material

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:

We've tread this flooring path before and again two years ago. At the time, plank floors were on an ascent as a design trend and well covered amongst the designer literati. Since then, choices have evolved and expanded. We offer some of the more noteworthy.

Three examples of a more straight ahead vision of the wood plank floor: Shiniest and straightest above with increases in rusticity as it goes down.

We've established the theme; below are the variations:

The Bolefloor, hardwood cut along the curves of the natural grain:

A plank floor with coordinated colors streaked into the grain:

Violet, here:

Rustic herring bone:

And a super tarted-up version:

Yet another approach to wood:

Not entirely sure if this floor is even wood, there was no corroborating information given with the image. (There appears to be no seams like you find with tiling.) Whatever it is, it's a bold statement.

Mafi features a line of natural wood flooring in a variety of 3-d textures:

Another Mafi offering: Carving Grunge 1.

A medley of grains: This patterned wood floor is reminiscent of rusted iron, playing with the perception of the material.

An interesting mix of textures: In a design by designer Waldo Fernandez a wood floor overlayed with a rug that has the appearance of a wood floor.

Often in Sean's garden designs, he has used patterns of stone dissolving into lawn or greenery. Here, similarly, tile and wood visually melting together:

A medley of tiles: Different tile patterns and styles blended for impact.

In this design, as seen in the plans below, the medley was executed from room to room so that every room had its own bold tile patterns. Examples follow:

And even bolder:

Not tile but concrete with random gum spots:

The title is from this Langston Hughes poem.

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.

The Nanyang Art School in Singapore: Not overpowering or separate from its environment but assimilating, like a good guest. As other architectural trends go long past their expiration dates, this building will likely remain as fresh as the evergreen fescue that covers it. Nature does that.

Garden styles may trend but they never date.

Picture and source Inhabitat.com:
The roofs create open space, insulate the building, cool the surrounding air and harvest rainwater for landscaping irrigation. Planted grasses mix with native greenery to colonize the building and bond it to the setting.

(The title is taken from Grass (1918) by Carl Sandburg.)

A chair is a very difficult object. A skyscraper is almost easier. That is why Chippendale is famous.
- Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Thomas Chippendale speaks for himself from a upholstered dining chair, above.

Is there another designed object in human history that can compare with the aesthetic tenacity of a well designed chair? The chair isn't subject to the same vagaries and fashionable whims that rule the best in other disciplines. Instead, a great chair seems to operate in a kind of geological time; Through thousands of years we see the same forms popping-up again and again, as if its DNA were as indefatigable as that of the cockroach.

To wit, the Egyptian chair:

This from the tomb of Hatnofer and Ramose, western Thebes ca. 1479–1473 BCE: Chair made from boxwood, cypress, ebony, and linen cord.

Egyptians began metal toolmaking around 4500 BCE and woodworking wouldn't have been far behind. Their aesthetic influence on furniture has proven to be nearly as long. Wood furniture produced at the time incorporated mortise and tenon joints and inlay.

Above: An ornate acacia stool.

Danish designer Finn Juhl created the Egyptian chair in 1949:

And, the Chieftain chair in the same year:

Another enduring Egyptian form is the X-chair or stool, (AKA as the Savonarola, Dante, and Scissors chairs). This, a Roman version:

A Louis XV styled version:

And famously, the Mies van der Rohe Barcelona designed for the King and Queen of Spain in 1929:

The Barcelona was awarded with the Museum of Modern Art Award in 1977.

The Greek Klismos chair and its successors:

If you attended school on the planet Earth anytime in the last 50 years it's likely you sat on a chair like this:

(A injection molded plastic version is the one I remember....)

But before this chair became the ubiquitous and nearly invisible object of our collective consciousnesses, it had a designer and a name: The Revolt by legendary designer and Amsterdammer Friso Kramer. (Ironic title given its eventual institutional use.) Designed in 1953 to compete with a chair already popular in its time by Wilhelm Gispen. Though the differences between the Kramers and the Gispens may be mostly academic, in the world of institutional Chair-dom the contest definitely had a winner. Manufacture of the Gispen would end by 1963.

The Gispen:

Gispen may be better remembered for his Art Deco-y bent tubular steel armchairs; A chair that may've gone on to its final rest in the hair salons of the world.

Mid-century Modernism may prove to be the Classic era of chair design. Peruse the catalog of any furniture manufacturer of quality these days and take note how the Mid-century aesthetic still rules. If the recent exhibition at LACMA on mid-century design in California is any indication, the honeymoon has yet to show signs of fatigue.

Another case in point, Charles and Ray Eames:

To start, the Eames Management office chair: The multitude of products borne of this design are still infiltrating offices from Madison Avenue to Shibuya and many points in between. The Eames Greatest Hits album would require at least a boxed-set: Their list of successes was a long one.

Throwing all industrial design under one tiny umbrella in its Best Design category, Time Magazine's Best of the Century listing gave the Eames molded plywood dining chair (1946) the singular distinction of being design's acme : "Much copied, never bettered."

The LCW (Lounge Chair Wood above in dark wood) and the DCM (Dining Chair Metal; above in blond wood) from 1948. There'd be variations, like a three-legged version, but this was the Mama to the many babies that would follow. Kramer's more vernacular Revolt remix (as seen at top of this post) would be one example.

Then, of course, there was that iconic lounger from 1956:

Originally designed for Chicago's O'Hare airport in 1962, the Eames's Tandem Sling seating is still comforting the weary derrières of traveling millions daily. And more than likely, yours too on occasion.

