21st Century New York Interiors

While my introduction set up an initial framework for analyzing contemporary interiors, this post will sketch out the broader social, political and economic context within which my subsequent case studies will sit. The New York examples to follow are at once specific, in that they are situated in a particular city and were designed in a particular time period, but they may also provide some general categories or ideas for engaging with contemporary interiors elsewhere. As any discussion of 21st century interiors will inevitably begin in the late 20th century, so I will begin my case studies in the mid-1980s. I’ve habitually referred to New York design from the 1980s to the present as “design of the Second Gilded Age”. With significant political and economic shifts in the last year or so, it may not be too presumptuous to argue that the Second Gilded Age, spanning the mid-1980s to 2008, has ended. While the first date marks the beginning of New York’s ascendancy to global economic prominence, the latter date marks the end of both the Bush era and the Wall Street era.

Billboard on the Plaza, 5th Avenue, 2006

The Second Gilded Age

New York almost went bankrupt in the 1970s, a decade also characterized by high crime rates, racial tension, unemployment and homelessness. Although these carried over into the next decade, a boom on Wall Street fueled the speculative real estate market and unemployment figures fell, and a new era of restrained optimism began in the early 1980s. The city began a resurgence which would result in New York claiming its position as the prominent global financial hub of the late 20th century (with London and Tokyo as the other two key hubs). Federally, the 1980s were the Reagan era (1981-89), while in New York; the 1980s were the Koch era (1978-1989). In general, the 1980s were an era where economic “reform” meant cuts to public expenditure (subsidized housing, welfare, education, health) and cuts to individual and corporate taxes, leading to an increase in personal wealth for some while the gap between wealthy and poor grew. The city actively campaigned to bring back corporate business, and, aided by tax exemptions, midtown construction began booming again, exemplified by large corporate towers such as the AT&T Headquarters (1984), Trump Tower (1983) and IBM building (1983).

While politics and tax breaks were partially responsible for New York’s resurgence, the flowering of a new economic mode, referred to as the post-industrial or informational economy, was perhaps more important. Geographer David Harvey characterized this shift to a “post-industrial” society as one driven by “flexible accumulation”. The premise is that from the 1960s to the 1980s, there was a fundamental shift in the economy of Western countries, from an industrial economy, based on increasing production of goods, to a post-industrial or informational economy, based on the production of services and information. While this shift was driven by new technologies and systems such as the computer and its networking abilities, it was also driven by more flexibility in the economy. Decentralization by large corporations resulted in a dispersal of production process and increased specialization, while mass production was increasingly replaced by batch production and niche marketing. There was also a consolidation of high-level service industries in core cities such as New York, with decentralization dispersing corporations across the globe (from the 1980s, production increasingly moved off-shore). During the 1980s and 1990s, New York asserted its position within this new economy as the preeminent core city, gathering together institutions and individuals responsible for controlling the specialized finance and services for increasingly global corporations.

Adam Tihany, Le Cirque 2000, Madison Avenue, 1997

Due to a bull run on Wall St, particularly from new technology stocks, New York during the 1980s became the epicenter of the “greed is good” mentality (see Oliver Stone’s 1987 film “Wall Street”). A new generation of young people eager to make money from the economic boom were drawn to the city. These young urban professionals were known as “Yuppies” and typically worked either in finance and related industries, or as professionals such as lawyers, accountants or doctors. Yuppies were characterized by their conspicuous consumption – spending their money on designer fashion, furnishings, and consumer goods, as well as dining out and nightclubbing at designer spaces. The yuppie lifestyle of New York’s Second Gilded Age was graphically illustrated in Brett Easton Ellis’ novel American Psycho, in which the characters are defined solely by the brand-name designer goods they consume.

The First Gilded Age

The parallels with the city’s original Gilded Age a hundred years earlier are worth highlighting briefly, as socio-economic conditions and design ideals are similar in both eras. After the depression of 1873, the 1880s and 90s was an age of unprecedented prosperity in New York, and is often referred to as the Gilded Age. While millionaires made immense fortunes and paraded their wealth with luxurious architecture, design and fashion, the other half of New York struggled in poverty, with poor wages and living conditions. The generation of the Vanderbilts, Morgans and Goulds amassed their fortunes from the industrial economy and its related services – railroads, mining, manufacturing, department stores, real estate and finance. By the end of the 19th century, New York was the undisputed center of American finance, business, law, publishing and entertainment: the core city of the first Gilded Age.

