contemporary designer furniture

Shapes and forms matter. In the pattern-seeking modules of the human brain, shapes and forms communicate; what they communicate to you will be a product of the culture and territory in which you were formed. For some reason culture is particularly when shapes are combined into more complex configurations. The one exception is organic forms, especially plants. Their symbolism tends to be more universal as they are seen to be pleasing and comforting by all. To us, a plant's asymmetry conveys spontaneity. The history of plants being used in the sculptural forms and motifs of many traditions goes back eons. These motifs were seen as a way of expressing everything from long life, healing, renewal, to fertility, strength and longevity. Perhaps for their medicinal as well as poisonous characteristic––life giving and life ending––plants supernatural project supernatural qualities in traditional art like magic, prophecy, and all seeing also charge traditional plant symbolisms in art.

Organic forms can also have a transformative role in the context of a design. As in the Sebastian Errazuriz Tree Table below, the mix of the organic with the industrial in the material and shape of the branch table base has the effect of softening the industrial-ness of glass.

Korean designer Chul An Kwak's eschews the static. He found inspiration in the movement of a running horse but knew he wouldn't get there with straight planar legs and right angles. Through his use of sculpted wood, the designer wanted to convey not just dynamic motion but dynamic emotion. The table have feeling of unresolved tension, as if it trying to escape from the room,  a horse galloping to freedom.

Below, another Korean, artist MyeongBeom Kim takes the concept to the extreme, in the case of the carved out chair from the tree he plays with industrializing the chair's organic source material, and in the urinal piece below that, nature beautifully blooms from the abundance of human waste. Below Kim's work, nature—either as a single element or as a faux jungle—projects a sense of vigor and hope into a stark hardscape or an otherwise barren vista.

Below, Kim may be commenting on the diminishing natural environment, our profligate use of water, and unsustainable production of waste.

Above, the accidental forest; below, the domestic micro-jungle; and below next, an integration of the urban with what it replaced.

A forest appears to be grow from the model's head like Athena out of the forehead of Zeus. Below, nature manipulated by nature as if they were bespoke creations made to order. At bottom: The building's glass gives back some of the sky.

Plastic, the word has become the very symbol of superficiality, the excess of our modern industrialism. But it wasn't always so. Once, plastic was the possibility and triumph of the Jet-age.  Even French philosopher and semiotician Roland Barthes couldn't help but rhapsodize on its romantic power: "[Plastic] is in essence the stuff of alchemy... more than a substance, plastic is the very idea of infinite transformation."

Another who was seduced by plastic, clear thermoplastic in this case, was Charles Hollis Jones. Jones was both a pioneer and a prodigy. Interested at an early age in the material qualities of glass, the advances in acrylic technology during World War II, especially in its use in aviation, made acrylic an industrial material worthy of designer crushes. For Jones, its transmissivity, i.e. transparency with a low reflectivity, were the qualities worthy of career long affair.

See our earlier post on acrylic.

His work with the material began at the dawn of the Rock and Roll Age in 1961 but didn't hit its full stride until the arrival of the Disco era of 70s. His work would find a roster of marquee champions including John Lautner, Raymond Loewy, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Tennessee Williams, and others.

By the early seventies Jones's stools were in the Playboy Club and his vanity tables in the Mondrian Hotel. His work had risen to the archtype of evil cool appropriate enough for the James Bond film "Diamonds Are Forever." But this success brought imitators selling downgraded knock-offs that would scratch and cloud. The effect would be devastating on the acrylic furniture market, by no fault of Jones it'd go from swank to stank within a decade.

While plastic furniture—for better or worse—has become omnipresent, clear acrylic wouldn't make a significant comeback until many years later. Even now, at the relatively spry age of 67, Jones is still working and very much dedicated to the material.

Beyond design, Jones also pioneered techniques in manufacturing. He developed a method for joining large acrylic castings in perfectly transparent and seamless joints as well as a proprietary technique for joining acrylic to metal without screws or fasteners.

Built-in seating (table optional) can give a project a more formal, architectural look. It can also provide an architectural point of interest for luring guests outside. The orderliness and permanence of it contrasts nicely with plantings and other organic materials surrounding it.

