Designs for Living

Sculptors, noting the enviable prominence acquired by the few pieces of furniture isolated in the open spaces of the modern house, have long since seized the opportunity to make them into true pieces de resistance. Isamu Noguchi, the Japanese-American abstract sculptor, turned his evocative vision to furniture in the late 1940s, designing powerful, amorphous, biomorphic shapes (mammary cocktail tables, phallic sofas) that would brook little competition from other objects in a room. A 1952 group of chairs by sculptor Harry Bertoia was planned specifically for modeling in the round, for completeness and interest of form from any angle, three-quarter as well as back, front and profile. Nine years later, still fashionable to the Nth degree, these effervescent beauties in radiant upholstery usually find themselves set at angles in interiors, seldom more than one in a room, and each a star.

Most outré of all furniture designers today are Estelle and Erwine Laverne – a darkly mysterious couple, silent in movement, fiery in temperament, who blaze with a sense of the fabulous. Their flights of fancy include a series of plastic flower-shaped chairs (the tulip, the lotus, the buttercup), and invisible chairs made of clear plastic. These latter, the Lavernes say, are supposed to assist the architectural desire for uncluttered, continuing space, and many find their kaleidoscopic color reflections entrancing. An infernal, science-fiction variation of the clear plastic group is the electric chair, whose edges light up. The Lavernes do not acclaim the architectural virtues of this one.

A warmer, more intimate aspect of modern design – some call it coy – that developed parallel with but independently of the industry-minded Bauhaus mainstream was the crafts-focused Scandinavian school. True Scandinavian designers talk of their work in language similar to that of the Bauhaus gray beards – integrity of materials, exposure of structure, and all that. But what the Bauhaus did out of categorical morality the Scandinavians do out of love. They love the feel and look and warmth and weight of wood, that time-honored material all but ignored by the Bauhaus except in its most machine-done forms, such as molded plywood and steamed bentwood. And the Scandinavians love the idea of handcraftsmanship; they exploit the joys of handwork in gently modulated, sculptured wood surfaces, the turns and joints made poignant by changes in grain markings. While every length of steel and every sheet of plastic looks the same as the next, they are fond of pointing out, each specimen of wood is as individual as a fingerprint.

“People need wood,” says Jens Risom the only top Danish designer to make his reputation on American soil – though he is the first to defer to two of his native countrymen, Hans Wegner and Finn Juhl, as the greatest artists in the Danish school. (The Metropolitan Museum recently purchased a Wegner chair as its first example of modern design as a work of art.) “In these days,” Risom elaborates, “when a building is made of glass and steel, people need the live texture, the depth texture that only a piece of wood can give.” Risom thinks of a chair as an emotional bridge between architecture and the human occupant, a concept clearly demonstrated by one of his chair designs – its rectilinear wood frame continuing the geometry of the room, its contoured seat and back reflecting the ins and outs of the human form. Risom’s approach to furniture as a craft – as a finished product that is not dreamed up beforehand on paper but that slowly arrives at its character in the actual making – leaves his sense of propriety little choice but to manufacture the furniture himself.

CONTINUED: Designs for Living

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