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SUNDAY, JUNE 13, 2010 Designers consumed by what, and why, we acquire design from E1
I came across Waxman and her wares one May weekend in New York, in Pratt’s booth at the Inter- national Contemporary Furni- ture Fair, which bills itself as “a global summit for what’s best and what’s next in design.” The yearly expo is a 145,000-square-foot madhouse of fancy goods — glass-and-steel tables, LED lamps and gleaming CD racks. (A ques- tion: Why do advanced designers insist on making elaborate racks for CDs, fanning them out or mo- torizing them or clipping onto each one? We already have a per- fect rack for CDs. It’s called a shelf.) Nearly every object could have been designed decades ago, when no one knew a Jetsons planet might include melting ice caps. It’s as though ICFF, going back to the future, still has one word for us: “plastics.” The polished banalities of ICFF made clear just how far Waxman really is from the the consumer- friendly objects made by most of her colleagues — even the most touted of them, such as Philippe Starck and Ron Arad. At ICFF, few designers seemed to recog- nize that fancy consumables are the last thing this planet needs more of.
Our deadliest problems — en- vironmental, economic and polit- ical — come out of the goods we cherish. Our huge new houses eat up energy, then throw it back into the air as wasted heat and light. Our cars — as well as our foods, it turns out — suck in oil and spew out greenhouse gases. Our pack- aging and products gobble elec- tricity and matter when they’re made, then drown the world in trash when thrown out. The people who designed those
goods helped get us into this mess, and now a few are keen to get us out. Waxman, with her concerned
ceramics, might have found com- pany in another roundup of cur- rent design that opened the same weekend as ICFF. “Why Design Now?,” the fourth design trienni- al at the Smithsonian’s Cooper- Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, is dedicated to proj- ects with a conscience. There are extension cords that light up to remind you that they’re drawing power, and high-style chairs molded out of eco-friendly flax and botanical resins. There are plans for everything from high- rise urban farms, which are still mostly a blue-sky idea, to the high-speed, high-efficiency, re- cyclable trains about to be de- ployed in Italy. For all of us who care about our
planet, this attention to making things better is music to our ears. The problem is, our eyes never get the message. Just from look- ing, you could never guess the green ideals behind most of these objects. They don’t look much dif- ferent from the ones that got us in trouble in the first place. Glancing around at the Coo-
per-Hewitt, you could almost be at ICFF, or any design show from the past 50 years. Nearly all its objects deploy more or less the same Jetsonian stylings that
DAYNA SMITH FOR THE WASHINGTON POST 1
1. The “Bathtub Garden,” conceived by students, teachers and parents at the Children’s Studio School in Washington, makes a virtue — and a full-blown aesthetic — of necessity. A limited budget, and a commitment to reuse, led the school to its new garden planters.
2. Hanging lamps from the “Jupiter Scrap Light” series by a Seattle firm called Graypants. It looks like a standard modernist fixture — shades of Sputnik and the 1939 World’s Fair Perisphere — but its materials subtly undermine its utopian purity. Its parts are laser-cut from used cardboard boxes whose original labels and printing are left intact.