Sean has designed and built seating fixtures for various Knibb Design projects over the years, some of which can be seen in this newsletters, here and here.)

Note the rough natural edge to the underside of both the table and the bench:

Constructions can offer a zen-like appearance to a garden as well, with their resolute lines, boundaries, and geometry. A built planter can also achieve this to a degree but seating adds the human component. By inviting us in it makes us another aspect of the garden of the garden itself.

For want of a garden a new view helps:

The mixing of culture and traditions can very often yield exciting new possibilities, sometimes, even radical ones. When it comes to design this mixing may include aspects of style, material, era, technology, region, language, etc, etc, and any combination of the above. It is in these intersections that the real leaps forward occur.

Above, a chair as an homage to the George Corliss, inventor of the first independent steam engine and great Rhode Islander, as created by the Providence based Studio Dunn. An aluminum back harmoniously intersects the curve of the maple seat.

Below, the Il Capo Dining Table by Creazioni: divided into ¾ minimalist and ¼ ornate sections which can be separated with different finishes.

The Recession Chair by Dutch company Tjep:

The symbolic piece begins as a stock IKEA wood chair and is then sanded down to skeletal proportions. By the end of the process the chair is too fragile to be of much use for sitting.

The Bare Bones Ghost Chair: Six pieces of driftwood and and two sheets of Acrylic. Each chair is custom made to order; from the Esty universe.

Christian Fiebig's rendition of the classic Chesterfield chair in polygonally trimmed foam and square powder coated tubing:

The Eros chair from Philippe Starck: A mash up of the Donald Knorr 132 Knoll Chair and the Lina Bo Bardi Bowl Chair with the legs of the Eames Eiffel Tower.

Look closely at the couch below—it's actually molded concrete.

The W(hole) Commode designed by Ferrucio Laviani for Fratelli Boffi: A mahogany and brass Louis XV pierced with a fuchsia hole.

The French designer Christian Astuguevieille’s Saulorme Chair has a bent chestnut wood frame and rope shag seat:

Thrown out pieces of Victorian furniture are repurposed with concrete by James Plumb, a cooperation between British designers James Russel and Hannah Plumb.

The Louis XV-cum-Age of Plastic style of Queen of Love comes in a variety of day-glo colors and is suitable for both indoors and out. Designed by Graziano Moro and Renato Pigatti, the full sized chair is spacious enough to seat two intimately. Their managed vulgarity had one blog referring to them as the "Big Pimps of lawn chairs."

Originally designed most likely as a way to extend the use of precious timber, pergolas—going back at least as long as the Egyptians, say 3000 years give or take—were in their earliest forms coverings with spaced slats. Over these slats were grown vines or fruit trees. These covered seating areas would used in the more temperate regions as a cool respite for the sedentary pursuit of watching the wildlife from your back porch, de rigueur for the noble class of 17th century England.

Here, paradise and cocktails under the logs:

If their design began as a practical matter we've so long ago grown enamored by their sheer object beauty of the things that their essential function hardly matters anymore. We just love to look at them. Most of the great gardens have at least one if not more.

A stone cold rush of rustic with a mixer of Mediterranean:

Wine and pyramids under the shady green:

Detached from the natural garden and incorporated into the paved one, pergolas are often used as a poolside shelter.

The word pergola, originally from the Latin, literally refered to a "covered eave." It is part of a tradition that traveled the world. Moroccan style, below:

It's been argued that it was the Italians during the Renaissance who first  incorporated the shelters as free standing elements in their formal gardens. In Italian pergola means "a close walk of boughs."

Here, a constructed forest featuring roses and waterlilies.

As interpreted by Andrea Cochran:

Cloth will work nicely, too.

A more finished rendition from architect Daniel J. Lieberman:

Small is also good.

The room without walls:

Gray is the yin and yang altogether. It's the feminine in the way it nurtures and supports surrounding colors. It's also the masculine, an ominous sky and battleships. In the tonal palette it represents Switzerland: Neutral, cool, subdued, sophisticated, elegant, corporate, and serious.

In the right hands it is grace, as in the designs of David Hicks (the two below) which are nothing like corporate.