The most popular architectural style of the late 19th century in New York is generally referred to as the Beaux Arts Style, after the Parisian Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where many American architects of that generation were educated. It is an eclectic style, incorporating neoclassicism from Greek and Roman models, but combined with Renaissance forms from Italian palazzos or French chateaux. Architects such as McKim, Mead, White and Richard Morris Hunt designed mansions and social spaces for the city’s elite, while interior design firms such as the Herter Brothers (Gustave and Christian) and Tiffany’s created luxurious interiors. Though eclectic, the Gilded Age designers took inspiration from European models, from J.P. Morgan’s Renaissance palace (now the J.P. Morgan Library) to William K. Vanderbilt’s 5th Avenue French Chateau, the city’s elite modeled themselves on the merchant princes of Renaissance Italy or on the French or English aristocracy. For cultural producers and patrons of the era, art and architecture were seen as a means to provide civic unity in Gilded Age New York, despite the increasing disparity of wealth (hence, for example, the growth of civic institutions such as the New York Public Library and the Metropolitan Museum).

Sarah Tomerlin Lee, Helmsley Palace Hotel, 1980

In the Second Gilded Age of the 1980s and 90s, financial and real estate speculators became wealthier (in relative terms) than anyone since the last Gilded Age. Fueled by the post-industrial economy and the globalization of financial services, figures such as Donald Trump and Michael Bloomberg represented the city’s new wealthy elite. However, as in the First Gilded Age, the city depended on services provided by a growing population of working poor comprising the former industrial blue-collar workforce, racial minorities and immigrants. While the wealthy patrons and cultural producers in the First Gilded Age believed in fostering civic unity, in the Second Gilded Age such virtues were replaced by an ideal of personal wealth as an end in itself. Trump Tower seems emblematic of this ideal: its public areas are dedicated to consumption, prominently featuring merchandise associated with the cult of Trump.

Not coincidentally, many of original Gilded Age spaces were either renovated or recreated in the Second Gilded Age. In a “resurrection” of the earlier era, projects such as Sarah Tomerlin Lee’s interiors for the 1980 Helmsley Palace Hotel included a newly designed hotel “integrated” into McKim Mead and White’s 1884 Villard Houses via recreation furniture and decorative schemes (see image above). Similarly, Julia Monk’s $100 million restoration of the St Regis Hotel in 1991 (originally built for J.J. Astor in 1904), included both restoration and replication (see image below). While Monk retained original marble floors and refurbished ceilings and plasterwork in some of the public spaces, guestrooms were gutted and modernized with the latest fittings. Rather than strictly accurate historical restorations, these self-conscious references to the earlier Gilded Age were eclectic in their mix of historical styling and modern amenities in a parallel way to the Beaux Arts designers’ eclectic mix of European aristocratic styling and modern amenities of the late 19th century.

Julia Monk, lobby of the St Regis Hotel, redesigned 1991

Spaces for the Nouveaux Riches

In design and architecture, the 1980s and 90s were characterized by a high turnover of styles, often lumped together under the term postmodernism. Aesthetically, postmodernism was associated with a return to historical references, symbolism, color, decoration and ornament, as well as a renewed interest in vernacular culture. With the shift to a post-industrial society, there was an emphasis on constantly changing styles and tastes in order to ensure ever more rapid consumption. In contrast to modernism’s embrace of “truth”, universality and timelessness, postmodernism embraced artifice and the ephemeral. Perhaps postmodern design was also aligned with the new financial models, the wealth of which was similarly based on artifice and the ephemeral, as we are now discovering.

