`Italian design: I can`t stand it,” says Diana Agrest, a New York architect. ”It`s all so `designy.` ” Sitting amid the floppy pillows of a roomy sofa she designed for her Upper East Side apartment, she adds, ”When I designed this couch, I didn`t want a designer`s couch but one that was just a couch, not an object of design fetishism.”
Agrest found, she says, that ”it was hard to make a couch that did not look `designed,` ” but she canvassed New York measuring ”every couch in town” and finally created one that looks like a simplified chesterfield crossed with a modern sofa. The three-seater has no skirt, no curves and no upholstery details and is a design statement about not making a design statement. It is-simply, unremarkably,unapologetically-comfy.
A design boom in the United States and Europe over the last decade has resulted in sometimes overbearing work, everything from living rooms decorated with a temple`s worth of columns, to three-legged chairs with jutting seats upholstered in animal graphic fabrics, to apartments that look like a blow-up of a Christian Lacroix dress. In cities like New York and Los Angeles, there has also been a backlash among some designers and clients who, like Peter Finch in the 1976 movie ”Network,” seem to be yelling out their chintz-draped windows, ”I`m not going to take it anymore.”
”Yes, there`s a reaction against overdesign,” says Hugh Hardy, a principal in Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates, a New York architectural firm. ”There`s been so much opulence and aggressive surface treatment.”
”Acid-etched steel and bronze and 24 coats of glaze on every surface:
This is not a necessity,” says John Loring, the senior vice president and design director of Tiffany & Co.
”My students at Parsons are tired of it,” says Herbert Muschamp, an architecture critic for the New Republic magazine who teaches criticism at the New York design school. ”They don`t want, for example, to look at Memphis design. People don`t want to be constantly stimulated; they don`t want to live in a discotheque. I`m not saying there should be a return to conservative design, but you want things to reflect your own taste, and when they`re overdesigned, you`re subordinated to someone else`s choices.”
LARGE AND SMALL SCALE
There is no pattern to the design reactions, which have occurred in small-scale endeavors like Agrest`s couch and large projects like the addition proposed for the Jewish Museum in New York by Connecticut-based architect Kevin Roche. His design for the new portion duplicates the facade of the existing neo-Gothic structure.
Many who design interiors simplify or neutralize their designs, as the New York firm 1100 Architects did in a recently completed loft renovation in New Jersey. Some stay very close to the existing interior, as at the Majestic Theater in Brooklyn, where Hardy renovated the interior by leaving it in a state of decay, sometimes peeling back surfaces to reveal the structure. For such designers, the idea is to improve an environment through design, but not so that the design itself is the overwhelming focus.
Since Agrest designed her couch, she and her husband, Mario Gandelsonas, also an architect, elaborated on the idea of non-design in their vacation home in East Hampton, on Long Island. First, rather than building an ”architect`s” house, they found a two-story turn-of-the-century house, which they moved to the site. They furnished the interior with found pieces:
simple generic chairs and tables.
”The idea was to be very basic,” Agrest says. ”I even went to great lengths to find a simple oven without a black glass door.” With some difficulty, she and her husband found a simple pine table, with a rich color and straight-edged legs.
”Nothing is `design designed,` ” she says. ”Nothing has a signature.” Agrest believes that highly designed pieces resist acquiring
”personal histories”-a chest found on a vacation abroad would do this, or an aunt`s side table.
”Beginning in the early `80s, I became sensitive to a non-design appearance,” says David Piscuskas, a partner in 1100 Architects. ”If it looked `designed,` it was wrong.
”We`ve developed a very non-aggressive design attitude and try not to do contrived environments,” he continues. ”The design isn`t bland but, at the same time, how uncomfortable it would be if the apartment is basically about somebody else or another time.”
A SINGLE GESTURE
The firm`s renovation of a two-bedroom loft for James and Christine Breit in Jersey City is, indeed, not bland: a tall, wide wall bows dramatically into the living room. But the bowed wall is the single gesture the architects made in a plain industrial shell that has no outstanding features. Elsewhere, the design is restrained: Moldings are flush, the materials are modest, the layout is simple.
When Loring looked for someone to design his new 5th Avenue apartment, he chose Bonnie Roche, a New York designer, because, he says, ”she was not a
`flying wedge` architect.” He had first seen a gallery she designed downtown; on entering it, one critic observed, ”So what`s the big deal?”
That, according to Loring, was precisely the point.
”My sense of design doesn`t come from a sense of style,” Roche says.
”It never occurs to me to think how something should look. For me, light and space are the materials to work with.”
For a kitchen and study renovation in the Manhattan duplex of Paloma Picasso and her husband, playwright Rafael Lopez-Sanchez, Roche worked with few materials in straightforward layouts. In the study, with its plain bookshelves and wood-veneered walls, there are no gratuitous distractions. Picasso is, in fact, able to study in the study.
”When I have to go to one of those overdesigned restaurants, I can`t taste the food,” says Michael Kalil, a New York architect. ”Ifind it too self-conscious, like the appetizer to somebody else`s ego. I teach my students to take the design out of design.”
In a recently completed penthouse in Manhattan owned by Morris Kramer, a New York lawyer, Kalil reduced the space to what he called a ”zero degree of design”: white walls, dark ebony floors and simple space dividers. A serenity pervades the rooms. ”I wanted to bring it down so that the environment is the background, and the person is the center,” he says, adding that the apartment is not about minimalism, which can be another form of overdesign. ”If you get it down far enough, you lose style, even minimalism.” He says the penthouse may be ”the most designed thing” he has ever done because the simplicity was achieved through very careful detailing.
Overdesign emerged as an issue during deliberations for interior design awards for a recent issue of Architecture, a trade journal published by the American Institute of Architects. ”It was a major question because there was a lot of fluff: tons of marble and tons of wood used for questionable ends,” says Frederick Fisher, a juror from Santa Monica, Calif. ”We saw many projects with a lot of smoke over no issue.
”Plays of light, space and scale can achieve results at least as strong without the fireworks. The winning projects, like the Majestic Theater, respected the existing conditions of a building. The architects simply pulled back and chose not to do something.” –
