Monthly Archives: June 2011

Purple has a troubled history. Its association with the gothic, pimps, and cheap motel rooms doesn't help. Neither does royalty, bishops, or a certain rock star. We might only hope that for the brave designer, this only provides more raw meat for a challenge.

Feng shui masters believe that purple's high vibrational energy can overwhelm other forces, upset spiritual realms, and in excess, even cause disease. In other words: Purple is powerful voodoo.

It can act as a balance to the centrifugal forces of yellow or as a dark foundation on a green chair. Mexican painters of the Deigo Rivera era often used dark purple instead of pure black. Where black absorbs the light, purple keeps the vibrational buzz going.

On Spanish doors: Subliminal purple.

If Henry Miller had of written Tropic of Cancer in this room, the carpet would've given him inspiration. (Photo by Silvia Lizama)

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Leonardo da Vinci

If you haven't already seen part 1, it's here.

Old and Bold: Above, Dorothy Draper's New York's Essex Hotel from 1954; Still brazen after all these years.

Interior Decoration may be design's oldest profession. Before there was a room, there was the tomb: Tomb construction goes back to the megalithic period, and cave painting even further. But it wasn't until well into the Industrial Revolution that interior design would be considered the legitimate industry it is now. With the help of the era's version of New Media — magazines — design could be mass marketed to middle class worker bees, a demographic who'd never had such access before. A cause forwarded by publications like Good Housekeeping, House Beautiful, and Ladies Home Journal, and others which all began near the end of the nineteenth century.

(Draper's Greenbrier Hotel, WV, above. Her Victorian Writing Room on the premises was once called The most photgraphed room in the United States.)

By the 'teens of the last century, the nascent industry was already minting its first superstars. Their names were Dorothy Draper, Syrie Maugham, Sybil Colefax, Elsie de Wolfe, Ruby Ross Wood, Rose Cumming, and Sister Parish (with her partner Albert Hadley). They would be women (mostly), born of wealth, blue of blood, and with design credentials often overshadowed by their status as socialites. Their client list — Astor, Vanderbilt, Kennedy, Roosevelt, Vreeland, Warhol, Jackie O, various Royals and other A-listers — would be impressive, and their influence, indelible. Interestingly, you'll find none of their names in Architectural Digest's "The 20 Greatest Designers of All Time." Maybe fashion is to blame; for most of the aforementioned, their work is wildly out of it. Maybe it's their use of chintzes, metallic wallpapers, paisleys, fabric by the truckload, and a musty classical grandiosity burlesqued too many years by too many lesser talents. Those who survived into the sixties would also live to see Minimalism torture their particular brand of high-style.

Designer egghead, theorist, Polosky Prize winner, and author John Pile (one of his definitive sourcebooks above) makes the point that "interior design is a field with unclear boundaries in which construction, architecture, furniture, decoration, technology, and product design all overlap."

With that in mind, The Evidence:

It's been argued that Dorothy Draper is the Mother of all interior designers (besides being Design Editor at Good Housekeeping and author of the classic Decorating Is Fun!). It was she who started the first interior design firm and was the first to "professionalize" the craft. (Though, according to the New Yorker this honor belongs to Elsie de Wolfe.) Whether she was first it seems clear its Draper's work that has left the more lasting legacy. Called the Martha Stewart of her time, she not only established herself in the otherwise female-unfriendly industry of construction, there was that best selling book and she was, from the 30s to the 60s, the most famous interior designer in the world. She was one of the first designers to use eclecticism authentically and not simply as a boast of an over-stamped passport. She is also the only interior designer, man or woman, to be honored with a retrospective at a major museum (starting with the Museum of the City of New York and traveling on).

Another Draper work: This from the Hotel Quitandinha in Ipanema, Brazil. Compare this to her contemporary, Elsie de Wolfe:

De Wolfe's work, while literate and fluent, was still very much a part of the Victorian age that was her time. Draper's style, often referred to as "mischevious," takes the Victorian motif as a starting point. She electrocutes it with color. She exaggerates the forms and modernizes them with affection and humor. And the impact of her work continues.

Two designers to be impacted by the Draper style were American Billy Baldwin and Brit David Hicks.

