minimalism

See Part 1 here.

This is not a pipe: Magritte called it The Treachery of Images. More treachery below, taking on the same idea only this time with chairs. Chairs to confound your concept of what a chair should look like.

As we've noted before, when it comes to chair design—traditionally—it's mostly a conservative medium. Forms are followed from history, sometimes very ancient history, and tend to get repeated in endless iterations. New tends don't enter into the design vernacular much. And how long will this thrall to all things mid-century go on?

Be that as it may, let's look at chairs that draw their design inspiration from somewhere other than chair history: Chairs that take their influence from other parts of the design world. Something of the unexpected: Not always or necessarily beautiful, but different.

Not sure if these wall-mounted chairs above are even usable in this configuration but the concept is certainly... interesting.

The Beehive chair from Kiwi designer Graham Roebuck. The materials are described thusly: Made of Lakepine Zero low emitting MDF and polished in beeswax to the edges, while tepid White Formica high pressure laminate envelopes the perpendicular faces of the piece.

The Bloom Chair by Kenneth Cobonpue; Here's how one seller describes it: Deep soft folds of handmade microfibre stitched with a steel base in different fabric colors that pop! Very comfortable and very artsy. Or kind of like a meat-eating orchid, as someone once said.

This bowl-with-a-hole chair is from Dublin based Tierney Haines Architects:

Where they found the inspiration: Donald Knorr's award winning Knoll 132 from 1950, designed to be low cost with steel legs and an aluminum seat. The chair has been discontinued.

The Ball chair by Finn Eero Aarnio, ca. 1963:

An even more flowery take on the Saarinen Tulip chair, this one from Australian designer Sydney Feathersone, 1969: the Stem chair.

This Guadi chair from Dutch designer Bam Geenen takes inspiration from its namesake basing it upon the master's use of arches for optimum strength.

Here, barely a chair from Oki Sato by way of Nendo.

The Vermelha chair from the Brazilian design team of the Campana Brothers. The chair is a steel structure with hand woven and dyed cotton rope.

Designer Yangsoo Pyo created these Afro chairs out of steel wire coiled (think two-ring binder springs) into a giant Brillo pad. Despite its appearance, it's claimed that the chair is actually quite comfortable.

Oskar Zieta's Chippensteel chairs:

The chair as a Buick: The Maxell chair by Harald Belker. You won't be surprised to learn that Belker actually designs cars for Porsche and Mercedes Benz. The chair was reportedly inspired by the Maxell ads with the guy being blown away in the Le Corbusier chair.

Another barely there chair, this one designed by Verner Panton, another take on a chair done for Herman Miller in the 70s. Panton is considered to be one of Denmark's most influential 20th century furniture designers. As Denmark was one of the apogees of the Mid-Century, this is no small claim.

The Lodge chair by Baltasar Portillo:

The crouching Z-Chair by—who else?—Zaha Hadid:

More to come in Part 3.

Topiary, the art of clipping and training plants into desired shapes, has origins dating back to Roman times. The first records of topiary come from the Greeks but the word itself is from the Latin (topiarius). Romans displayed topiary in tomb paintings and there may've been some Persian influences as well. It's also likely that something similar was going on contemporaneously in China. The Japanese borrowed forms from China and started a tradition of their own.

We tend to think of topiary as plants shaped into whimsical forms, like animals and such, but this occupies only a small part of a long tradition. It was a Roman, poet Cneus Matius, who is credited with bringing topiary to the attention of Caesar Augustus. (Roman emperors have a history of having their predilections make epic impressions on world culture—think Constantine and Christianity.)

Once characteristic of the grandest European gardens, interest in topiary would wane, partly by vandalism and partly religious oppression: The great Roman gardens would be destroyed by the invading barbarian hordes in their zeal to destroy the Empire. The Dark Ages would have a profound effect on garden aesthetics, as pleasure gardens were repurposed as places to consider to contemplate God's power and not human vanities. Interest in pleasure gardens would return during the Renaissance in great part due to cultivation of herbs, flowers, and shrubs in monastery gardens throughout Europe. Geometric shapes were most prevalent, simple cubes, orbs, cones, and obelisks. The Victorian era would see another resurgence.

Traditional grandeur, above and below, at the gardens of Château-de-Villandry, France:

A hedge is a simpler, functional form of topiary intended to create boundaries, walls, or screens.

Below, hedges form an extension of the manor's heroic architecture.

Or a castle hall:

And more modern treatments:

The severe serenity of the well ordered Japanese garden:

Two view of the gardens at the Trentham estate, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire:

The title is from this Langston Hughes poem.

Grasses are sensual. You can smell them and hear them and watch them move. Meadows are sexy, just like lovers they never stop changing, never ceasing to surprise.

John Greenlee

That sensuousness can be seen in the way grass moves in the breeze. How it blooms robust with color in the spring and goes dormant brown in the winter: As Greenlee might say, they're the essence of sex and death.

Grass is dynamic. It gives texture and balance, it can be sharp or fluffly. It's an ensemble player, a backgrounder, accompanist, or virtuoso soloist if need be. Its culturally polyglot: It's Asia, Africa, the Mediterranean, and the American heartland. It's tropical, jungle, desert, lush, dry, sparse, and dense.

Below, the work of Washington D.C. based James Van Sweden:

Layers:

Meadows:

In contemporary gardens, it is the quintessential modern material.

More James Van Sweden:

It works in the meadow; it works in a pot:

Piet Oudolf's Trenthan Gardens:

Speak low when you speak, love
Our summer day withers away too soon, too soon
Speak low when you speak, love
Our moment is swift, like ships adrift, we're swept apart, too soon

Speak low, darling, speak low
Love is a spark, lost in the dark too soon, too soon
I feel wherever I go that tomorrow is near, tomorrow is here and always too soon
Time is so old and love so brief
Love is pure gold and time a thief

We're late, darling, we're late
The curtain descends, ev'rything ends too soon, too soon
I wait, darling, I wait
Will you speak low to me, speak love to me and soon

Speak Low, lyric by Odgen Nash, music by Kurt Weill

Speak low if you speak love.
- William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, 2.1

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».

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.

A bridge, a canal, a sky.

We probably see a thousand raw master strokes of design daily: The way a building meets the sky, the way a cluster of streetlights, wires, and telephone towers meet, how an orange bridge meets a blue sky and still water. The challenge is clearing away the surrounding noise and finding the purer signal.

The art of design is both a matter of collection and subtraction and the resonant harmony in-between.

Often the answer is the simple one; Simple it may be, but not unconscious.

Chaos will find us soon enough. For now, let's just enjoy the quiet.