Category — Design

The new visitor center at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden offers transparent passage to “a secret Eden,” reports Philip Nobel in the New York Times (5/9/12). Brooklyn Botanic has been around for 102 years and until now its “creaking turnstiles … served as the only public entrances to the place.” But starting next week, a new gateway will greet visitors “at the northeast corner of the garden” and “plant lovers will contend with architecture at the garden’s threshold.” The building, designed by Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi of Weiss/Manfredi, carries on their tradition of “integrating buildings with nature, albeit with a certain brashness.”

If you enter Brooklyn Botanic “from Washington Avenue, you climb a few steps, pass through monumental steel gates and find yourself on a bare concrete plaza … To your left is a wall of clear glass under an accordion-folded copper roof … Ahead, the roof continues past the edge of the glass over a wide entryway through which you can make out the green of trees beyond. On the other side of this pedestrian slot through the building is a high wall, the same clean, white concrete of the plaza ground. The effect is distinctly urbane … you approach nature now through the stuff of the city.”

And yet “most of the building remains out of sight, seemingly lost in nature, embedded in a grass-and-tree-covered berm. It’s a move that creates high-contrast oppositions between growing and built, and that also defends the garden against the asphalt and masonry of its neighbor.” The 10,000 square-foot roof is itself a garden of “grasses and flowering bulbs” and the “vertical steel mullions are kept short to match the rhythm of nearby tree trunks … The result is not a craven, apologetic attempt to deny that what was once nature is now architecture. It’s a model of one way those two opposed systems can coexist.” (image)

A new natural-history museum in Utah makes “nature and humans all part of one ingeniously complex continuum,” reports Julie V. Iovine in The Wall Street Journal (5/9/12). For one thing, the $102.5 million Natural History Museum of Utah is not located downtown with other local museums; it is on the University of Utah campus and “straddles a popular hiking trail perched halfway up the slopes of the Wasatch Range, foothills to the Rockies at the edge of both the campus and the town.”

The museum’s facade, “clad in a burnished copper, mottled by streaks of zinc and tin” all but disappears “amid the reddish-brown rock against which it is set … you enter as through the faceted, sheer walls of a canyon, rendered in beige plaster and board-formed concrete. Instead of a procession of galleries with symmetrical predictability, the organizational logic is that of switchback paths traversing ramps, bridges and underpasses.” Todd Schliemann of Ennead Architects, designers of the new museum, says the approach was intended to help convey an overall message.

For example, a room featuring a display of “a model of Lake Bonneville, which filled the Great Basin during the Pleistocene era some 15,000 years ago” opens up to an “adjacent terrace to view the actual lake in the distance.” The main lobby, known as the Canyon, features “an enormous panoramic window that, with breathtaking sweep, delivers natural history live: a view of the entire Salt Lake Valley and snow-capped Oquirrh Mountains … The laudable intention was to provide a public place where people can range widely and even see a little something for free before buying a ticket.” (images)

“It’s hard to check responsible consumption at the door and go back to mass-produced things that have no stories to tell,” says Bradford Shane Shellhammer in a Wall Street Journal piece by David Sokol (4/21/12). Bradford is co-founder and chief creative officer of Fab dot-com, a flash-sale website specializing in simple designs for household items. For example, Fab recently featured “garden tools created by a Montana blacksmith and forged-steel lighting made in Illinois that the site described as having an ‘unpretentious, minimalist sensibility with a rough-hewn edge’.”

David McFadden, curator of the Museum of Art and Design, says the appeal is a “lingering response to the economics of the past few years.” Ruth Storc, who keeps a blog called Design Patriot, agrees: “People are interested in all things artisanal, because they want to know where the things they live with are being made and by whom,” adding: “Perhaps there is a bit of backlash against globalization and technology.” Tyler Hays, founder of BDDW, a furniture designer, also notes that American labor costs are now more competitive with Chinese, and besides, “you can spend $4 in fossil fuel for shipping a $10 item overseas.”

Such forces are fueling a design trend becoming known as New American Minimalism that features “reserved shapes, natural materials, apparent construction and hand finishing.” For consumers, says designer Kimberly Ayres, the “basic yet refined lines allow more whimsical furniture pieces to stand out” while “the handmade quality is grounding.” For BDDW, it’s also smart business. “We’re making a bigger profit on pieces made in America than stuff made in China, and there’s huge, huge interest at the Anthropologie price point,” Tyler says. “It’s green and good for the economy,” he adds. “Local fits everybody’s agenda.”

“Since the rise of middle-class prosperity after World War II, cars have been an extraordinary window into the country’s culture and mood,” writes Paul Ingrassia in a Wall Street Journal excerpt from his book, Engines of Change (4/20/12). That window opened in a big way, of course, with the 1950s appearance of tail fins, which were both inspired by fighter planes as well as “powerful totems of America’s peacetime bounty.” The fin-wars escalated between General Motors and Chrysler, peaking with the 1959 Cadillacs, which “had the tallest tail-fins ever appended to a vehicle that didn’t fly.”

