Monday, October 4, 2010
Blogging Note
We're off to Spain, Portugal and Morocco tomorrow and return the 29th of this month.
But posting at Art Contrarian will not cease -- provided that the blogging software by those kind geniuses at Google does what it's expected to do.
I've written 11 articles and stuffed them into a publish-date queue. A new post should appear every Monday, Wednesday and Friday (West Coast USA reference) while I'm away.
While on the road, I'll check the blog and my email as best I can. But be advised that it might be days or weeks before a comment gets vetted by me and published.
Happy reading!
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Sinister-Looking Car
Selecting a styling theme for an automobile is a tricky business. For that reason, many car designs have tended to be bland or highly derivative -- remember back around 1980 when a number of brands featured boxy styling that clearly was inspired by Mercedes-Benz?
There is the related, but hard to put one's finger on, factor of "personality:" consider the various iterations of the cute Volkswagen "Beetle" or Plymouth/Dodge Neon from the mid-1990s. Luxury makes often attempt to look dignified -- stately and conservative. In general, where personality is consciously injected into a design, it is something positive that a potential buyer might relate to.
So why then did Honda's Acura brand move to a style image that strikes me as being sinister?
Acura has been a runner-up near-luxury make. It hasn't had a racing heritage image such as Mercedes or Maserati or a performance-sedan persona like BMW's. And so far as I can judge, it never was skewed to one driver-sex; not a "chick car" nor "guy car."
Well, now it's a male-image car; a sub-middle-aged male one. Note all those sharp cuts and angled shapes in the grille and trunk areas.
This is not to say that only youngish, car-performance freak guys will be the only buyers. Still, I can't believe Honda consciously wants to abandon other, larger demographic market segments. Perhaps they simply want the car to be "edgy" (in more than one context), and are placing a bet on the Bob Lutz concept: Intense approval for some buyers is better for sales than blandness that doesn't have much effect one way or another.
Me? I don't mind the looks of the Acura TL and would consider buying one if I had the money and was needful of a new car. Though it might not be my first choice.
Friday, October 1, 2010
Traveling "Victorian" in the 1960s
Even 50 years ago rail-based passenger conveyances tended to look sleek and sometimes even streamlined and racy.
But there was an exception that I stumbled across in the bowels of New York City in the early 1960s -- the Hudson & Manhattan rail line colloquially known as the "Hudson Tubes." During the 60s the New York - New Jersey Port Authority took over the H&M, re-equipped it and renamed it PATH (Port Authority Trans-Hudson), in which guise it exists today.
For a while during my three-year Army career I was stationed near New York City and got into town on pass every weekend. Some weekends I'd sleep over in Hoboken, New Jersey at the Stevens Tech chapter of my college fraternity. Normally when getting there I'd catch the Hoboken bus at the west side Port Authority terminal. But occasionally I'd ride the Hudson Tubes. There was a Tubes station at 33rd Street not far from Pennsylvania Station (the original building was still standing then) and I would work my way down stairs and through tunnels to that Midtown terminus of the H&M.
Once there, I beheld archaic train coaches whose design dated from more than 50 years previously. It was almost like stepping into a time machine. I hope the illustrations below give you at least a slight feeling of what I experienced.
(For a general history of the H&M and PATH, click here. More detailed information regarding the Hudson Tubes can be found here and here.)
Such coaches were built from 1909 until 1928. They were still in service in the early 1960s.
This is how I remembered them. Dark, sooty-looking exterior; probably due to the paint-job, but a dirty appearance nevertheless. In a station all you'd see of the coach was the part above the bottom of the doors. This made the arched window and door shapes stand out -- very static looking, actually, and not at all the speed-style for transportation conveyances the began to appear in the 1930s. Another impression I had was that the H&M coaches were noticeably smaller than New York City subway cars, and this added to the quaintness of the Hudson Tubes experience in those days.
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Groping for the Platonic TV Set
It's often interesting to examine design from the point when a type of product makes its first commercial appearance until things settle down to a "best" general solution that persists with relatively minor variations until the class of product becomes obsolete or a major technological advance requires a renewed design evolution.
Designers are literally making things up as they're going on, uncertain what the ultimate general solution will be. There are trials, errors and successes (measured by market acceptance) along the way.
Today's post deals with television set design evolution in a sketchy way from the late 1930s till nearly 1960. Call it 20 years -- 15 if the "time out" for World War 2 is factored in. By "sketchy" I mean that entire classes of TV sets such as tabletop or semi-portable examples are omitted from this review. Perhaps I'll get around to dealing with them another time.
