nalinamoses

Jan 10

Should a microwave oven look like a microwave oven, and, if so, what exactly is that? My graciously appointed office pantry has a Sharp Half Pint, a smaller-than-average microwave, about the size of a bowling ball, that’s perfect for dorm rooms, small apartments, and office pantries. But the oven mechanism — the bright white box where we set our leftovers and stale coffee to be irradiated — is wrapped in curved plastic panels that are trying very hard to make the appliance look like more than just a microwave.

There’s a recurring joke on 30 Rock about Jack’s half-cooked marketing schemes for GE microwaves. (In one episode his team makes the case really big and puts four wheels, four doors, and a steering wheel on it.) There must have been similar brainstorming sessions at Sharp. The earliest Half Pints have a simple, rectangular white plastic case that echoes the inner box. Then, in 2000, Sharp released a series with curved translucent cases in rainbow hues, similar to the colored iMacs. Today the oven is only available in opaque black. Our office Half Pint is a pretty, see-through, cornflower blue. Each time I open it I have to wonder what a microwave oven was meant to look like, because I doubt that this is it. Unlike the iMac, with its freely curving case, the Half Pint case remains squished and cubish; it sticks close to the contours of the oven inside. It’s nice to be able to see through the front panel to the sleek metal box within. Perhaps Sharp can engineer a microwave with a clear, orthogonal case, unsoftened by curves and color. That would be honest and also, maybe, unappetizing.

Oct 23

I had a revelation inside one of the very hip (and very dark) lobby restrooms at the Ace Hotel. It was at the moment I dropped my hands into the narrow slot at the top of the Airblade hand dryer as if they were pieces of bread to be toasted. It felt vaguely humiliating, the same way opening your mouth super-wide for the dentist does. (My dinner companion said that this peculiar motion reminded him of the way women in the old Palmolive commercials dipped their hands into small bowls of the green fluid.) I wondered why the dryer wasn’t simply designed so that the slot is horizontal. This way it could be accessed in a more relaxed way, especially by those who are especially tall or short or in wheelchairs. A horizontal machine would stick out further from the wall, but could be tucked next to the sink and reached by swinging one’s hands over from under the faucet. It all seemed terribly obvious.

But Dyson, who design and sell the Airblade, care little about ergonomics or common sense. They’re interested in peddling products that look like they’re revolutionary rather than products whose operations are so seamless that they might have a chance to actually be revolutionary. I’ve never used a Dyson vacuum cleaner or fan. Like the Airblade, these products have a high-tech contemporary gloss, with strong shapes, clean lines, and a silvery finish. The vacuum cleaner turns dramatically on a big, visible ball pivot and the fan is a perfect circle. The Airblade doesn’t have those alluring geometries, but it certainly looks a lot smarter than a conventional metal enamel hand dryer, that kind that gets scratched and dented and wheezes and heaves and never really gets your hands dry enough. But is it? It might require less time and energy to dry one’s hands in an Airblade, but it requires a highly unnatural motion. This machine takes the mindless act of drying one’s hands and makes it onerous.

Jul 11

I overheard a man in our hotel lobby in Helsinki say that he wanted to visit the Hard Rock Cafe to pick up an only-available-there souvenir t-shirt. It’s with the same abject touristic spirit that I visited the Marimekko flagship, hoping to pick up a very cool, very authentic kind of souvenir, one in keeping with the city’s designation as World Design Capital 2012. The store turned out to be off-putting. While the brand’s graphics (like their map of Helsinki) are always charming, that charm just doesn’t always find its way into the products. The store’s two floors were merchandised unimaginatively, with products I’d already seen before, in patterns that were overly familiar, with laughingly expensive prices. Ten American dollars for a plastic change purse? Forty for a glass votive candle holder? The quality of the goods just didn’t justify it. The dresses were shapeless and and the linens were coarse; they didn’t feel luxurious at all.

What really inspired were the Iittala glasses and plates I stumbled across in the housewares section of an unassuming department store further off the main street. Even the simplest pieces here (water glasses, pitchers, cereal bowls) were pristinely shaped and finished, in dreamy, watery hues. A new line of Iittala tableware called Korento by designers Klaus Haapaniemi and Heikki Orvola was graced with a complex flower-and-insect pattern that is very close to sublime. It feels both old-world and contemporary, and definitely Finnish. I stopped and thought, for just a moment, about carrying some place settings home. They would have made an entirely fitting souvenir.

