Ikea enjoys a charmed stature as a progressive outlet delivering smart and stylish furnishings for a new kind of forward-looking home. Who doesn't like high design at rock-bottom prices--served with that agreeable touch of Scandinavian merchandising?
Turns out all that modular furniture and bookcases may not be such a wondrous bargain after all. An article in the July/August issue of The Atlantic argues that behind its friendly face Ikea promotes the worst kind of consumerism and waste.
"...put down your 59-cent Färgrik coffee mug and ask yourself: Can we afford to keep shopping at places where an item's price reflects only a fraction of its societal costs?" writes Ellen Ruppel Shell in a brief article drawn from her book, "Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture," published last month by Penguin.
(Note: as of this posting Ikea had not responded to my queries about Shell.)
Nobody disputes that Ikea table lamps and kitchen carts are pleasingly designed. The problem, Shell contends, is that they're designed for only brief use; when they're worn or broken they're tossed into the landfill, a practice badly out of keeping with the new emphasis on durability. In this way Ikea is as wasteful and inefficient as any discount chain, and it suggests that products have no lasting merit. (Anybody who has tried to assemble an Ikea dresser knows how much the company values craftsmanship. )
What's more, Shells says in her book, the drive toward a disposable culture has unsettling human intimations: "If Ikea thinks it's crazy to care deeply about objects, why does it sell a wok named after a girl?"
Ikea takes full promotional credit for lighting its stores with energy efficient light bulbs, Shells says, but it deliberately positions its stores far outside city centers. As a result, the average Ikea customer gas driving 50 miles round-trip.
According to some counts, Ikea is the third largest wood consumer in the world. The company declines to pay up for lumber that is certified to be legally and responsibly harvested. Instead, Shell says, it buys from low-wage sources in Europe and Asia and oversees them with 15 "forestry monitors," which is presumably a woefully small staff for the vast the territories.
"Eight of them work in China and Russia," Shell writes, "but illegal logging is widespread in those vast countries, making it impossible to guarantee that all wood is legally harvested.
These sweet summery beach days contain some of the happiest hours of the year. We wish we always lived like this: The outdoor showers, the bare feet, the calm.
In a similar way, beach homes burrowed in the dunes reflect architecture's best self. Those unfortunate trophy homes notwithstanding, beach houses tend to be modest places where we live simply and with a certain freedom, as if on a boat. And they defer to their surroundings, opening themselves up to water views and salt air. Alastair Gordon, author of "Weekend Utopia," called the beach house "the sonnet form of American architecture."
Here are eight sonnets for a summer season:
Peru has a history of starkly modern beach homes perched on the desert coastline. Javier Artadi gave this house, on a beach south of Lima, a weightlessness by suspending it above the ground, and he perforated the walls to frame the views.
Here's the opposite of the Hamptons ideal of a gabled home in the dunes: a 160-square-foot surf shack made from a shipping container by HyBrid Seattle.
This isn't exactly a beach house, but it's close. Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, French brothers known for furniture design, created this floating house to be moored in the Seine on the outskirts of Paris. It's covered in an aluminum skin and a trellis that will eventually be covered in vines.
Some beach houses are nothing more than a glorified deck. The Depot Beach House by Stuchbury and Pape, an Australian firm, is a basic platform and canted roof oriented toward the water.
The Caromandel House by the New Zealand architects Crosson Clarke Carnachan is a dead simple timber box that sits lightly on the land. The living room is in an outdoor space between two wings.
Chilean architects Jose Ulloa and Delphine Ding redid an undistinguished 1990s house overlooking Tunquen Beach by wrapping it with a sculptural covering of slats.
James Cutler gave this guest house on the windy northern tip of the Big Island of Hawaii a shed-like roof that reflects the direction of the prevailing winds.
The Los Angeles architect Lorcan O'Herlihy built this house for himself with 105 vertical slit windows three blocks from the beach in Venice Beach. Hemmed in on three side, he used the tiny windows to let in light while blocking views of his neighbors.
Imagine coming home to your loft in an aging suburban office park. You pull into a parking lot bigger than a football field beside an uninflected wall of mirrored glass. You step inside a seven-story atrium where 600 people once worked and ride the elevators to a loft overlooking that unmistakable office landscaping--tasteful clumps of trees and artfully positioned artificial ponds. A long lawn stretches to a water tower shaped like a transistor.
