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EXT.RUDE.D

@ext.rude.d

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Essays about objects
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Object Lesson 8: The Recliner If the Eames Lounge and its derivative two-piecers are the paradigmatic seats of the professional class, the recliner is the archetype of the once-ascendant lower middle classes in the United States. It is the definitive combination of function and comfort and has more in common with the automobile than with the easy chair. For a generation, after the workday ended, millions of recliners across the country clicked back into position, echoing across suburbia, up in apartment buildings, and out in farms—a great American chorus singing work’s transition into leisure. The recliner is a universe from which to watch the modern world move by on television screens, to detach the mind from the body. The body rests somewhere between sitting and lying, in a half state, not asleep but also at the ready. To recline mechanically is to automate leisure, but always with a readiness to spring back up. by @ext.rude.d
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9 days ago
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Correspondence 9: Representational Rugs Photography replaced the need for realistic painting in the mid-19th-century. In a somewhat misaligned reversal of roles, the rug is now taking on the mantle of realistic—and fantastical—representation. Apparent in a slew of products that recently hit the market, this type of image-making centers less on the overt portrayal of power and authority and tries to adhere to or influence current trends. Instead, it projects a kind of soft-power sentimentality, a degree of cuteness even. There’s a lot of cheeky plays on pastoralism, naturalism, and other types of escapist historicism, perhaps even a fetishization of those antique hunting scenes hinted at before. With new analog strategies and digital technologies at the ready, contemporary talents and boutique brands seem to be developing rugs as a less risky means of flexing their aesthetic and stylistic muscles, easily extending their lifestyle visions without having to reinvent the wheel or invest too many funds. With the possibility of more dexterous transitions between materials, techniques, and textures, there’s also more room to play around with age-old pictorial devices such as trompe l’oeil and the sfumato effect, techniques normally “reserved” for “high-brow” fine art painting. - Adrian by @ext.rude.d
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7 months ago
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What is De-Art? De-Art began in earnest around a decade ago. It is decadent and figurative. It takes elements of modern design as a heading and mutates them—just as modernism itself has been mutated with global communications technology. It is more useful to name specific geographical or temporal movements in design, rather than just measuring the purity of design in relationship to art. For example, we talk about Art Nouveau as a movement in itself, without the anxiety of considering it art or design. It’s almost tragic that we are so preoccupied with these massive categories when society and art have become so diverse and variegated. - Ben by @ext.rude.d
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7 months ago
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Correspondence 8: Stone Chairs The solid stone chair speaks to the overlap between architecture, sculpture, and design. Working with stone is almost a rite of passage for a designer, connected through it as one is to the Italian stone masons, the pyramids—hell, even the cavemen, who invented art, after all. Stone is both impractical and thus luxurious; ubiquitous as rock and thus grounding, chthonic. It takes immense effort and resources to work with stone and move it. Yet, it always seems somewhat primordial, backwards, overly referential. Many designers working with it today reference some antiquity, whether it be Egyptian or Mesoamerican, and we are, honestly, confused by anyone who thinks that reclaiming monumental stone from emperors past is the syncretism we should be practicing. These stone chairs show the concept of the chair as it might exist in nature, who hasn’t found a nicely shaped rock in Central Park or elsewhere on which to sit? This eternal appeal links us back to other times, projecting our current production and input into the future. At worst, it demonstrates the excess of furniture. It shows us that, if we want to get back to nature, we may as well sit on the ground, as many still happily do. by @ext.rude.d
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7 months ago