G

Gray socializes well with other colors. It is a peacemaker. It pulls back bright colors and grounds darks and lights. It's most agreeable: In a family of purple, pink, and yellow it is a kind of visual middle child.

It's the epitome of diversity and the ultimate equalizer. It is also bold without being assertive. An abused gray can easily turn into a drone: drab, dull, and dead. Yet within it is always the potential for the spectacular.

It is simple, understated elegance, refined enough to never call attention to itself.

In the garden, it stands back and launches the green and red forward.

It makes even a hand-made look natural in the landscape.

Paint the walls or swath a fabric around a room and it can gush as much color as you like. But this isn't about that. This is about choosing a whisper or a breath, an accent to stand apart.

In design, like art and politics, power can come from the margins.

Here, the blue flowers make a brilliant and contained explosion.

A suggestion of a tint from the windows adds a low chorus to the blue of the sky.

Tomorrow, the table could be red. But for today, it's blue.

Beneath the cabinet there's another margin of opportunity.

The quasi-blue of Mexican Blue Palms at LAX, and the Hilton Hotel in Pattaya, Thailand, with intermittent radiating blue cubes.

Long ago, before the living rooms of America were designed to funnel all attention into home entertainment centers, the social space of well-designed homes would have inhabitants focus on each other rather than appliances. A quintessential example is this seating platform by architect Paul Rudolph from 1955.

Just by the fact we descend into the space transforms the atmosphere into something more rarefied. It practically gushes with implied intimacy.

Perhaps the most iconic of conversation pits, below, from Eero Saarinen’s Miller House in Columbus, Indiana, built in 1957.

The pedigree for the pit may come from the Middle East or North Africa. The Moroccan trend of the early naughties brought a resurgence of conversation spaces, especially outdoor.

Below, a more recent interpretation created by March Studio, Australia.

And more classics of the mid-century:

Another of more recent vintage, below a Chicago townhouse by Roger Hirsch Architect.

As seating, this stark vision in triangles may be more appropriate for lectures on particle physics or hostile take-overs than soft-spoken candlelit conversations.

This example, with its resplendent views of the outdoors and pillowy comforts, invites much more than conversations with its provocative mirrored ceiling.

Thank you to the Ouno design blog for material and inspiration.

Black needs no surrogate or replacement; there is no new black. The old one is still doing just fine.

Our relationship with black as a medium goes back at least 35,000 years. Many of the primordial art materials were black — soot, charcoal, pitch, asphaltum — and were most likely associated with ritual and special occasions. Because of this, no color is as heavy with significance. Black was associated with authority, priests, and royals. It was also the dark of night, the void, the beginning and the end. It would come to symbolize death, mourning, evil, magic, and no doubt because of all of the above, sex.

Black would be integral to cultures around the world. The earliest uses of black in manufacturing that can be dated include Korean and Chinese lacquering and pottery around 700 -800 BCE. A short time later it would also be found in Greece and the Americas.

Below: Black-figure Neck Amphora, 6th century BCE.

When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
``Beauty is truth, truth beauty,''--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
John Keats, Ode to a Grecian Urn

While black was the color of power it also symbolized submission. Priests don black to demonstrate their submission to God.

Black was also favored by vampires and witches for implications of evil. It also gives the wearer the appearance of being thinner which for many of us may be the opposite of evil.

Boulders suspended in a sea of high gloss black walls.

Black is the complete absorption of all colors and the absence of light. It is those properties that make black, along with yellow, the most visible. (The reason why it's used on street signage.)

Robert Longo prints and Queen Anne chairs direct the otherwise subtle tones of the wallpaper and flooring.

An old school remix with Adolf Loos:

And David Hicks:

Interior designer Billy Baldwin's blend of classicism and modernism is described with a Louis XV chair and a Chinese table framed in black with flashes of gold. His ca. '50s Slipper chair is in the foreground.

The Interior designer that the New Yorker once called the presiding grande dame of West Coast interior design and erstwhile Playboy Playmate, Kelly Wearstler, channels some serious David Hicks mojo in her use of black, above and below.

