Design: Bauhaus, FROG

Semantic inflation is a widespread vice in American higher education: In the 1960s, development officers waved their magic state-legislature wands and suddenly Teachers Colleges became State U's.

Last year, when the unpronounceable pupa of the Philadelphia Colleges of the Arts suddenly took sweetly euphonious butterfly wings as the University of the Arts, I silently smirked at the onomastic hustle.

Wrong, overgeneralizer-breath. For if the international conference Design 88 is a fair indication of what's going on on South Broad Street, then hooray for the U of the A.

I've been subjecting myself to the ideological abuse of international design conferences since I represented the Annenberg School of Communication in 1958, and Design 88 has been eclipsed in my mind only by Osaka 83, where I found to my dismayed delight that the Japanese design establishment is motivated by the blue-collar idealism of the Bauhaus.

One of the saddest stories of good ideas pre-empted for mediocre ends is how the Bauhaus refugees who strove to bring the best design to the masses diminished themselves into minions of the Fortune 500.

Well, 44-year-old keynote speaker Hartmut Esslinger, bless him, still believes in the old Teutonic verities, delightfully seasoned for joy by a wanderjahr in the Milanese region of design funk.

He spoke with wit and passion of frog design, the Triadically-based firm that began in the Federal Republic of Germany but now has functioning footholds in Silicon Valley and Tokyo, thus leavening the always potential lumpishness of the Big Three of contemporary design--Europe, the United States and Japan.

He chided his host country for reneging on its ideals, predicting fiscal disasters from our bad habit of letting the hunger for growth each and every quarter force us to "balance" the always hot Christmas quarter by cutting back on R and D in January. And he shamed the U.S. as well for paying designers the worst and taking the cheap maneuver of hiring house designers instead of autonomous free agents like FROGdesign.

"Form follows emotion" is his update of the Bauhaus bromide, a formula brilliantly embodied in the colorful roller skates the firm donated to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. You can judge for yourself about the firm's ecumenical brilliance through December 3rd at UOA's Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, Broad and Pine.

ID magazine publisher Randolph McAusland ended the first day of the conference where all significant change must begin: in the consumer's consciousness. He praised the Wall Street Journal for stepping up its coverage of design and for institutionalizing its "Form & Function" feature every two weeks or so.

We are so tied apart in tiny loops of almost hermetically sealed audiences that McAusland, having made a pitch for including design education in the elementary grades, was astonished to learn that Richard Saul Wurman, the Louis Kahn protege, has published an entire curriculum on the architecture of Philadelphia for elementary school children.

And fresh from a visit to the Munich Museum for Folk Culture, which has just opened an exhibition on a new prize for design in the European Community, I was puzzled that not one of the frequent-flyer headline speakers had so much as heard of the prize!

But the truly thrilling thing about Esslinger's practical idealism is that it has survived all the piffle and palaver that corrupt the Bauhaus idealism of good design for everyone--not just those upper-middles who can afford, say $500 for Robert Venturi's screwy new cuckoo clock, one of the tidal wave of status-conferring objects I bunch under the rubric of the Higher Goofy.

Postmodern ideologues don't just muddy the water of discourse with hemline haha objects. Jean Nouvel, who has in his right mind designed the wholly credible new Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, is responsible (and I use that term as a Savonarola) for the most disgraceful, misleading, meretricious exhibition I have ever seen in my life: "The Fifties," at the Centre Pompidou.

I started thinking about design in the 1950s--indeed, started to be a conscientious consumer then as well. So there is more than intellectual anger in my reaction to his jumbo sale of an exhibition. There is personal affront as well.

The first thing to greet my astonished eye was an Eames chair jammed upside down in a Bertioa womb chair, thereby destroying the aesthetic pleasure inherent in each classic. Those two icons just happened to be the first two investments in good furniture my bride and I made as young marrieds (a Nakashima end table was the next).

The moral of the stupid juxtaposition was to deconstruct both objects. The whole show was just such a jumble. And the level of documentation can be inferred from the fact that the press photo on a Las Vegas strip--which Venturi enjoined us to learn from--was identified as California.

We are asked to revere Louis Kahn's Richards Medical Center with no quibble about the fact that it doesn't properly exhaust the toxic gases from research. And the major slide show--Paris Match covers punctuating nostalgic takes of Elvis and others--operates on the fallacious assumption that a Miles Davis soundtrack compensates for intellectual emptiness.

All those mesmerized kids in their teens and 20s were lapping it up, as if they were really seeing the '50s. I was relieved to see that much of the French design community was outraged enough by this nonsense that the press kit included a formal (and totally unconvincing) reply to their cri de coeur.

The Pompidou has partly redeemed itself from the "Fifties" travesty by co-sponsoring, with the Ecole des Beaux Arts, a luminous gloss on Alvar Aalto (viewable until December 19th). The Pompidou covers the transition from his beginnings in the Finnish nationalist style (sort of frozen Jugenstil, if you know what I mean) to his conversion to the International Style around 1930.

There is an intro to his sanitarium, where he focused his theory that funcationalism must first of all take into account the psychological needs of putative users. Notice the gentle shape of the examination table. His goal was to use light and soft materials like wood to help the healing process.

At the Ecole itself, it was a kick to be allowed to sit in one of his chairs, to give it the buns test--something the Swan Gallery, surprisingly, let me do on the Frank Gehry cardboard chair in its window. It felt great--until they told me the Higher Goofy price--$1,200 without arms, $1,400 with. Hell, I needed a chair--any chair--just to absorb that cultural piracy.

Before Gehry stopped selling them abruptly after they became runaway best sellers at $200, he was in a Bauhaus track--good design for everyone. Then he Knoll-Internationaled it up.

I can hear architects and designers saying, "Who the hell does Hazard think he is, telling us how to price our designs?" The answer lies in another exhibition in Paris, at the Musee des Arts Decoratifs (through January 29th) on "Les Annees UAM, 1929-1958"--UAM standing for the Union of Modern Artists. If you can't swing a trip, get the catalogue.

It is refreshing to see these painters, sculptors, affichistes, jewelry makers, designers and architects fine-tune their idealistic visions when depression and war would give them every reason to cut corners.

I wish every chair designer would, for example, metabolize one of the aphorisms on the wall: The only, proposition a chair should make is repose. Take that, Gerrit Rietvald, whose bun-numbing centennial we'll be celebrating next year at the Dayton Institute of Art.

Good design has come on bad days, I believe, because the design community jettisoned its Bauhaus heritage of serving the entire culture for the megabucks of the upper-middle discretionaries. As America two-tiers itself further between a Nobel laureating thin-crust top and a metastasizing underclass bottom, it will take more and more character for a designer to take the road less traveled.

Esslinger will have none of them. And besides, he's teaching the Germans to smile. There's a miracle!

"Hazard-at-Large" from Welcomat: After Dark, November 30, 1989