William Lescaze: Modernism at what price today?

With all my Lescaze research over the last couple of months, I've only just registered that William Lescaze's house at 32 E74th St, aka the Kramer House, is currently for sale for $14 million (the NY Observer asked "Is it worth it?"). Similar to his own midtown townhouse, the Kramer House was built by Lescaze in 1934-35, for friends, Raymond and Mildred Kramer, and is approximately 6,800 square feet. This was the townhouse restored a few years ago by Laura Day. Some images and a plan of the townhouse below, but see also images of the original interiors here and here.

William Lescaze, Kramer House, plan

William Lescaze: Early Interiors

Continuing my research on the career of William Lescaze, I thought it worth returning to Lescaze’s New York projects of the late 1920s, which comprise almost entirely interiors. Lanmon notes that in 1928, Lescaze wrote to Le Corbusier complaining that all he ever got commissioned to design was interiors – restaurants, private apartments, retail interiors and exhibition rooms – and Corbu replied sympathetically: “That's the way it always is. I didn't do anything myself for years, besides writing articles and giving lectures. Keep it up.” (in Lanmon 1987: 37) But despite Lescaze’s frustration at not being commissioned to design complete modernist buildings, his early interiors contributed to the growing sense of modernity in 1920s America. Although I haven’t done exhaustive research here, I thought it was worth sharing these images and what little information I have found, as these projects are not widely known nor are the images readily available. All of these projects were completed before Lescaze’s partnership with George Howe and the well-known Philadelphia Savings Fund Society building (1929-32).


Above: Capital Bus Terminal, 239 West 50th St and 240-242 West 51st St, New York, 1927. I can find very little information on this building, although it does seem to reflect Lescaze’s knowledge of European modernism and seems fittingly designed for a relatively modern form of mass transportation.



Above: Display room for department store Frederick Loeser and Company, Fulton Street, Brooklyn, 1928. Includes Lescaze-designed furniture.



Above: Display room, penthouse studio apartment, Macy’s Department Store exhibition, “International Art in Industry”, 1928. This exhibition also included exhibition rooms by designers such as Josef Hoffmann, Gio Ponti and Kem Weber.



Above: Showroom, Andrew Geller Shoe Factory, Brooklyn, 1928.
Lescaze’s design here is austere and efficient, a retail space stripped back to essential display and furnishings. The color scheme was neutral and Lescaze here displayed his interest in recessed lighting. The Andrew Geller Shoe company was formed by Andrew Geller in 1910 and manufactured upscale shoes. Geller’s nephew, Bertram Geller began designing shoes for the company around the time of the Lescaze commission. Bertram Geller continued the family patronage of modern architecture by commissioning Marcel Breuer to design the influential Geller House, in 1945, and then another house, Geller House II (interior), between 1959 and 1969 (both in Lawrence, Long Island). Marcel Breuer and Associates later redesigned the Andrew Geller company offices and showroom in Manhattan in 1975 (see the Smithsonian Institute’s Breuer archive).



Above: Leopold Stokowski studio apartment, East 71st Street, 1929.

English-born conductor Leopold Stokowski moved to New York in 1905 to work as an organist and choir director. After further study in Paris, he returned to the US to work as a conductor in Cincinnati and became known as a passionate advocate for modern music by living composers. In 1912, Stokowski became conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra and his reputation for modern music expanded to include his flamboyant showmanship, which included conducting without a baton and altering the seating of the orchestra. As a committed modernist, he also maintained a life-long interest in modern concert hall acoustics and the latest technological advances in sound reproduction. In Philadelphia, Stokowski continued to premier and champion modern music, including that of modern composers such as Arnold Schoenberg, Dmitri Shostakovich and Igor Stravinsky.

Lescaze’s New York pied-à-terre for the composer was a studio apartment designed for mobile lifestyle and for a cosmopolitan modern individual – the open space, built-in furniture and flat surfaces stripped of ornament and all historical references cohere into a complete environment, a unity of form, color and space similar to what European modernists were doing in the 1920s. The emphasis on coziness, warmth, decorative and luxurious surfaces that was so popular with the New York bourgeoisie, is completely absent. Lescaze’s painterly abstraction and embrace of a new, universal aesthetic not only self-consciously reject tradition, but also pare back sensory distractions so the inhabitant might focus on higher thoughts. Stokowski’s studio apartment is an economic living space organized in rational manner, its built-in cabinetry, geometric carpet and austere furniture, all designed by Lescaze, suggest a holistic machine built for modern convenience. In this commission, Lescaze clearly understood the modernist ideal of the gesamtkunstwerk and in Stokowski, he presumably found a client with complementary modernist ideals.



Finally, Stokowski was responsible for getting Lescaze the commission to design a new building for the Oak Lane Country Day School in 1929 (sketch above and photos below). Stokowski was a parent at the school and provided funding for a new nursery wing designed by Lescaze. Oak Lane was a progressive school founded in 1916, and in 1924, the school counted philosopher and educational reformer John Dewey among its advisory board members. In the late 1920s, the school’s headmaster William Curry’s educational philosophy was based on modern progressive education principles: “firstly, an enhanced concern for individual children and their way of learning, secondly, the need for pupil participation in school governance, thirdly, a resistance to uninformed parents forcing their views of education upon teachers.” (Dudek 2000: 22) In 1931, Curry moved to Dartington Hall school in England, where he commissioned more Lescaze-designed educational buildings. In these last two examples, the Stokowski apartment and the Oak Lane school, Lescaze’s modernist design not only serves to self-consciously reject traditional design, values and hierarchies, but explicitly emphasizes individuality as the basis for a new modern society.




References

Dudek, Mark, Architecture of Schools: New Learning Environments, Oxford: Architectural Press, 2000.

Lanmon, Lorraine Welling, William Lescaze, Architect, Philadelphia: The Art Alliance Press, 1987.

Leopold Stokowski: Making Music Matter, an University of Pennsylvania Library Special Collection exhibition.