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Object Lesson 7: Nespresso Machine Styled in various brand and off-brand versions, this ubiquitous gizmo seems to denote a certain dialect of a universal language. No matter if one finds themselves in the far reaches of the Arabian desert, Paris, or Paramaribo, it’s there. It’s perhaps one of the most tangible and perceptible signifiers of now well-entrenched globalism and the antiseptic homogeneity it lugs. It’s insignificant yet insidious, incongruous yet indispensable. Its seemingly negligible pods—filled with myriad flavors, styled in endless hues and patterns—have become one of the most glaring signifiers of ecological and cultural collapse; worse even than the plastic straw. But its two light-up buttons are oh so easy to use, with the small mug icons depicting and facilitating a direct and conducive service—a passive, if excruciatingly delayed cause and effect, especially at the break of day, regardless of time zone and disrupted circadian rhythm. In its simplest iteration, the design is a feeble replication of the sturdy, precision-engineered espresso machine—the kind that wakes one up simply by the jolting blare of its portafiller being emptied with brute force. The latter was invented by Milanese mechanic Luigi Bezzera in 1901 and now has the allure both of style and hipster retroism, rooted in the consistency of Italian design excellence, which is, in part, transmuted to the legions of its plastic cousins. by @ext.rude.d
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8 months ago
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It contains the memories of the family and, like the stage, is the location of their psychic struggle, through the pain of the wars and joys of births, reunions, and the simple pleasure of the psyche encountering shadows from the trees and vases, which the script repeatedly and simply calls “beautiful.” There are clear metaphors of trauma that run parallel with those of the family – a crack in the foundation runs up the ornate walls to the upper floors. It doesn’t get much more Bachelardian. but Like all value, sentimental value is transitive. It guides one toward the other and toward the past. Objects can denote style, but they do not contain personality. Nora only becomes interested in the sentimental value of her mother’s glassware when Agnes has already set some aside for herself. The house’s meaning changes completely when, after her mother’s death, Nora wonders why her father is staying there, and then it changes again when it becomes bland, when its soul is erased. Most people stop here, but the memories of the house must be overcome. by @ext.rude.d
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8 months ago
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Correspondence 7: Rewilding Metal Metal can do a lot, but it can’t sprout stems, grow branches, and bloom flowers. However, a growing crop of contemporary furniture designers is asking: what if it could? Enter, rewilded metal: furnishings, lighting, accessories, and semi-functional sculptures that are equal parts natural and industrial, primordial and technological. We suspect this trend is growing out of something else. It might not just be romanticism, pastoralism, or somewhat superficial biophilia but an actual bid to re-ground ourselves, re-align with what’s familiar and fundamental. Today this familiarity extends to both the synthetic and the natural. Instead of a mythic before, it’s grounded in an embrace of our complicated, hybrid world. What we’re seeing crop up isn’t just floral motifs cut out of sheet metal but the intrinsic formation of structurally integral components. Making the most of metal’s expected and unexpected properties—even if just as a single element—a table leg is cast to fully embody the look and feel of a tree branch. by @ext.rude.d
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9 months ago
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Design Under Zohran “High Millennialism” Mamdani understands how design interventions can build connections between a politician and a people, and it may be that Mamdani’s time in power inaugurates a temporal shift in the way design is practiced in New York City. Mamdani is already engaging with toilet politics—a topic we covered here last year. His office has put out a request for proposals for “modular public toilets” to be installed throughout the city. The transposable aspect of this is concerning, in that a toilet that is easily placed anywhere can also be easily taken away, but it does show a day one concern on Mamdani’s part, in his words: “not the most glamorous side of governance [but one] felt in the day-to-day lives of New Yorkers for years to come.” With this opening up of the public sector to these touch points, where people are exposed to design and through that exposure connected to the greater machinations of political operations, designers have an opportunity to put to the test the theories of equity, affect, and other progressive imaginings that often languish in private arenas and cloistered universities. by @ext.rude.d
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9 months ago
