SLEIGHT OF HAND

Modern American product designer Russell Wright proclaimed, “The hand of man should not be visible.” Wright’s house-studio in Hudson County, Dragon Rock, set high into the rock face of an abandoned quarry, conforms to this dictum. The structure can’t be seen or understood completely from any angle on the ground, and gives no clear image of itself. It’s a deft act of camouflage, one that even an accomplished architect might not be able to execute.

If Wright’s iconic midcentury dinnerware feel charmingly dated today, this house doesn’t. It has the rough, eccentric personal presence of those by Bruce Geoff and Bart Prince. It’s less an object of its time than a figment of its creator. It’s no surprise that Wright got his start in theater design; the house feels like a loose assemblage of moments rather than a cohesive structure. There’s a narrow passage that squeezes one from the studio into the main house, a twisting spill of rock stairs leading down to the dining room, and a low, skewed two-seat banquette in the center of the living room. Even on a sunny summer day the great room, framed with exposed wood beams and a tree trunk, felt shadowed and forlorn, as if the visitor were trapped inside its creator’s dark dreams.

Wright shared many ideas (building into the earth, the open plan, motifs derived from nature) with his extraordinary architectural counterpart, Frank Lloyd Wright. But the master architect’s contemporary houses, scaled similarly, offer experiences that are physically and psychically expansive. They can overwhelm but they can also, often, dazzle. The rhythm of the ornament, the spatial complexity, the sly spatial transitions, can transport. One never feels, as at Dragon Rock, that the finishes are rough, the proportions pinched, or the connections between materials unconsidered. Russell Wright’s home is best understood as a personal experiment. To consider it as architecture is unfair; that discipline requires a firmer, more coherent hand.

Photograph of Dragon Rock by Rob Penner.

September 14, 2019 by Nalina Moses

NO SO SIMPLE

In lieu of church, I walked to the Met on Sunday morning to see a show of Shaker objects culled from the collection called Simple Gifts. There is an immense maple dining table held together by pin-sized wood dowels. There is a handwoven bolt of wool, just wide enough for a dress, with softly jagged edges, dyed darker than midnight. There is a chair made with such minimal material, and fuss, that it looks like a line drawing of a chair. All these objects are handsome but none has the revelatory, purifying effect I was searching for. They are sort of beautiful and also sort of unremarkable.

What is remarkable is their purposefulness, their unapologetic pragmatism. There are no tchotchkes or decorative pieces here, like those that fill the ceramics, metalworks and furniture halls surrounding the gallery. Each is, instead, made to meet a particular need, and each of its attributes responds to an aspect of that need. A cabinet has drawers just wide enough to store bolts of fabric laid flat. A sewing table has inches marked off along its front lip to reference when cutting patterns. A knit glove has open fingertips so one can sit inside, near the window, on a cold day, and turn the pages of a book.

This pragmatism is strikingly apparent when one steps into the Shaker Retiring Room, just footsteps away. The room is furnished with a constellation of everyday objects, and without any decoration. The atmosphere is sensually spare and dramatically rich, as each object speaks powerfully to its use. There is a desk and chair for writing in a journal and keeping accounts, a rocking chair with a footrest for knitting and mending, a small iron fireplace for heat in winter winter, a bed for sleeping (it’s too narrow for much else) and small high windows to let in light. Each thing is simple in form and rich in life.

Photo courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum.

September 18, 2016 by Nalina Moses

BOOM WITHOUT THE BOX

Stumbling from the subway station to the office on Friday morning, in an end-of-the-week haze, I was overtaken by a young man playing a lusciously-textured slow-moving rap song out loud on his black Beats Pill XL portable speaker. The music hit me when he passed, a big warm cloud of sound. The Pill is a simple, sleek baton-like device that broadcasts audio from a remote player. Though it’s been branded “XL” it’s small, about the size of an evening bag, and could be tucked easily under the arm or in a tote bag. This man carried his from its handle, swinging it back and forth as he made his way breezily, otherwise unburdened, up Broadway. He was dressed smartly, in Levi’s straight legs with deep cuffs, a plain black t-shirt, a White Sox cap, and black high tops with a thick white sole. Brandishing the Pill, he was an image of supreme cool.

This encounter me took me back decades, to a time when young men in the city carried suitcase-sized boomboxes, with shining silver knobs and multiple cassette decks, that required six or more D-sized batteries to operate. Today the fashion is to listen to music on small devices like iPhones, through headphones with cushioned earpads the size of hamburger buns, retreating deeply into an inner world. Broadcasting one’s music in public has become outrageous, an act of transgression and aggression. The young man I saw was asserting his taste, his identity and his turf, and also sharing his tunes – something of himself – with the city. It would be tiresome, certainly, if everyone on the sidewalk played his music out loud. But that morning it made for magnificent street theater.

Image courtesy of Beats Audio.

October 06, 2014 by Nalina Moses

BURNING BRIGHT

This year’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) has its share of charming hand-blocked wallpapers, embroidered throw pillows, and driftwood end tables, but what shines most brightly are the LED light fixtures. LED technology is advancing so rapidly that each year brings lights that are more energy-efficient, longer lasting, less costly, and with improved light quality. LED’s are so much more smarter and smaller (about an eighth of an inch in diameter) than incandescent, halogen and fluorescent bulbs, that they might do for lighting what steel did for construction – bring about an entirely new model for design.

And just as the first wave of steel-frame buildings were clad in stone panels to give the sound appearance of a building, most LED light fixtures are designed with shades and baffles that, primarily, give the sound appearance of a lamp. Vendors at ICFF are cloaking LED diodes in nostalgic fittings, with shades made in warm materials (dark woods, textured metals, cardboards, felt), as if trying to soften the technology before permitting it into our living rooms. One Swedish company even sells an LED pendant that looks like a bare incandescent bulb.

Only a few designers seem interested in exploiting the tiny size of the bulbs. Unsentimental designers tend to line the diodes up in lines, like a tape, or add a long, cylindrical lens to them, turning the brilliant pinpoints into light sabers. But there are hints of what lies ahead. One English fabricator is showing wallpapers that have LED diodes integrated within their baroque patterns, and one artist is showing lamps made of clouds of them, that resemble models of the atom more than chandeliers. They get at the potentially revolutionary question: what does an LED light fixture look like?

Image of “Bubble Chandelier” courtesy of Pelle Designs.

May 28, 2014 by Nalina Moses