cutting edge leisure

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:

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:

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.

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.

In martial arts they speak of hard and soft forces. An attack is a hard force; a defense redirecting the energy of such an attack is a soft force. In design, it's the sharp edge, straight line, spatial geometry, fine textures, and smooth surfaces that represent the hard forces. Yet, their visual energy can be redirected with even a slightest suggestion of a softening force.

Contrast makes oppositional forces even more acute. In the yin-yang that is life, where the two forces meet there is also harmony.

A master is fluent in both languages. S/he can effortlessly bring the two energies together into a balanced whole.

Harmony can be scaled in any direction: The balance needn't be centered.

Oppositional forces generate energy: Synergy.

Below, a rendering by Peter Guthrie of an imagined gallery at the Museo Canoviano, Possagno (Veneto, Italy).

Despite the dizzying spirals of yin-yang in color, texture, form, material, reflection, and opacity going on, the net effect is serene comfort.

Here, tenderness presented in what may be the ultimate example of soft power ever: The gift of forgiveness depicted in a hard and most unforgiving medium.

As if to extend the metaphor, there is the story of Lazlo Toth: Meeting Soft with Hard.

A couch, more or less: This from designer Shiro Kuramata in nickel-plated expanded metal mesh.

Al fresco refreshed.

The Halley 4150 by Spanish designers Jordi Vilardell & Meritxell Vidal.