First, a history lesson: 500 years ago the harmony and high grandeur of Renaissance painting and architecture yielded to a new style characterized by distorted forms, awkward balances and lurid theatrics. Scholars called it Mannerism.
A new kind of Mannerism will attend the Milan Furniture Fair when it opens next week. As modernism begins to loosen its grip designers (particularly the Dutch contingent) are showing a warped and contorted version of its clean surfaces and straight lines, like this fireplace by Snode Vormgevers.
The New Mannerism, as we'll call it, was hinted at last year when Maarten Baasshowed his Sculpt series (above), with its wavy, wobbly lines. Julie Lasky, former editor of I.D. magazine, said its stumpy profile reminded her of Bedrock, home of the Flintstones. Wilma!
Baas' earlier collection, called Clay, was modeled by hand over a steel frame to assure that each piece was quirky and unique, as if in reaction against modernism's mass production. "The less the thought," he said, "the more the joy."
Design trends often turn up and then vanish, like trial balloons that never pan out. But the New Mannerism looks like it's gaining momentum, with a healthy representation at this year's fair, including this cockeyed dresser called, "What It Is, It Isn't," by Nathan Wierink and Tineke Beunders of Ontwerpduo.
Is the New Mannerism a cousin of the green movement? Bo Reudler, another Dutch designer, seems to think so. In designing his Slow White collection (above), he says, he walked in a forest, communing with the surroundings and breathing in the scent of wood. As he gathered branches for fabricating his work, he tried to capture some of nature's randomness and complexity. "We've lost our connection with nature and our surroundings. This century will be about renewing this connection."
Two years ago the words "green" and "sustainable" were barely uttered at the Milan Furniture Fair, largely because the furniture makers based in Northern Italy have a big investment in their production facilities and are loathe to retrofit them to conform to green principles. Instead, there was much defensive talk about how European manufacturing is de facto green because of its efficiency.
You can be sure green will get more prominent play at this year's fair when it opens on April 22nd, but not always in a literal way. While flat packing and non-toxic finishes are the earnest preoccupations of American designers, Europeans are responding with a more conceptual expression of the natural world. The example most likely to get attention at this year's fair is Vegetal, a plastic chair designed by the French brothers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec.
Rather than design with carbon footprint in mind, the Bouroullec brothers have romanced the appearance of nature with a chair that takes its imagery from the plant world with vine-like structural tendrils fanning out across the seat and back. "The initial intuition was that of a chair which would sprout up like a plant," they said.
The Bouroullecs say Vegetal is a their spin on traditional English garden chairs. In other words, it's a high-tech version of art nouveau, with its flowery forms and twining branches.
I think Vegetal is more accurately described as an example of biomimicry, a genre of design that tries to duplicate the efficiency of nature. Sometimes called "organic essentialism," it's the kind of work that Welsh designer Ross Lovegrove has been doing for years, with water bottles, cameras and other products based on the lean and toned organics whittled to perfection by evolution. Few objects are lighter and stronger than whale bones, as Lovegrove is fond of saying.
In the case of Vegetal, Bouroullecs worked out the form over four full years using computer software and die-cast polyamide. Liquid plastic was injected into a steel mold where it circulated evenly inside the mock branches, just like the sap in a tree trunk.
With all the hoo-ha over laser-cut patterning and mid-century styling, it's easy to forget that design is a business. But is it a profitable business? The folks at Design Investors think it is--or can be with smart management.
Design Investors may be the first attempt to bring the tricky magic of venture capital and private equity to design. Will it bring the breath of life to design seedlings?
Started two years ago by Peter Sallick (left), the former CEO of Waterworks, the firm has so far invested in just three outfits: Rose Tarlow Melrose House, Twill Textiles and Waterworks, Sallick's former employer. Design Investors, which is based in Wilton, Connecticut, used its own funds and pooled with a dozen investors. (Sallick declines to say how much capital they have invested.)
As is often the case with VCs, success relies on bringing their management skills to bear. "We're the most active board members you can imagine," said Meg Touborg, managing partner, who serves as interim CEO of Rose Tarlow Melrose House. Sallick plays the same role with Twill Textiles.
Designers could use some help, particularly during this nuclear winter. Design and business seem to reside in opposing brain lobes, and some of the finest designers lack any notion of how to run a bankable studio. In most cases designers have financed startups through banks or ad hoc loans from friends and family. Design Investors takes a broad definition of design, and they're willing to consider anything from fashion to Web ventures. A candidate's financial structure matters less, they say, than an innovative idea and how it's marketed to customers.
