ot only do I love Arper's relaxed contemporary
furniture designs, in beautiful tertiary colors—citrine,
Roman red-brown, turquoise and a panoply of pinks and
purples—I really love the first sentence of the 'About'
section of its website: "Is an object as elemental as a chair
or a table still subject to insight or innovation?" The notion
that deep thought may attend and inform the mundane,
in the positive sense of the word, i.e. whatever objects
are of this earthly world, is an important one. To include
tables and chairs beneath the penumbra of ideas is not
new, and yet, even post-Bauhaus, it still seems radical.
In my article on the exhibition 'Designing Modern Women
1890-1990' I mention Clarence Cook's 1878 treatise
on decoration, the title of which is worth repeating
here, for it dovetails nicely with Arper's manifesto: The
House Beautiful: Essays on Beds and Tables, Stools and
Candlesticks. A chair or couch in the hands and minds
of Arper, with its polyglot battalion of designers—James
N
PIX
Design by Ichiro Iwasak
HYLAND HYLAND HYLAND