Fins became progressively smaller after that, “and disappeared entirely by 1965. By then, extravagance in car design had spawned a backlash. Volkswagen was selling some 150,000 Beetles a year in the US by the mid-1960s,” and became an icon of “the 1960s counterculture.” Another icon of a different sort — the Ford Mustang — “debuted in April 1964, just as America’s first Baby Boomers were coming of age. The car caused a sensation, even though it was built on the chassis of the dull and dowdy Ford Falcon.” Seymour Marshak, Ford’s marketing chief at the time, compared the Mustang’s lines to those of a woman.

The 1970s saw the introduction of the AMC Gremlin, which was “designed on the back of a Northwest Airlines airsickness bag and launched on April Fools’ Day, 1970″ … and was perhaps was a metaphor for the ensuing decade. The 1980s gave rise to yet another Baby Boomer icon, “the revolutionary Chrysler minivan,” which “quickly became the preferred vehicles of ‘soccer moms,’ who were becoming a formidable force in America’s political landscape.” The minivan led to SUVs as well as renewed interest in pickup trucks,which are political icons in their own right, most recently in Scott Brown’s 2010 campaign to fill the late Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat (link).

Airplane windows are rounded because of the catastrophic cracks resulting from square-edged portals in 1950s-era jetliners, reports Matt Ridley in a Wall Street Journal review of Henry Petroski’s To Forgive Design (4/11/12). That’s but one example of how design failure spawned innovation. Most of Henry’s other examples involve bridges, such as the one built in 1939 over the Tacoma Narrows in Washington State. The area was “thinly populated and heavy traffic was not expected,” so engineers designed “a two-lane bridge with a narrow sidewalk” that “was extremely narrow, light and shallow for its great length.”

This made sense until the winds kicked in and the bridge began to sway, “slowly at first, then gradually building to wild undulation — before finally collapsing.” The problem was that a bridge “so long, thin and light was almost bound to be too flexible to stand.” The solution, among other things, was to build “a new suspension bridge … with four lanes rather than two to reduce the length-to-width ratio.” The result was that the new bridge attracted “economic growth to the area” and “tolls rapidly retired its debt … within 50 years another was needed to handle the increasing traffic.”

Henry provides many other examples of how bridge failures led to improved designs. A “cantilever bridge over the St. Lawrence River” in Quebec, built in 1907, would have been “the world’s longest span,” but “it collapsed under construction, killing 75 workers.” Following the disaster, Canadian engineers wore “an iron pinkie ring” to remind themselves of the failure and recited a Rudyard Kipling poem, Hymn of the Breaking Strain, as a ritual reminder: “So when the buckled girder / Lets down the grinding span / The blame of loss, or murder, / Is laid upon the man. / Not on the stuff — the man!”

The rate of technological change has gotten so fast that we need to inform the design to reflect it," says Ryan Anderson in a New York Times piece by Steven Kurutz (3/29/12). Ryan is director of future technology for Herman Miller, and he works with a "design team to come up with answers to vexing, internet-age questions like what the home office should look like when the iPad and other tablets and laptops have freed us to work anywhere." Among the imponderables is "whether people prefer to use such devices on a work surface or, say, on the couch." Among the challenges is making the furniture look good, too.

"Seeing a beautiful piece of furniture in a beautiful space littered with cords and cables is not a great experience," says Ryan. "Making them discrete is important." Over time, this is a problem that may solve itself. "What’s interesting, from a design standpoint is that the computer gets rid of so many things," says Harry Allen, an industrial designer. "You don’t need clocks because they’re on our phone … A lot of things that used to take up room, like records and books, you don’t need." Ikea is among those picking up on this, having re-designed its Billy bookcase so it is "deeper because so many people were using it to hold everything but books."

Philippe Starck refers to the process of "dematerialization," or the "elegance of the minimum." As to the future of design, says Philippe, "There is no future." He predicts that eventually "we’ll all be implanted with microchips and we’ll be the product." In the meantime, Yves Behar of Fuseproject, a design firm, says furniture designers have not kept pace with consumer needs. "We’ve had technology in our living rooms for 10 or 12 years, and furniture has not changed at all in response." He sees a future in modularity, so that "you would be able to modify the couch that you’re using in a way that makes it adapt to new technologies."

The iconic Chinese take-out container was designed by an American inventor in 1894, report Hilary Greenbaum and Dana Rubinstein in the New York Times (1/15/12). The inventor was Frederick Weeks Wilcox, who patented what he called a "paper pail," commonly referred to as the "oyster pail." His design consisted of "a single piece of paper, creased into segments and folded into a (more or less) leakproof container secured with a dainty wire on top."

