Designs for Living

1961 Playboy photo featuring left to right - George Nelson, Edward Wormley, Eero Saarinen, Harry Bertoia, Charles Eames and Jens Rison

Unfettered by dogma, the creators of contemporary American furniture have a flair for combining functionalism with esthetic enjoyment

xuberance, finesse, and high imagination characterize U.S. furniture design today. For the crusading era of modern is over. In the early years of Twentieth Century design, a chair – to its creator, at least – was very much more than something pleasant to look at. An early modern chair was a resoundingly significant expression of the age, a concrete rendition of abstract structural principles, an almost belligerent assemblage of mechanical parts in which every bolt was paraded with all the bravado of Erich von Stroheim’s monocle. Early modern thrived on dogma (“Form Follows Function!” “Less is More!” “Structure is Beauty!”) that rivaled Milton in Puritan passion; it paid deepest obeisance to the machine and let the softer human sensibilities accommodate themselves as best they could; and it dwelt, along with pre-Bach and post-Bartok, strictly among the intelligentsia.

Today design is more likely to reflect great good spirits than profound philosophies; to relish shapely contours rather than “honest” structures; to pride itself more highly on elegance than earnestness. An early modern chair had an aura of fatalism about it; it had to look the way it did, just as von Stroheim had to spy and torture; it couldn’t help its swift lines and metallic glint any more than Dietrich could help falling in love again. There is nothing inevitable about a chair any longer. Today the machine is the collaborator rather than the determinant of a design. Instead of pressing a cerebral button to solve a mechanical puzzle, the designer brings his unique imagination, his own emotions, to bear at every point in the development of the object. No bulwark of metaphysics is required to justify its every turn. If a bolt is exposed, it is because the designer enjoys the accent, and he is as likely as not to paint the bolthead black, just for the hell of it. A chair today stands on its own legs in existential – even absurd – delight.

Liberated, fanciful and romantic as today’s design is, it has arrived at this happy condition via a direct route from concepts formulated by the founders of the modern style. In phenomenon perhaps unique in the history of all the arts, a major movement in architecture and design was consciously planned, plotted and programmed from the beginning. “Can you imagine Borromini, Bernini or Guarini proclaiming, ‘We are Baroque!’” muses Gio Ponti, the Italian architect and designer regarded as one of the contemporary greats. “Or Louis XV saying, ‘Let us now invent the Louis Quinze style?’”But that is exactly what the moderns did. They announced to all mankind their objective of revolutionizing the man-made forms of the world, and in order to emphasize the sweeping scope of their program, they titled their mode of expression the International Style.

The early moderns faced a clear and real challenge in the form of the industrial revolution, which had bombarded the world with piecemeal triumphs in science and technology, but had provided no esthetic rationale to guide their use. Objects formerly made by hand were now mass-produced by machines, but they were made to look handcrafted – not out of the maker’s attempt to deceive but simply because he knew no other way to fashion them. Buildings which required only widely-spaced, narrow columns of steel to sustain them nevertheless had thick walls of masonry or brick because the builder could not imagine how else to make a wall. Down that delusory road – in the view of a handful of brilliant German architects and isolated individuals elsewhere, including the great Le Corbusier in France – lay a world of visual meaninglessness, not to say insanity. The Germans – Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer among them – established in 1919 in Weimar, Germany, a training ground that was to become one of the most powerful molders of esthetic thought in history. Their design school, the Bauhaus, dedicated itself to informing the shapes of the industrialized world with visual significance and esthetic integrity. The Bauhaus revolutionized art training by synthesizing the teaching of production techniques with the fine arts; it taught that the form an object takes must proceed logically from what it is made of, how it is made, and what it is to be used for. The school banned the slightest ornament, stripped away the smallest nonfunctioning member, and extolled the shiny surfaces and smooth lines that spelled the machine. (In a nice distinction between essential truth and circumstantial fact, they were bothered not a whit that the most flawless “machine look,” as exemplified in Mies’ famous Barcelona chair, in fact required meticulous hand attention to achieve.)

CONTINUED: Designs for Living

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