hold an ink-well, either. The desks were sturdy and not particularly comfortable—they weren’t intended to be. The Times piece is full of fluff about how different classroom chairs might improve learning,

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Boiling Water

Yanagi Tea Kettle 2

Every morning I boil water for making tea or coffee (I alternate). What starts my day is the most perfect kettle I have ever used. It is the work of Sori Yanagi (1915-2011), a Japanese product designer probably best remembered for his molded plywood Butterfly Stool. Yanagi studied architecture, but the kettle is decidedly not architectural—no purist Platonic forms, no postmodern irony, no gimmicky whistles. It is just a kettle: handle, spout, lid. Yet this perfectly balanced and shaped everyday object provides a feeling of well-being every time I use it—or even glance at it.

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On the Potomac

Last week I had the opportunity to sail on San Francisco Bay on the Potomac. The USS Potomac, built as the Coast Guard cutter Electra in 1934, two years later was commissioned as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidential yacht. Roosevelt used it to sail up and down the Potomac until his death in 1945, when the ship was decommissioned. Subsequently, the Potomac had a checkered career. She was used as a ferry boat in the Caribbean, was briefly owned by Elvis Presley, was later used for drug smuggling and seized by the Customs Service,

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The Odd Couple

Norman Bel Geddes (1893-1958) is the subject of a new book. We don’t associate Bel Geddes with iconic designs, as we do his contemporaries such as Walter Dorwin Teague (the Kodak Brownie), Raymond Loewy (the International Harvester tractor), Henry Dreyfuss (the classic Bell telephone handset), or Eliot Noyes (the IBM Selectric typewriter). Rather, Bel Geddes is best remembered for his visionary sci-fi designs, and for popularizing the streamlined style. He has been criticized for indiscriminately streamlining radios and refrigerators as well as buses and cars, although this does not seem any different than architects giving décor or chairs the Bauhaus—or the Baroque—treatment.

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