Monthly Archives: July 2011

Those of us who call Southern California home should be well acquainted with water scarcity. Don't be fooled by the landscaping, much of this moderate New Eden was sprung from a desert floor. The lushness is borrowed: Considering the distance our water travels to get here it's a shame it can't collect frequent flyer miles.

But recent climatic trends are forcing a kind of Southern Californization (or Californication) on other parts of the world as well. Or worse. The full scale of this change has yet to seen but in the meantime we'd be wise to gain an appreciation of drought tolerant gardens.

Drought resistant needn't mean lush-less, though.

These camels of the garden can be colorful, sculptural, and dramatic.

Here, a hardy oasis of densely planted Agave attenuata, purple Aeonium, and cactus offer potential combinations.

Warm hued Echeveria mingles with cool Agave, dryly.

An arid forest of Agave, Flax, and Aloe vera provide density, height, and coverage.

The Red Pencil Tree Euphorbia tirucalli "Sticks of Fire" is a native of Central Africa and a distant cousin of the Poinsettia. Its caustic white sap is the bane of both pests and would-be pruners.

Here, Agave angustifolia: Like any good guest it can be satisfied with minimum to drink and will accept shade in good spirit.

Desert gothic: Agave americana offers more barbs and twists than Molière.

The garden's exclamation point: Agave americana variegated marginata in all its bold and symmetrical glory.

It's been said that design is a way of solving problems. (Art is a different matter.)

So, how to solve this "problem?" To break it down: Take the creative process, strip out all the poetry and magic, leave it to the accountants and engineers to design a methodology, what you'd end up with might look like this:

This chart taken from the excellent Art Is Everywhere blog.

With the above in mind, then, art and design would appear to be a simple act of mental processing. Add a bit of inspiration, emotion, some personal history, jigger it with various approaches as shown above and layer (or not), repeat as necessary. Eventually, if you're lucky, something like the below might happen.

Behold, a chair: A designer may create a chair to provoke one to sit. The artist, on the other hand, may just want to provoke.

The iconic "Series 7" chair by Arne Jacobsen (1955) as reworked by Australian artist Lisa Jones. The motifs represent various  human organ systems. As for a place to sit, you may want to look elsewhere.

Below, a lamp of porcupine quills: Traditionally, animal products were used to imbue an object with the animal's power.

Unfortunately for the porcupine, quills have been gaining popularity in Afrocentric design. (South African porcupine quills pictured above.) As porcupines only shed their quills occasionally it wouldn't be possible to obtain the necessary quantities with non-lethal means. In other words, quill harvesting is not unlike the fur trade.

They are beautiful, though.

Rather than work with materials already imbued with power, Okinawan born artist Yuken Teruya does the opposite. Working with ephemera and discards, mostly paper products, he empowers the lowbrow.

Killing the context: Forests from toilet paper rolls.

Below, a side table made from the shell of a boiler.

The take-out box styled maple veneer stool is by Akiko Yokoyama.

The easy chair gone hard: Armchair in marble by Scott Burton.

Phillipe Ramette and from his Le Suicide des Objets series: Stress on a chair of the kind most designers usually don't consider.

Israeli designer Shmuel Linski created this coffee maker as a student project. Made from concrete with stainless steel parts the coffeemaker is fully functional.

Illustrator Mike Perry's commissions include a number of consumer products featuring his drawings. These Eames Shell chairs feature one-of-a-kind hand-drawn graphics by Perry. Available from Herman Miller.

Another take on the everpresent Eames chair; this unique Pincushion chair was created by Paula Scher for a charitable auction.

This Wassily chair was redesigned by Alessandro Mendini in 1978.

The story begins with tubular steel.

Industrial production of seamless steel tubing began with the twentieth century. Bauhaus designers were among the first to embrace it in a big way, elevating it to a fetish material. It'd be impossible to imagine mid-century design without it. Hungarian-born architect, furniture designer, and Bauhaus-er Marcel Breuer is thought to be the first to use it in furniture design.  Designed in 1925-1926, his iconic Wassily chair remains one of the most influential pieces of modernist furniture ever.

French architect and designer Charlotte Perriand was a mere 24 when enlisted by team Le Corbusier. In 1927 she impressed the master at an exhibition of her furniture using nickel-plated copper and anodized aluminum tubing. The collection is now famously known as "Bar under the roof."

The work she created with Le Corbusier is credited as a co-design with the master and his cousin Pierre Jeanneret. It's been argued that many pieces from this 10 year collaboration were in fact of her design. The exact provenance may never be known, but this we do know: Their collaboration would produce work of such eminence as to be nearly archetypal. The work of Perriand that followed would prove itself to be no less than its equal.