You could live in such a place if a developer succeeds in saving the endangered Bell Labs campus in Holmdel, New Jersey. Designed by the Finnish architect Eero Saarinen shortly before his death in 1961, it qualifies as a prime artifact of corporate modernism, and it was the site of pioneering work on transistors and cell phones. By 2006 it was owned by Lucent which chose to abandon it rather then pay for needed upgrades. The facility was turned over to a developer who planned to raze it until scientists from all over the world loudly objected, both because of the architecture and the historic nature of research conducted there. Fifty members of the National Academy of Sciences wrote to New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine asking him to help save "part of the science heritage of all mankind." It was a facility that helped shape our world. For the high nerds, it's sacred ground.
Last August a new developer, Somerset Development, took over with the promise to preserve the structure, which extends a quarter mile long, by turning the skylit atrium into an indoor main street with shops and sidewalks, and by inserting lofts on the top floor. But with the strictures of the financial crisis Somerset says it can't finance its plan without building 600 additional low-rise residential units on the grounds, which the township refuses to approve.
If the conversion goes through it could serve as a model for the conversation of aging and abandoned surburban offices across the country. "I think key to the project is how to retrofit the building into an era that requires sustainable new systems," Nina Rappaport, a preservationist and architectural historian, told me this week. "With such a mass of building, materials, and such an open site, it behooves the potential developer to preserve the building's modern aesthetics, as designed by Eero Saarinen, and make it sustainable."
You won't see any chase scenes or canoodling. No scatological jokes, and hardly any women. For the most part it's just wrinkly old white men talking about fenestration and foundation walls. Design documentaries may not be sexy, but they're enjoying a surprising surge on the indie film circuit.
Why design? The documentaries riding a wave of interest in the field, and designers are, almost without exception, charismatic figures who know how to court the camera.
The trend began six years ago with My Architect, an effort by Nathaniel Kahn to uncover the hidden life of his father, the enigmatic Louis Kahn. Nathaniel was born out of wedlock, and he barely knew his father, whom many consider the greatest architect of the 20th century. Kahn, who died badly in debt in a Penn Station men's room in 1974, maintained three families for years in almost total secrecy. His son's angry and unsettling account was nominated for an Academy Award.
Who could have imagined that a film about a font would earn a following? Two years ago Gary Hustwit released Helvetica a feature length-documentary about the world's most common typeface and the globalization of visual culture. He traces the font's origins back to an obscure Swiss foundry in 1957 and shows how it became the favored imagery for street signs, corporate logos, transportation maps and government forms. Some of the graphic designers interviewed castigate it as the face of corporate and governmental authority, even comparing it to the Nazi imagery of the 1930s.
Earlier this year Hustwit debuted Objectified, a documentary about our preoccupation with everyday objects and the people who design them. "The story of America for the past 60 years," Hustwit says, "is essentially tied to the story of our stuff."
Design documentaries tend to work best when they tell a specific story. The Greening of Southie recounts the painfully difficult campaign to build the Macallen Building, Boston's first green residential project. As if building with untested green products wasn't hard enough, the 11-story condo went up in South Boston, a blue-collar neighborhood with a history of fighting gentrification. This is an impartial view of green building, and it reveals drawbacks you won't hear about in most coverage. Example: One of the project's environmental consultants acknowledges that shipping green materials from China, Bolivia and elsewhere required more energy than the building will consume in its lifespan.
We read endless appraisal of modern architects, but what about the photographers who helped bring modernism to the masses? Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman, follows the 97-year-old photographer as he travels the country visiting landmarks by Richard Neutra, Rudolph Schindler and others that he helped make famous with his particular visual style.
Long before there was any thought of Architecture for Humanity, Samuel Mockbee was building modern housing for poor families in the rural south. Snakebit, to be aired in the fall, is a 60-minute documentary about Mockbee and Rural Studio, the design-build program he started as a training ground for what he called "citizen architects."
Read more of Michael Cannell's blog on Fast Company
Last month the Cynthia Smith curator of socially responsible design, the first position of its kind at any design museum. Her new duties include helping to select candidates for the 2010 Triennial, which the museum is giving over entirely to social and sustainable design. These are the clearest signs yet that social design, as it's come to be called, is more than a passing fashion on design's evolving agenda.
We've been here before. In the aftermath of 9/11 many designers declared their intention to put aside colored gels and titanium coating and concentrate, at least part-time, on designing new security systems, pharmaceutical labeling, and other features of a new world preoccupied with safety. The effort started auspiciously, and quickly, with a viewing platform at Ground Zero (above) designed by a consortium of architects.
