The richest, most expressive element of the BBC detective series Wallander might be the Scandinavian-modern style sets, which were designed by Anders Olin. They set the scene with precision, and offer deep sensual pleasure. The centerpiece is the police station in Ystad, the small city in southern Sweden where the drama unfolds, which was constructed in its entirety in a studio there. The floor where the homicide detectives work is spacious, with low ceilings and limited views to the outside. The open central space, where they gather, is lined with wood planks and furnished with gently-worn, generic (that is, non-iconic) pieces of Scandinavian modern furniture. Lit dimly, and propped with flurries of paper, stuffed birds, rusting metal desk lamps, and dying potted plants, the room evokes the strangeness and sadness of the work the detectives carry out, and that seeps into their personal lives.

The Wallander sets are a terrific contrast to the Mad Men sets, which fetishize mid-century modern design by recreating pristine, museum-like environments, including Rogers Sterling’s office and Don Draper’s apartment. In those sets every object is gleaming, unused, and bathed in brilliant white light. Compare them to the dark hardwood walls, bare concrete floor, and austere tables and chairs that furnish the Wallander police station, which suggest that these rooms have been around for a while, and that the detectives who work here have been around for a while too. Everything inside it them has a lyrical battered feeling. While open office spaces have become a design cliche, particularly for companies that want to project a socially progressive image, the set for Wallander is not about that at all. These detectives work to unearth secrets, purposefully and painfully. The common room, where everyone’s mutterings and moods spill over into everyone else’s, shows us the tumult.

Image courtesty of Ouno Design

March 01, 2013 by Nalina Moses

December 23, 2011 by Nalina Moses

My first toehold in New York City was a summer internship during college at the public art gallery operated by the Department of Cultural Affairs. Both the Department and the gallery were housed at 2 Columbus Circle, the famous Edward Durell Stone building at the southwest corner of Central Park. It was built as a private museum in 1965, acquired by the city 1980, and then, with some controversy, sold in 2005 and renovated to house the Museum of Art and Design. For three months I sat at a desk on a narrow, cluttered balcony on the eighth floor, whose only ventilation and natural light was admitted through plate-sized portholes at the corners. I inspected sheets of slides submitted by artists and wrote rejection letters explaining that while their work was very, very good, we just wouldn’t be able to show it at the gallery. It was a job I was good at. And the great, ostentatious interior gave my endeavors a whiff of artistic authenticity. I wasn’t sure if the building was good, but I knew that it was architecture.

Last month I heard Hicks Stone, Edward Durell Stone’s son, speak about his father, who’s work he’s just commemorated in a monograph. Hicks is an architect too, and took great pains to compare his father’s work, building by building, to the work of more celebrated contemporaries like Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright. Hicks was trying to legitimize his father’s work, which was considered too ornamental, too excessive, and just too bizarre to be part of the modern canon. While Hick’s efforts are poignant they’re disappointing, because he’s not looking entirely clearly at his father’s work. Right now, when we’re all mindlessly nostalgic about mid-century modernism, might be the perfect moment to look back at Stone’s work, which challenges the proprieties of High Modernism. Herbert Muschamp (who has unpacked the history of the building brilliantly) relates 2 Columbus Circle to the Venetian Gothic and to Ruskin. Whatever it’s fundamental failings (like lack of light and air), the structure has got drama and glamor in spades. It’s ultra-modern and also highly artistic. Thirty years ago Tom Wolfe, in From Bauhaus to Our House, upheld Stone as a great modern American architect who didn’t get his due. That’s still true.

October 21, 2011 by Nalina Moses

There are flower-fabric umbrellas at the cafe tables in Madison Square Park, and Op Art beanbags on the sidewalk. They’re part of the opening celebrations for the new Marimekko flagship store on the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street. As stores go it’s a good one: brightly lit, nicely merchandised, and smartly organized. The products are just what you’d expect: waistless shifts, bath towels, coffee mugs, and placemats, all in signature patterns from the iconic Finnish brand. I hope the store survives but that’s hard to imagine. The only ladies I saw buying were from that slender sliver of the population that’s both old enough to remember the brand’s early 70’s heyday, and bold enough to want to shake up their personal style.

What I like best about the store, and the brand, is it’s support of home sewing. Smack in the middle of the first floor there’s a full-height, open display shelf selling by-the-yard Marimekko fabrics. The 45"-wide bolts, neatly rolled and pinned, have a candy-like allure. The prints, of course, are glorious. The fabric is a stiff cotton that’s not quite strong enough for upholstery and not quite soft enough for garments. But it’s unusual to find fabric for sale in a retail store. And it’s especially heartening in New York City, after almost all of the small, family-owned fabric stores along West 39th and West 40th Street have closed their doors. There’s even a workstation with a professional sewing machine to the side of the sales floor, ready for demonstrations and classes. Just the sight of the machine and the piece goods cheered me.

October 11, 2011 by Nalina Moses

There’s an informative piece on the history of IKEA in last week’s New Yorker. I love their noisy, labyrinthine stores. I appreciate their mission to bring good design to the masses. I’ve specified their cabinets for interior remodels. And I’m dazzled by their skill at knocking-off iconic pieces. (Is It IKEA or Is It Mid-Century Modern?) But there’s something in the piece that makes me pause. IKEA has changed the definition of furniture.

“Furniture” used to be big, important things we bought once in a lifetime and passed on to others. Now “furniture” is flat-packed, somewhat important things we switch out every few years. Though IKEA has taken steps to green itself, like discontinuing incandescent bulbs, they’re essentially manufacturing million of temporary beds, sofas, and tables, shipping them to all ends of the earth, and distributing them in immense, new shops built in places one needs to drive to. The new IKEA-inspired attituded about home decor is perfectly in step with shifting notions of home and family. But it leaves no room for craft. What if each of us had a dining table that was a singular, substantial piece, something we saved for, selected carefully, and cared for? It might make a more beautiful home.