Russel Wright: Manitoga

Constructed during the 1950s, Russel Wright’s Manitoga, a seventy-five-acre estate in the Hudson River Valley, was the culmination of a design practice that extended like a Moebius strip from the household objects of the house’s interior to the regeneration of the surrounding landscape. Manitoga’s significance was officially recognized in 2006 when it was designated a National Historic Landmark, the highest level of recognition for historic sites in the United States, but despite this recognition, the project seems to have fallen in the cracks between disciplinary histories. Best known as an industrial designer, it is Wright’s only completed architectural and landscape project, which is presumably why it has inspired little interest from architects or landscape architects. However, it is worth revisiting Manitoga as a design project that is particularly pertinent to 21st century practice – a house, studio, and environment that folded industrial, interior, architectural and landscape design onto a single continuum, and redefined the relationship between design and nature.

Dragon Rock nestled into the walls of the former quarry

In an earlier blog entry, which serves as an introduction to this one, I outlined Wright’s design career up until he began working on Manitoga. Thus this story begins in 1942, when Russel and Mary Wright purchased the property with the intention of building a retreat from life in New York City. The site had been extensively logged and its main feature was an abandoned quarry, which hardly made for a picturesque setting for a future home and studio. Their initial work included creating paths, diverting a stream to make a pool in the quarry, as well as both selective clearing and regeneration of the landscape. With Mary’s death in 1952, Russel, while continuing to practice as a designer in New York City, became increasingly obsessed with Manitoga. After working with the landscape for some years, Wright finally decided on a site for his house and studio. Instead of situating the house on the hill top with views of the Hudson, Wright chose to fit it into the side of the granite cliff overlooking the quarry, enclosed by rocks and trees. Between 1955 and 1960, Wright designed and completed the house, Dragon Rock, with the aid of David Leavitt, an architect who had worked for Antonin Raymond in Japan for several years in the early 1950s. Though Leavitt is officially credited as the architect (and Wright was drawn to his Japanese experience), Wright had very specific ideas on the design of the house, and was certainly responsible for the interior fittings and furniture.

Wright's studio on right, main house to the left

Dragon Rock comprises a split-level living-dining room which flows into a kitchen, a wing for his daughter and a housekeeper to the West, and Russel’s separate bedroom-studio building (which also included a guest room), to the East. The studio is connected to the main house via a vine-draped loggia intended to create a theatrical effect of anticipation for a visitor who can hear but not see the waterfall beyond the screen of vines. The house itself is built on several different levels, creating not only visual interest but also heightening sensory awareness for the occupant moving through the space – though they can hear it, visitors cannot see the waterfall and quarry below until descending into the living-dining room area, further heightening anticipation.

Looking down into the dining room from the living room area

While Dragon Rock contains many innovative design details, Wright suggested two principles as the key to his design process: Blending and Contrasting. Framed in local white oak, the house blends with its natural surroundings, an idea which is carried further by his blending of the house’s interior and exterior by his use of granite stones from the quarry site for the living room’s rough stone stairs, fireplace, and flagstone floor. The living room feels like a cave built into the cliff face. A cedar log supports the main ceiling beam above the dining room. Plant material from the local area was incorporated into the ceilings, and native leaves were pressed behind transparent plastic laminates on a sideboard panel. A local stone becomes a door knob, a branch becomes a towel rack. Via materials, colors, textures and literal appropriations, Wright blended the interiors almost seamlessly with the environment outside.

A local stone becomes a door knob

However, the principle of Contrasting provides both visual and sensual interest in the interiors, with Wright’s juxtaposed the local, natural materials, with modern, high-tech plastics and textiles; regular windowpanes with the organic forms outside; and plastic furniture, panels and partitions with the stone floors and wooden beams. With careful attention to the texture, color and surfaces within the house, Wright incorporated innovative synthetic materials supplied by manufacturers such as DuPont, for whom Wright had previously worked. Dragon Rock was not simply a homage to raw “nature”, but a dynamic interaction between the artificial and the natural, blurring the boundaries between the two.

The cave-like living room, constructed of local granite from the quarry

The house was designed with Wright’s earlier “Easier Living” concepts in mind. He included a practical kitchen arrangement, for example, with a bar for buffet serving of food, built in shelving and pull out racks for easy storage. While Wright’s easy living was not reliant on technology, the house is equipped with a modern washer-dryer and dishwasher. Entertaining and meals were an important part of Wright’s redefinition of American lifestyle and for Manitoga, he took this idea further, designing menus with specific meals designed for both nutrition and aesthetics. Dinnerware and table settings were chosen to compliment particular foods, as well as harmonize with the seasons. Thus the house also designed for a specific way of living that Wright described as a reaction against the increasing mechanization and homogenization of American culture in the 1950s: Dragon Rock, he said, was “a designer’s experiment, not only in designing a house, but in designing a home and the way to live in it.” (Garrison lecture) It is worth noting that the 1950s was the era of the popular prepackaged TV dinner, a phenomenon diametrically opposed to Wright’s “creative living” ideal.

Looking down onto the kitchen-dining room area

Dragon Rock was designed to interact with the seasons, as Wright carefully devised two seasonal schemes for the interiors which included changing curtains, furniture, reversible panels and partitions, and artworks. For summer, cool blues, greens and white shades dominated the interiors, while for winter, warm colors such as brown, red and gold provided a contrast to the winter whites and grays outside. For winter, chairs were covered in fur slipcovers, which could be pulled off in summer. Even the candle chandelier above the dining table was replaced by a Plexiglas summer light fixture. Wright’s design of Dragon Rock ensured that the house and its inhabitants were in a continual and changing dialogue with the local environment – engaging with the materials of the landscape and adapting to seasonal rhythms.