Many of us thought it was a signal moment, the beginnings of a design culture that would place more value on the public realm. "I think we're going to come out of this with a much more human culture in the United States," David Kelley, of IDEO, confidently declared at a roundtable discussion I helped convene at The New York Times a month after the attacks. "There are designers who are humanists, and they're going to come to the front."
Most of those good intentions were forgotten when renewed prosperity swept designers away into a fresh wave of luxury condominiums and furniture collections for a quickening consumer culture. It's understandable; designers want to earn a living like anyone else.
Will the same thing happen this time around? I suspect not. Design's greatest talent is to pose and then solve problems, and designers of all stripes seem committed to playing a role in innovating a way out of the economic crack-up and the attendant inefficiencies of production and distribution.
The Cooper-Hewitt deserves a fair shake of credit for helping to put humanitarian design on the map with shows like "Design for the Other 90%," which launched in the backyard of the Cooper-Hewitt two years ago, well before design was widely talked about as a vehicle for solving humanitarian problems. In May the museum opened "Design For a Living World," (above) a roundup of products that sustain the people and places that produced them.
The Cooper-Hewitt is a branch of the Smithsonian and it had a reputation for putting out the unimaginative content one might expect from a government bureau. But it appears to have found a leadership role in social design, a topic we all hope has staying power.
Read more of Michael Cannell's blog on Fast Company
Walter Gropius had a lot more in common with Vitruvius than he let on. The fact is, modernism is a classical discipline, and it places the same value on the classical virtues of balance, order, proportion and scale.
So what happens now that modernism is loosening its long-held grip? In some cases order and proportion are giving way to their opposite: the architectural equivalent of a whirl-a-gig ride. A new crop of residential design, particularly in Japan, puts homes in tilted and dizzy-making postures. So far the trend is not prevalent enough to earn a name. But if it had a label, it might be Slantism. Nor does it come with the rhetoric that often accompanies fledgling design movements. It's more about an impression, and the modest thrill of sensation.
This three-story reinforced concrete house in Yokahama by Junichi Sampei is sculpture as much as architecture. One of the modernist precepts is that function should be expressed on the exterior. But in this case there is no hint of the family apartment and dance studio within. All is subverted to the teetering effect.
This atelier for a calligrapher stands at the foot of a mountain in Yamanashi, Japan. The calligrapher wanted a view of the nearby rice fields, so the architects, Mana and Kazuyasu Kochi, obliged him with a prow they say was based on the famous scene of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet on the foredeck of the Titanic.
Michael Rantilla, a North Carolina architect, designed this house for himself on a woodsy Raleigh plot as a vertiginous stack of floors, like children's tower on the verge of collapsing.
If Slantism has a practical purpose, it's that a tilting house makes room to park the car. That's the case with the Maison Zufferey, a Swiss house designed by Nunatak Architects at a 30 degree angle from the ground.
When it comes to architecture, we're living in a time of diminished expectations. The iconic buildings that rose so prolifically over the last decade no longer go up. The quieted skyline may be a matter of taste as much as finances: our culture has turned its back on bombast, at least for the moment.
Nobody has learned this more abruptly than Frank Gehry, the master of artful bombast. His design for the multi-billion-dollar Atlantic yards (above) in Brooklyn--a typically flamboyant amalgam of cascading glass and wobbly towers--was scuttled by Bruce Ratner earlier this month. If that weren't bad enough, the new Theater for a New Audience in Brooklyn Gehry was to have designed with Hugh Hardy will proceed without him, and the theatre he was slated to create for Ground Zero looks increasingly unlikely.
In the wake of these letdowns Gehry last week unveiled his most modest plan in memory, a humble shotgun house to be built in the sixth ward of New Orleans. He designed the modular shotgun house, known as the "Modgun," with urban planner Robert Tannen (shown with model left).
No titanium swoops here. Like traditional shotgun houses, it has an elevated pitched roof for natural cooling and stilts for flooding. It will be built on a rundown block on Ursuline Avenue, but it's meant as a prototype that can be duplicated in the various neighborhoods still blighted four years after Hurricane Katrina.
The shotgun house is a 19th cottage built to conform to the city's long narrow lots. It reflects local Cajun culture as much as gumbo or jambalaya. Efforts by Brad Pitt and others to modernize the shotgun shack have met mixed reactions. Will Gehry's surprisingly subdued version court a better reception? "Gehry and Tannen both appreciate the fundamental architectural strength of the shotgun house: the elegant box with the long pitched roof," said Reed Kroloff, the director of Cranbrook Academy and former dean of architecture at Tulane. "They know when to play visually, and when to leave well enough alone. Yes, it's understated. But New Orleans has more than its fair share of gingerbread; it can handle a little restraint."