Philippe Starck, lobby of the Paramount Hotel, 1991

For New York’s nouveaux riches, there was a boom in luxury restaurants, nightclubs and bars, fashion boutiques, designer hotels, and private apartment renovations. Design provided a means through which a new generation could differentiate themselves. Designer fashion, designer restaurants, designer nightclubs and designer furniture were all increasingly linked to personal identity. Interior spaces were no longer simply functional architectural boxes or aesthetic containers but were experiences within narratives of identity and lifestyle. Stage sets for yuppies, designer interiors of the Second Gilded Age were situated at the intersection of aesthetics, branding, new technologies and social organization. Artifice became a collective given in spaces such as Ralph Lauren’s flagship store, Rhinelander Mansion, the minimalist white cube of John Pawson’s Calvin Klein store or Philippe Starck’s playful designer hotels. If eclecticism was the defining aesthetic of the era, there was also a sense of continuity. However, this continuity was not based on a universal aesthetic or even a democratic sensibility (as was the ideal of an earlier modernist generation), but the continuity was experienced between these physical interiors and the artificial, virtual world of advertising, magazines, TV and cinema.


Bibliography

Ellis, Brett Easton, American Psycho, London: Picador, 1991.

Frisa, Maria Luisa, Mario Lupano and Stefano Tonchi, eds., Total Living: Art, Fashion, Design, Architecture, Communication, Milan and New York: Charta, 2002.

Harvey, David, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1989.

Moody, Kim, From Welfare State to Real Estate: Regime Change in New York City, 1974 to the Present, New York: New Press, 2007.

Stern, Robert A.M., Thomas Mellins and David Fishman, New York 1880: Architecture and Urbanism in the Gilded Age, New York: The Monticello Press, 1999.

Stern, Robert A.M., David Fishman and Jacob Tilove, New York 2000: Architecture and Urbanism from the Bicentennial to the Millennium, New York: The Monticello Press, 2006.

The 21st Century Interior

The interior is a fluid and often disputed territory claimed by architects, interior designers and decorators. In his provocative essay, “Curtain Wars: Architects, Decorators, and the 20th-Century Domestic Interior”, Joel Sanders traces the 20th century “battle” for the interior by professionals from interior decoration, interior design and architecture, concluding with the idea that these once rigid boundaries seem to have collapsed in the early 21st century. While the disciplinary boundaries may have collapsed, the way we think about the interior itself has also changed. While a common-sense definition of the interior as a contained or enclosed space seems straightforward, the interior is more elusive than this initial definition suggests.

I want to begin this series of posts on the 21st century interior with three propositions that might challenge this initial definition. Firstly, the interior is inherently ephemeral, as people are constantly moving objects around in interior spaces, changing the way the space is configured and thus how it operates. Secondly, the interior is in a constant state of flux due to its inhabitation by humans – that is, the interior is in some respect inseparable from the people who inhabit it. Finally, our initial definition of the interior is further destabilized by the saturation of media culture and digital technologies, which affects our understanding of the interior in two ways – in the way physical spaces are reproduced and circulate as either two dimensional photographic or virtual (digital) images, and in the way our use of mobile digital devices change our perception of space.

The Interior: Beyond the Container

To date, the few available histories of the interior have treated it as a subset of architecture, whereby enclosed spaces designed by well-known architects, interior designers, decorators or design firms, are analyzed as coherent, stable objects for study. For example, this sense of the interior as a contained architectural space is emphasized by design historian John Pile in the introduction to his pioneering book, A History of Interior Design: “interior design is inextricably linked to architecture and can only be studied within an architectural context” (Pile, 2005: 11) Pile’s narrative of exemplary architectural containers from the caves at Lascaux to Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, is accompanied by images of furniture and objects typically found within them.

More recently, Susan Yelavich, in the introduction to her book, Contemporary World Interiors, highlights the lack of critical attention given to interior design compared to architecture or other design disciplines. She writes: “discussions of the interior have been prejudiced by its perception as a container of ephemera” (Yelavich, 2007: 1). The book itself comprises a survey of exemplary contemporary interior spaces organized according to loose typologies: “The House”, “The Loft”, “The Office”, and so on. Most of these spaces were designed by well-known designers, architects or design firms, and Yelavich makes no distinction between disciplines. This suggests that we may be beyond the point where the interior is considered simply a subset of architecture, and that the boundaries between disciplines in the 21st century are more fluid than in the last century.

Although differently organized to Pile’s book, Yelavich’s range of contemporary spaces contains images of empty architectural containers largely devoid of people. While there is some attempt in both books to provide a little social context, many of the important social questions (Who uses these spaces? When? Why? How do they affect their inhabitants? How do they relate to their socio-economic context?) remain unanswered. Given the interior’s condition of instability noted above, it is worth extracting the interior from this particular architectural context – less for the sake of disputing disciplinary territories, and more in order to expand our understanding of the interior as something other than a decorated architectural container.