This bench with storage is reconfigurable, transforming into a couch, daybed, table, or some combination/hybrid of the three.

Above, more couch and less storage: Same principle of interchangeability.

Perriand's Ombra Tokoyo, as the name implies, takes its inspiration from Japanese design. The inspiration would in fact be actual as she would live and work in Japan for six years. The Ombra chairs are produced from a single die-pressed piece of curved ply from a 1954 design: Ash above, stained oak below and all available from Cassini.

Another Japanese inspiration: Perriand would reinterpret the LC5 Lounge from her days with Le Corbusier. Originally conceived in bamboo in 1940, the chair wouldn't be produced in the designer's lifetime. Cassini would make the chair a reality as well as in bamboo, beech, and teak.

Back East: The Nuage wall-mounted shelf and five door Bahut cabinet. Below: Perriand in the kitchen.

Nesting tables and the tube:

The Ventaglio low table:

If Charlotte Perriand is a product of mid-century design then so are we; There's very little in her canon that isn't still being produced today.

What higher praise could you bestow on a designer?

It was only when architects discovered the joys of Deconstruction did the concept finally find its way into the mainstream spotlight. Maybe because for all of its expressions, architecture provided the least subtle venue. The warping and mangling, the rectilinear-phobia, the cubist perspective: Summed up all so well in Gehry's many twisted tungsten projects.

Another classic example of the form would be Daniel Libeskind's Ontario Museum in Toronto.

These days, most architects eschew the Deconstructivist label finding it declassé. Gehry says his buildings are "a sculptural object, a spatial container, a space with light and air..." He'd rather you think of his work as extreme package design.

By the late eighties Deconstructivist architecture was in full rage. And even though its influence today is still strong, its circle of practitioners is small. It's also interesting to note that the rock star of this group, Frank Gehry, one of most successful and well known architects of our time, is also one of our most avant garde. It's as if The Beatles, once famous, created all their subequent work from the model of Revolution #9.

But long before architects and academics began kicking theories of Decon around from the plush seats of their faculty clubs, artists — painters, especially — had been experimenting with what would be the tweed-jacketed roots of Deconstruction for literally hundreds of years.

To wit: Impressionism.

And long before that, the Mannerists:

And more recently, there's fashion:

The deconstructed dress by Anotonio Berardi, above, and his heel-less boot below.

But before the buildings and Berardi (somewhere between Eisenmann's Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State in 1989, and Gehry's wrapped clapboard house in Santa Monica in Decon industrial gingerbread in the late seventies) there was Vivienne Westwood.

Westwood's creations of the mid-seventies included hand painting, screening, adding bits of fabric, tearing other parts away and often holding it all together with safety pins. She decontextualized bondage wear and gender specificity (e.g. skirts for men).

Her fashion seemed to take its cues from Dada graphics, Pop art, and combine artists like Robert Rauschenberg: Westwood (on right) and her creations.

Of course, it's the clothes (created in collaboration with Malcolm McLaren) donned by the Sex Pistols and Adam Ant she is most known for:

Post-modernism was the descriptive word most often used at time. But the process — her contextualizations and decontextualizations, the metaphors, the history lampooned, the juxtapositions, the tearing down through to layers — is quintessential Deconstruction.

For Westwood, tearing down wasn't just an issue of style. Clothes of the punk era, of which she was a vital part, contained an integral component of the DIY ethic. Punk fashion dared to tear down fashion as a commodity. (Something the fashion houses gleefully ignored as they introduced their own lines with safety pin closures.)

The Westwood shirt: Torn, pinned, with sloppily silkscreened graphics that mingle the sacred, profane, and outright offensive. And just in case the point was missed, all is surmounted with a headline. Destroy: The ultimate Deconstruction signifier.

An antique plate sandblasted by artist Cat Merrick:

And then, back to the garden: A survey of landscapes with Deconstructive tendencies.

Below, a shambolic admixture of shapes, textures, and layers: Boundaries are broken.

Here, the form of the garden playing against the decay and dissolution of the building surrounding it. The garden makes the aged building even more rustic in comparison.

While the building sleeps the forest reclaims itself: The dream of all plants, no doubt.

In the suburbs where meticulous lawns rule: The meadow. Its organic randomness defiant against the trimmed order of hedges, fescue, and bordered planters of its neighbors.

What could be more Deconstruction than a plot planted by seed?

An example of the work of Danish designer Stig L. Andersson. The primordial forest escaping into the steel and glass one. And right angles are nowhere to be found.