These are a mix of glass and lucite, past and present. The bottom 3 pieces are from the 70s and all of the pieces at top are contemporary. Transparency puts furniture into the realm of the future or the imaginary, even when it also automatically harks back to the 1970s. Which may be the same thing. The 70s also had that thing for kaleidoscopic and candyshop colour, iconoclasm, disco and visual pleasure. And conveniently mirrored table tops. Above, XXX tables by Glas Italia, released this year. See this Arren Williams article. Below, glass and lucite by Italian company Sawaya Moroni, who are present-day masters of this too. Example further below are vintage.
Above, French 70s lucite desk from here. Below, Electrified Plexiglas and Mirrored Glass Low Table by Ron Ferri, circa 1970’s USA. Mirror, Lucite. From Todd Merrill
All of these things belong in the comfortable homemade space station where we’ll live in some sort of harmony and wear space rags. Pictured here: space capsule by unknown; lounge by Joe Colombo; spacey driftwood root from the Pacific; Gabriella Crespi steel table; 7′ steel sculpture by Paul Evans; Roger Tallon helicoid aluminum spiral staircase. Click each for more information. If anyone knows the identity of the space capsule, please advise. UPDATE: a Flickr user informs me that the white space capsule is actually a replica of the Trinity Gadget, part of a nuclear explosives test at Los Alamos, which changes things completely. It’s not lo fi at all, and is massively destructive. But this is fitting, because in science fiction, utopias go wrong so fast.
“Electrified Plexiglas and Mirrored Glass Low Table,” circa 1970-79, by American designer Ron Ferri. American Glam. From the artnet site:
“There are few designers who captured the essence of the Studio 54 era as well as Ron Ferri did. The Emerald green Plexiglas base is illuminated from within and rests on a sleek mirrored glass top. Pure disco chic. From the original Jay Spectre designed interior for R. Roberts. Documented in Point of View: Design by Jay Spectre by J. Spectre and G. Bradfield; page 46. Original condition.”
I’ll admit right off the bat that this is not strictly an architecture post; it’s technically a moment of retro 70s nostalgia. The 1976 movie Logan’s Run, a dark sci-fi dystopia about escape from a domed post-apocalyptic society which euthanizes its citizens at age 30, completely occupied my late childhood imagination. The movie was shot entirely in Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas and most of the film’s key action takes place in the “Great Hall,” which turns out to be the fairly bizarre and also recently demolished Dallas Market Center Apparel Mart, not a great piece of architecture but one that did conveniently feature a quasi-sci-fi interior. If someone has the correct terminology for this style of interior, please advise – my guess is 60s mall rendition of Corbusier, Notre Dame du Haut era. The novel the film is based on was written at the height of 60s youth culture and student unrest, and it was explicitly written with a screenplay in mind. Though it was published in 1967, like Dune the process of turning the novel into a film was fraught with problems, and by the time the film was made, the decor and costumes were reflecting the 70s. The film’s commentaries on totalitarianism, a Brave New World-style docile populace distracted by pleasures, and youth-oriented culture are pretty heavy-handed, but I loved it when I saw it around age 12, too young to notice how wooden Michael York’s acting was but not young enough to avoid total infatuation.
Above, scenes from the film. Below, the mart as it was in reality and then during its demolition. Its destruction is strangely fitting considering the film’s ending. Oddly, the building is part of the vast trade complex JFK was headed for when he was assassinated – he was on his way to a luncheon for 2400 people, in a setup very similar to the one shown below. This particular part of the complex, however, was built a year later, in 1964.
All photos and information in this post are from racprops, aintitcool and snowcrest. The film’s “Love Shop” (image at top, with the odd, oozing brown leather seating, and the mall shot with somewhat anatomical neon sign) was the Oz Restaurant/Nightclub in Dallas. Other locations: Sandman HQ was Zales’ International Headquarters; the Sandman gym was the Arlington Health Center and the living units were the Burton Park Building. The video below was a long promotional trailer for the film intended as a preview for theatre owners, and it gives a sense of the futuristic 70s sets and costumes.
More houses by Paul Rudolph. I’m not sure why I like him so much; maybe it’s that he was willing to try so many versions of modernism, or it’s the use of white, or that he went so adventurously, successfully space age in the 60s and 70s, or the glam. I really like all the low Japanese-style seating, often in one-step-deep conversation pits – it’s something almost all his houses have in common, whether they’re strict midcentury modern or 60s/70s mod. Whatever happened to conversation pits? I believe he’s underrated. His Modulightor house was in the previous post, and above is the Milam Residence; below is the Green Residence.
The Bass Residence, looking like a white Frank Lloyd Wright:
Below, the Cohen House, also via here, shown present day (in condition almost identical to original, for resale since it’s currently for sale) and also shortly after it was built. But what happened to the cool lamps flanking the fireplace?
The Hiss Residence, also known as the Umbrella House. All photos by Kelviin of the Paul Rudolph Foundation.
Below is the fairly psychedelic, late 70s glam Edersheim Apartments.
Rudolph’s own apartment in the Beekman Building: lots and lots of parties. Lots and lots of house plants.
And finally, as already shown in our first Rudolph post, the Alexander Hirsch Residence, later owned and refinished by Halston:
This is a long, messy, eclectic photo essay about the strange, hybrid, and surprisingly impure histories of objects and buildings. It is skewed toward the ancient, the modern, the space-age, the 1960s and the 1970s, the adventurous, the unexpected, the ecological, the utopian and the anti-utopian, the unstuffy and the unstaid, design as making-do, the real, the lived in, and mixes of all kinds. Since design isn't divorced from other things, it's also about art, social issues, urban and community planning, technology, philosophy and anything else that intersects with design, which means everything. "ouno" is a name in both Finnish and Japanese, it's the same upside-down as right-side-up, it refers to both zeros and ones, and it is pronounced uno. My name is Lindsay and I'm open to your complaints, disagreement or general crankiness. Free free to comment or email. This is an anti-intellectualism-free zone and around here we don't try to dampen critique by calling it negativity or whining. We call it thought!