John Pawson, Calvin Klein store, New York, 1995

The Interior: Space of Inhabitation

If we are to think about the interior as more than an architectural container, we must firstly acknowledge that it is also a space of human habitation. In his book, A Philosophy of Interior Design, Stanley Abercrombie argues that while architectural histories tend to focus on the facades of buildings (the exterior), to understand the containers within (the interior), requires a different experience: “We do not merely pass them on the street; we inhabit them. When we enter a building, we cease being merely its observer; we become its content.” (Abercrombie, 1990: 3) Importantly, the interior is defined by Abercrombie as inseparable from the people who inhabit it, so an interior history that simply catalogues and analyzes empty architectural containers seems inadequate.

Despite Abercrombie’s point about inhabitation, a brief flip through any recent book or magazine on interior design (or architecture for that matter) will reveal scant evidence of human habitation. In photographs of contemporary interiors, the absence of people (and their ephemera) is remarkable. If we follow Abercrombie’s idea, the interior is not an empty, designer container, but a space that is always marked by human habitation. Even when a house is empty, someone has left a pair of dirty socks on the floor or dishes in the sink; even when the office is empty, someone has left a coffee mug or a stack of papers on the desk. The interior is always contaminated by traces of human presence.

The Interior: A Dynamic Process

In the 21st century, our understanding of the interior is predominantly a visual one. This is no doubt compounded by a media culture in which the first time we “see” an interior space is often as a glossy color photograph in a magazine, book, brochure or website. This mediation of the interior by a flat, two dimensional image gives us a limited understanding of the space. For design historian and theorist Suzie Attiwill, this flattening of three dimensional space into a two dimensional image suppresses the interior’s temporal aspect: “Interior design histories have … ignored temporality in the design of interiors through a focus on objects and built space as static form.” (Attiwill, 2004: 6) Given our history of interiors is based on two dimensional images, our interaction with the temporal aspect of the interior is lost. What is also lost is the range of sensory phenomena beyond the visual – the sounds and smells (or lack thereof), the touch and weight of materials. By including these additional aspects of the interior – the temporal and the phenomenological – into an interior history, we can start to understand how the interior is more than simply an architectural container.

Histories of the interior thus far tend towards a mummification of spaces as empty containers, their ephemera frozen as in a museum’s period room. Even when considering contemporary interiors in books, magazines or websites, our contemporary culture of the spectacle privileges visual perception, suppressing the rich phenomenological experience when we interact with a space. The fixity of photographs tends to reinforce the idea of the interior as an “ideal” or pure space comprising a series of abstract forms, lines, color and objects such as furniture and fixtures. It may well be easier to admire a pure empty container, and such spaces uncontaminated by inhabitation are certainly easier to catalogue, classify (according to style or function) and analyze as data.

Finally, beyond an architectural container filled with ephemera, the interior is also a dynamic space. It is dynamic in at least four senses: in the sense of people flowing in and out; in its interactions with the surrounding context; in its interactions with media culture (the circulation of images); and in its interactions with new technologies (which includes the virtual realm from CCTV cameras to cellphones or mobile listening devices that alter our perception of space). These dynamic aspects of the interior suggest that issues such as how we interact with and experience spaces seem more vital than simply cataloguing styles or functions of architectural containers. In this way, we may begin to consider how the interior affects psychological states or plays a role in shaping individual or collective identities through projections of lifestyles, class, gender or social values.

Philippe Starck, Hudson Hotel bar, New York, 1999.

Contemporary New York Interiors

My starting point for this series on interiors was a graduate course I taught at Pratt Institute between 2005 and 2007 which focused specifically on contemporary interiors in New York. For the series of case studies which I hope to post over coming months, I aim to examine some of the complexities of the interior sketched above through the analysis of concrete examples drawn from those classes. However, any discussions of the interior inevitably reach the issue of accessibility and all of the case studies to follow are spaces that are publicly accessible spaces that I have actually experienced and spent time in. This necessarily limits the study to a narrow range of interiors. Despite the arguments about images of empty architectural containers above, the case studies will mostly be accompanied by images of these spaces as empty architectural containers, again given the difficulty gaining permission to photograph them.

