Sleeker, Thinner, Sexier - National Design Triennial: Design Culture Now

Art in America, July, 2000 by Stephanie Cash

The Cooper-Hewitt's inaugural National Design Triennial showcases some of the best designs recently produced in the U.S., from real consumer products to virtual buildings.

Where old masters once hung in the hallowed halls of Andrew Carnegie's turn-of-the-century mansion on Fifth Avenue--now home to the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum--Oral-B toothbrushes, Palm Connected Organizers and Nike sneakers currently hold pride of place. Design is hot these days, aided by the popularity of magazines like ID., Nest and Wallpaper, stores like Moss in SoHo that hawk fetishistic but functional doodads in museum-like displays, and national chains like Target that commission objects from high-profile pros like Michael Graves. The Mar. 20 issue of Time magazine proclaimed "The Rebirth of Design" on its cover. The moment couldn't be more propitious for the Cooper-Hewitt's launch of its National Design Triennial, on view through Aug. 6.

The Triennial brings together some of the best examples of design (or design ideas)--in the form of objects, models, drawings, photographs and new-media works--produced over the last three years by 83 individuals and studios in the U.S. The brainchild of former Cooper-Hewitt director Diane Pilgrim, who resigned earlier this year and is now director emeritus, the show was co-organized by Donald Albrecht, adjunct curator for special projects, Ellen Lupton, adjunct curator for contemporary design, and guest curator Steven Skov Holt, director of strategy at Frog Design and former editor of I.D. magazine.

Architect Michael Gabellini was responsible for the exhibition installation, and is also included in the show. Doing the best that anyone could within the confines of the Cooper-Hewitt, whose dark wood paneling and architectural flourishes seem antithetical to the clean, uncluttered look of contemporary design, Gabellini attempts to offset the architecture with the simplicity of his installation. For example, white banners demarcate each section and unify the various rooms and floors. Perhaps to minimize the number of pedestals or vitrines, many of the items in the show are displayed in containers that look like pneumatic tubes, held taut in midair by cables stretching from ceiling to floor. It works at times, but in the case of the Oral-B toothbrushes, Swingline staplers and Oakley sunglasses, the items look as if they were tossed into the containers in a jumbled mess, which diminishes their visual impact.

Among the issues addressed by the curators is the influence of technology on design. Leaps in technology have been accompanied by demands for things sleeker, thinner, smaller and generally sexier. Increasingly, products are curvy, sinuous or, in design parlance, blobular. Conversely, it is interesting to consider how design is limited by technology, and to imagine how it will continue to evolve.

Accordingly, the exhibition made good use of computers, both as display tools and as design objects themselves. The importance of computers and CAD (computer-aided design) software in contemporary design is particularly evident in the architecture entries, which, perhaps due to the amount of space they take up, seem disproportionately represented. For example, Greg Lynn's Hydrogen House, a proposal for an exhibition pavilion near Vienna, is represented by a model and an animated sequence on a monitor showing the evolution of the building from a spinelike form into a three-dimensional rendering. Yet with all the bells and whistles of CAD software and the buttressing of theoretical explications, the result ends up looking a lot like the Sydney Opera House. So although the organic shapes (shades of '50s biomorphism) seen in many of the works may not be entirely new to design, technological advances in everything from software to manufacturing processes have made them easier to produce.

Instead of organizing the show according to obvious groupings like architecture, consumer products, graphic design, etc., the curators divided the work into eight descriptive designations: Minimal, Fluid, Physical, Reclaimed, Local, Branded, Narrative and Unbelievable. Among the more successful categories is Fluid, which seems to best capture the spirit of recent design. Contained in this group are many of the organically shaped objects that are so prevalent today, including the Apple iMac and iBook, a motorcycle named Curvaceousness, designed by Cory Ness, and the OH chair by Karim Rashid, who also did a great job designing the show's catalogue. The Minimal section includes things with spare, simple forms, from Kate Spade handbags to Carlos Jimenez's competition entry for the expansion and renovation of the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City (the commission ultimately went to Steven Holl). Works grouped in the Physical section typically reveal the means of their construction, or are at least made to appear to do so. For example, in Cannondale bicycles, the company's signature fat-tube aluminum frames are a direct result of the technology that makes them stronger and lighter than traditional bike frames.