Billy Baldwin, called the dean of indigenous decorators by Architectural Digest — he hated the term interior designer (and just to note: another designer, Benjamin Baldwin, was similarly called the dean of American interior designers), may be best known for his treatment of Diana Vreeland's Park Avenue apartment. Her instructions to the designer: "I want this place to look like a garden, but a garden in Hell." Eclectic gone wild with exotic flourishes and few strokes of orientalism was his answer. (For a guy who said "the best way to decorate a room is to simplify" this must've been way outside his comfort zone.)  The room has an almost pummeling energy and dynamism which makes Draper's bold work practically understated by comparison. Baldwin takes Draper and spins it into something else, which, as we know, is what great creatives will do.

The design of David Hicks (above) came to symbolize the epitome of Swingin' Sixties style. Hicks was infatuated with motifs and geometry and his design, while extremely ordered and disciplined, pulses with anarchic energy and color. Not only could he dress a room, he could dress himself: He was voted Best Dressed Man from the Clothing Manufacturers Federation of UK.

From the Dean of Interior Design to the man Diana Vreeland called the James Dean of decorators: Michael Taylor. If the image above is any indication, his work didn't shrink from the bold. As a colorist, it was subtlety for which he'd be better known. Credited with inventing the California Look, Taylor's style is described as glamorous rustic. His neutral tones and natural textures might appear pale against the aggressive color of the Draper-ists but aggressive color or style would never go mainstream. Enter Michael Taylor: He would change that. His palatte, while subtler and muted, favored tertiary colors to play off the reflective mirrors, chandeliers, and white accents. And natural light: Abundant natural light was his meat.

The result: Whispered elegance and a substantial influence.

Unlike the others above, Taylor was one of Architectural Digest's "20 Greatest Designers of All Time." His supporters are legion. Taylor may also be the one designer who most significantly helped form our contemporary standards of good taste. Yet, in his time he was considered an innovator, an original, and for many he was the best of America's designers.

One design theorist recently spoke of aesthetic sustainability: If there's a yardstick for measuring a designer's greatness, sustainability may be it. With all things considered, for aesthetic adaptability and sustainability the verdict is:

Michael Taylor: World's Greatest Interior Designer.

Next, Part III: Furniture.

Ensō: The circle.

It symbolizes the Absolute, enlightenment, strength, elegance, the Universe, and the void; it can also symbolize the Japanese aesthetic itself. As an "expression of the moment" it is often considered a form of minimalist expressionist art.

So, you see, it's not just a circle.

Portrait of Richard Neutra: All above photos by the late, great Julius Schulman (1910 - 2009).

Above, another great also gone: Ezra Stoller (1915 - 2004).

A tomb designed for the Brion family by Carlo Scarpa in San Vito d'Altivole, Italy.

Photo above by Wijnando Deroo.

A Witraz project in Denmark.

The Star Trek Enterprise: Circles are the past and the future.

They are the beginning and end as well. Goodnight.

Turquoise may be the ultimate earth tone:

It's water, earth, and sky altogether; like a white sand tropical beach and a desert at twilight. It's royal and peasant; it's the robe of a king and it's the perfume lady's eyeshadow at the all-night drug store.

It's five-star hotels and no-tell motels.

It's the perfect sea for setting a ceramic moose head adrift.

It's a cactus on a Miami patio.

It's all we can imagine.

If you're an American, born anytime after 1940, of middle-class indoctrination, you most likely lived a portion of your early life in some version of the tract house.

Vernacular suburban landscaping, as I remember it, mostly didn't do layers. You had lawns, trees, and something in between on the borders. The in between acting as a moat-like barrier between the house, street, and neighbors.

The photo above is from photographer Julia Baum. See her photo essay of maturing suburban homes here.

Layers give depth, illusions of space, and levels of interest that the suburban yards of my youth were crying out for.  A challenge beyond the reach of a mere lawn and oleander border.

Layers give space a visual hierarchy, not just of height and planar discontinuity, but also guide the eye to new discoveries.

As the elevation rises, plantings help break through the linearity and offer many surprises..

The layering can be horizontal and vertical, linear and non-linear.

Brazilian landscape architect and multi-hyphenate artist, etc., Robert Burle Marx was the master of layering. Above, he also uses layers in a horizontal graphic way. Above and below, an experiment with the patterning with stones and gravel and juxtaposing different grasses.

Marx goes all flat in tile and stone on Rio de Janeiro's Avenida Atlantica.

Japanese architect Tadao Ando and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth: Only the squares of the structures, water, and concrete walkways are needed to complete the vision. Any other details would be superfluous.