In some sense this project has already begun on this blog, with my analyses of The Myrtle Avenue Style, the section on designer interiors in the Meatpacking District post, the Starchitect Condos post, and the section on the Frank Gehry/G Tech- designed Issey Miyake store in Portrait of the Architect as an Artist. For those interested readers, I will include bibliographies for further reference, and if anyone has further ideas or readings please let me know – comments are most welcome. Finally, in advance, many thanks to all of my students from Pratt Institute’s Interior Design program who, through their research, discussion and enthusiasm, helped both stimulate and formulate many of the ideas to follow.


Bibliography

Abercrombie, Stanley, A Philosophy of Interior Design, New York, Harper and Row, 1990.

Attiwill, Suzie, “Towards an Interior History”, IDEA (Interior Design/Interior Architecture Educators Association journal), Brisbane, QUT Publishing, 2004. Download the journal here.

Pile, John, A History of Interior Design, John Wiley and Sons, New Jersey, 2005 (second edition)

Sanders, Joel, “Curtain Wars: Architects, Decorators, and the 20th-Century Domestic Interior”, Harvard Design Magazine, Number 16, Winter/Spring 2002. Online here.

Yelavich, Susan, Contemporary World Interiors, Phaidon, London, 2007.

Sharon Mesmer: Annoying Diabetic Bitch

In the closing years of the Bush era, poetry from the Flarf collective emerged as one of the most challenging creative responses to contemporary American culture. The era’s key themes – 9/11 and the subsequent wars, the ongoing occupation of Iraq, the rise of the religious right, tensions over immigration, and the conspicuous consumption of the credit bubble economy – have littered Flarf poetry over the past few years. Poets such as K. Silem Mohammad, Nada Gordon, Gary Sullivan, Drew Gardner, Sharon Mesmer, and others have actively taken up the challenge of creating a literature of critical engagement in a culture characterized by the almost complete pervasiveness of mediated communication (recently dominated by the internet, but also TV and radio). Diving headfirst into the information flows, Flarf poets have surfaced with a practice that operates like the literary equivalent of burlesque: the pastiche of “serious” content mashed up with kitsch, the corrosive parody, the teasing humor, the glittering costumes and play with identities, and the essentially performative nature of burlesque are consistent with much Flarf poetry.

Burlesque’s intention was rarely to shock (in the 20th century avant-garde sense), but rather to titillate and seduce, while at the same time overturning and challenging social norms. While it may not be possible to shock a literary audience anymore, the extreme Flarf of Sharon Mesmer’s recent book, Annoying Diabetic Bitch, may prove challenging (at least in this burlesque sense) to some readers. In Mesmer’s hands, the earnest lyrical voice of confessional first-person poetry has degenerated into scatological language, garbled gibberish, inane conversation and insults as she mines the excesses of conventionally unpoetic realms such as online chat rooms, spam and celebrity gossip websites for material. While lacking in earnest gravity and narrative continuity, the voices Mesmer employs are nonetheless compelling and at times, the dialogue she employs reads like a series of warped comedy skits – her reading at the Flarf Festival 06 and the audience reaction here really capture the sense of a Flarf poem as a kind of burlesque performance.

Characterized by abrupt changes in voice and register, Mesmer’s poetry is composed from within a culture of extreme distraction. She creates a strangely artificial zone inhabited by characters derived from chat room handles such as “SmarmyMan” and “Fckme69” or pop cultural figures such as the Olsen twins, and the use of words and phrases such as “like, totally”, “crazy ass” and “go figure”. The characteristically Flarfy juxtapositions of “serious” political or philosophical content with frivolity or banality serve to undermine any attempt to establish a clear polemical position. Conventional literary criticism (such as this essay) and close reading techniques seem only marginally useful in coming to grips with the Flarf of Annoying Diabetic Bitch. Indeed, as Mesmer points out in the poem “Why I Love Literary Criticism”, “literary criticism is extremely boring, whilst a squid superconducting quantum interference devices is exciting.”) The latter squid may well serve as a handy metaphor for a Flarf poet: conducting (in both senses of the word) interference devices within the streams of contemporary media culture.

