TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/85/85capbst.5

Text File | 1992-09-25 | 5.5 KB | 115 lines

                                                                                January 6, 1986

DESIGN

BEST OF '85


Breaking Out of the Box


A year of renewed traditionalism, plus quirks and fantasy

Not long ago it was generally supposed that one kind of building
was suitable to almost every modern purpose. Corporate offices?
Put up a plain box, a big one. A university?  Put up a couple
of plain boxes, medium size. A civic building?  Another box,
and make it bland.

The renewed use of traditional architectural styles is a done
deed, praised and damned but now mainly accommodated. A more
significant traditionalist trend, however, may be the revival
of the belief in appropriately expressive building types. A
courthouse should not look like a Pizza Hut; a parking garage
and a theater ought to be distinguishable.

Nonetheless, when Architect Frank Gehry was commissioned to
design a campus for the Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, he had
little direct formal precedent. Who knew how a downtown Roman
Catholic campus in California was supposed to look?  The small
site is in a raggedy neighborhood; the budget was not great
($4.8 million); students and faculty yearned for a physical
sense of community. Gehry's solution is a small miracle. Using
his customary sorts of raw materials-- galvanized steel, plywood
and stucco--he has virtually invented a new form of late-20th
century urban classicism, simultaneously gritty and dignified.

Government buildings have a special obligation to express their
public nature. Taft Architects, a partnership of three
Houstonians, has met that obligation with its elegant Water
Resources Building for the Houston exurb of The Woodlands, a
structure that serves, for now, as the town hall. The columns
and pediment are stucco and the "stone" is split-faced concrete
block, but classic American civic form is evoked with a
convincing freshness.

Some argue that grand classicism must be reserved for public
buildings. A refutation of that theory is the absolute beauty
of Michael Graves' headquarters for the Humana corporation in
Louisville. A dense collage of lush textures and elements,
novel but never freakish, the highly sculptural tower conveys
the joy of architectural invention. Not since the late 1950s
and the monuments of the International Style has there been a
high-rise as satisfying.

About 1.7 million houses were completed in the U.S. this year,
and a great many of them were homely--lousy craftsmanship,
ill-used sites, confused, graceless. All of which makes a new
Omaha development called West Fairacres Village especially
promising. The architects, John Goldman and Daniel Solomon,
have designed housing the old- fashioned way, comfortably dense,
with a pleasantly irregular street grid and just enough
stylistic variation. The basic model is an adapted Craftsman
bungalow, circa 1920, but a buyer of a one-store house can mix
and match from among four brick porches and four compatible
timber gable ends.

In an era when so much manufactured children's fantasy is
anodyne or idiotic, the Philadelphia Zoo's new Treehouse seems
particularly fetching. A team of architects, engineers,
sculptors and tinkerers spent four years turning an 1877
antelope shed into a vivid little natural-history funhouse,
designing the scores of objects from scratch. A giant honeycomb
smells of honey; from dark corners come recorded frog croaks and
bird songs. The science is implicit:  there is not a sign or
label in the place.

Out in the capital of exuberant quirkiness, San Francisco
municipal authorities agreed on a set of laws meant to codify
the city's piquant urban character. The Downtown Plan, a
radical and ambitious zoning scheme, will protect dozens of fine
older buildings from demolition, severely restrict the amount
and bulk of new high-rise construction and virtually outlaw the
modernist office block.

Modernist furniture is another matter entirely:  the
stripped-down, functional aesthetic is alive and well.
Particularly when it comes to chairs, the charms of rococo
revivalism and campy ca-ca shapes tend to pall quickly. Aeons
Magi's lithe Tonietta chair is subtle as can be. What could
have been another exercise in thoughtless angularity is redeemed
by the slight, supple art nouveau curvature of the aluminum legs
and the natural give of the leather seat and back.

With a few prominent exceptions, design in the computer industry
has tended to be an afterthought, a matter of fashioning
inoffensive shells for cathode-ray tubes. Larry Vollum, a
recent California State University graduate, won the first
Burroughs design competition with an approach of a deeper sort.
His MUSE prototype, a small computer grafted onto a versatile
high-tech music stand, is the equivalent of a word processor for
composers, performers, students and teachers. It enables them
to add, change or erase notes and chords at will, add rhythm
accompaniment, and play back part or all of a composition.

Personal computers use floppy disks. FACPACs, a line of disk
storage boxes devised by Worrell Design of Minneapolis, are
handsome, simple and effective. The lever that fans out and
displays ten or twelve disks inside is incorporated into the
recessed logo.

Artist Eiko Ishioka's stylized, otherworldly scenery for Paul
Schrader's film Mishima was remarkable, a sort of reductivist
baroque that seemed peculiarly Japanese. Despite the dazzling
sets, critics generally found the movie a failure. Design, it
turns out, cannot do everything.

--By Kurt Andersen