For some reason many of the very earliest television sets that people could actually buy had a top with a mirror underneath that could be propped open when one was about to turn it on (the controls were under that top along with the cathode ray tube - CRT). The CRT was set up so that it projected a reversed image that the mirror then righted so that the image was normal -- that is, so any text images could be read normally. Actually, the reason is pretty obvious: the console containing the television set was simply another sort of cabinet when not in use, just another piece of furniture. (See below for later examples of this design strategy.) The problem with the mirror feature was that viewers had to be positioned almost exactly opposite the set and have their eyes at the correct height to be able to view the image properly. Direct-viewing TVs were less restricted. Even so, CRTs were small in the early days, so viewers still had to huddle and stay closer to the screen than later on. Mirror-top televisions were still being sold in the late 1940s, but then disappeared from the marketplace.
For many years television sets resided in living rooms, where families tended to gather before the "family room" gained popularity in America starting, say, in the mid-1950s. Therefore the expensive TV set (and they often cost more than today's largest flat-screen TVs, adjusting for inflation) was a major item of furniture that many wives wanted to fit well with the rest of the décor. Note that the console has doors than can be closed to hide the screen when not in use.
This Crosley is a pretty typical less-than-a-console TV with respect to price and style. (Actually, the ensemble shown is contained in a console -- but the set itself in the upper-right corner could just have well be freestanding, and probably was in most cases.) It just sits there on one side of the living room and its big "eye" stares back at you all the time. Of course, this is how most television sets were over the last 60 years, console models having gradually faded from the scene.
For some reason Zenith built a line of sets with round screens for a few years. They seemed odd at the time, but at least a few people bought them. Why a round screen? Well, cathode ray tubes were round in those days and perhaps designers felt that a round "frame" for the image was "functional," the holy grail of purist industrial design and architecture. But source images were essentially rectangular, so the round format clipped off parts that might be of interest to the viewer.
This TV set was built 10 years before the moon-landing image being shown on the screen. But hey, this design was really super-dooper space-age! Actually the modular screen/innards box concept wasn't a bad one; most desktop computers until recently followed the same practice. Philco's problem was that this line of TV sets was unreliable, thus helping to kill sales. Another negative might have been that the design would clash with traditional-style living room décor; TVs tended to reside in living rooms in those days, as noted above.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Crumbling Egos
Eric Felten's De Gustibus column in the 24 September Wall Street Journal (link here) has the intriguing title "Pardon Us, But Our Museum Is Falling Apart."
He cites defect examples that include the new Modern Wing of Chicago's Art Institute and I.M. Pei's National Gallery East Building -- the latter apparently needing an extensive re-skinning.
Then there are the cost over-runs. Felten mentions an addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum that was budgeted at $35 million but came in at $125 million, nearly four times the estimate.
What is going on here?
Radically designed buildings are essentially massive inventions produced and sold without prototypes. Is it any surprise they tend to be glitchy?
There have always been building failures (you would not want to have been standing in the choir of the Beauvais Cathedral the evening of 29 Nov., 1284). But the impractical nature of much current architecture has made it a pressing modern problem.
And then there's this bit that warms the cockles of my black little modernist-distrusting heart:
"The forms of traditional buildings, such as pitched roofs and moldings, almost always contribute to proper weathering, shedding water, and protecting the structure," says Steven W. Semes, a professor of architecture and academic director of Notre Dame's Rome Studies Program. "Modern buildings often assume shapes that do the opposite, directing water into the building rather than away from it."
I've been aware of the last point by virtue of living most of my life in the drizzly Pacific Northwest: essentially flat roofs are harder to drain than peaked ones.
But the point about large, flash, ego-statement building being engineering experiments hadn't sunk into my brain even though it should have years ago. Thank you, Eric, for highlighting this.
Monday, September 27, 2010
Costumed in Carmel-by-the-Sea
It was a typical foggy morning as we lined up outside the mess-hall door waiting our turn for breakfast. A newsboy hawking San Jose papers moved along the line but got few takers, as usual.
I'm normally a news junkie, but the rigors of Basic Training seem to have killed most of my interest; the Army kept me too occupied to spare the time and effort. But I did scan the headlines if they were large enough. Not long ago there were huge ones about Russia testing a 50-megaton H-bomb.
But today was going to be special. We were more than halfway through the eight-week training cycle, it was Sunday, and this afternoon we were to get our first pass. We could do as we pleased, provided it was legal, from noon till 10 that evening.
Many guys planned to head for the Soldiers' Club, a large, wooden structure near the beach where one might order a real hamburger and down some beer. Others, me included, opted to go off-post for the afternoon. Of course we had to wear uniforms -- our green "bus-driver" style Class-A kit complete with no rank or unit indicators, we being of the lowest class of Private and too temporary to bother having a Sixth Army shoulder patch sewn on.
Where to go? Perhaps to Seaside or Marina, in those days off-post purveyors of booze and other imagined necessities for those who found Fort Ord's Soldiers' or NCO clubs too tame. But we might have been told to keep away from Seaside and Marina; I don't remember, perhaps because they didn't appeal to me in the first place. Otherwise, given that we had to take a bus, the only real possibilities were Monterey and Carmel. I went with the Carmel-bound group, which was a pretty small share of our training company: let's say six of us.
