Pieter van der Lugt is a freelance writer based in Cape Town. He's available for work in Afrikaans or English and his specialist fields are entertainment, pop culture and literature. See about me for a full CV and contact details.

LUCKY DAY!

YOURS. OR MINE.

links

• julius shulman
  Los Angeles Times Obituary

• the mies van der rohe pavillion
  My pictures

• charles and ray eames
  Eames Office

• frank lloyd wright
  Falling Water

• jean prouvé
  Vitra Design Museum

 

• joe colombo

  He died in 1971 on his 41st birthday, so Italian designer Cesare “Joe” Colombo didn't have much time to make his mark on the world. But in his short career he did enough to be remembered as one of the twentieth century's most important designers.
    His first work was a ceiling for a jazz club in his home town of Milan in 1953 and the next year he built three miniature theatres with TV sets for the Triennale. This inspired him to study architecture and after a few years experimenting with materials such as fibreglass and polyethylene in his father's factory, he opened a design studio which did mostly interiors for ski lodges and mountain hotels. His trademark was bold curves - he disliked sharp corners and straight lines - and his ideal was to create “an environment for the future”, using new technology to change the way in which people live.
    Like many designers he started with a quest for the perfect chair, which in his case would be made of one material, stackable and easy to clean. He came up with the Universale, as popular today as back then. Instead of redesigning furniture he tried to reinvent them. Many of them are still being made, like the mobile office cabinet he called the Boby trolley, the mobile mini kitchen and the Additional Living System, six polyurethane cushions which can be stuck together in different combinations. Perhaps his ultimate creation was the Total Furnishing Unit, designed in 1971 for his own flat. It is a single unit of only 28 square metres containing a kitchen, cupboard, bedroom and bathroom, with elements sliding in and out as required.
    Joe Colombo's futuristic ideas lay the groundwork for the pop art and plastic design of the seventies. He was excited by the possibilities of new technology and the improvement of everyday life. He envisaged a future which arrived not too long after his death. More's the pity that he isn't here to design it for us.

• julius shulman

  Do an image search for modernist houses and chances are the most striking photographs that come up will be the work of one man. Julius Shulman is regarded as the most important of all architectural photographers. His most famous works might be as familiar to you as any iconic art of the twentieth century.
    Perhaps his best-known is a 1960 photograph of Pierre Koenig's Case Study House No. 22 in Los Angeles. It's not just a perfect shot of an incredible house but a cultural time capsule. Architecture critic Paul Goldberger described it as “one of those singular images that sum up an entire city at a moment in time”.
    Shulman took his pictures to spread the word about new and innovative architects. One shot printed in an architecture journal could kick-start a brilliant career. Sadly, some of his pictures are also the last records of great designs which were torn down or destroyed.
    He had Russian Jewish roots and was born in Brooklyn in 1910. The family lived on a farm for a while where he said he got his appreciation of light and shadow, a key element in his work. He studied various subjects after school, unsure what to do until he met architect Richard Neutra by chance in 1936. He was invited to go see one of Neutra's houses and took along his pocket camera. "I had never seen a modern house before," Shulman said. “It intrigued me with its strange forms - beyond any previous identity of a house in my experience."
    Shulman sent his pictures of the house to the architect, who ordered prints and asked him to photograph more houses. A legend was born - a genius who never used a light metre and often took only one shot.
    Purists complain sometimes about Shulman staging his compositions. He would bring in furniture and props and even pose models or shoot through branches or potted plants to make a new house look like it was landscaped already. Shulman said he wasn't just taking pictures, he was “selling modernism". To him modernism wasn't just a building style: it came with a philosophy which matched his own.
    Gallery owner Craig Krull explained: “Modernism is characterised by an optimistic spirit, a belief that the future holds great promise and technology will improve civilisation. Julius was perfectly suited to translate the tenets of optimism.”
    Shulman died in 2009 not long after his works were moved to the archives of the Getty Research Institute and a wonderful documentary about his life was completed. Visual Acoustics shows him revisiting classic buildings of just about every modern and progressive architect working in America since the 1930s, including Frank Lloyd Wright, John Lautner, Charles Eames and Frank Gehry.
    Whether watching him in this film or looking at his work, Julius Shulman is an inspiration, a reminder that it is fair to be optimistic about the future of humanity and not unrealistic to believe that we can build a better world.