Win or lose, the disputed Iranian election marks a return to politics for Mir Hussein Mousavi, the reform candidate who challenged the ruling party. Mousavi was a hardcore activist in the Iranian Revolution that overthrew the Shah in 1979, and he served as prime minister until 1989.
So what's he been doing the past 20 years? Mousavi spent his two decades out of politics reinventing himself as a designer and painter. He taught at Tarbiat Modares University in Tehran, and in 1998 he became president of the newly founded Academy of Arts. All the while he was painting a mix of figurative and abstract works (some of which he sold to pay for his presidential campaign) and designing public buildings.
By all accounts, Mousavi has a temperament more suited to an architect than a president. He is a soft-spoken intellectual not given to thundering pronouncements or speechifying. He likes to stay home and watch movies. He may not be a charismatic firebrand, but he's in good company as a statesman-designer.
It's hard to say if Mousavi is a good architect. According to a report on Archinect, he cites the Italian designer Renzo Piano as a major influence. "He takes some elements of modern Japanese architecture, and American postmodern, and then puts them in the context of Iranian architecture," a relative told The New York Times. Judging from the work shown here for a Tehran museum I would say he's something like the Robert A.M. Stern of Iran, a sophisticated classicist who knows how to adapt traditional design for institutional use.
When Bono and the boys take the stage next week in Barcelona for the first date in their yearlong "360º" concert tour, the set will get as much notice as the music. Okay, that may be a stretch. But the stage is a departure from the standard rock concert setup, and the band is known for its lavish set designs (on their last tour, in 2006, U2 showed maps, walking cartoon figures and text on a beaded curtain hung behind the stage).
In fact, the 360º tour takes its name from the stage. Designed by architect Mark Fisher, it places the band on a circular stage smack in the middle of the audience. The stage has no front or back. Nor does it have the stacks of amplifiers that have been a rock concert fixture since the early days of the Grateful Dead. Instead, the speakers are embedded in four legs that support that rise 164 feet to support a cylindrical video screen. "We have some magic,” Bono told MTV, “and we've got some beautiful objects we're going to take around the world, and we're inside that object."
Fisher says he designed the four-legged stage, nicknamed The Claw, in imitation of the Theme Building at LAX International Airport, where a restaurant on parabolic arches. William Pereira and Charles Luckman, in turn, created the Theme Building in 1961 under the influence of late-1950s sci-fi movies.
Are museums and zoos being deceptive when they depict animals in a pristine version of their natural habitat? Should they design exhibits that reflect an idyllic environment, or the reality of an eroding world?
The dioramas designed for natural history museums in the 1920s and 1930s that showed taxidermy animals brought the wonders of the natural world to us. The painted backdrops were real views lifted from the savannah of Kenya or a rainforest in Rwanda. The details were exhaustively researched, but the lighting and painting conveyed some Disney dazzle. As windows onto an exotic world, they were as much about the thrill as the science.
When the American Museum of Natural History in New York began an expansive renovation of its halls in the 1990s they found that none of the scenes depicted in the dioramas still existed. The mountain gorilla tableaux had been visited by a museum staff member who found that the forests on the distant volcanoes had all been cut down and turned into terraced farmland.
Should institutions dedicated to the public understanding of the natural sciences depict a world untouched by civilization as a matter of history (and because they are a sentimental favorite that makes turnstiles spin)? The Schönbrunn Zoo in Vienna has chosen the opposite approach: this spring its animals share their pens with an installation created by artists Christoph Steinbrener and Rainer Dempf that reflects the degradation of animal habitats.
In the world of Steinbrener and Dempf, a rhino shares its pool with an abandoned car and the penguins skitter about beneath an oil pump. Their installations may be more of a provocation to curators and designers than to the public. According to the artists, these scenes are an "experimental set-up" in which the "viewer is forced to reconsider traditional modes of animal presentation and simultaneously to question the authenticity" of restaging natural environments even as they disappear.
If the conversion goes through it could serve as a model for the conversation of aging and abandoned surburban offices across the country. "I think key to the project is how to retrofit the building into an era that requires sustainable new systems," 
In the wake of these letdowns Gehry last week unveiled his most modest plan in memory, a humble shotgun house to be built in the sixth ward of New Orleans. He designed the modular shotgun house, known as the "Modgun," with urban planner 