The former quarry

Learning from Manitoga

Wright began working on Manitoga by clearing underbrush, planting native vegetation, pruning trees, and designing a series of trails that followed the site’s topography. From redirecting the stream to creating secret alcoves of native flowers, Wright completely redesigned the formerly denigrated landscape. In his design, Wright retained and highlighted the remnants of native forest remaining, but the site was also selectively cleared and leveled, trees pruned, and perhaps most importantly, plants cultivated in an effort to regenerate the environment. Wright completed extensive study of local flora in an effort to create appropriate plantings for the region and its climate. In his regeneration, Wright paid careful attention to texture, color, light and sensual qualities. The waterfall, for example, was carefully designed for both its aesthetic and aural qualities, stones and boulders were moved to create steps or informal seating, and a moss garden invited visitors to touch its sensuous surfaces. But this was not the recreation of “wilderness”, as Wright acknowledged human intervention into the landscape by exposing a cable hook embedded in a rock, or leaving blasting marks visible on another rock, and even hinting at more recent human intervention here and there in the form of carvings into a stone, for example, or subtle trail markers nailed to trees.

Cable hook embedded in a rock

Wright’s ongoing project at Manitoga included the construction of woodland paths to be experienced on foot, providing a range of sensory experiences for the walker. Four miles of trails, each with individual names such as Autumn Path, Morning Path, Sunset Path or Lost Pond Path, were designed for a particular time of day or season. The paths were carefully conceived to provide a wealth of sensory experiences – they narrow so the visitor has to climb over rocks or brush past undergrowth, then widen to a scene such as a hemlock canopy or bed of ferns. Wright’s ritual paths through the property may have been Japanese in inspiration, but can also be seen in an American context as part of a continuing tradition from New England Transcendentalism, a designer’s response to David Henry Thoreau’s walking in the woods in order to engage with the environment sensually and intimately.

The moss garden

Historically, the 1950s are typically characterized in architecture and design as the triumph of International Style modernism on the one hand, and more popularly, by the growth of suburbia and excessive consumerism. Both International Style modernism and suburban design began with a universal space, regardless of local environment or topography, and both (in their different ways) fetishized new technologies. Unlike either suburbia or the International Style of the period, Wright’s design engages intimately with the local environment, ecology, topography, and history. While modernism was typically confined to urban areas, suburban design was reshaping the landscape beyond cities by a clearing and leveling, thereby erasing the local topography and ecology, and replacing it with the standardized monoculture of the suburban lawn and decorative evergreen trees. Wright’s process at Manitoga was a reverse of this “tabula rasa” beginning of both the International Style and suburbia, beginning instead with an already “disturbed” landscape and carefully regenerating it through intervention and care. However, there could be no “return” of the landscape to the wilderness – the environment, as Wright’s design of Manitoga constantly reminds us, is always already artificial.

Wright's studio

Finally, it is worth reconsidering Manitoga as a contemporary design laboratory. For Wright, nature is always already marked by human intervention, and the dynamic interaction between nature and culture is at the heart of his project. At Manitoga, the environment is more than simply a background for human habitation and consumption, it is integrated into a dynamic relationship with culture, and Wright’s “creative life” actively involves humans in a tactile, sensual relationship with the surrounding landscape. Wright’s design process challenges the industrial society of the mid-20th century, whereby nature was seen in merely utilitarian terms (quarrying and logging), to begin what could be termed a postindustrial design practice that engaged in an alternative dialogue with nature. If the dominant narrative of postwar American culture was the technological conquest of nature by culture, Wright’s view from his studio at Manitoga is a good place to conclude. Wright described this view as a “worm’s eye view” – rather than looking down on the environment from above, Wright consciously positioned his studio so that the designer was situated below, or at least within, the landscape, a perspective which engenders a certain humility and respect.

Inside Wright's studio: "a worm's eye view"

The 21st Century Interior

In order to finish off my 21st Century Interior project for the year, I have put all of the posts for 2009 together in a single document, edited them lightly and added a short conclusion. Please download here as a PDF for your reading pleasure. Note that if you want to print it out, this document is 65 pages long and contains colored pictures, as well as a full bibliography at the end.

Any comments you have would be gratefully received either here or via email.

Thanks for reading and have a wonderful holiday season.

Tadao Ando: Morimoto Restaurant

In my recent blog entries on the 21st century interior, the issue of theatricality has recurred several times. The intersection between the virtual spaces of the theater or cinema, and the actual spaces of physical interiors, seems both a vital and under-theorized connection with a long and somewhat marginalized history. In the United States, for example, the earliest professional designer, Elsie de Wolfe, began her career as an actor at the beginning of the 20th century; many of the best known designers of the interwar era, such as Norman Bel Geddes, Henry Dreyfuss and Russel Wright, began their careers in theater set design; while designers such as Morris Lapidus continued the theatrical impulse into the postwar era. An understanding of the contemporary interior as a stage set in which inhabitants “perform” social rituals or enact their identities (through seeing and being seen) seems a useful one. Rather than understanding the interior as an empty architectural container, the theatrical interior is an inherently dynamic, mediated environment, always already subject to a human gaze.

Christopher Innes, through a close analysis of the careers of Norman Bel Geddes and Joseph Urban, argues that in the 1920s, Broadway theater was a thoroughly modern medium which influenced not only the fashion and décor of its audience, but impacted upon their social and cultural values too. Bel Geddes and Urban worked on both theater and film sets, as well as on commissions for hotels, restaurants, retail spaces and private homes in the 1920s and 1930s. Innes argues that Bel Geddes’ and Urban’s scenery, lighting schemes, and technological innovations developed in their (virtual) theater projects leaked into their (actual) hotel lobbies, banquet rooms, cabarets, and ball rooms. The virtual Art Deco interiors featured in 1930s Hollywood cinema similarly spread into the actual world of both public and private spaces. This seepage between the theatrical or cinematic set and physical interior spaces continues to the present, as seen in my recent case studies: Naomi Leff’s Rhinelander Mansion for Polo/Ralph Lauren (1986); Philippe Starck’s Royalton Hotel (1988), Paramount Hotel (1990), and Hudson Hotel (2000); OMA/Rem Koolhaas’ Prada Flagship Store (2001); and the two New York restaurants of Karim Rashid, Nooch (2004) and Kurve (2008).

However, within an architectural context, this understanding of the interior as a mediated theatrical space is often suppressed by the continuation of modernist architectural ideals. The inherent conflict can be distilled into to three key dichotomies:

1. The Fake vs the Real. The moral imperative of modernist truth to materials and truth to form is undermined by the artificial materials and forms intended to create effects in the theatrical interior. This divide goes back to the 19th century modernist critique of Victorian designers’ use of faux materials, overly-elaborate forms and eclectic historical references.