In the book’s Postscript, Mesmer describes how some of the poems were composed using the results of Google searches in which she entered odd word combinations into the search engine. This technique appears most obviously in poems such as “Ass Vagina”, a poem that reads like a kind of pornographic spam salad, beginning: “Free Lindsay Jessica Carmen topless puss ass butt vagina 100% free”. The mash-up of porn search tag phrases is pushed into absurdity with subsequent reiterations and mixes in later lines, such as: “Hairy preggo men teen orgy Greenville manufacturing district with endangered hairy ass teen rappers 100% free”. Again, the performative nature of the repetition of key terms (“ass”, “hairy”, “100% free”) continually undermined by unrelated material makes for a hilarious live reading experience (see here). Mirroring internet searching, language shifts horizontally in these poems, skimming across the surface of meaning. Perhaps Mesmer’s poetry thus cynically performs the absence of transcendence in contemporary American culture (other than the excitement of being pulled along the information stream by a superconducting squid).


Mesmer teasingly offers up mashups of incredibly inane, unsophisticated language and banal declarations, almost as if to challenge our expectations of what poetic language is or should be. Beyond the literary provocation, she is also highlighting the flippant superficiality of much online culture – the exaggerated whining of blog culture appears in numerous poems, the self-centered and superficial voices of “I am Beautiful” take vain declarations to extremes (“I also have a beautiful soul, to go with my body”), and the repetitive insults of “Annoying Diabetic Bitch” and its companion piece, “Fine Hormony Bitch”, reflect the online culture of discussion board flaming:

You annoying diabetic bitch.
You anorexic bulimic diabetic bitch.
You dumb annoying talentless diabetic bitch, eat some diabeties.
You and your bitch monster diabetic junkhead father,
and your diabetic cat, your pathetic diabetic cat that eats birds

A poem such as “I Wuv Bumblebees” pushes this inanity envelope to the extreme, opening with a series of variations and extensions on the phrase “I Wuv Bumblebees” and continuing:

I wuv kittycats and I have three cats.
No – ha! – seriously, I wuv bumblebees more
and I think you’re a deadly bumblebee crack whore
(oh, I meant “fucking legend”).

Mesmer’s parody of such online banter exposes cracks in the culture of banality, bursting at certain points into violent confrontational language as the wuvable bumblebee suddenly becomes a “deadly bumblebee crack whore”. While titillated by the transformative bumblebee, the reader is ultimately left frustrated, as the final lines serve to deflate any rhythmic sense or continuity of the bumblebee theme:

And you only have to insert “Flight of the Bumblebee” to produce
duotone balls, pink and white,
and anal beads of purple.
I’m sick of this.
Let’s go pirate gaming at Brickfest.

Cruising through the datascapes of distraction horizontally from bumblebees to anal beads, Mesmer ends her “search poem” with a signature abrupt and illogical change of course: an invitation to attend a Lego convention. Like the form, Mesmer’s content is also “irrational”, sliding horizontally across contexts as it gains and sheds meaning in a literary equivalent of channel or web surfing.

As with other recent Flarf volumes (see my previous reviews here and here), contemporary political realities are prominent in Annoying Diabetic Bitch. The collusion of the religious right and recent American imperialism are highlighted in the poem “My Jesus in Lint Form”:

My Jesus in lint form taught me
About taking barbarism to new levels,
Levels heretofore perceived only in metaphors
Of demon legions in a post-Dutch world.

But the most scathing parodies are reserved for the commander in chief, who Mesmer has performing thus in “I Am A Very Confident Little Fellow”:

When I do my flight suit sausage strut
On the deck of the frigate, flippin’ the bird
The grunts all know I have the primo cunt
And a whole butt-load of dung-sniffin’ butt monkeys.

While the sacred icon of the presidential figure is dragged through the scatological mud-pit several times in the book, the various voices Mesmer inhabit reflect varying political positions (presumably apart from her own). In the poem “I Know That Babies Feel Just As Nervous and Confused As You Do”, for example, she pushes a contemporary anti-immigration voice to extremes to expose its inherent racism: “I’m not all left-wing and shit, but I know the Religious Right can be easily replaced by a baby with a Pez dispenser … And you know what else I know? That America is becoming another Europe where the birth rate is so low the continent is now overpopulated by immigrants from Muslim countries, and that’s why I’m urging white people to have babies because most immigrants show up here with bad fucking attitude problems. Same with their babies.”

