A New Design Boom

Having spent the last ten years in Weimar trying to figure out by whom and how Walter Gropius’s moral meliorism to bring good design to the working classes was corrupted into Cultural Tourism, (My analysis will appear next year on the 90th anniversary of the Bauhaus founding), I’m elated by a sudden efflorescence of design criticism: a brilliant historical gloss at the London Design Museum, Dr. Annemarie Jaeggi’s shrewd “recovery” of the Ulm School of Design’s Peter Raacke at the Berlin Bauhaus Archive, and especially the V and A’s breakthrough show, Cold War Modern, as well as a belated centennial tribute at the Vitra Design Museum to George Nelson.

The Design Museum under Dejan Sudjic‘s leadership is reshaping the agenda of a design museum, especially with his annual selection of several promising young design starlets and giving them free reign to innovate under his watchful eye, including the latest goofy genius ,Freddie Yauner, who just got into the Guinness Book of Records by designing a pop up toaster to beat all other slices by its height of upward thrust! Sudjic leads us through modern design history beginning with the first World’s Fair in London 1851, followed by Adolf Loos’s Secession Vienna in 1908, Gropius’s Dessau Bauhaus in 1928, the Eames’ LA in 1949, Tokyo in 1970, finishing with a triumphal return to his own London of 2008.

One thing I especially relished was the presence of battered artifacts: for example, Kolomon Moser’s furniture, which had clearly been lived on! (Too many design shows go for virgin examples that make you forget you’re talking about human lives, not sterile exhibits, as if all designs, say, were the unsittable upon chairs of that Dutch genius Gerrit Rietveld.

I would have snuck in a Philly episode: Christopher Dresser’s four lectures at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts during our Centennial Exposition in 1876, after which he made his momentous four month deviation to Japan, about which he famously said, ”I went to Japan a mere decorator and returned a 'designer'.” The first in history, who not only anticipated the Bauhaus’s ideals by almost fifty years, but actually mass produced Modern Design until his death in 1904. I’m still working on the mystery of how the Friedrich Schiller University in nearby Jena gave him a doctorate “honoris causa” in 1859 at the tender age of 25 for his two small books on botanical designs!

I also crit Sudjic for making William Wagenfeld the hero of Dessau 1928 when that is the year Marianne Brandt became the first women to head a manly workshop (Metal). And whose designs therefrom are made to this day in Alessi’s Italian factory. I regard her and Chicago architect Bertrand Goldberg (last class, Berlin,1933) as the greatest Bauhaus students ever, neither of whom has had a major Bauhaus retrospective, an outrageous scandal that derives from both German Filiopietism as well as Patriarchy (Pius decreed that only 30 percent of Bauhaus applicants could be women!) It should be (but won’t) be corrected in their silly 90th anniversary celebration to hype Tourism!

Then there is Dr. Jaeggi, the first significant deviation from the Patriarchal Sinecuriat that has been running (and ruining) the Gropius Heritage of Moral Meliorism for the past forty years since Pius’s death. Please note that her first exhibition was a salute to a minor achievement of my Bauhaus Heroine, MB: her innovations with photomontage. Another coup is her current show on Peter Raacke who has made a career of inexpensive cutlery as well as brilliant and cheap, collapsible cardboard furniture. It is a fiscal disgrace that Frank Gehry’s cardboard chair is selling at the Vitra Design Museum for over 600Euros! (It was a five and dime bargain before FG Pritzkered himself into Starchitect status,a condition that is slowly but inexorably destroying the moral seriousness of World Architecture.)

Raacke finally gives meaning to the frequent but generally meaningless assertion that Ulm was the Bauhaus Redivivus. Her 8 euro catalog (including a cover adorning minifork by PR!) is the greatest book bargain in the Western World at the moment. And Gerda Müller-Krauspe’s “The Mono Flatware by Peter Raacke” at three euros is a close second. Watch these women taking over Bauhaus scholarship, an encouragingly bloodless coup!

And then there’s the V and A’s splendid intellectual sortie: how Moscow and Washington squared off in “Cold War Design:1945-1970” about the contending kitchens of the world. Remember Khruschev in Nixon’s Kitchen! And his premature ejaculation: “We’ll bury you!” Sorry, Nikita! But what I didn’t know about modern designing in the Eastern Sector could fill an Empty Kremlin. And not Just the Space Race either! Posters. Cars. TV Towers. Clothes.

(Come to remember: Somewhere in the New York Guggenheim archives are the photos I Contaflexed for the George Costakis Prole Fashion show when their staff shooter didn’t show up. Only the Indianapolis Star had the good sense to publish a Sunday Supplement stash, and they never even sent me tear sheets! It’s a cruel life being a Papparazzi stand-in!)

Heh, guys: no company had the cojones to sponsor this show. Such PR cowardice is not how we won the Cold War, eh? Shame all around the Fortunate 500.
Finally, there’s George Nelson who was born one hundred years ago, and quickly forgotten precisely because he wasn’t artsy, fartsy avant gardish, but the Main Man of the Biz Comm. His first Retro ever is a smash at the Vitra Design Museum just up the Rhein from Basel. There are other things happening up in Weil-am Rhein NSG (not so good!) My first tour there (I’m a lone man explorer) was a double disappointment: the Zaha Hadid’s notorious fire house “burned out” after a measly two years! No fires there! It is a jumble of gratuitous angles, prefiguring Daniel Liebeskind’s shin smashing secret ones!

And the premiere of Dubai as the future World Capital of Culture makes me quake in my boots. All those Filipino and Pakistani peasants packed into slums overnight so they can build high rises every day for the Richest of the World Uniting—to put chains on the Rest of Us for the rest of of our lives. Ugghly. Have we learned nothing since the Glass Palace of 1851. Petro Dollars be damned, Guggies, and Louvres, and other suckups!