2. The Temporal vs the Timeless. Modernist architecture’s drive for establishing timeless, universal designs stands opposed to the ephemeral and contextual nature of theatrical or cinematic sets. More than this, there is an implicit association of the overtly theatrical interior with the temporality of fashion: while stage sets are “dressed”, architectural spaces are ideally naked.

3. The Corporeal vs the Conceptual. The theatrical interior is conventionally associated with the immediate gratification of desire rather than with modernist architecture’s higher rational values. In the theatrical interior, the creation of a mood or an atmosphere which engages with the senses of the audience is valued more highly than an intellectual engagement.

These polemical extremes seem an unlikely introduction to an interior space designed by the contemporary master of authentic materials, abstract geometries and natural forces, Japanese architect Tadao Ando. And yet it is precisely these dichotomies that are played out in his recent New York restaurant, Morimoto.


Tadao Ando: Morimoto

While Ando’s career in Japan began with the founding of his Osaka office in 1969, it was not until the 1980s that he gained international prominence, particularly for his iconic Church of Light (1989) in Osaka, and Church on the Water (1988) on the island of Hokkaido. His architectural influences – cited by both Ando and subsequent critics – include the solidly modernist lineage of Le Corbusier, Mies Van Der Rohe, Alvar Aalto and Louis Kahn, combined with elements of Japanese traditions. Ando’s architecture has been lauded for its use of raw materials (particularly his signature use of concrete), abstract forms, and spare, unadorned interiors. This emphasis on abstraction, the engagement with natural forces (light and shadow, wind and water), and above all his “pure” minimal spaces have been associated by many critics with higher, spiritual values (see, for example, Jin Baek’s recent monograph, Nothingness: Tadao Ando’s Christian Sacred Space). This sense of profundity is no doubt highlighted by the proliferation of black and white photographs of Ando’s spaces, emptied of any human inhabitants. However, Kenneth Frampton, in “Thoughts on Tadao Ando” (written when Ando received the 1995 Pritzker Prize), argued that Ando’s architecture “resists all spectacular apparatus of techno-scientific display, in order to testify to a moment that lies outside the constant threat of commodification.” For Frampton, the solemnity of Ando’s architecture somehow offers redemption from the shallow spectacles of contemporary consumer culture. And yet… ladies and gentlemen, meet Morimoto…

On 10th Avenue, at Chelsea’s industrial edge, a red curtain partially covers a huge arch in the former Nabisco Baking Company’s brick warehouse. Morimoto’s location is not easily accessible, and, in the absence of overt signage, it is not immediately obvious that this is a restaurant (confirming that this is an “in the know” establishment). The red curtain is at once a dramatic opening and an exaggerated reference to traditional Japanese noren, an “open for business” curtain. Behind it are automatic doors which open to a desk/coat check at the edge of a multi-leveled, open space containing varied seating options. There are some long communal tables, as well as semi-private rooms, and, towards the rear are what appear to be low, Japanese-style tables but their accompanying sunken bench chairs give patrons the impression of kneeling down to eat without the discomfort (a concession to Westerners). Another major feature at the back of the space is the display of sushi chefs working away in front of the diners. While the color palette is muted overall, a shimmering wall composed of illuminated plastic water bottles provides a spectacular central focus (see photos above and below).


Concrete stairs going down to a subterranean bar are lined with prominent columns, also immediately recognizable as Ando’s signature concrete, but the columns are purely decorative: they clearly stop before reaching the ceiling. Above, the ceiling appears to be folding ripples of beige fabric, but on closer inspection, it turns out to be solid fiberglass (sprayed onto fabric). Furniture throughout the restaurant, designed by Ross Lovegrove, continues this playful tension between appearance and reality. Some chairs appear to be made of solid concrete, for example, but are made from foam, while other chairs appear light but are solid and heavy. Thus the interior engenders active participation by its inhabitants, whose perceptions are challenged even as they move a chair to sit down. The juxtaposition of Ando’s naked concrete and wood, with Lovegrove’s plastics, fiberglass and other high-tech materials (including the water bottles that comprise the central wall, designed by Lovegrove for Ty Nant) creates a complex sensual experience, but not an authentic engagement with raw materials.


Down the concrete stairs, the subterranean bar space continues the same themes, but the bar itself is particularly noteworthy (see photo above). Its surface contains skeletal leaves embalmed in a plastic resin (which reminded me of Shiro Kuramata’s 1988 Miss Blanche chair, with flowers similarly set into transparent resin), which, when illuminated with a blue light from above, appear as poetic remainders of nature, a further reminder of the completely artificial nature of the space and its experience. The interior as a whole is carefully lit with artificial lights, and there is no engagement with natural light (the few windows are covered with translucent screens). In addition to the lighting, club music adds to an atmosphere that seems closer to a nightclub than an exclusive restaurant.


As well as with Lovegrove, Ando collaborated on this project with New York designer Stephanie Goto, a former employee of the master of the theatrical restaurant, David Rockwell. But Morimoto’s other influential contributor was its owner, entrepreneur Stephen Starr. Starr began in the entertainment industry in Philadelphia, and currently owns over a dozen restaurants in Philadelphia, New York City and Atlantic City, all characterized by their theatrical atmosphere. Starr’s spectacular dining experiences include not only innovative menus and designer spaces (the first Morimoto restaurant opened in Philadelphia in 2001, was designed by Karim Rashid), but also distinctive designer websites, and in the case of Morimoto, Pentagram-designed graphics. The final player in the Morimoto experience is its namesake, head chef Masaharu Morimoto, best known as an Iron Chef from the television series, and famed for his signature Japanese dishes infused with European flavors or ingredients. Morimoto himself occasionally appears in the restaurant, blurring the boundaries between his (virtual) TV character and an (actual) sushi chef performing for diners at the rear of the restaurant (see photo below: the empty performance space).