Design Investors also runs an annual invitation-only conference, the Design Leadership Summit, which was held last week in New Orleans. The conference brought together 120 designers, all principals of their own firms, including some big names like Annabelle Selldorf, Thom Felicia, Kathryn Ireland and Calvin Tsao. "They've all achieved real prominence, and they're not seeking design inspiration," said Touborg (right). "What they crave is a better understanding of their industry--how to manage people, how to make good strategic decisions."
The mood was apparently not as gloomy as you might think. Many of the participants said they had received a small but noticeable uptick in work inquires over the last few weeks. "I wouldn't call it robust," Sallick said, "but people did feel that they'd turned a corner."
The Milan Furniture Fair is still two weeks off, but editors and bloggers (many of whom will be staying home this year) are already studying advance photos of new works for telltale signs. In this year of uncertainty, nobody knows which way the wind will blow.
The fair, which is the most influential design event by a wide margin, is a five-day marathon of exhibitions, installations and parties--all of which compete for make-or-break buzz. This year it will be hard to upstage Love Design, an exhibition of sex toys and other objects "that question the very meaning of the word 'love,' the beginning and the end of what binds us together and tears us apart." The 20 works are drawn from a book of the same name published this month by Daab Press, a German publisher known for a mix of design and erotica.
Why is sex stepping up alongside sofas and sconces at this year's fair? For one thing, sex toys have become a big business, and Milan is all about business. They may also be seen as an antidote to the downbeat mood which will no doubt oppress both the sprawling fairgrounds and the modest exhibitions tucked in the back of courtyards. As the coverage gets under way in the weeks ahead it's likely some reports will spin Love Design as a sign that the design community is searching for a human touch after years of modernist austerity. Below is a sampling of what will be shown.
Powered by Arik Levy, an Israeli-born product designer, is a wood jar with an extractable vibrator.
Alexa Lixfeld, a former fashion model based in Hamburg, created a cutlery collection called Metamorphose in which the spoons are half-formed female figures and the forks are male.
Matali Crasset, one of the more inventive young French product designers, made a sex toy called 8ème Ciel (or 8th Heaven) with eight metal balls that move freely inside a silicon massage pad.
This bedside lamp by Matteo Cibic is part of a series of household furnishings that double as pleasure devices. In this case, the lamp changes color when a silicone sex toy is removed from its base.
Vessel One by Adam Farlie is a bed that records intimacies, conversations and incidental stirrings and replays them at random intervals as “audio-memories.”
Traces of an Imaginary Affair by Björn Franke is a set of nine tools which can be used to create bite marks, scratches and other signs of an imaginary affair. Why would anyone need such a thing, you might ask? Franke says he designed the tools after hearing about people who faked affairs to provoke jealous attention from their partners.
Waveform by Sakurako Shimizu is a collection of necklaces and rings laser cut in the shape of digital sound waves representing the voice of French actress Jeanne Moreau reading a love poem called “Cet Amour” by Jacques Prévert.
Belly Button by Romain Gnidzaz and Marie Lambertis is tableware with a midriff touch.
The term "cocooning" came into use by design editors after September 11 as shorthand for the tendency, real or imagined, to linger in the safety of one's home. The term is enjoying a second life now that evenings out are a financial strain.
The Russian space program took cocooning to a whole new level on Tuesday by locking a six-man team into a mock spaceship for a 105-day stay simulating the isolation of space travel. Early next year another team will check in for a 520-day confinement, roughly the duration of a round trip to Mars with a month-long stop on the planet.
The isolation experiments are meant to lay the foundation for a Russian-led trip to Mars, known as Mars 500, sometime in the next 20 years.
In preparation, Russian authorities have made a science of cocooning. Of all the dangers a Mars mission would face, they consider the crew's physical and psychological welfare the most crucial. Dr. Mark Belakovskiy, head of the Mars 500 project, called the crew "the most valuable and vulnerable component" of the trip.
So how have the Russians designed for deep cocooning? On the space shuttle NASA provided only sleeping bags slung like hammocks and sleeping capsules that resemble morgue lockers. But the Russians consider personal space crucial to well-being over a long haul, so the mock spaceship inside a brick warehouse on the outskirts of Moscow contains six individual wood-paneled compartments for crew members, each with a narrow bed, desk, chair and shelves. It may be disappointing to learn that it looks more like your freshman dorm room than a set from 2001: A space Odyssey or Barbarella.