Jun 19

Scandinavians are awfully cavalier about their treasures. The Munch canvases in Norway’s National Gallery are displayed near rooms with open windows. (More about the rooms, and the paintings, later.) The Danish crown jewels, on display in the basement of Rosenborg Castle in Copenhagen, a royal residence from the seventeenth century, are crowded in vitrines that tourists squeeze through and photograph without supervision. In any other country (which is to say, in the United States), pieces this precious would be secured with armed guards and bulletproof glass in a bunker.

While they’re appropriately dazzling, the Danish crown jewels aren’t as formidable as the English or as fairytale-wondrous as the Russian. By comparison they are, like the security, remarkably informal. What struck me most was how so many of the designs steer away from abstraction and incorporate flowers and figures. It gives them a fizzy, Pop-Art sensibility. There’s a charming chain strung with elephant charms, a small lion bowl, and several pieces with skulls in them. This seventeenth-century chalice has a porcelain skull with glittering stone eyes. It’s kooky and Gothic, and calls to mind both Hamlet and Damien Hirst. The official English-language museum text reassures us that the skull is a symbol of “eternity” rather than mortality. Graced with diamonds and emeralds and set in gold, with a dramatically flaring base, it possesses a seriousness that so much contemporary skull imagery, which adorns everything from oxford shirts to baby clothes, just doesn’t. It’s grave.

May 25

The product at ICFF that gave me the most pleasure was a silly one: a fussball table by R S Barcelona with teams of female players. Very early in the morning, after a tortuous trip from home that included three subway transfers and a descent into the basement of the Javitz Center, it made me smile. The table comes in different candy-colored metal enamel finishes, all far too pretty for a bar. Their bright sheen drew me in and then, a full minute later, I realized what was really going on.

There’s nothing feminist about the table and nothing revolutionary about it either. It’s all in the service of the same rather dumb parlor game and time-waste. But it’s refreshing to see female figure primed for action rather than dress-up, and it’s reassuring that the table is from Spain. In America the likeness of a female fussball team would most likely have been implemented (and then interpreted) in the spirit of Title IX. My image of Spanish womanhood had always been the eye-popping, overdressed Madrilenas in Pedro Almodovar films. This toy throws a new figure into the mix.

May 24

I saw a young man at this year’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) ride a bike through it, and it struck me that he had exactly the right idea. This year’s show is significantly smaller than it’s been in previous years, but it still fills the entire lower level of the Javitz Center. The show is usually fun to walk through, and each new booth has the potential to surprise and delight. But this year I spent just an hour on the floor and then took a seat while my friend finished her viewing. The show felt like an endless array of the same handful of products: artisinal wood tables, artisinal hand-blown glass lamps, and artisinal wallcoverings.

I’m all for a return to craft, sustainable materials, and small-scale fabrication. But most of the artisinal-minded products at ICFF are too obsessively designed and machined to be authentically artisinal, or even artsy. Their one-off hand-finished look is just an aesthetic. It’s obvious that behind the reclaimed materials and artfully irregular finishes, highly ambitious trained designers (frustrated architects, perhaps?) are at work. The rage for handmade stuff has already been parodied, lovingly, by the iconic Put a Bird On it! skit on Portlandia. What’s the limit to the number of artisinal products the market can bear? Isn’t it just a matter of time before the sensibility, like all other trends, falls out of fashion?

Jan 24

Last week interior designer Clodagh (like Cher and Madonna, there’s no last name required) concluded a presentation of her chic, contemporary bathroom designs with a heartfelt appeal for water conservation. She showed images of happy, hydrated children around the world, and of a toilet/lavatory like this one, with a sink over the toilet tank that reuses handwashing water for flushing. It seemed clever and obvious and, also, too weird to be true. Will the skinny little faucet provide enough water to rinse your hands properly? Will water splash up from the shallow basin onto the toilet seat? And will it be awkward leaning over the toilet seat to brush your teeth? While I see how this toilet would work well in small, retrofit powder rooms, I wouldn’t feel comfortable specifying it for a client. There’s still, for me, a strangeness about seeing a toilet and a lavatory combined so seamlessly.

