Best of the Decade

Seaside, Fla. This is a real old-fashioned small town, built from scratch since 1981. Developer Robert Davis and planners Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk have laid down simple, thoughtful rules derived from epicenters of charm such as Charleston, S.C., and Savannah, with their narrow streets, porches, alleys, wood siding, pitched roofs and absence of picture windows. On this master plan they let individual owners (148 so far) execute their own versions of the Seaside housing code with personal architects. The heterogeneity is real; the harmony is deep. Seaside could be the most astounding design achievement of its era and, one might hope, the most influential.

MTV Graphics. The cable channel's high-spirited ten-second promotional spots, based on a logo created by Manhattan Design, are among the edgiest, unruliest and altogether most intriguing graphic images produced today.

Viet Nam Veterans Memorial. From the time the design was chosen in 1981 until its completion in 1982, Maya Ying Lin's somber black granite dead end in Washington was controversial. Conservatives objected that it was both meaninglessly abstract and too dovish. But as soon as it was dedicated, with its roster of 58,000 Americans killed, all but the most relentless cranks were moved and subdued. No other American memorial has been the vessel for so much authentic emotion.

Battery Park City. Pedestrian amenities were taken seriously in this New York City project. Housing and shops and offices and parks neatly dovetail. Various architects designed smallish high-rises under the supervision of planners Alexander Cooper and Stanton Eckstut. Right out of a dead zone -- landfill on the southwestern tip of Manhattan -- something quite like a piece of real city is emerging.

Apple Macintosh Computer. The Mac and its disks are still sexy and trim by conventional, clunky PC standards, but the machine is more than merely an artifact of stylishness or miniaturization. Its software is unusually lucid and engaging, and the mouse is to using computers what the ballpoint was to writing.

1984 Olympics. Deborah Sussman's graphics and Jon Jerde's evanescent architecture for the Games of the Los Angeles Olympics were homogeneous, sunny, reassuring, nice. The color palette of the cardboard columns and fabric-covered fences was precisely of its time and place, beach-blanket postmodernism come to temporary life. For mere millions of dollars (rather than hundreds of millions), an Olympiad found its perfect aesthetic expression.

Equa Chair. This handsome office chair, created by Bill Stumpf and Don Chadwick for the manufacturer Herman Miller, comprises two structural innovations: the backbone is an ingeniously cut single piece of springy glass- reinforced polyester resin, and a special knee-tilt mechanism lets the sitter lean back without whipping his feet off the floor.

Humana Corp. Headquarters. It seems fitting that Michael Graves, the most intensely promoted and most beleaguered of the postmoderns, was responsible for the finest work of the movement: his 1985 Humana building in Louisville, a confident, deluxe synthesis of historical styles from the past several millenniums that avoids cartoonish mannerism.

Loyola Law School. Southern California's Frank Gehry -- whose buildings are tough, peculiar, playful and often brilliant -- became the architectural avatar of the last half of the decade. His campus for Loyola in Los Angeles (1985), a dense little complex of rough stucco and plywood and cheap steel, is a thoroughly apt, gratifyingly civilized work.

Mazda MX-5 Miata. The Japanese were already building more reliable, cheaper cars than American automakers; suddenly, they are also producing a more splendid-looking car. Designed in Mazda's California R.-and-D. center by Mark Jordan, son of General Motor's design chief, the 1989 Miata is the first production car to share the decade's penchant for alluding to other eras: not just a convertible, but the sweet, plump, rounded lines of '50s-style sports cars.

And, also featuring . . .

black, the voguish color for '80s objects. The background of these pages, black matte, is an homage to that design enthusiasm.