This oscillation between the virtual and real is characteristic of Morimoto’s total design, and appears, on the surface at least, to be opposed to the tranquility and solemnity conventionally associated with Ando’s architecture. However, in an article entitled “Thinking in Ma”, Ando wrote that he believed in an architecture that could create “space of dynamic variance, space that pulsates in the gap between reality and fiction, between the rational and the illogical...” The interior space of Morimoto and its designed experience hold the dichotomies listed above – the fake vs. the real, the temporal vs. the timeless, the corporeal vs. the conceptual – in perpetual suspense. Ando concluded his essay with the idea that the Japanese concept “Ma” denotes a place of conflict, and in this way Morimoto operates as a performative stage upon which its inhabitants might actively engage with contradictions.


Bibliography

Ando, Tadao, “Thinking in Ma”, in El Croquis, 44+58, Tadao Ando issues, 2000, p.6.

Amelar, Sarah, “Record Interiors: Tadao Ando Morimoto Restaurant”, Architectural Record, vol. 194, no. 9, September 2006.

Baek, Jin, Nothingness: Tadao Ando’s Christian Sacred Space, Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2009.

Heller, Steven, “Missing Component”, Metropolis, April 2008.

Innes, Christopher, Designing Modern America: From Broadway to Main Street, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005

Sparke, Penny, Elsie de Wolfe: The Birth of Modern Interior Decoration, Acanthus Press, 2005.

The photos of the column, the bar, and the chair are by D.J. Huppatz. The photo of D.J. Huppatz in Morimoto is by the eminent design historian, Katarina Posch.

Karim Rashid: Nooch, Kurve

Continuing my series on 21st century interiors, this post analyses two New York restaurants designed by Karim Rashid. A prolific designer in the Philippe Starck mold, Rashid established his reputation in furniture and product design during the 1990s, but has since branched out into packaging, fashion and interiors. Like Starck, Rashid has assumed the public persona of a design celebrity (see the Samsung advertisement below), although he has taken his celebrity status to another level, with a media image seamlessly integrated into his design aesthetic (he wears only white suits and or/pink shirts for publicity photos), and the production of several self-promotional manifesto/coffee-table books. For my purposes, Rashid’s interiors embody a trio of early 21st century preoccupations: digital technology, design and celebrity.

Karim Rashid, advertisement for Samsung, July 2007

Rashid was born in Cairo, raised and schooled in Canada, and, after studying industrial design at Carleton University, taught at both RISD and Pratt. He opened his own New York-based design practice in 1993 and soon gained a reputation as a “signature designer” via a distinctive vocabulary of forms and day-glo colors. Rashid’s organic forms were intially associated with similar forms by “blobject” designers such as Marc Newson or architect/designer Greg Lynn. These stylists of digital fluidity were experimenting with the sculptural possibilities opened up by new technologies such as CAD and CAM. Like a contemporary version of streamlined design, the application of a smooth and curvaceous “digital skin” onto existing products was supposed to evoke the new digital era: the 1930s metaphor of speed was replaced by the 1990s metaphor of cyberspace. Much like Raymond Loewy or Norman bel Geddes, Rashid applied the same fluid forms and seamless surfaces to existing products – from chairs to vacuum cleaners – in order to stimulate consumer desire via the resulting digital aura.

Karim Rashid's Chelsea loft

Like Rem Koolhaas, Rashid peppers his manifestos with bite-sized, trademark phrases such as “sensual minimalism” or “techno-organic” in order to define his design ideals. In I Want To Change the World, Rashid portrays himself in the tradition of the designer as visionary, a seer who can interpret the (digital) future for the rest of us mere mortals. Rashid’s blind faith in new technology and rejection of history (despite the 1960s pop references) places his design philosophy squarely in the modernist tradition. But, unlike the early 20th century modernists, for Rashid, democracy is conflated with consumerism, and the individual consumer is the ultimate endpoint of his design logic. Homogenization, he argues, is a threat to individuality. To rise above the poverty of mass produced goods, Rashid proposes variance and niche marketing, but the idea of confirming one’s individuality by buying Rashid-signature designs seems contradictory (see also his Design Your Self: Rethinking the Way You Live, Love, Work and Play). However, Rashid’s digital artifice reflects the values of a certain class of early 21st century design-saavy consumers: cosmopolitan, casual, and moneyed.

Nooch Noodle Bar

Rashid’s first foray into interior design was Morimoto restaurant in Philadelphia (2001), but his first New York interior was Nooch Noodle Bar (2004), a moderately-priced branch of a Singapore-based chain of contemporary Asian noodle shops. Situated in the heart of retrofitted Chelsea, on the corner of 8th Avenue and 17th Street, the entire street frontage of Nooch is a glass façade. The glass is foggy at the top and bottom, then gradually clearer towards the middle, resulting in a long horizontal frame that wraps around the corner of the city block. At night, a neon green glow from below creates an otherworldly atmosphere. From outside, the entrance is marked by an oversized image of a model’s face, which resonates with both the pan-Asian cuisine and the voyeuristic environment within. From inside, the space is sealed from street noise by the constant dance music, so patrons watch a stream of traffic and pedestrians striding along 8th Ave, clutching cellphones or shopping bags, walking dogs or hailing taxis, for the most part oblivious they are on display.


Inside, the small dining space has a capacity of around fifty diners, and comprises Rashid-designed lime-colored chairs and translucent plastic benches, as well as smoothly contoured metallic tables. However, the spongy material of the benches and the table surfaces have not worn well, the bench edges are crumbling and white chips on the tables somewhat spoil the high-tech effect. Another major design element, a spectacular blue, pink and green “noodle” mural on one wall, highlights Rashid’s exploration of virtual space with its complex layers and reflective surface.


The floor pattern, which looks similar to 1960s Op Art, continues up the back wall and into the bathroom. Along with the patterns, the highlight of the bathroom is the ameboid mirror across which run scrolling LED messages that appear as textual fragments such as “sexy underwear” or “naughty girl”. A central bar with Rashid-designed stools makes the restaurant seem casual while a prominent DJ desk, “DJ Kreemy”, a curvaceous blue stand with two turntables and a mixing board set into it, connects the dining experience to nightclub culture. And music is a crucial element in the creation of atmosphere here: the seamless surfaces of the furniture and the continuous patterns are complemented by a seamless musical experience. Like cyberspace, Nooch is insulated from the outside world, but the simultaneous experience of being on display and voyeuristically watching passers-by reflects a contemporary celebrity culture in which the boundaries between private and public are blurred.