The lockdown also includes a kitchen-dining room, a living room, and a control room. Limited to three tons of water, the crew will use napkins to wipe off grime and a sauna to steam off dirt. They will eat dehydrated food and breathe recycled air.
Not unlike the producers of reality TV shows, behavioral scientists will watch for signs of conflict via video cameras mounted throughout the cramped rooms.
Viewers of MTV's Real World will not be surprised to learn that boy-girl conflicts can sour a mission. So this time it's an all-male crew. During an isolation experiment 10 years ago a Russian man twice forcibly tried to kiss a female colleague, setting off a minor international incident. She accused him of harassment; by way of response, Russian officials called her hysterical and depressed.
This time around team members will likely face more conventional problems, like what to do with the garbage.
The Milan Furniture Fair opens next month, and with it, the design world’s annual bacchanal of hype and hoopla. More than any other event on the design calendar, Milan sets the agenda for the year ahead, and not just for furniture. But will the economic downturn derail the prevailing design movements? Which way, design?
At the sprawling fairgrounds on the outskirts of the city, visitors will mill around new works by design’s boldface names. By night swarms of editors and bloggers will search for the next cool thing (and the next cold Peroni) at impromptu shows tucked in the back of cobblestone courtyards in the Zona Tortona.
The most discerning observers pick up signals from the white noise. The trick is to identify the design currents of the day and figure out what they mean. What follows are five design trends that have been percolating since last year's fair. We can't wait to see how they shift or veer, go mainstream or fizzle out, at this year's event.
A conspicuous number of European furniture manufacturers have been reissuing vintage designs, in this case a lacquered trolley designed by Bruno Mari in 1962. Faced with the downturn and competition from China, they’re playing their trump card: the venerable tradition of European design.
As the design world looks for alternatives to the sharp lines and clean surfaces of mass-produced modernism, a new genre of rough-hewn furniture has come to the fore, like this chair by the Brazilian designer Hugo Franca.
Chalk this up as another reaction against the austerity of modernism: We've been seeing a breed of squat, stumpy furniture with wavy lines, much of which looks like it belongs in Fred and Wilma Flintstone's living room. This example is a liquor cabinet by Josef Blersch and Mander Liefting.
The big bang at last year’s Milan fair was the arrival of “design art,” a new category of furniture and other pieces sold as fine art (and with art world price tags.) The wardrobe above, for example, was designed by Dutch designer Tord Boontje for Mallet, a venerable antiques dealer based in London. The biggest question at this year’s fair: Will design art wilt in this economic climate?
When the British designer Jasper Morrison created this simple pine bedside table three years ago, he was calling for design to put aside frivolous and fantastic preoccupations and return to its utilitarian roots. Finding beauty in austerity will likely be a predominant theme at this year’s show.
It's one of the strangest footnotes of the entire Bernard Madoff scandal: Newspaper accounts of the episode noted his obsessive insistence on furnishing both his triplex headquarters in the midtown Lipstick Building and his London office in a matching palette of black and gray. He was notorious for demanding a monochrome décor consisting of furniture made from black ash, gray walls with black detailing and black mouse pads. He even had a black refrigerator for the trading floor, and according to New York,
"he drank out of square drinking glasses, kept his pencils in square
holders, and had only square trash cans in his office. He couldn’t
stand curves, which must have presented an obvious problem for a man
who works in an oval building."
His focus on minimalism and order traveled with him. His jet, of course, was a uniform gray. "On the occasions he visited London, we'd spend days before his arrival leveling the blinds, making sure the computer screens were an identical height, lining every picture up straight," an employee told the London Daily Mail. "No paper was allowed on the desks. We'd use black marker pens to touch up the skirting boards and the doors. Anything that looked as if it had a mark or scratch on it, we'd have to retouch."
Madoff's lair is one example of a certain kind of monochrome minimalism that may be remembered as the house style of "irrational exuberance," to borrow a coinage from former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan. When Oliver Stone makes the inevitable movie about derivative traders, you can be sure the set designers will surround the actors with spotless swaths of black and gray.
Madoff was not alone in embracing this pre-crash power palette: In House of Cards, an account of the Bear Stearns collapse published this month, William D. Cohan describes CEO Jimmy Cayne presiding over the firm's unraveling from a Madison Avenue office equipped with black furniture and ebony walls.