• jean prouvé

  He's been tagged the pioneer of prefab - which sounds a bit bland if you consider all the achievements of French industrial designer and architect Jean Prouvé. Until recently mostly people in his field knew about him and admired his genius, but that changed when the Tate gallery in London rebuilt one of his prefab houses on its front lawn for a special exhibition. It was a chance for architecture fans to discover the beauty of his work.
    Considered one of the great designers of the 20th century, Prouvé was a craftsman, designer, manufacturer, architect and engineer whose career spanned over sixty years. He created prefabricated houses, building components and façades as well as furniture for the home, office and school. His goal was to keep everything simple, functional and economical.
    Jean Prouvé was born into an artistic family in Nancy and trained as a metal smith before studying engineering and opening his own workshop in 1923. He worked with the best, including Le Corbusier, and made a name for himself with classics such as his standard chair of 1934, the Antony chair of 1954 and tables made of sheet metal which he folded with a self-invented method. As admirable as his work ethic was his treatment of his workers: he provided them with insurance and gave them paid holidays, which were a novelty at the time. Never design anything that cannot be made, he said, and so he made sure all his designs could be mass-produced in his factories.
    In the fifties he took up the challenge of designing prefab houses which would be easy to assemble, durable and also affordable. His greatest creations here were the "maisons tropicales" made for Niger and the Congo.
    Since his death in 1984 he has become a legend and many of his buildings have been declared monuments. But he would have hated the fact that his furniture pieces have become collector's items and that one of his tropical houses was sold recently for over R35 million to a hotel boss. The idea was to help the poor, not to amuse the rich...

• CHARLES AND RAY EAMES

  Someone should make a movie about this pair. It could start here: he was head of design at an American college the day the art major arrived on campus to do a weaving course. It was love by design. After working with her on a big project, Charles left his wife and married Ray. Soon they were happily moulding plywood in their flat with a home-made contraption they named the Kazam!Machine. Charles nabbed the wood and glue for the job from MGM studios where he worked as a set designer.
    During World War II they made wooden splints and stretchers for the army. After that they got stuck into their famous plywood chair designs, followed by furniture in fibre glass, plastic and aluminium. Their mission statement: "Get the most of the best to the greatest number of people for the least". Imagine a 21st-century multinational working like that.
    "Take your pleasure seriously," Charles used to say. The Eameses must've had a lot of fun together. They made short films to explain their ideas, amazed their peers with a novel idea called a multimedia presentation and broke new ground with exhibitions that were never less than a great party. The house they built for themselves is considered one of the greatest post-war home designs.
    Visit Eames Office and you'll be surprised by how many of their designs are still around. You might be using some of their furniture right now.

• BENEDIKT TASCHEN

  The shallow view of Benedict Taschen is that he made his money with dodgy pictures and coffee table books on architecture. King of Kink is a typical headline for an article on the driving force behind the classy Taschen publishing house. He does print books other publishers wouldn't touch, but by doing that he's merely expanding the boundaries of art - and without his treasure of titles a trip to your local word franchise would be even more disappointing.
    Benedikt was born in Cologne in Germany, the son of two doctors and the youngest of five children. "Nobody played with me," he's said. "Neither parents nor siblings. Though my brother-in-law Ulli did. He was an art and music fan." When he was eight, his 22-year-old brother Wolfram committed suicide. A distressed Benedikt took refuge in the world of comics and built up such a huge collection that he didn't have enough space for storing them. At the age of twelve he started a mail-order business and at fifteen he opened a comics shop.
    The market for graphic novels and comics was still small, so in 1984 he got a loan from his family and bought 40 000 copies of a book on Magritte. At a new, lower price they sold well and Benedikt could afford to print a book on upcoming photographer Annie Leibovitz. After that came more art books and Taschen's reputation for quality printing and value for money.
    His wife Angelika, also from Cologne, wanted to be a ballet dancer but grew too tall. She considered an operation to have her legs shortened, but thankfully her parents stopped her and she went to study art in Heidelberg. With a PhD and nothing to do she went to the Frankfurt book fair and fell in love with the Taschen brand. She wrote to the publisher, landed a job and fell in love with the boss as well.
    "We never start with a huge print run," is how Benedikt explains his business strategy. "We reprint. If you don't reprint a book, it is not a success, but neither is it a big failure, so you don't have a problem."
    The Tachen family live in Cologne but also have a unique home in Los Angeles. It's the Chemosphere, an experimental design by John Lautner, who's worth an entry of his own. Benedikt won an award for his restoration of this landmark.
    King of kink? Hardly.

• JOHN LAUTNER

  One of the most remarkable buildings in Los Angeles is an octagonal home on a single concrete pillar which can only be reached by rickety finicular. Called the Chemosphere, it was the designed by John Lautner in 1960 and built on hills overlooking the city. The upkeep costs a fortune, apparently, but current owner Benedick Taschen doesn't have a cash flow problem. He also published a book on the architect which created a new awareness of his work.
    Chemosphere with its Modernist style and interior (thanks to Taschen's revamp) is the kind of house in which James Bond and The Jetsons would feel equally at home. John Lautner created many such futuristic marvels in a career of six decades and some of them were used in films such as Diamonds are Forever and Charlie’s Angels. In his time he was overshadowed by his Modernist peers Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra, but these days the fundis aknowledge that he wasn't just an escapist creating fantasy worlds. There was a serious philosophy on humankind's relationship with nature and the environment behind his designs.
    A good example is his Carling House. Its sitting room turns on a platform and becomes an outdoor patio overlooking the city. He was also a practical designer as he proved with a desert motel which can withstand the fiercest storms, a solar home in Alaska and a wavy seaside home on a ridiculously narrow plot in Malibu.
    One of his great legacies also cost him his crediblity. In the late 1940s he designed Googie's Coffee Shop, which led to a wildly popular style named Googie. Critics and other architects considered it silly and laughable. For a while he couldn't find work and had to survive with modest jobs like revamping kitchens. This changed in the 1970s when he built a now famous home for comedian Bob Hope in Palm Springs. Suddenly it was okay to like Lautner again and he won medals and lifetime achievement awards. In 1994 he died a respected and famous architect.