It really was quite ingenious: "The supportive folds on the outside, fastened with that same wire, created a flat interior surface over which food could slide smoothly onto a plate." It became known as the "oyster pail" because it was based, apparently on an existing design for "a wooden receptacle with a locked cover used in transporting raw oysters." The rendering of a red pagoda "and a stylized ‘Thank you’ on top" wasn’t added until the 1970s.

That design touch was added by a graphic designer whose identity is unknown, but who was employed by a "company now known as Fold-Pak." The irony, of course, is this: "The structure has come to represent the idea of Eastern cuisine in Western society even though the packaging is not used for food containment in Chinese cutlure," notes Scott Chapps, a package designer. The design has changed little over the years, although it is now offered in microwave-safe and environmentally friendly models.

The designer of the most iconic coffee cup of all time had "no formal training in art," reports Margalit Fox in a New York Times remembrance of the late Leslie Buck (4/29/10). Born Laszlo Buch, Leslie was a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald who came to America, changed his name, and designed "the Anthora, the cardboard cup of Grecian design that has held New Yorkers’ coffee securely for nearly half a century."

As every New Yorker knows, the Anthora is blue "with a white meander ringing the top and bottom." On each side is "a drawing of a Greek vase known as an amphora." Leslie’s accent was responsible for altering that to "anthora." The design is also emblazoned "with three steaming golden coffee cups" and, of course, the famous motto: "We Are Happy To Serve You." Leslie never earned royalties for his design, but did well on sales commissions on it.

He came up with the idea while working for the Sherri Cup Company, as part of its plan "to crack New York’s hot-cup market." Leslie figured that since many of the city’s diners were owned by Greeks, they should try "a Classical cup in the colors of the Greek Flag." At its peak in 1994, Sherri "sold 500 million of the cups" but by 2005 the company had been sold to Solo and was down to 200 million." Today, "Solo no longer carries the Anthora as a stock item, making it only on request."

A magenta two-wheeler with a sound system and "an electrical assist battery" is "the ultimate modern utility bike," reports Nancy Keates in the Wall Street Journal (10/8/11). The bike was designed by Tony Pereira, and came out on top in a competition in which 32 bicycle designers had to re-invent the bicycle as "convenient and comfortable vehicles for commuting, lugging stuff and actual travel." The designers then had to prove the bikes lived up to such promise by riding them over a "grueling 50-mile course" that "included hauling boxes and groceries over patches of gravel and up 3,000-foot elevation hills."

The competition, sponsored by Oregon Manifest, required that the bikes had "anti-theft systems, fenders and lights, while remaining upright on their kick stands despite heavy loads." Among the entries was a nine-foot "cargo" bike, "featuring a super-stiff 48-pound frame and a wood platform that was able to maneuver agilely while carrying 400 pounds." Another was designed to carry "three meals and is equipped with a back-rack and heavy-duty lunchbox." A third "included a hub generator-charged battery pack with USB port for juicing cellphones and bicycle lights."

The competition’s judges included Nike innovation chief Tinker Hatfield, Breezer Bikes co-founder Joe Breeze and Rob Forbes of Design Within Reach. While many of these ideas might not yet be ready for mass production, the idea was to "generate ideas that could trickle down to the big-guy manufacturers." Sales of so-called "hybrid" or "cross" bikes "have risen from 14 percent to 21 percent of all made since 2005, according to the National Bicycle Dealers Association" and "the number of bike commuters in the US’s 70 largest cities grew by more than 36 percent between 2005 and 2010, according to the League of American Bicyclists."

Kohler’s Numi toilet costs $6,400, but it offers a certain luxury that’s easy to get used to, reports Sam Grobart in the New York Times (10/13/11). "Features that initially seem unnecessary can become something you cannot do without, even in a bathroom," says Sam. Such features include a heated seat, as well as the ability to "blow heated air from its base, warming your feet on chilly mornings." The Numi can also "wash and dry its user (there are modes for both men and women)." And you never have to touch the lid or flush the toilet because the Numi can detect your presence or lack thereof.

Each and every control is "handled through a touch screen remote control that is somewhat larger than an iPod Touch." It can store "combinations of preferences … in user profiles for different family members." The Numi has "two flushing modes, both of which are more efficient than current federal flushing standards," and comes equipped with an "FM radio and stereo speakers" with three presets, as well as controls for bass, treble and balance. You can plug in an MP3 player if you like. "The audio quality was quite good," says Sam, "considering that you are listening to a toilet."

Of course, all this technology comes with complications. Sam says that one day he "approached the Numi only to discover that its remote had frozen." He had to thumb through a 43-page manual to discover that he had to "reboot the toilet," a process he said was akin to "working on a wireless router." Sometimes the sensor was a bit too sensitive, and the Numi would open its lid anytime a user was near it, whether nature called or not. Sam also felt that the lid opened and closed a bit too slowly, and he quickly disabled a short chime that played each time it went up. While all of this has its charm, Sam suspects few will spring for a toilet that costs 80 times more than a standard model, noting that, for most folks, "the bathroom is a waypoint, not a destination."