Storied designer Nicky Haslam channels his own version of Dorothy Draper mojo:

The entrance to the Avenfield House, Park Lane, London:

For this British home, Haslam turns up the aristocratic swank. Shiny and glittering surfaces bounce a little harder given the undertones of black.

The white linens on this bed designed by Loyd Ray Taylor and Charles Paxton Gremillion, Jr. bursts into the room's stark black.

The cabinet gives a touch of black to add drama:

Black deftly provides some cold yin to the room's otherwise white hot yang.

It might've been comedian Steven Wright who asked: Why do we call them buildings; shouldn't they be called builts?

In the world of architecture, perhaps the most famous unbuilt of all may be that of Moravian born Austrio-Hungarian architect Adolf Loos. Loos was an early zealot for modernism and, as was made clear in his famous essay Ornament and Crime, a militant decorative reactionary. Said he:

The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from objects of everyday use.

Loos also created what he called the Raumplan which suggested that houses shouldn't be divided into rooms separated by walls. Instead, they should flow from a more continuous living space: Clearly, an idea whose time has come.

In 1928 he completed a design for a proposed Xanadu-styled dwelling for legendary American ex-pat singer, dancer, actress, and apparent enchantress, Josephine Baker.

Exactly how and why the design came about has long been the subject of speculation. She may've commissioned Loos for the design. Or not.

Here's a model of the legendary building:

And the tabloid version: At the winsome age of 19, Josephine Baker arrived in Paris to find work as singer and dancer. She quickly became an overnight sensation. This success allowed her into the most cultured circles of the Parisian fabulous. It'd be here that Loos encountered her and, like many others, was immediately smitten. Adopting her as his muse, he designed a grandiloquent residence unbeknownst to La Bakaire. He presented his vision of Chez Baker to her in 1928. (She would've been 22 at the time.) How in her youth, even as a sensation, she'd be able to afford a palace clad in black and white marble, split into three levels with spiraling staircases, a cylindrical tower, and an interior second floor pool is a mystery. (See floor plans here.) Baker's response to either the design or designer is unknown.

Why Loos would be enthralled with La Bakaire isn't hard to imagine: Leaving New York behind as "the highest-paid chorus girl in vaudville," her dances and costumes in the Folies Bergères and other productions were famously provocative. She was beautiful, exotic, and a fluent jazz dancer at a time when jazz was the vanguard. But even this pales to her experience during the war in the French Resistance. She also spoke at the podium before Martin Luther King gave his I Have a Dream speech. (She was offered a leading role in the post-King civil rights movement: She turned it down.) As the victim of much racism in America and abroad (Hitler was not a fan) she'd adopt a dozen children from around the world, her so-called Rainbow Tribe, to make a point on diversity and compatibility. In his later years Loos would boast that Baker had taught him the Charleston.

But, clearly, there was more to Adolf Loos than leery fan-boy infatuation. His mix of austere classicism with modernist streamlining would meet with success.

Above, Villa Karma: His collaboration with architect Hugo Ehrlich is considered an early example of the modern house (Loos was the primary designer 1904-1906; Ehrlich would finish it). Loos's personal life was not nearly as balanced and harmonious as his professional one, particularly his health. (He was diagnosed with cancer early in his career.) Below; The Villa as seen on the inside.

The Villa Müller, below*: Due to Loos's failing health, the architect Karel Lhota was hired to help with the design. The client himself was a successful concrete contractor who had been working on some innovative uses of reinforced concrete which became part of the building's design. The building itself would have a colorful history of its own. (Thank you Veronica G. for the heads up!)

This sensibility, especially when applied to furnishings, would prove prescient: Below, a timeless chandelier from 1911 and a tumbler set from 1931.

Another renowned Loos unbuilt: This Doric column-styled tower was a proposal for the Chicago Tribune from 1922. Created for an architectural competition that would lure a gallery of marquee names including Walter Gropius, Adolf Meyer, and Eliel  Saarinen (father of Eero). Alas, none of them would prevail; the winning entry, which one contemporary critic said would set back architecture 50 years, has since been described as a "fruity Gothic pile."

Feeling his pain for the decorative in the everyday object, an homage to the maestro from artist Laurent Craste: Petite étude pour «Adolf Loos’s wet dream».