Since then, I've visited Carmel quite a few times and have a rough feel for the place. It's a former art colony that remained pretty arty. Immediately to the northwest is the famous Seventeen-Mile Drive part of the peninsula. It has a number a well-known golf courses including Pebble Beach, Spanish Bay, Spyglass and Cypress Point. Some housing near the north part of the Drive was originally modest, middle-class, but near the west and, especially, the south there are plenty of ritzy digs. To put it another way, the area in and near Carmel is crawling with money. And it probably was when our bus finally dropped us off near Ocean Avenue.
The "downtown" (business district) part of Carmel is small now and about the same size when we set off to explore it. Even the buildings are pretty much the same. Nowadays, there's a small, three-floor open mall at the top end of the Ocean Avenue commercial strip and here and there are other buildings that were added since that Sunday when the Army invaded. One thing that definitely has changed is that Fort Ord is now essentially closed. There are no more young men going through Basic and I haven't seen anyone wearing an army uniform in Carmel in years. The closest I came was when I was chatting with a retired Navy Rear Admiral at my wife's college sorority alumnae club Christmas party in a house near the number two green at Spyglass, and that's not close at all.
Anyway, since we had little money and virtually no place to store any purchases, we simply wandered around, gazing at the storefronts, Spanish-style buildings and the occasional odd Storybook Style structures that can still be found there.
Perhaps we had something to eat and maybe drank a Coke or Pepsi someplace. But after two or three hours, we'd wrung the place dry several times over and caught the bus back to Ord. Once there, we checked out the Soldiers' Club. It featured a big, smokey hall where beer was served, but I'm not sure if I bothered to wait in line to buy a glass. The next day we'd be back to training, so we hiked back to the barracks to get our gear in shape and have some sleep.
Besides the lack of money and storage places, our visit to Carmel was limited psychologically. Yes, were were on pass and off-post, but we weren't really free from the Army thanks to the pass' deadline and the possibility that Military Police might flag us down and offer some hassle (one reason I passed up seeing Monterey, a less classy place than Carmel). We were guys about 20 years old wearing "Army Green" -- not a bit like the older, much richer and better-dressed locals. We eyed them and they eyed us, quite likely gazing down their mental noses in the process.
In a nutshell, I felt out of place and distinctly uncomfortable. I had pretty much the same reactions two years later by the beach at Waikiki on a short pass while our troop ship paused in Pearl Harbor on its way to the Far East.
Friday, September 24, 2010
Watch This Designer Try Too Hard
I really should get around to writing about industrial designer Richard Arbib. But for now, I'll present a couple of his designs for wrist watches and make a few remarks about wrist watch design in general.
I referred to Arbib as an industrial designer. But his work reveals him to have been mostly an industrial decorator ... to be charitable, "industrial stylist" can do.
The period 1945-60 was an odd one in the annals of American design. A case might be made that cars sporting tail fins, Formica kitchen counter tops with squiggly, linear patterns and molded plywood chairs with spindly metal legs represent a daft era where our national characteristics shone through. Or perhaps it was a "whadda we do next?" phase following the design-purity (with lots of streamlining) public relations poses from the generation of industrial design pioneers. Whatever it might have been, Arbib contributed in spades.
A word about wrist watch design (I'll leave digital watches out of the discussion and stick to analog watches -- those with hands). Watch hands sweep in a circular motion, suggesting that the face of the watch should match this. On the other hand wrist bands, especially rugged ones preferred by men, are flat and basically squared off. A watch following that theme would therefore have a square or rectangular case. Between those extremes might be rounded-off rectangles, ovals and so forth.
Arbib, however, tried something very different in his work for the Hamilton watch company. Something very wacky 1950s.
Arbib's designs are, well, distinctive. But totally at odds with either the hand-sweep or the watchband. He was involved with styling Hamilton watches for the better part of a decade, so presumably sales were acceptable. I think they look awful and apparently others agree because most watchmakers have avoided such styles for the past 50 years.
The "tank" design, dating from the Great War, is a popular example of design that favors integration to the band over honoring the sweep.
Movado made its fame with ultra-purist sweep-oriented designs such as this. Actually, style trumps functionality here too; the absence of hour indicators requires the owner to guess the time -- and often be off by a minute or even more.
Confession-time. This is the watch I've been wearing for more than 10 years. Not the same one, actually; I buy a new one every three years or so when I figure the battery is about to fail.
Advantages: It's electronic and so keeps good time. It's not very expensive, currently still selling for less than $150. The hands, hour marks and numerals glow in the dark which make it handy for checking the time while in bed at night. The face cover almost never scratches. While it isn't classy like a Rollex, it looks nice. Disadvantage: The band grooves and holes start to clog after a few months use.
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