Furniture

America's Design Legacy...Going, Going, Going

New York Times, By JULIE V. IOVINE

N London, Washington and, most recently, New York, attendance at the traveling exhibition on Charles and Ray Eames, the postwar design mavericks, broke museum records. But people filing by to marvel at their plywood molding experiments -- prototypes that didn't cut it and (eureka!) ones that did -- were unaware that nearly every major American institution had passed up the chance to buy the Eameses' legacy of furniture invention.

Frank Gehry's archive may be worth millions, but no museum has paid.

The Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art were among those that turned it down, leaving the Eames family facing huge inheritance taxes, the threat of eviction from their offices and the prospect of selling off the products piecemeal to resale stores.

"Cherry-picking would have paid a lot more to the family," said Eames Demetrios, the designers' grandson. In 1988, the Vitra Design Museum in Germany came to the rescue, acquiring 400 Eames objects. It has gobbled up the estates of the American designers George Nelson, Harry Bertoia and Alexander Girard, as well. The preservation movement that routinely takes up arms to protect buildings of established cultural significance has yet to take an active role in saving America's modern design legacy. While any museumgoer can inspect the preliminary studies of great painters, Donald Albrecht, a guest curator at the National Building Museum in Washington and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, is one of many experts who fear that the lack of interest in the design process, from objects to blueprints, will mean a loss of "intellectual underpinnings, and the context that explain how our world is put together," as well as inspiration for future generations. "It's very shortsighted of American institutions not to be going after the great designers," he said.

When Raymond Loewy, the industrial designer who stamped his streamlined vision on such familiar objects as Greyhound buses and Lucky Strike packages, died in 1986, his widow auctioned his best concept drawings in Europe, where they disappeared from view. The widow of Minoru Yamasaki, the architect of the World Trade Center, destroyed her husband's papers and drawings when no institute expressed interest in taking them.

"How do these things slip away?" asked David A. Hanks, a museum adviser in New York. "It's an ongoing tragedy, because the public doesn't realize the importance of archives."

Architects of the predigital generation like Frank O. Gehry, Richard Meier, Michael Graves and Robert A. M. Stern are filling storerooms to the I-beams with their prototypes and correspondence but say they have yet to find serious takers for the accumulations of their lifeworks. "It's a big problem," said Terence Riley, the chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art. "The approach in America is all too often helter-skelter. There ought to be a big national archive of American design."

The de facto attics for American design have been university libraries, private European museums, corporate collections, foundations, government institutions and the Library of Congress, to which Charles and Ray Eames donated their papers, drawings and photographic images. But these institutions collect scattershot only those donations they can afford to preserve and maintain, squirreling them away for persistent scholars but rarely exhibiting them for public enrichment. It took the Library of Congress about 10 years to pull together the Eames exhibition, with the help of Vitra, I.B.M., the Herman Miller furniture company and the Eames family. (It opens Saturday at the St. Louis Art Museum.)

The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles did not express interest in buying the architectural outpourings of Richard Meier, even though he designed the Getty Museum. The institute prefers to collect single projects.

"Archives since the postwar period have grown incredibly in size," said Wim de Wit, the head of special collections at the Getty Research Institute. "The number of drawings are gigantic. You'd need warehouses for them."

In contrast, well-financed European institutions are methodically and aggressively pursuing the creative overflow of significant living architects and designers, among them the Netherlands Architecture Institute; the Fonds Régional d'Art Contemporain, a state-financed archive of art and architecture outside Paris; and the Royal Institute of British Architects. More recently, the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal scooped up the archive of Peter Eisenman and the works of a handful of other American architects as part of its program to focus exclusively on projects and people "who make new proposals to the international current of ideas," said Nicholas Olsberg, chief curator at the center.

Archives tell the story of the invention process and the evolution of new ideas, said Stephen VanDyk, who presides over the archives of Henry Dreyfuss and Donald Deskey, which were donated to the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. "You can see their thinking," he said. Dreyfuss, for example, designed the 20th Century Limited and innovative household appliances. "You can look at drawings showing how he made a round thermostat" by analyzing rectangular ones already in use and watching how people handled them, Mr. VanDyk said.