Kurve

Rashid’s more recent restaurant/bar, Kurve (2008), occupies a corner site in the gentrified East Village. A floor-to-ceiling glass façade along 2nd Avenue “kurves” around the corner onto 5th Street where it ends halfway around, with three oval-shaped windows completing the 5th Street façade. Like Nooch, Kurve’s glass facade wraps around the corner, but here the fish bowl effect is more pronounced, particularly at night, when patrons are on display to passers-by due to not only the glass façade, but the interior’s light palette. Like Nooch, Kurve is similarly insulated from the noise and smells of the street outside, and patrons are immersed in a soft and comfortable Rashid-world of organic forms and calm colors.


Inside, ovaloid shapes abound and the color scheme is distinctively pale pink and white. Light is cleverly diffused, making the interior space light-filled but not overly bright. Pale pink couches line one side, an oval bar sits in the middle of the space, and more formal dining seating comprising white tables and chairs lies on the other side of the bar. Above the couches, three video monitors, also oval shaped, stream random patterns, morphing forms and numbers in a constant abstract datastream. There is an obligatory DJ booth at the rear, and, like Nooch, a seamless soft club mix adds to the hypnotic atmosphere created by the lighting and soft curves throughout. The plastic flooring material, which appears to be similar to that used for childrens' playgrounds, adds to the sense of a cocooned world, safely removed from the dim, dilapidated grittiness of 2nd Avenue outside.


Rashid’s interiors are consistent with his design aesthetic, but move it beyond a single object into a kind of digital gesamtkunstwerk. Rashid (and his studio) also designed the graphics and logos for both restaurants (see images below), including details such as designs for the napkins and chopstick holders. Both Nooch and Kurve are complete, immersive environments that reflect the contemporary experience of cyberspace – safe, non-threatening and detached from the “outside world”. While Rashid’s digital spaces are supposedly universal (without reference to any particular culture, history or specific location), they reflect a certain cosmopolitan class that is mobile, design-conscious and technologically-saavy. And it is not coincidental that both spaces are located in gentrified downtown areas associated with New York’s cultural industries. With the idea of designer “lifestyle” as a discourse of differentiation now firmly entrenched amongst urban middle classes (see my post on Ian Schreger/Philippe Starck), Rashid’s consistent aesthetic and high-tech references clearly appeal to the early 21st century fetishization of digital spaces and the display culture of contemporary celebrity.



Bibliography

Rashid, Karim, Evolution, London: Thames and Hudson, 2004.
Rashid, Karim, Design Your Self: Rethink the Way You Live, Love, Work and Play, New York: Regan Books, 2006.
Rashid, Karim, I Want to Change the World, London: Thames and Hudson, 2001.
“Kurve Designer Karim Rashid Thinks New York Has Some Catching Up to Do”, interview by Sasha Petraske, Grub Street New York (from New York magazine) published online, 8/06/08. There are good images of Kurve included with the interview.

Images of Nooch above by D. J. Huppatz.
More images of Nooch here.

Miuccia Prada/OMA/Rem Koolhaas: Prada Store

“In every relationship there comes a time when you take that next important step. For some couples that step is meeting the parents, for me it's meeting the Prada.”

- Carrie Bradshaw, Sex in the City, Season 6, 2003.

New York’s Prada flagship store, designed by Rem Koolhaas/OMA, was the subject of much media hype when it opened in December 2001, and has accumulated a wealth of architectural criticism since then. In this post, rather than reviewing the extensive literature devoted to the Prada, I will situate the store within my initial framework for understanding the 21st century interior. That is, while Prada is conventionally understood (in architectural criticism) as a sophisticated high-tech architectural container, how might we understand it as an interior? This requires thinking about its ephemeral nature, how it is inhabited, how it is mediated, and its relationship with the formation of identity (how Carrie, for example, comes to invest parental authority in a clothing store). I will begin with a brief introduction to Prada as a brand, then Koolhaas’ OMA, before an analysis of the flagship store and its significance as a 21st century interior. A comparison between the Prada flagship store and the Ralph Lauren flagship store (analyzed in a previous post) will highlight the differences between the contemporary discourses of architecture and interior design.


Prada

Miuccia Prada inherited the Prada family leather goods business in 1978, and, with the help of her husband and business manager Patrizio Bertelli, transformed it into a global fashion brand in under two decades. Usually described as an uncomfortable entrepreneur, Miuccia Prada gained a PhD in political science, was a member of the Italian Communist Party, and trained and performed in mine for several years before embarking on her career in fashion. As creative director at Prada, she designed the classic black nylon handbag in 1985, then expanded into ready-to-wear collections in 1989. Prada’s popularity soared in the 1990s with collections of elegant, understated clothing, characterized by their austerity and innovative materials. Challenging the conspicuous excess associated with 1980s luxury fashion, Prada’s functional “uniform” appealed to the tech-saavy yuppies of the 1990s. Prada’s advertising campaigns, typically featuring simply a Prada-clad model and the logo, followed the same restrained, sophisticated ideal as the clothing.

Prada grew into a billion dollar conglomerate in the late 1990s with corporate acquisitions of labels such as Fendi, Helmut Lang and Jil Sander (all sold since then). In an effort to reach a broader consumer base, Prada also diversified from high fashion clothing to mass produced accessories. With diversification, Prada, like other luxury brands, faced a major challenge in differentiating a luxury commodity from a mass produced one. During the designer decades of the 1980s and 90s, this differentiation could be achieved, at least partially, by the signature of the designer. Critic Nicky Ryan describes this process as fashion’s “transubstantiation” whereby simply a “signature or label could transform ordinary commodities into luxury goods.” (Ryan, p.12) However contrived, calculated and carefully mediated, the personality of the designer served as a key point of differentiation, arousing empathy in an era obsessed with self-expression through consumption. Prada’s brand was understood to be “intelligent”, “political” and “progressive”, like the media image of Miuccia herself. Thus consumers could differentiate between not only luxury goods and mass consumer ones through the identity of their designer, but also between goods authenticated by a cosmopolitan, Milanese political science graduate (Miucci Prada) rather than by a self-made, all-American cowboy (Ralph Lauren).