2 GRAYPANTS
“new” design has promoted in the modern age. A netbook com- puter, designed for the world’s underprivileged, is made of glit- zy-green plastic. Those high-rise farm buildings might as well be from the cover of “Amazing Sto- ries,” circa 1960. Barely a single designer seems to realize that for an object to make a real differ- ence, it needs to have symbolic as well as practical force. The symbolism of modern de- sign was all about helping to move product. Designs by Bau- haus masters and their heirs, in- cluding those on show in the tri- ennial, help us find pleasure in consumption, with the idea that owning more of the right things
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can inmprove the world. Modern- ism’s glossy, factory-fresh forms dispel all doubts about the vir- tues of modern technology. This is just what truly new de- sign, out on Waxman’s cutting edge, will have to combat. It obvi- ously can’t hope to do away with objects — that ascetic, Luddite ideal is as far-fetched and ob- noxious as anything embraced by the prophets of technology. What design can do is give us a new sense of the moral weight that ev- ery object comes freighted with. It’s what Waxman does with her ceramic bowls. A few figures in the triennial also achieve it. A Dutch designer named Jetske de Groot designs chairs
made from usable scraps of other chairs that have broken. She mates a chromed bottom with a turned-wood top, the base of a bar stool with the back of a task chair. But rather than covering up the awkward moments where two chairs meet, de Groot em- phasizes them, by fixing the joints with huge wads of colored epoxy. This mix-and-match look isn’t just a novel aesthetic — it’s a new aesthetic that talks, as loud- ly as possible, about the need to reduce, reuse and recycle. De Groote’s hand-glued furniture may have a limited circulation, but it spreads ideas in a way that a sleek modernist chair never
3 CHRIS RUCKER/RUCKERCORP
could, however eco-friendly its materials. Selling 50,000 seats made of flax and bio-resin does little good for our future if it doesn’t also send the message that buying fewer seats would be a still better thing. Even ICFF included plenty of
“green” materials and objects. But their ecological conscience was being used as just another selling point.
Good contemporary design ought to help us put on the brakes. It needs to have a hint of difficulty built into it, as fine art has since at least the time of Cé- zanne. A central issue in much of modern art has been the ques- tioning of art itself. Contempo- rary design could also cast doubt on its field. Design may never really move forward until it em- braces the option of an off-put- ting ugliness. For design objects fully dedi-
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cated to that mission, I had to come back to Washington. This summer, the National Geograph- ic Museum is presenting a tour- ing Cooper-Hewitt show called “Design for the Other 90%.” As its title suggests, it’s about designing for all of the people in the world left behind by mass consump- tion.
A few of the objects are Jet- sonian: A filter, made to let you suck water straight from a dirty pond, is made from the same blue plastics as a Braun electric tooth- brush. But many other objects keep their small-is-beautiful ide- als on view. A foot-powered water pump is made of local bamboo, accepting that the best of objects can be — and should look — cob- bled together. Mohammed Bah Abba’s “Pot-
in-Pot Cooler” simply puts one lo- cally made clay pot inside an- other, with wet sand in between to provide evaporative cooling. In Nigeria, he claims, that can stretch the life of a farmer’s toma-
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to from two to 20 days. Just as im- portantly, it sends the visible message that improvisation — low-tech, low-carbon and local — can count as more “beautiful,” and certainly as more important, than any design from ICFF. In those terms, the most “beau-
tiful” design objects I’ve seen we- ren’t in a show at all. I came across them on my morning run, in an empty lot beside the Chil- dren’s Studio School near 13th and V streets NW. This spring, six vintage bathtubs—two pink, two blue and two white—were put to use as planters in the schoolkids’ vegetable garden. According to parent Brandi Redo, the garden’s wooden planters had rotted out over the winter, and the school was trying to dream up a cheap replacement with good drainage when some students piped up: “Well, bathtubs have drains.” Re- do and another parent went hunting at Community Forklift, the nonprofit that recycles con- struction supplies, and sure enough, “the first thing that we saw was bathtubs that they were trying to get rid of quickly,” Redo remembers, at $10 or $15 each. The arts-themed school is dedi-
cated to reuse — kids there use trash to make sculpture — so the bathtubs were a perfect fit. More than that, from this critic’s point of view, they achieve a quirky new look that lets its principles show. Such aesthetics are still a hard sell. “I imagine that the teachers will want to beautify the tubs,” says Redo. She explains that two classes already have plans to hide their planters’ bathtubness under shiny mosaic or tile. That way, those planters will look more like something that you’d want to buy. And less like something that we need to have.
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3. The “Double Chair #1” by New York designer Chris Rucker, from his solo show now at Industry Gallery in Washington. Rucker uses ultra-low-end materials and the simplest of forms to make objects that resist the visual cliches of high-end consumption.
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