First, a disclaimer:
Is such a thing even possible, to designate one work the be all end all for everyone? Probably not. And even though we'll be confining our choices to the twentieth century, there's still loads of room for debate. Art and design, like politics, are emotional: The best work is forged from it, and our response is a product of it. Emotions are a kind of social anarchy where tastes are concerned; Each of us with our own internal wiring will inevitably make for spirited, complicated, and endless disagreement. Maybe awards for The Greatest are best left to accountants to tally up the tangibles, like sales and attendance. But art is a slipperier. As Humphrey Bogart said of the Oscars: " Awards are meaningless for actors, unless they all play the same part." Why should design be any different?

There are many Greatest lists, surveys, and Top Tens to choose from if you're satisfied that's close enough. But where's the fun in that? For this, The Definitive Guide to The World's Greatest Design, we're looking only for the acme, apex, and apogee : That true One. To find it may require a bit of data teasing and some creative speculation, but no matter: We'll get to the bottom of it.

Now, down to business.

1) Architecture
The evidence:
According to the paper The Greatest Architects of the Twentieth Century: Goals, Methods, and Life Cycles by David Galenson published by NBER, using a method of  surveying textbooks, Galenson was able to establish, based on his research, the greatest architect of the twentieth century: Le Corbusier.

Above, Le Corbusier's Chapel for Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp, France: The architect showing some influence of the popular Art Noveau and Art Deco movements of his time. In its Best of the Century feature in 1999, Time Magazine named The Chapel as Best Building. (Falling Water came in third.)

Time Magazine also called Le Corbusier "the most important architect of the twentieth century. Frank Lloyd Wright was more prolific [but] many would argue that Le Corbusier was more gifted." (Below, Villa Savoye, Poissy, France.)

Not that the legendary modernist didn't have his detractors. He's not only been blamed for the unsavory conditions of life in his high rises, but also for violent urban gangs. One critic accused him of being "to architecture what Pol Pot was to social reform." Ouch.

Galenson also makes the claim, using the same methodology, that Frank Gehry and Renzo Piano are the twentieth century's greatest living architects.

Frank Lloyd Wright (his Fallingwater above), on the other hand, was recognized in 1991 by the American Institute of Architects (AIA) as "the greatest American architect of all time." (It's interesting to note that Wright also thought of himself the same way.) The prodigious Wright designed more than a 1,000 projects and completed over 500. In addition, he wrote books and articles and, like Le Corbusier, designed all matter of other stuff as well: To him the term consummate designer would certainly apply.

As for the greatest single example of architecture, the Empire State Building: Ranked number one by the AIA on its List of America's Favorite Architecture and named one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World by the American Society of Civil Engineers. Designed by architect William H. Lamb and completed in 1931, it was the tallest building in the world for 40 years (and is once again the tallest in NYC) and perhaps the greatest example of the Art Deco building style. It also remains one of the most popular tourist attractions in the world.

In 2010, Vanity Fair magazine published a survey among 52 of the world's most prominent architects, a list that included 11 Pritzker winners. This Western-tilted jury included the likes of Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Zaha Hadid, and Richard Meier. The quesiton? What is the most important piece of architecture built since 1980? The winner: Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.

Here's Phillip Johnson's anointment of the master in the same article:

"In February 1998, at the age of 91, Philip Johnson, the godfather of modern architecture, who 40 years earlier had collaborated with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe on the iconic Seagram Building, in Manhattan, traveled to Spain to see the just-completed Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. He stood in the atrium of the massive, titanium-clad structure with its architect, Frank Gehry, as TV cameras from Charlie Rose captured him gesturing up to the torqued and sensually curving pillars that support the glass-and-steel ceiling and saying, 'Architecture is not about words. It’s about tears.' Breaking into heavy sobs, he added, 'I get the same feeling in Chartres Cathedral.' Bilbao had just opened its doors, but Johnson, the principal apostle of the two dominant forms of architecture in the 20th century—Modernism and Postmodernism—and the design establishment’s ultimate arbiter, was prepared to call it on the spot. He anointed Gehry 'the greatest architect we have today' and later declared the structure 'the greatest building of our time.' ”

There you have it: The Pritzker laureate and architect that brought Philip Johnson to tears. And in terms of cultural impact, Gehry's Guggenheim alone has had the effect of taking the otherwise unassuming Bilbao, a municipality only slightly larger than the city of Bakersfield, and bringing it to the world stage as a global destination.

The verdict:
Frank Gehry, World's Greatest Architect; The Guggenheim in Bilbao, World's Greatest (modern) Building.

Next in Part 2: Interior design.