• GOOGIE

  Space Age is what some call it, but most people know it as Googie, a quirky design style which spread through America in the late fifties and all but disappeared about a decade later. Its main root is architect John Lautner's forties design for Googie's Coffee Shop on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Crescent Heights in Los Angeles. An architecture professor gave the style the name Googie in a 1952 article and it stuck.
    Googie architecture is on the endangered list. Like art deco at the end of the thirties, it became unfashionable and few thought it was worth preserving. Googie's Coffee Shop and many other icons of the style were torn down before Googie was recognised as a piece of Americana to be treasured.

   Googie is instantly familiar. It's the home of The Jetsons, the classic Vegas neon signs, road houses and motels and even some cars from the era. Common features are flat roofs tilted upwards, which left room for a huge front window, roofs in the shape of parabolas, big concrete domes and boomerang shapes often used for signs, logos and printed patterns. Nobody is entirely sure here the boomerang came in - maybe from science fiction's "flying wing", or else it's a stylised arrow suggesting progress. The amoeba blobs might have been inspired by camouflage patterns from World War II. Then there's the starburst and the atomic diagram which reminded people of outer and inner space in a time of exciting advances in science.
    Googie designers loved the new materials whcih suddenly became available. They used sheet glass, plywood and plastic to give structures of steel and cement a new look. They were trying to build the world of tomorrow in an age of almost naïve optimism about the future.
    The romantic view is that Googie lost its appeal when America lost its innocence in the sixties with the Kennedy assassination, Vietnam and space exploration bringing back more questions than answers. Who knows. Now it's just another part of retro pop culture. Pity. As with many design styles that fell out of favour, Googie was built on some solid, sensible concepts. There's more to it than ideas for an eye-catching promotion or cool web design.

• FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT

  Frank Lloyd Wright was fired from his first big job as architect because he did some freelance work after hours. Hehe. He said "beauty is but the shining of man's light" and strived for "humanity" in his design. All of which is rather nice. Now look at the houses - especially the one and only Falling Water which I must see someday or I'll die unhappy.
    I turned green with envy when Angelina Jolie booked out the place in 2006 so she could take Brad there for his birthday. "He's so hard to buy for," she told the staff before joining him in the sitting room for caviar and champagne she had flown in. You and I would pay a few hundred Rands for an hour-long tour.
    Frank Lloyd Wright gave geometric shapes, concrete and steel an organic, spiritual life of their own. That's my best punch line on him so far. I'll keep working on it. Meanwhile do an image search for those houses.

• LE CORBUSIER

  On his first visit to New York in 1935 this radical genius said the skyscrapers were nice, but too small. Le Corbusier (he worked under his grandmother's maiden name) arrived in Paris, checked out the design scene and said it was time to start over.
    He did just that with the International Style, intended to bring nature back into human lives by redesigning cities and transforming them into orderly, healthy environments. He even proposed knocking down virtually everything on the right bank in Paris, which was a bit extreme and didn't get council approval.
    In his spare time he wrote books like Towards a New Architecture, the best-selling architecture book ever, published his own magazine, painted, sculpted and scared people with statements like "a house is a machine for living in".
    What gave the man a bad reputation after his death in 1965 was urban designers using his ideas to build cheap and nasty areas which turned into monstrous slums. They missed the point: Corbusier didn't want to slap a concrete roof over every homeless family and call it a home. He wanted everyone to live better.

• SIGNS AND SYMBOLS

  German designer Oyl Aicher specialised in corporate imaging but his claim to fame is the graphics for Munich's Olympic Games of 1972. He made pictograms for every Olympic sport and they are so clear and effective, anybody can understand them.
    In the same league is the map for the London underground designed by engineering draughtsman Henry Beck in 1933. He ignored the distances between the stations and simply drew them as they are laid out, all at right angles or 45 degrees for easier viewing. The map has been updated often but the design has stayed the same and is used around the world - also for Gauteng's new fast train.

 Site built and maintained by Pieter van der Lugt, a freelance writer based in Cape Town. He's available for work in Afrikaans or English and his specialist fields are entertainment, pop culture and literature. See about me for a full CV and contact details.