With the end of the Bush era only weeks away, perhaps the parodies of Annoying Diabetic Bitch already seem dated. In the not too distant future, critics may look back on this poetry as a cynical response to a particular era in American culture that has passed. However, there is much in Mesmer’s book that indicates productive future possibilities as well: the stinging comic parodies, the inhabitation of various online voices and the engagement with the particular languages and modes of contemporary communication. Finally, Flarf’s convincing convergence of literature, performance and communications technology (both as a means to build literary communities and as a data mine for both content and form) has created a 21st century poetry that is both entertaining and critically engaged.


Further reading

An interview with Sharon Mesmer
Sharon Mesmer’s blog

Russel Wright House and Studio, East 48th St

In my last blog entry, I mentioned a possible connection between architect William Lescaze’s house on East 48th Street and designer Russel Wright’s house on the same street. Geographically, the connection is closer than I’d imagined – Lescaze lived and worked at 211 East 48th St, while Russel and Mary Wright lived at 221. Historically, while both were designer home-cum-offices in midtown Manhattan, Lescaze’s 1934 house can be seen as a continuation of a certain austere and uncompromising version of prewar International Style modernism, while the Wright’s 1949 house might represent a alternative attitude towards modernism, with an emphasis on informality, relaxation and an intimate relationship between interior and exterior. The Wrights’ townhouse on East 48th St is also significant as it served as a kind of laboratory for their ideas about modern American lifestyle that culminated in their 1950 bestseller, Guide to Easier Living.

American Modern Lifestyle

Although best known as an industrial designer, Wright began his design career in the 1920s designing sets, props and costumes for Broadway productions. In the early 1930s he shifted into product design, creating a series of bar and serving accessories from spun aluminum. Marketed and successfully sold during the Depression years, Wright’s serving accessories were designed for informal dinners or cocktail parties rather than formal dinners or afternoon teas. Wright’s most commercially successful and best-known design was for the ceramic dinner service, American Modern. First marketed in 1939, American Modern quickly became the best selling dinner service in the United States, and remained so until the mid-1950s. The dinnerware was innovative in a number of ways: it was marketed as flexible (as consumers could mix and match pieces within a range of modern colors), easily washable, durable and importantly, inexpensive. But most of all, it appealed to an emerging informal lifestyle, characterized by a shift away from the excessive number of delicate and decorative pieces needed for formal entertaining.


The hand-crafted look of the American Modern pieces belied their mass production, allowing them to retain the aura of human craftsmanship in an increasingly mass-produced and mechanized world. A further key to the success of the American Modern line was its marketing, largely overseen by Russel’s wife Mary. She created “stage sets” for department stores and promotional material (see photo above). In these, domestic life was portrayed as theater and its commodities were sold as part of a new, casual American lifestyle, free from formal European models that had been the mainstay of an aspirational American middle class for generations.


Staging American modernism: The Guide to Easier Living

After creating some of the props for this emerging lifestyle, Russel and Mary Wright published the script in 1950. Their Guide to Easier Living focused on not only how to design interior spaces that would be suitable for modern middle-class living, but also as a guide to housekeeping and casual entertaining. Their proposals included open floor plans which flowed seamlessly between kitchen, dining room and living room, and an emphasis on open, flexible interior spaces with lightweight modern furniture. There was not only an emphasis on practical, easy to clean and maintain homes but also a shift away from the formal, rule-bound Victorian lifestyle of previous generations to a more relaxed, spontaneous way of living.


Rather than a guide to taste, the Wrights’ book functioned more as a Do-It-Yourself manual. While they emphasized modernism in general, the Wrights were not too proscriptive as to precisely which furnishings, appliances or décor to adopt. Instead, the book contained detailed analyses of many new materials and their properties – new textiles, flooring materials, synthetic coverings for furniture – all analyzed in terms of their practicality, durability, cleanability and comfort (rather than their aesthetic appeal). Of course, Russel’s own American Modern dinnerware was a perfect fit for the Easier Living lifestyle, as were his various furniture designs of the time, particularly the Easy Living range.