As well as the designer signature, a designer space became an essential branding component – a physical environment in which consumers could commune with the brand. Just as Ralph Lauren commissioned designer Naomi Leff to design the brand’s Manhattan flagship store in 1986, Miucci Prada commissioned Rem Koolhaas to design Prada’s Manhattan flagship store in 2001. Their respective choice of designers, of course, was not coincidental: Leff had worked with Lauren on previous store designs and knew how to create an appropriately historical ambiance. Koolhaas, on the other hand, was not only a cosmopolitan celebrity architect, but also a Harvard professor with intellectual credentials. While the design of their respective flagship stores appear to be aesthetically worlds apart, both designers created similar experiential environments specifically designed to complement the existing brands. This comparison is considered in more detail below, following a brief introduction to Koolhaas and his design of the store.


Koolhaas/OMA/AMO

The Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) was founded in London in 1975 by Koolhaas, and relocated to Rotterdam in 1978. During the 1980s and 90s, OMA became better known for their weighty publications and competition entries than for their small output of built work. Koolhaas published the influential urbanist manifesto Delirious New York in 1978, but the shift into collective production, particularly OMA’s S,M,L,XL (1995), redefined architectural publishing. OMA’s mash up of polemical statements, textual and visual provocations, blurry photographs, maps, statistics, and research data challenged both the graphic language as well as the content of the conventional architectural monograph. Architecture was no longer represented as an autonomous cultural product but converged with the entertainment and fashion industries, appropriating both form and content from them. In 1999, Koolhaas formalized this convergence with the establishment of OMA’s dedicated research, branding and publication studio, AMO.

During the late 1990s, Koolhaas’ Harvard studio also began compiling material for books, starting with The Harvard Guide to Shopping. Echoing Jean Baudrillard’s essays from the previous decade, Koolhaas’ team declared that “everything is shopping” in contemporary consumer culture. In relation to the later Prada commision, two points made in The Harvard Guide to Shopping are worth repeating here: firstly, in his essay “High Architecture”, Daniel Herman noted the failure of “high” (that is modernist) architecture to engage with retail shopping environments. Secondly, Hiromi Hosoya and Markus Schaefer’s essay “Brand Zone” described contemporary flagship stores in which “experiences must be provided, images sustained, myths created. Movement, symbols, sound, and smell all reinforce the stores’ message, which finds its ultimate embodiment in the figure of the designers after whom they are usually named. Increasingly, shopping’s obsession with the individual’s behaviour and perception turns these spaces into engineered synesthetic environments.” (pp.166-68). With all the appropriate intellectual research in place, “high” (that is modernist) architects such as Koolhaas could safely take on shopping. Although the research was completed years before, The Harvard Guide to Shopping was coincidently published only months after the Prada store opened.

The Prada store’s significance, regardless of its financial or architectural success, was assured in advanced by a heavy promotional blitz before the store’s opening, including a large book and an exhibition of models and plans. Edited by Rem Koolhaas, Jens Hommert and Michael Kubo of OMA/AMO, Projects for Prada Part 1, published by Prada, comprised photographs of models, mock ups of the New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco stores (the latter was never built), research data and Koolhaasian proclamations such as “Luxury = Intelligence” or “Luxury = Waste”. We can understand this publicity blitz as specifically modernist by returning to Beatriz Colomina’s take on modernism in Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (in which we could easily substitute Le Corbusier for Koolhaas). Colomina argues that “modern architecture becomes ‘modern’ not simply by using glass, steel, or reinforced concrete, as is usually understood, but precisely by engaging with the new mechanical equipment of the mass media: photography, film, advertising, publicity, publications, and so on.” (p.73) Le Corbusier was consciously engaged in his own historical and intellectual legitimation, as Koolhaas is today, through utilizing the communicative power of the mass media. Thus by the time the Prada store opened, it was already more than a store: it was an historical event.


Meet the Prada

By the late 1990s, the invasion of Soho by retail shopping was almost complete: most art galleries had migrated to Chelsea, while artists had moved on to cheaper pastures. The expansive Guggenheim franchise opened a Soho branch on the corner of Broadway and Prince in 1992, designed by Arata Isozaki, but it struggled and closed in 2001. It was in this same building (the 1882 Rogers Peet Store), in the vaccuum created after the avant-garde community fled, that OMA and Prada founded their New York “Epicenter” store. The Prada store opened in December 2001 with predictable media hype, the staggering cost, upwards of $40 million, was repeated in newspaper and journals. The epicenter store strategy was to create diversity within a single global brand, each store differentiated by its unique design (OMA also designed the LA store, Herzog and de Meuron the Tokyo store). The store itself would help maintain brand exclusivity – there was only one Koolhaas-designed Prada store in the capital of luxury (and of culture), New York.

From the street, large picture windows display the store itself, stimulating curiosity and reminding the consumer that the store’s design is more important than the display of merchandise. Once past the prominent security guard at the entrance, the immediate sensation is a sense of space (the luxury of wasted space in expensive real estate) with a loft-like two storey space. Three key design elements are visible upon entering at ground level – the zebrawood “wave”; the large, circular, transparent elevator, and the (ever-changing) wallpaper mural covering most of one wall. From the Broadway entrance, the wave flows down to the basement area (where the shopping takes place), and rises to the other entrance on Mercer Street (see images of the wave above). Oversize steps on one side are used as display space for merchandise, but double as seats for cultural events when a concealed stage opens out of the wave opposite. Like a choreographed runway show, shoppers sweep down the stairs of the wave to the basement, self-consciously on display from above and below.