"You can see the inventor in him at work," he said. Last month, the John Lautner Foundation was established with an annual budget of just $13,000, gleaned from private donors and copyright fees. Its goal is to assure that awareness of Lautner, the iconoclast who designed the Chemosphere House and other Los Angeles architectural landmarks, will be kept alive through exhibitions, publications and educational events. (Both the Getty Research Institute and U.C.L.A. made offers that the foundation found all too easy to refuse.) "Our ultimate goal is to move into a building designed by Lautner, like the Corbusier Foundation," said Frank Escher, the archive administrator.

Michael Graves with Sara says his archive has not attracted takers.

Some living architects are more interested in getting top dollar for their work than wide exposure. Frank O. Gehry thinks he is sitting on a golden egg. "If it's worth something it would be nice to get something for it before I die," said the 70-year-old architect, who has meticulously saved just about everything he's ever produced, from cardboard chair prototypes to silver-paper models of the Guggenheim Museum at Bilbao, Spain. He said that work pertaining to an unbuilt house in Ohio for the patron Peter B. Lewis fills 200,000 square feet of storage space.

Mr. Gehry says he does not know what will happen to his archive. But Mr. Olsberg of the Canadian Center for Architecture said: "I know Frank sees it as multiple millions, and it will be. It ought to be." Even so, Mr. Olsberg, whose center asked to buy only the Lewis house documents, added: "There are a hundred major architects out there, and their archives are worth one to three million dollars each. They all aren't going to find buyers."

THE architect Michael Graves has not been approached by the institutions that are known for going after archives. "The usual suspects don't go after me," said Mr. Graves, whose Tuscan watercolors at the Max Protetch Gallery in 1979 set off the craze for collecting architectural renderings. "My 15 minutes are over. I'm a dinosaur."

His archive is now "in a warehouse somewhere out on Route 1" in New Jersey, said Mr. Graves, who hopes to make his own home an archive open to the public, and might possibly donate it to Princeton University.

Eames chair with Paul Steinberg doodle in a German museum. American museums passed it up.

The Getty Research Institute would be pleased if Richard Meier donated his materials related to the Getty building that he designed. But Mr. Meier said, "I would like my things to go to an institute that would keep them all together and make them accessible, and not just be a repository."

If the value of a design archive is its ability to convey to a future generation an appreciation for the past -- its design history, social commentary and labors of love -- then it is perhaps odd that no institution has pursued the archives of Robert A. M. Stern, the architect who so acutely represents the nostalgic yearnings of certain well-to-do Americans.

As a result, he plans to give them away. "One day some university will see a truck pulling up with all my papers inside," said Mr. Stern, who is dean of the architecture school at Yale University.

Ultimately, the question of who is going to get what may be moot. If the next generation of designers relies on a computer mouse more than a pencil, its archives will all be stored digitally, by the gigabyte. And cocktail-napkin doodles will go the way of celluloid.

"It's a scary thing," said Bernard Tschumi, dean of architecture at Columbia University. "We are a generation in transition."

Furniture Woods

Construction Techniques What is Veneering. Engraving and Printing. Finishes.

CHECK LIST FOR BUYING WOOD FURNITURE

All woods used for making furniture fall into two categories -- hardwoods and softwoods, but the designation doesn't really have anything to do with how hard or how soft the wood is. "Hardwood" identifies the trees that lose their leaves seasonally and "softwood" refers to those that keep their foliage all year.

Among hardwoods frequently used in making furniture are ash, cherry, maple, oak, pecan, teak, rosewood, walnut, mahogany and poplar. In the softwood category are cedar, cypress, fir, pine and redwood.

CONSTUCTION TECHNIQUES

Several different woods may be used in the same piece of furniture. For example, the term solid cherry or solid mahogany means that all exposed parts of the piece are made of solid wood. The frame or other parts not visible to the eye might be of another wood such as gum or poplar.

Generally, more expensive furniture usually is made of fine hardwoods such as maple, cherry or oak or of "selected" softwoods such as pine. Medium-priced furniture may have a combination of different woods on exposed surfaces.

