Forms That Follow Function

By Wolf Von Eckardt

Proof that everyday objects can be simple and elegant

To enter the wonderful world of good design now on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, you pass fluttery rococo plaster nymphs in the ornate beauxarts classic entrance hall. The abrupt aesthetic change is like jumping from a sauna into a cool swimming pool. Titled "Design Since 1945," the exhibition (through Jan. 8) presents a world based on the primacy of function, which beautiful form is supposed to follow automatically. It often does. Modern style is the only authentic one of our time, and modernists and their friends therefore peremptorily equate modern with good. It often is not.

With more than 400 objects of furniture, household goods and small appliances by 285 artists from 18 countries, this is one of the most extensive and impressive retrospectives of the genre ever staged. The exhibition was conceived by Architect George Nelson, 75, to show the effect of design on daily life and the effect of changing technology on design. Nelson's own contribution includes his 1942 proposal to build downtown pedestrian malls and his 1944 invention of the storage wall that also serves as room divider. Nelson has created or inspired much of the modern officescape. This show reflects his ele gant functional flair, a wealth of material organized in a logical way that pulls the viewer through a sequence of open and narrow, straight and winding, busy and contemplative display areas.

The products of the new technologies--from Raymond Loewy's 1948 television set to Giorgetto Giugiaro's 1981 Logica electronic sewing machine--are concentrated by Curator Kathryn Hiesinger in a central space, a circle of dramatic display columns that Nelson calls Stonehenge. Models of Explorer I and a 1976 Satcom satellite hover above. Along the way to the shrine, like altars lining a processional, are huge blowup portraits of the most influential designers of the age. There is Charles Eames, whose chairs, toys, films, buildings and exhibits, produced with his wife and partner, Ray Kaiser Eames, made good design American. There is the Dane Arne Jacobsen, whose sleek furniture and tableware for a while convinced the world that all good design must be Danish. There are two Italians (Ettore Sottsass Jr. and Marco Zanuso) and a Finn (Tapio Wirkkala), reflecting the international, eclectic diversity of the decorative arts in our time.

Yet the exhibition presents a world born in illusion and doomed to confusion. Modern design began with the notion that artists and craftsmen, rather than technicians, should shape products made by machines, giving beautiful form to rational function, "liberating" the toiling masses from the "crime" of ornament and clutter. By 1945, Bauhaus idealism was established in the U.S. Textile Designer Jack Lenor Larsen writes that the movement became "a cause, allied with the optimism of a world to be made over in the light of the Four Freedoms. The solution was so simple and clear--and naive."

Confusion set in when it turned out that the toiling masses did not care to be liberated from ornament and wanted no part of functionalism. Some people would sooner tattoo their own skin than go without decoration. Those interested in good design, says Sociologist Herbert J. Gans, belong to "an upper-middle culture, not quite highbrow and not quite middlebrow." There aren't enough of them to warrant mass production. Furniture/Today, the leading trade paper, reports that only 14% of the dining-room and bedroom sets sold in America in 1982 were contemporary, as opposed to 45% that were Early American. The chairs that Mies van der Rohe intended for mass production and for the working class are handmade for corporate executives.

New York City's Museum of Modern Art, which introduced and nurtured the movement in the U.S., tried in the 1930s and again in the 1950s to win a wider audience for the cause. It presented several exhibitions, particularly of inexpensive objects, and held competitions. The famous molded-plywood chair by Eames and Eero Saarinen was a MOMA winner. Critic Russell Lynes called these efforts "grassroots tastemaking with a vengeance." Edgar Kaufmann Jr., director of MOMA'S design department, nevertheless persuaded several furniture manufacturers in the 1950s to go into production. No sale. Noted Kaufmann's successor, Arthur Drexler: "The people who were stopping this were the buyers."

It is their loss. The Philadelphia exhibition shows that the design of our time is often exciting and at times beautiful. Modern art at its best is surely more varied and inventive than baroque, with its ubiquitous baby angels, or art nouveau, with its obsessive limpid vegetation.

Functionalism may have failed to conquer the mass market, and modern is surely the least popular style in the history of what curators call "the decorative arts." But it has often brought classic beauty to mundane objects: Italian Architect Gio Ponti's toilet is an example. Artists have domesticated technology, like the electronic Logica sewing machine that Giorgetto Giugiaro logically styled. They have given elegance to synthetic materials like plastic. Jean-Pierre Vitrac's disposable picnic dishes, Earl S. Tupper's cereal bowls and Massimo Vignelli's stacking dinnerware are indeed museum pieces.

New materials have given children's chairs color, fun and sturdiness. The craft of weaving takes advantage of polypropylene, Mylar and machine production. There is a marvelous collection of fabrics at the museum by such masters as Anni Albers and Jack Lenor Larsen. Design becomes art in Lino Sabattini's silver-plate tea and coffee service and Ernest Race's shaped steel-rod chair.

Creations like these are overwhelmed by junk because consumers are blinded by a mistaken notion of tradition, of what is proper. The products of new technologies are therefore far better received than contemporary versions of furnishings and utensils that have always been with us. It is hard to imagine an electronic calculator in Early American style.

American indifference to good form and concept may be beginning to hurt America's industry. In most corporations, designers are relegated to the status of what Critic Ralph Caplan has called "exotic menials." The Japanese and some Europeans, in contrast, have shown that creative minds on the production team can help to produce a higher-quality product. Most foreign governments promote design. Official Washington snubs it. The extensive State Department reception rooms are anachronistically furnished in colonial style.

The Philadelphia show provides no answer to the question of why this appalling lack of faith in the art of our time prevails. But the exhibition does show that good modern design is still good. Form still follows function. Or at least it should. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.