The unique glass elevator (see image above), constructed at great expense, takes shoppers down only one floor and is rarely used, adding to the luxury of waste idea. The wallpaper, featuring graphics coordinated by local graphic designer firm 2x4, allows for a constant renewal of the interior, although the graphic material reinforces that this is art (some well-known artists have designed images for this space) or “high” design rather than merely decoration. Continuing the flexibility idea, large industrial cabinets containing clothes hang from the ceiling on a movable tracks (see image below), allowing for different spatial configurations, particular when the space is opened for cultural events. This theatrical articulation of the brand as both luxurious and cultural also appeals to a particular image of New York as the capital of both.


Retail is confined to the basement area, where design also features prominently. The black and white checkerboard marble floor recalls Prada’s main store in Milan, but the main attraction down here is the technological gadgetry. An ephemeral and mediated space is created via LCD screens with streaming images of “aura-related content” that appear amongst the clothes displays (see image below). Some of these are also interactive, with cameras which capture images of the shopper display them, fragmented or delayed on a nearby screen. An LCD triptych consciously evokes a religious communion with the brand, but the nearby fitting rooms were a tourist favourite, with their magic mirrors and switchable glass doors (the latter mostly not working). Technological innovation featured high on the Prada store’s priorities, not only visibly in the store, but with IT innovations such as a global customer database, RFID tags for inventory control or protection from theft, and digital customer loyalty cards that might create a personal “virtual closet”. However, as Greg Lindsay reported in 2004, a quarter of the store’s budget went into IT innovations, but only three years later, “the multimillion-dollar technology spend is starting to look more like tech for tech’s sake rather than an enhancement of the shopping experience”. He detailed the various failures of the IT systems and technological gadgets, such as the fitting room switchable glass, the RFID system, staff PDA devices and the sales and inventory wireless network.


Interior Design vs. Architecture

Finally, in rethinking the Prada flagship store as an interior, it is worth noting the similarities and differences between it and Naomi Leff’s Polo/Ralph Lauren flagship store, Rhinelander Mansion. Both stores were interior projects, retrofitted into existing 19th century structures; both responded to the interior as ephemeral, creating a basic, iconic framework within which changing component parts could reinvigorate the space; and both were designed as “experiential spaces” for staging identity in which customers could become part of the complete, seamless artifice comprising fashion collections, advertising campaigns, graphic styles and the stores themselves. Once considered the essence of fashion, material products such as clothing and accessories were reconceived with these interiors as props within carefully orchestrated narratives of lifestyle and identity. However, there remains a fundamental difference, between the two: the Prada store is architecture.


Following the popular understanding of interior design, Rhinelander revels in its fakery – antique copies sit next to real antiques in a creative restoration – while the Prada revels in modernist “truth” (to materials and to forms). Rhinelander’s hand-crafted historicism seems opposed to Prada’s futuristic technologies. Luxury is equated with “Intelligence” by Koolhaas, and “intelligence”, in turn, is uncritically equated with digital technology. Leff’s Rhinelander Mansion appears (at least on the surface) intuitive and feminine compared to Koolhaas’ intellectual and masculine Prada store, the latter driven by, and legitimated by, academic research. Finally, the populist culture of Ralph Lauren (whose fantasies derived from Hollywood movies) seems opposed to Prada’s self-conscious cultural elitism (avant-garde art, design and architecture). To further this distinction, Prada’s epicenter stores were part of a more general strategy designed to enhance luxury through the association with avant-garde culture, which included establishing the Prada Foundation in 1995, directed by curator Germano Celant. Through conflating its brand identity with that of avant-garde art and architecture and its (assumed) values – progressive, critical, liberal – Prada appealed to a particular cosmopolitan class who might buy into such cultural capital.


Despite these differentiations, the elaborate spectacle of store obscures the realities of mass produced commodities. Just as an empty store is transformed via designer transubstantiation into a cultural space, so to a bag produced for a pittance in Vietnam is transformed into a luxurious commodity. Curiously, the voluminous Koolhaasian research fails to address issues of globalization in relation to the production of Prada’s clothes (Who makes them? Where? How much are they paid? Under what conditions do they work?). Finally, the two stores might be seen as illustrations of the difference between globalization of the 1980s and 1990s – Rhinelander’s aura of tradition, stability and patriotism seem to complement the Reagan-Bush values that accompanied American capitalist expansion, while Prada’s more global associations and appeal (Italian brand, Dutch architect) reflects more recent multinational capitalism and the mobility of a wealthy cosmopolitan class without national allegiances.


See the full Sex in the City clip here, with a bonus hidden video tour of the store and critique.

Selected Bibliography

Alan Brake, “Prada World’s Price Tag”, Architecture, Vol. 91, Issue 3, March 2002.

Joseph Giovannini, “Finally, Prada”, Interior Design, Vol. 73, No. 4, 2002.

Rem Koolhaas, Jens Hommert and Michael Kubo, OMA/AMO, eds. Projects for Prada Part 1, Fondazione Prada Edizioni, 2001.

Rem Koolhaas, Chuihua Judy Chung, Jeffrey Inaba, Sze Tsung Leong, eds., Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, Cologne, New York and London: Taschen, 2001.

Rem Koolhaas and Brendan McGetrick, eds., Content, Cologne: Taschen, 2004.

Greg Lindsay, “Prada’s High-Tech Misstep”, Business 2.0, March 2004, online here.

Philip Nobel, “Waiting for Prada”, Interior Design, Vol. 72, No. 4, 2001.

Joan Ockman, “The YES man”, Architecture, Vol. 91, Issue 3, March 2002.

Nicky Ryan, “Prada and the Art of Patronage”, Fashion Theory, Vol. 11, Issue 1, 2007.

Michael Sorkin, “Brand Aid”, Harvard Design Magazine, No. 17, Fall 2002/Winter 2003, online here.

Michael Sorkin, “Riff on Rem: Sorkin’s Take on Multinational Style”, Architectural Record, Vol. 190, No. 1, Jan. 2002.

Carl Swanson, “The Prada Armada: Interview with Miuccia Prada and Rem Koolhaas”, New York Magazine, 16 April 2006, online here.