Because trees don't grow in the shapes and sizes required for making furniture, pieces of wood are bonded together in different ways to achieve the necessary sizes and shapes.

Four types of bonding are often used:

1. Wide boards are often cut into long narrower planks and bonded back together. In solid wood furniture, strips are carefully glued together to form the tops, sides and door panels. The interior may be of another wood.

2. Shaping is achieved by gluing blocks of wood together. These blocks can be machined for a deep carved pattern or turned and shaped into a leg, pedestal or post.

3. Combination wood panels are made by mixing wood particles, chips or flakes with resins and binding agents. These sheets are formed under extreme heat and tremendous pressure making them exceptionally strong, stable and resistant to warping. Called chipboard, particleboard, fiberboard or engineered wood, this material is frequently used on the backs of cabinets and doors or as cores for tops and panels.

4. Ply construction is achieved by adding layers, placed at cross grain, to a solid wood or particleboard core. Adhesives are placed on each layer and this "sandwich" is permanently bonded under high pressure. Modern glues and manufacturing techniques have made ply construction very strong and resistant to warping.

VENEERING. . .an ancient art.

Much of the most expensive furniture produced today owes its exceptional beauty to veneers. Veneering is centuries old. The Egyptians used it and Sir Thomas Chippendale was a masterful practitioner of the art. His designs from the 1700s attest to the beauty and lasting quality of fine veneers. In Chippendale's time, veneering was so costly that few could afford it. But that isn't the case today.

Veneer construction is the application of this layers of highly decorative woods on top of solid cores, plywood, particle board or medium-density fiberboard. Veneering allows great flexibility, making it possible to match grain patterns or use inlays to create designs that nature can't produce in the solid wood. Today, wood furniture in all price ranges is made of veneer construction which allows maximum use of beautiful, distinctive grain patterns and rare woods at affordable prices.

ENGRAVING AND PRINTING. . .a new technique

Modern technology has produced a less expensive method of achieving the look of wood veneers. Manufacturers can simulate a natural wood grain by printing or engraving a pattern on surfaces such as density fiberboard. This beautiful furniture is easier to produce and available at a lower price than genuine wood veneers. It's attractive and durable but usually doesn't provide the same benefits as the real thing. However, printing and engraving offers you exceptional looks on a limited budget.

FINISHES. . .the final touch of beauty

An appropriate finish adds the final touch of beauty to wood furniture. A finish which provides uniform color and adds a degree of protection generally requires the application of several coats of oil, wax, lacquer or paint to the surface.

Clean finishes allow the markings and grain variations of naturally beautiful woods to show through. Tinted or opaque finishes change the color of the wood and can make two different woods appear to be the same. Finishes can vary the look of a piece, making it appear smooth and sophistcated or rough hewn or rustic.

Distressing is a technique for aging new furniture and heightening its rustic appeal. The wood is beaten or battered before the finish is applied. Distressed finishes tend to hide finger marks and scratches and can be an excellent choice for rooms where there is a lot of activity.

Painted finishes are another popular way of adding the final touch of beauty. Painted pieces can be more expensive than those with natural finishes because paint tends to point up flaws so extra care must be taken at the factory to make sure that imperfections are removed from the wood.

Imported furniture and some contemporary designs may have other finishes. Your sales person or designer will be glad to explain the variations and fill you in on how to extend the life of your new wood furniture by pampering it with the right care.

CHECK LIST FOR BUYING WOOD FURNITURE

Doors and drawers fit well.
Drawers have glides and stops.
Drawers glide easily when pulled.
Drawers have dust panels.
Drawer corners are jointed securely.
Insides of drawers are smooth and snag free.
Long shelves have center supports.
Doors swing open easily without squeaking or rubbing.
Long doors are attached with study hinges.
Hardware is secure and strong.
No rough edges on hardware.
Interior lights operate easily.
Entertainment units have hole for electrical cords.
Heavy balanced feeling when table is rocked.
Tables leaves fit properly.
Tables leaves match grain and finish of table.
Finish feels smooth to the touch.(except distressed)
Distressed finish has randomly spaced dark marks.