East 48th Street: the Easier Living Laboratory

During the late 1940s, the Wrights’ renovation of a New York city townhouse functioned as a laboratory for this new vision of a more relaxed and casual, yet distinctively modern lifestyle. In 1949, the Wrights moved to their newly renovated townhouse at 221 East 48th Street. It included a design studio on the first floor, living space on the second floor, with the third and fourth floors rented out. Rather than a machine for living, here was postwar modernism American-style, where efficient and functional meant easy to maintain, flexible and comfortable. Rather than the purity, abstraction, universal truths and technological fetishism associated with prewar modernism, the Wrights’ were creating modern life as style. Although this was a New York townhouse situated in dense midtown, the modernism is perhaps closer to a Californian suburban model (and not surprisingly the Guide features various references to Californian designers and architects, particularly Richard Neutra and Harwell Hamilton Harris).


The first floor design studio included a small reception room and conference room as well as the working studio at the rear. The reception area featured a frosted glass partition and built-in desk, while the conference room was similarly spare but both revealed a careful attention to lighting and presentation as these were public spaces for meetings with clients. The rear studio space featured an S-shaped wall comprised entirely of six foot high double hung windows overlooking the garden (see photo above). This curved window wall not only created a distinctive effect from outside but also shaped the studio from inside as a kind of garden pavilion as much as a rational modern workspace. An anonymous writer in a contemporary issue of Interiors described the studio floor like this: “It is difficult to find a single non-functional object, and extraneous ornament is conspicuous by its absence.” Although sparse and functional, the studio was also described as “unexpectedly poetic” due to the lemon yellow ceiling and the intimate connection with the exterior garden.

However, upstairs, Mary’s bedroom combined modern built-in cupboards with pink lace curtains, pink walls and a deep green carpet. The Interiors writer continued: “The uncompromising puritans of contemporary design may be disturbed by the fact that the Wrights have set redolently Victorian rooms side by side with pristine modern ones on the upper floors of the house … the melange suggests that the Wrights are practical people (they had a number of Victorian pieces) and that they have a sense of humor. Or perhaps they decided that it would be stimulating and not at all unpleasant to step from the Hardoy chair and raised fireplace of the living room, into a quaint bedroom (Mary Wright’s) where festoons of Nottingham lace dyed solid pink adorn the windows, and thence back to a terrace curved like the desk of an excursion steamer.” It may also be because their vision of modern design was not primarily aesthetic nor technological, but about how individuals could style and inhabit spaces to suit their particular needs.


The Wrights’ living spaces were open and flexible, with built-in desks and cupboards (to maximize both storage space and floor space) and fluorescent lighting hidden under bookshelves (to create an intimate atmosphere). Idiosyncratic innovations included a storage wall that concealed both a piano and a movie projector which could project onto a window blind opposite which doubled as a movie screen (see photos below). This was modernism from the inside out, transforming a small living space into a movie theater, its furniture designed for comfort, ease of cleaning and ease of moving. The living space continued almost seamlessly onto the terrace outside which featured outdoor furniture covered in yellow sail cloth to contrast the lush greens of the carefully designed garden.


A link to Lescaze’s house on the same block was mentioned in the Interiors article when the writer added that Lescaze’s staff had dubbed the house “A Streetcar Named Desire” due to its curved studio windows and spiral metal stairs which resembled a contemporary streetcar. However, I believe this resemblance was short-lived. An inconsistency in the photographs I have of the ground floor confused me for a while (see the photo above of the rear of the studio and the one below it of the living room looking out onto the garden) and I can only assume that the curved studio was replaced by a living room between the visit of the Interiors writer and the photograph above taken from Albrecht’s book. Perhaps this adds to the Wrights’ ideas about the flexibility of modern living! With Mary’s death in 1952, while Russel continued to live at East 48th St, he devoted increasing time and energy into creating the ultimate stage of his lifestyle vision: the designer house and landscape, Manitoga.



Bibliography

Albrecht, Donald, Robert Schonfeld and Lindsay Stamm Shapiro, Russel Wright: Creating American Lifestyle, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001.

Wright, Russel, Good Design is for Everyone: In His Own Words, Garrison, NY: Manitoga/Universe, 2001.

Writer unknown, “Idyll on 48th Street: The Russel Wright Homestead”, Interiors, No 109, 1949.

The website for the exhibition "Russel Wright: Living with Good Design" has some excellent essays on Wright's life and work.