Sigmund Freud’s office has been wonderfully recreated in the movie A Dangerous Method.  It’s decked out with blood-colored curtains, leather-bound volumes, dark wood furniture and ancient talismans, so that there’s barely space for the doctor to sit, or think, inside.  And it’s a dramatic contrast to Karl Jung’s (movie) office, with its pristine white walls and scrubbed oak floors.  Freud was thinking modern and living Victorian, searching for scientific clarity while weighed down by all of literature and history.  The sumptuously shadowed, cluttered room might be the perfect (movie) symbol for his mind.  I visited the Freud Museum in London, once, years ago, on a drizzly afternoon.  It’s Freud’s old house and office, which his son, the architect Ernst Freud, remodeled and enlarged with a small sunroom.  I remember walking uphill from the Camden tube station through winding residential blocks, ringing the bell, then being inspected and admitted by a smiling, overattentive docent, who followed me silently from room to room.

Freud’s consultation room at the museum is furnished with the books, artworks and furniture he brought with from his famed office at Bergasse 19 in Vienna, which has also been turned into a museum.  His couch, the most mythologized piece of furniture in Western history, was not at all what I expected.  It was small and lumpy; it did not beckon me to lie down on it and surrender myself to my unconscious.  It had a tapestry thrown over it, the same way college students throw tablecloths over furniture they drag into their dorm rooms from the sidewalk.  Yet seeing it was tremendously moving.  Freud left Vienna for London in 1938, for the obvious reasons, when he was 82 years old.  He was suffering from jaw cancer and a portion of his face had been removed, so that he could barely speak.  It’s tragic that this great man was was uprooted at this stage of his life.  And it’s poignant that he recreated his life at Bergasse – piece by piece – in this stodgy brick house in suburban London.

It’s fairly simple to get to commodity and firmness, and rather tricky to get to delight.  So I was pleased to stumble across this image of Frank Gehry when searching for images of his iconic Santa Monica house.  It’s a 1972 photo that has the young architect demonstrating how sturdy his new Easy Edge line of cardboard furniture, specifically this desk, is.  It’s an image I have never seen before, an image of architecture and joy.

Of all contemporary architects Gehry might be the only one who is able to express pleasure in his work: pleasure in materials, pleasure in construction, and pleasure in form-making.  There’s a playful, kinetic freedom in his most memorable buildings (his own house, the Norton House, the Dancing House, the New York Tower) that might be its defining characteristic.  Key in all this is that Gehry lives and works in America (he’s Canadian by birth), and specifically in southern California.  It’s hard to imagine a European sourpuss like Rem Koolhaus, or an east coast American sourpuss like David Childs, posing for this kind of picture, or making cardboard furniture in the first place.  The joy comes from the man.

I attended an event last week at a contemporary Italian furniture showroom.  Upstairs there were ultra-slick cabinets with exotic veneers and concealed hardware.  Downstairs there were pieces in gravity-challenging shapes and ice-cream colors that reminded me very much of Memphis.

Memphis was an quirky little design movement.  Its members possessed an excellent story about how they got their name (a group was sitting around listening to records when “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again” came on), and an enviable formal freedom.  But their work was unremarkable.  In fact it’s hard to believe that Italians (Italians!) wanted to make things that were so awkward and so unlovely.  But apparently their kooky, graphic energy is inspiring a new generation of designers.

In the movie “Please Give” a well-heeled New York City couple buys vintage mid-century furniture from dead people’s relatives and resells it to stylish, ignorant young urbanites, making a handsome living in the process.  Parts of the film look like they were shot on location at the White on White showroom, which is stuffed with valuable pieces.  Some, the chairs especially, are so ubiquitous that they’ve lost their allure.  Some, like the clocks and tableware, seem hopelessly whimsical.  And some, like the smaller tables, have been approximated so closely (and so cheaply) by IKEA that to seek out and purchase the originals would be absurd.

Why do we fetishize mid-century modern design?  The furniture (and the clothing too) has a clean, graphic look but it’s uncomfortable.  And the style hearkens back to a time when American culture was oppressively rigid, both politically and emotionally.  The mid-century pieces that continue to intrigue me are the ones that are rather ungainly, like the Rae and Charles Eames ESU’s (Eames Storage Units).  They’re funny and Frankenstein-like, assembled from bits of mismatched materials.  They don’t have the stylish chill of so many other mid-century designs.