The same use of basic black was popular with the media titans in those overheated years. When IAC, Barry Diller's Internet outfit, moved two years ago into a new New York City headquarters on West 18th Street designed by Frank Gehry with ship-like contours and a sweeping minimalist lobby, journalist John Hockenberry noticed an oddly Madoffian detail: a wealth of symmetrical black pencils neatly stacked in rooms throughout the building. "Standing in cups, ready for action, extra-thick and irresistible, is an abundance of No. 2 soft lead pencils with the IAC logo on them in white," Hockenberry wrote in Metropolis magazine. "An employee who would not allow her name to be used volunteered that they were 'someone's obsession,' you can guess whose."
It's often said that design acts as a responsive gauge of the moment. If so, then what does the preponderance of black say about the halls of power and the people who inhabited them? For one thing, it suggests a monolithic façade that discouraged questioning.
Update: Hours after we posted this item yesterday about foodies lobbying for a White House vegetable garden, Michelle Obama announced that the the White House would comply. She is scheduled to sink a shovel into soil near the South Lawn fountain later today in preparation for a 1,100-square-foot vegetable garden, the first at the White House since World War II. It’s a symbolically important gain for advocates of local food consumption and organic produce. Washington fifth graders will tend the garden, the First Lady said, along with every member of her family, including the president. It’s not yet known if she will appoint a Farmer-in-Chief. If she does, we nominate Fritz Haeg, a designer and environmental activist whom we discuss below.
I have a message for Michelle Obama: Fritz Haeg is standing by with trowel in hand.
On Sunday, Alice Waters, the co-owner of Chez Panisse and a force behind the Slow Food movement, told Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes that she has petitioned the Obamas and their predecessors to plant a vegetable garden on the White House grounds. "I have been talking non-stop about the symbolism of an edible landscape at the White House," Waters said. "I think it says everything about stewardship of the land and about the nourishment of a nation."
The idea is gaining momentum. In October Michael Pollan wrote an open letter in The New York Times magazine urging the appointment of a White House farmer to transform "five prime south-facing acres of the White House lawn and plant in their place an organic fruit and vegetable garden" whose produce would be prepared by the White House chef and given to local food banks. In November a website was launched to lobby for a White House farmer.
It's hard to picture a compost pile on the South Lawn, but it may not be far fetched given the First Lady's emphasis on food safety. If it does happen, I hope the Obamas appoint Fritz Haeg Farmer-in-Chief. Over the last four years Fritz has conducted a project called Edible Estates in which he persuades a series of suburban families to rip up their lawns and replace them with fruit and vegetable plantings. The eighth Edible Estate will be planted this spring at a housing project in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan.
In equal measure arty intervention and radical landscape design, Fritz challenges our assumption that manicured lawns are beautiful and subsistence gardens are ugly. Of course it's a provocation--the neighbors' reaction is part of the fun. But Edible Estates is also a way of advocating for transparency in consumer habits: in the Edible Estates, everything is on view.
So how would Fritz transform the White House grounds? For starters he would make the 18 acres of the south lawn if not entirely wild then at least "a lot looser." Because Edible Estates is founded on the notion that the gardeners themselves consume the produce, he might put aside plots for the White House staff, and the first family. "I'd like to see photos of Sasha and Malia out there weeding on the weekend," he told me this week. "I think that would be a lovely thing."
Is squash and rhubarb fattening on the world's most famous lawn this generation's version of Jackie Kennedy's famous redecorating? Dream House, a book by Ulysses Grant Dietz and Sam Watters to be published in September, charts how the White House reflects the preoccupations of the time. George Washington used it as a country estate. For Teddy Roosevelt it was a mansion in the style of the robber barons. At the onset of suburbia, Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower barbequed on the roof of the south portico. So it's entirely fitting that the White House expresses subsistence and sustainability since they may be the defining issues of our culture.
Fixing and reformulating seems to be the ambition of the moment, now matter your field of interest. Jessica Helfand, an editor at Designer Observer, surely had this in mind last month when she posted a list of items that she feels needs reworking. Putting aside larger issues, like healthcare and political chicanery, she listed her picks for everyday things that could stand some revamping, a checklist that includes lottery tickets, hearses and IRS forms. In the comments field following her post readers took issue with some of her choices (who knew the hearse is so popular?) and added their own pet peeves, including lower back tattoos, rain pants and Gov. Rod Blagojevich's hair, among others.
Political figures and designers tend to take opposing paths to the improved world we imagine for ourselves. Instead of large undertakings, like tax reform or nation making, designers are inclined to work on a small scale, the scale of serifs and moldings. As Mies van der Rohe said, "God is in the details."
With that in mind, I asked some distinguished design figures to come up with their picks for everyday objects in need of improvement:
Maya Lin, designer and artist. Plastic Furniture "Plastic lasts forever, so why not create amazing furniture designs that are collectible and made from all of our old plastic bottles and bags?"