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Correspondence 6: The Squiggly Form Design has gotten whimsical, cute even. Everything from lampshades to sofas are sporting ‘playful’ flourishes: pictorial depictions with strong narrative, even nostalgic, resonance. Much like how the golden ratio shape of a shell influenced the exuberant yet frivolous Rococo style of the early 18th-century, the squiggly form is perhaps a more sparing distillation of nature for our time-leaves and flower pedals-less obvious and far more refined than a realistic painting. Nature, after all, is the most fundamental and transcendent source of inspiration. What, then, could the current turn toward this motif be signalling? by @ext.rude.d
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10 months ago
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Object Lesson 6: The Fast Casual Bowl Today, public opinion has turned on fast food, or at least the kind that enchanted McDonald’s CEO Ray Kroc and a whole generation of busy consumers. The industrialisation of the kitchen, with its glittering stainless steel and synchronised worker systems, was seen as a way to unmoor people from the perennial tedium of food preparation, allowing for multiple members of a household to work. Soon, though, people began to feel as though a new sort of dependency was forming. The corporate profit model kicked off by Kroc eventually degraded the quality of the food in favor of profits; eyebrows were raised at mystery meat wrapped in paper. Low-paid laborers were central to 21st-century labor politics. With scrutiny on quality standards and millennial focus on health, new businesses began trying to fill the marketplace with healthier options. Enter Subway (yikes) and the clear-glass assembly-line model of fast food, where the ingredients were displayed openly, as if to demonstrate the brand’s transparency while drawing on the nostalgia of mid-century food counters and cafes. After a half-century of ask-not consumerism, people wanted the convenience while maintaining control; an impossible bargain. Recently, this trend has taken an even cringier turn with fast-casual restaurants such as Sweet Green and Cava, offering “healthier” options for the optimized urban worker. Here, a melange of ingredients is piled into the ubiquitous “bowl”—the trough at the end of the long walk towards slop and complete breakdown of culture. And the bowl itself? by @ext.rude.d
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a year ago
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The Detail: Mark Malecki’s Thrifty Image A few weeks ago, designer @mark_malecki posted a series of photos on his Instagram that stirred up conversation. They featured a slime-green iteration of his Hairy Table (made with a fur-like skirt of powder-coated nails) in the middle of a nondescript American thrift store—and not one of the fancy ones in Brooklyn—the type with lamps missing shades and unwanted VHS tapes and the whole woolly wardrobes of the recently deceased. The green table was placed in various positions in the decor section, standing out against the shelves of mismatched glassware and rows of furniture, beautiful but discarded—bureaus and those uncomfortable floral couches, old televisions, etc. (It just so happens to be in a Virginia thrift store near where one of us went to high school). It stands in contrast to Malecki’s otherwise hip and fashionable feed, and he told us that the response he received was surprising, provoked, for sure, by the charming idiosyncrasy of the image but also by the curt caption: “Collectible Design ends here.” It’s a lovely bit of indeterminacy and sass in the design space, which usually relies on literality and seriousness, whether seriously functional or seriously baroque or some mix of hipster “fun” that can’t help but be overly sincere. by @ext.rude.d
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a year ago
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Correspondence 5: Tree Branch Furniture When looking past the advancement of ergonomics over the last century—the manufactured organicism that’s supposed to contour and support the human body—we return to the inherent organicism found in nature: a form of ergonomics that’s, perhaps, always been there if less fine-tuned. When looking at tree branches, we also see curves that, in theory, could form a slung chair that might cradle the human body. They might not be sleek or plushly upholstered, but they get the job done. Designers have long sought to harness this inherent quality, using the innate shape of tree branches as a single formal gesture, creating chair concepts out of the raw material. What they’ve exposed in these works is the tension between an implicit desire to respect the material in its original state and one to endlessly refine it into uniformly hewn components: such as sheet wood that might then be bent into curvilinear forms that also cradle the human body, many extra steps that might seem futile if assessed along essentialist or even ecological lines. When reviewing the Regenerative Design philosophy of early sustainability proponent Victor Papanek, there something fundamentally ‘green’ in working with and only slightly adapting the forms nature has already provided us, instead of exerting additional energy to endlessly process them in incredibly refined shapes. by @ext.rude.d
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a year ago
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