And then, their contribution to the rarefied field of Chairs of Near Invisible Ubiquity: The molded-plastic with Eiffel Tower wired base DSR also from 1948.

British designer Robin Day, generously borrowing from the Eames's and taking it one step further, created this stackable polypropylene version on an enameled tubular steel base. Introduced in 1963 when injection-molded polypropylene was a new technology. Injection allowed speedier production of numbers not possible with their wooden counterparts: 4,000 shells a week. At present, something like 14 to 20 million (depending on whom you believe) units have been produced making this the most mass produced chair ever.

It wouldn't be hard to imagine that both Eames and Day's chairs didn't borrow some of its form from a much older ancestor, the Windsor chair:

With origins that date back to the 16th century, the Windsor would've been all the rage in the colonial U.S. Also, you won't be surprised to learn that Windsors were originally built by wheelrights who coped out its spindles in the same way they did wheel spokes for wagons. Another obvious progeny of the Windsor is the Konsumstuhl Nr. 14, otherwise known as the café chair from 1859:

Developed by German-Austrian cabinet maker Michael Thonet the chair's breakthrough was in its use of steam bent wood. This "chair of chairs" (Le Corbusier was a fan), once unavoidable in cafés and dining rooms throughout the world, would have a pretty good run of its own with 50 million units produced by 1930.

For its own part, the Eames Management chair may've also inspired one of the most praised and popular office chairs ever: The Aeron.

Designed for Herman Miller by Don Chadwick and Bill Stumpf in 1994, the Aeron has won heaps of praise and troves of accolades for both its design and ergonomics. Among them: “Designs Greatest Hits” by Your Company magazine; “Design of the Decade” gold award winner by Business Week & Industrial Designers Society of America; IDSA "Design of the Decade" winner; Also, it's the only desk chair to gain a spot in the New York Museum of Modern Art.

Upholstered armchairs also have a demonstrated aesthetic sustainability. In most cases you could follow the lineage of just about every chair from Levitz warehouses to Design Within Reach showrooms, in markets both up and down, to examples below.

Judging from it's evergreen popularity you wouldn't know the design of Le Corbusier's so called LC2 - Fauteuil Grand confort, petit modèle (in collaboration with Charlotte Perriand and Pierre Jeannerrat) was a relic from 1928.

This candy-colored array is now available from Cassina.

These archtypal Club Chairs were from designer Jean-Michel Frank ca. 1930. Frank, who'd become a successful interior designer (he did Nelson Rockefeller's Fifth Avenue digs) was also a first cousin once removed to Anne Frank, designed a collection of minimalist furniture for Hermès beginning in 1924; More evergreen: The line was introduced by Hermès once again in 2011.

Frank's rounded armchair showing the contemporary influence of Art Deco.

Le Corbusier mentor and Moravian-born Josef Hoffmann was nicknamed "Quadratl-Hoffmann" (little squares) for his apparent fixation. This, the Kubus armchair, was from 1910 and appears to have had more than a little influence over his famous protégé. The Kubus is still in production.

Next in Chairs, Part 2: More history and more living room icons from Arne Jacobsen and Eero Saarinen as well as sixties whimsy and beyond.

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.

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.

Material and its surprises:

A couch constructed from a solid piece of poly-foam. Here, the material not only allows the designer to test new possibilities with a new medium, it allows him/her a means to experiment with conceptions of traditional shape and form.

Non-traditional materials allow dialogues with new layers of undiscovered subtext. To wit: Lamp shades made from beet and cabbage leaves...

...dry pasta...

... and milk bottles.

Cowhide chairs: Molded and formed wet, then dried into the desired shape and structure from a single hide.

Described as a piece of hell frozen in space, designer Charlie Davidson has fashioned these Black Lights from layers of foil. Light eminates from the center and passes through colored gels.

Davidson then brings Hell back to earth in the form of his Crunk chair (below). Similarly constructed as the Black Lights but with added reinforcement. As described on Charlie Davidson's website:

Formed over a simple wooden buck from a giant sheet of aluminum foil measuring 5 meters square, the final shape was filled with self hardening polyurethane foam.

The Cabbage Chair by designer Oki Sato, otherwise known as Nendo. Fabricated from many layers of coated paper. For details and a demo on construction go here.

A chair of hemp rope coated in resin.

A table formed from hardened dollops of heated rubber.

Gary Harvey, a multi-hyphenate designer/businessman with a résumé that includes creative director at Levi-Strauss and Dockers Europe, plays with perceptions of elegance as well as material. For a vision he calls "street-tough glamor" he has developed a line of ball gowns constructed of recycled textiles.

For Cinderellas who rave on both sides of midnight, a dress made from black rock t-shirts:

And another of re-adapted laundry bags:

For a hair salon, an thematically constructed chandelier.

Canadian artist Brian Jungen juggles subtexts like flaming sticks of semiotics in his recreations of northern indigenous images. The material: Nike Air Jordans.

On his work, Jungen writes:

"It was interesting to see how by simply manipulating the Air Jordan shoes you could evoke specific cultural traditions whilst simultaneously amplifying the process of cultural corruption and assimilation."

Jungen's choice of Nike wasn't arbitrary. Besides producing shoes specific to the fit needs of native peoples (apparently, width is an issue) as well being the makers of the Nike Air Native, the Air Jordan's color scheme of white, black, and red is also the traditional colors of the Haida, an indigenous peo­ple of the Pacific Northwest coast.

As in all of the work above, maybe the act of "simply manipulating" material does indeed amplify the corruption. And perhaps it's this "corruption" that's not only at the heart of innovation, but modernism itself.

Leaving the material comfort behind may be the way forward.