Chip Kidd, author and graphic designer. TV/DVD Remote Control "Why does it all have to be so impossibly complicated? It makes one long for the good old-fashioned boob tube with its single channel knob."
Fritz Haeg, designer, artist and environmental activist. Clothesline "We are ready for a well-designed, simple and sexy clothesline worthy of both front and back yard. It could be really sculptural, or it could disappear altogether. Instead of offending the neighbors, it should inspire envy (and help eliminate the need for the nasty gas/electric dryer)."
Julie Lasky editor of Change Observer, a forthcoming web magazine affiliated with Design Observer. Wire grocery cart "Clumsy, child-unfriendly (despite kiddie seats), and hard to pull out of their clumps. I'm sure we can do better."
Stefan Boublil, founder, The Apartment, a design agency. Nail and hammer "It seems that we've been banging away for years without ever giving a second thought to all the bruised thumbs and unstable material marriages brought about by the unholy duo. There's got to be a better way to stick two pieces of something together or hang a picture on the wall, isn't there?"
Mitchell Owens, executive editor, Elle Décor Plastic Lids for Take-Out Coffee "No matter how well-designed such lids appear to the naked eye, they always end up leaking or dribbling when in use; the latter reaction could be a design flaw related to my own mouth, but I don't believe so."
Paul Gunther, president, Institute of Classical Architecture & Classical America. Airport Security "As the world zooms toward the tenth anniversary of 9/11, I'm astonished at how little progress has been made with the design of airport security stations, portals, gateways—call them what you will. Even the new Jet Blue terminal at JFK, conceived and built in the post-attack age, features a surprisingly haphazard, seemingly ex post facto superimposed line-weaving corral leading to collapsible tables set up for standard issue plastic tubs."
Justin Anthony, publisher, Materialicious.com. Hearing Aids "I'm hard of hearing and wear hearing aids, and the one thing I've been waiting for my entire life is to be able to use the telephone! More specifically, I've been waiting for a videophone that actually works in real-time. I'm a lip reader, so I need to be able to see whom I'm talking to. Cell phones could have a web cam built-in like a lot of laptops have nowadays. What would be even better is a wristwatch videophone like in the old Dick Tracy comic books."
Heather. Sage. Claret. Plum. One of the most conspicuous design trends of the last year or so has been the blitz of color -- a full-on rainbow of bright assertive hues--in places where subdued tones had previously reigned.
The fashionable kitchen, for years cloaked in stainless steel and creamy beige countertops, is growing dandified with plum colored refrigerators and taxi-yellow dishwashers. Viking, for example, added four shades last year to bring the color roster for its ovens up to 14. Blue Star, that also makes restaurant grade ovens for the home, has tricked itself out with 190 colors. These and other manufacturers are looking for the competitive advantage that comes with custom color, though they should probably issue a buyer beware warning: appliances are a long-range investment, and that orange microwave will no doubt look like bell bottoms in a few years.
Home electronics, that have historically been encased in black or beige boxes, is also undergoing the peacock effect, in part because manufacturers are hiring signature designers to give their products cachet. KEM Acoustics, for example, recently hired Ross Lovegrove, the British designer, to create 6-foot-tall speakers as sculptural as anything Henry Moore created. The aim, of course, is to bring electronics out from the credenzas and into the foreground.
Underlying these trends is a growing appreciation for how color helps sell products. So who decides what color your next refrigerator will be? The public tends to assume these choices are left to the vagaries of fashion. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The color palette for virtually every field--furniture, electronics, advertising, cars, etc.--is determined years in advance by a little-known non-profit organization called the Color Management Group. At its five annual conferences held all over the world, hundreds of members convene in private sessions to debate what colors should be prescribed for the coming years. In generating their forecast, the delegates consider a broad range of political and cultural events, including Broadway shows (expect to see more of Shrek green) and sports events (the Beijing Olympics has put the red tone of the Chinese flag into wide circulation).
As if to combat the financial gloom around us, the colorists’ picks for the coming seasons include Mimosa, a brilliant yellow hue that suggests nothing so much as sunny optimism.
With all the hoo-ha over laser-cut patterning and mid-century styling, it's easy to forget that design is a business. But is it a profitable business? The folks at 
Design Investors also runs an annual invitation-only conference, the Design Leadership Summit, which was held last week in New Orleans. The conference brought together 120 designers, all principals of their own firms, including some big names like 