So many popular green construction strategies rely on advanced technologies like photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, and geothermal wells. While the systems are energy-saving, and becoming more and more affordable, it’s simpler, low-tech solutions that might be the most powerful. There are sun movement studies, exterior plantings, and super-insulating construction methods architects can use to help heat and cool rooms more economically. This toilet/lavatory has a similar low-tech vibe, which might limit its appeal to style-conscious clients and designers. How can manufacturers make these types of products, that are so important to green design, positively alluring? And how can designers overcome their biases?

Jan 12

Vision-impaired, temporarily, from dilating drops administered during a routine eye exam, I stumbled home from the doctor’s office like a movie drunk, navigating by counting blocks, and attaching myself to other pedestrians to cross the street. I couldn’t read street signs, gauge the distance of oncoming traffic, or see clearly into store windows. For the hour or so that the drops remained in effect, I was unable to read, write, use my phone, or move around my neighborhood with any degree of confidence. Powerfully, if only temporarily, disoriented, I came home, sat down, and waited for the effects of the drops to subside. It all made me acutely appreciative of my eyesight.

At their design triennial last year the Cooper-Hewitt included a pair of self-adjustable eyeglasses designed by Josh Silver for Adaptive Eyewear, a non-profit overseen by the Centre for Vision in the Developing World. A wearer can adjust the lenses with the turn of a dial to correct refractive problems, without an eye exam or prescription. Silver was trained as an atomic physicist, but now he’s working to bring improved vision to one billion people internationally before 2020. A pair of these eyeglasses can be life-changing for someone without access to formal vision care; it’s some kind of gift. And the frames have a nice retro, Encyclopedia Brown-goes-steampunk feeling. Elaine Scarry has written about the deep beauty of the light bulb, describing how this seemingly inert object transformed our lives, releasing our bodies and imaginations from darkness. I’d say that eyeglasses are similarly transformative.

Jan 9

I subscribe to the myth, still. I believe that Modernism is something entirely divorced from what went before, a historical rupture, a revolution. But the exhibit celebrating reknown nineteenth-century New York furniture maker Duncan Phyfe on view now at the Met makes it seem much less so. Phyfe opened his workshop in 1794 and died in 1854. His work impresses because, like a lot of great work, while it seems absolutely of its time it also looks far forward.

As displayed in the small, open, interconnected galleries in the museum’s American Wing, adjacent to the work of his contemporaries, Phyfe’s pieces have a singular assurance. They are finer, smarter and less fussy, with more elemental profiles. And they are stronger, more fit, than the other Victorian pieces, which seem to be drowning in their own over-ripe Gothic and classical embellishments, some so much so that it’s hard to determine what purpose they serve. Is that a side table or an umbrella stand? A console or a bench. After taking in the Phyfe exhibit my friend and I walked through galleries packed with Arts and Craft, Art Deco and Shaker treasures, arriving finally at the museum’s famous Frank Lloyd Wright-designed period room. The Duncan Phyfe exhibit was a perfect overture.

Jan 4

A few years ago Thomasville launched The Ernest Hemingway Furniture Collection with four lines called “Paris,” “Kenya,” “Key West,” and “Havana,” inspired by the great writer’s travels. The pieces, exaggerated versions of regional styles, had a real appeal. (The company still sells Hemingway furniture in some of these styles, but now it’s only classified by room.) The furniture richly evoked the mythology of the writer. And it was just a beginning. Thomasville could have followed with “Ketchum,” “Pamplona,” and “Oak Park.” Hemingway had so many lives, so many incarnations. Every reader can sift through them and choose the Hemingway she likes best.

After reading A Moveable Feast, “Paris” became my favorite. That memoir, in which Hemingway describes his life there as a young writer in the 1920’s, was completed in the late 1950’s, decades afterwards. In the book Hemingway remembers Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso and F. Scott Fitzgerald. And he remembers his (first) wife, his (first) son, and his work. He rented a small, unheated garret for writing, and climbed the steps each morning with empty copy books, pencils, and a pocketful of oranges. He struggled over the empty pages all day, and the oranges sometimes froze before he could eat them. This Hemingway, remembered softly, is the one that appears in Woody Allen’s movie Midnight in Paris, and he’s entirely winning. The movie gives us a Stein, a Picasso and a Fitzgerald that are convincing, but it’s Hemingway, played by Corey Stoll, that really springs to life. He stares boldly and impassively at whomever he’s with, and speaks in slow, absolute declarations that are at once stylistically accurate and richly satirical. He’s always drinking and challenging men to boxing matches, but we don’t see any of the consequences. We only see the young man.