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Visual Arts :: Great Taste to Go An exhilarating exhibition organized by Germany's celebrated Vitra Design Museum displays things designed to be rolled, inflated, collapsed, and hauled away. "Living in Motion: Design and Architecture for Flexible Dwelling," at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, MA. by Peter Walsh
This impulse to go never really goes very far, though, because, as Bloomsbury novelist Vita Sackville-West points out, "Those who have never dwelt in tents have no idea either of the charm or of the discomfort of a nomadic existence. The charm is purely romantic, and consequently very soon proves to be fallacious." Thus, when contemporary city folk try to leave the easy life behind, they usually find ways to drag all the comforts of home and office after them. Wherever you go in modern life, there you are. Something quite like this conundrum of civilization lies at the heart of the ICA's "Living in Motion: Design and Architecture for Flexible Dwelling." The show, organized by Germany's celebrated Vitra Design Museum, unfolds as a compendium of every modern design that can be rolled, inflated, collapsed, hauled away, shifted around, assembled, popped up, put together, knocked down, worn, or lugged around with a handle -- many of them paired with parallel objects from pre-industrial societies. The attitude of the show, like so much on the elite side of modernism, is deeply romantic. Impractical and even maddening as some of these designs might be in real life, the objects in the ICA show are almost all beautiful -- sleek and elegant in form, functional in design, honest in materials, bright or neutral in color. Think of it as great taste to go. Modern design is partly built on a rejection of Western ideas of progress. It has always had great respect for cultures once considered "primitive" or "savage" as well as objects from traditional societies that have survived into modern times. Besides the inevitable chrome piping and shiny plastic, "Living in Motion" features, among other things from the pre-modern past, a large wooden flour chest from Afghanistan that can be disassembled for transport, a Malaysian woven mat, a leather trunk made by an American Prairie tribe, a large Russian samovar used on the legendary Orient Express, and many useful objects of Japanese design, including a collection of 19 th -century Hibachi.
Another subtext of the show is the free-wheeling, spontaneous, on-the-go life of Americans. Thus we have a gleaming black domed Weber grill, a Mini Maglite flashlight, a North Face sleeping bag, folding chairs by Russel Wright and other American designers, an Apple PowerBookG4, and a pair of cargo pants, revived and adapted in the 1990s to hold all the mobile gadgets of contemporary American living. Included are many of the most famous names in modern design: Buckminster Fuller, Alvar Aalto, Marcel Breuer, Eero Saarinen, Raymond Loewy, and Isamu Noguchi, to mention just a few. Among the show's many unexpected delights are mobile variants of celebrated modern designs. There is a collapsible version of Breuer's famous "Wassily" chair, a little-known model of a classic Eileen Gray side table, equipped with a carrying handle, and a small, portable paper lamp -- sibling of Noguchi's larger, stable models based on traditional Japanese lanterns. Charles and Ray Eames' elegant, rippling screens, designed in various sizes for different functions, are another pleasant surprise. For once, the ICA's Graham Gund-designed interior complements, rather than detracts, from the show. The wall-hugging galleries, meandering through hanging trays of space, help the show make sense of this miscellany of objects. The show's typology -- grouping objects into categories like "Assembling and Disassembling," "Adapting," "Wearing and Carrying" -- seems a bit forced and not especially useful. On the other hand, the installation makes many interesting and useful comparisons and contrasts. There is, for example, the American Chair Company's 1849 Centripetal Spring Armchair, an office model based on early railroad car seating, placed next to Raymond Loewys's Foldable Armchair for Railroad Cars (1935-40). Photographs of Bucky Fuller's futuristic Wichita House (1944) shares space with a model of a Central Asian Yurt, based on nearly identical geometric principles. A 19th-century Belgian travel desk sides up to its modern "equivalent," the laptop computer. Few of the most imaginative creations from the visionary side of design have made it even to the edges of mainstream society. A few of the successes are included here, such as Aalto's set of round, stacking bent plywood stools, which will be familiar from their use in trendy interiors or as successful mass-market items, aimed at the youthful and well educated. Others, like Jerszy Seymour's self-rolling, radio-controlled table (Free Wheelin Franklin, 2000), seem more intent on making a splash than being practical. Above all, this is a show about exceptional designs, not how people actually live their lives. One of the show's rather perverse tricks is to contrast time-tested, thoroughly rational tents and other nomadic housing designs from traditional societies with wildly impractical "homes of the future" by modern designers. One of the latter is Shigeru Ban's Naked House (2000) -- a kind of long, narrow airplane hanger with boxlike rooms on wheels, so that they can be pushed down ramps into the surrounding garden. You leave it wishing someone would use some of this taste and ingenuity to design a few trailer parks and mobile homes, not to mention that ubiquitous artifact of modern life, the RV. "Living in Motion: Design and Architecture for Flexible Dwelling" is on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, Mass., through May 7, 2006.
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