TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=93TT2565> <title> Jan. 04, 1993: The Best of 1992:Design </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1992 Jan. 04, 1993 Man of the Year:Bill Clinton </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> DESIGN, Page 58 THE BEST OF 1992 </hdr> <body> 1. The Work of Frank Gehry In celebrated architectural careers, fame and lavish public praise often mark the beginning of the end of the creativity that prompted the kudos in the first place. But Frank Gehry has avoided the seductions of celebrity coasting: his work remains as confidently exuberant and sincerely odd as ever, each building another sui generis celebration of the pleasures of making buildings. This was truly Gehry's year. He introduced a jaunty furniture line for Knoll, far right, springy bentwood shapes that look as if a team of Constructivist elves had decided to make chairs out of old picnic baskets. He also nudged two extraordinary buildings toward completion: in Paris the dashing American Center, and in Ohio a splendid copper-clad Cubist sculpture that also doubles as a warren of classrooms and studios for the University of Toledo art department, near right. There has been no comparable American designer since the days of Eames and Wright. 2. Seattle Master Plan American cities usually manage growth haphazardly or not at all, often ceding to developers the important decisions about how and where housing and stores will spring up. The de facto principle has been "growth is good"--and yet the no-growth countermovement has been nearly as crude and thoughtless. But in Seattle they are looking at a third way, a way to shape the look and feel of the place for the long haul. Citizens there will spend 1993 debating the physical future of their city, thanks to a sensible and extremely hopeful new master plan that municipal officials are pushing. The basic idea is to encourage a dense, old-fashioned city of well-defined neighborhoods, each with its core of essential shops and services to which residents can walk, and to discourage dispiriting, traffic-clogged, no-there-there suburban sprawl. If adopted, the plan will permit--albeit not guarantee--a charming, civilized 21st century Seattle. 3. Lied Jungle, Henry Doorly Zoo, Omaha, Nebraska Zoo design has undergone something of a revolution during the past decade or two, with impressively pseudo natural animal habitats replacing smelly, depressing cages. The virtual-reality revolution now has a new benchmark: the Lied Jungle at Omaha's zoo, designed by Stanley J. How & Associates, is both architecturally stupendous--a naturally lighted, eight-story-high dome containing 1 1/2 acres--and zoologically thrilling. A long ramble up and down its half-mile maze of trails, among Malayan tapir and pygmy hippos, feels as much like a hike through an actual rain forest as most people, Omahan or otherwise, would ever want. 4. A/X Armani Exchange Packaging One thing the '90s is supposed to be about is a kind of sexy utilitarianism--thus Bill Clinton's infrastructure talk, thus GM's Saturn, thus the Gap and the Gap-derivative A/X Armani Exchange. Designer Alex Isley has conjured that voguish grittiness for Armani perfectly. The paper is pulpy and brownish, the handles are bits of clothesline. The niftiest A/X box is punched with an industrial-seeming grid of holes, and the top doesn't pull off; instead, the inside slides open like a drawer. 5. Oriole Park at Camden Yards, Baltimore, Maryland If baseball is the last living vestige of a sweeter, more authentic America, the Orioles' new downtown stadium, with a 19th century brick warehouse as its right-field wall, is a baseball kind of place. In addition to using good-old-days materials, the architects, HOK, put the (real grass) field 16 ft. below street level to reduce the stadium's bulk. And because fans can get there by streetcar--streetcar!--hardly any parking had to be built. Who says nostalgia is a dead end? 6. 202 Island Inn, San Diego Architect Rob Wellington Quigley has done more than fret and attend symposiums about affordable housing. He has designed and built four low-rent, single-room-occupancy hotels. The latest is his best: 197 airy rooms that cost only about $20,000 apiece to build, landscaped courtyards and a reading room. The three-sided exterior is magnificent by subsidized-housing standards, particularly a kooky Deconstructivist facade in bright purple and red. 7. BCE Place Galleria, Toronto No wonder the Spanish architect and sculptor Santiago Calatrava has been commissioned to radically refashion the interior of New York City's Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where he plans to turn the upper reaches of the church interior into a new-age greenhouse filled with trees and shrubs: he is a natural at a sort of sci-fi Gothic style. In Toronto, where he was asked only to connect two new run-of-the-mill high-rise office towers called BCE Place with a pedestrian arcade, he went beyond the call of duty and produced a glorious galleria, a series of 90-ft.-high, white steel-and-glass arches enclosing a granite expanse as big as a football field. It is an extravagant, exultant public--well, quasi-public--space, and proves that high-tech need not mean soulless. 8. BeeperKid As public life becomes largely a matter of wandering around vast shopping malls, keeping track of small children while they dash from Disney merchandise store to Haagen-Dazs shop is more anxiety provoking than ever. BeeperKid, conceived by Lev Chapelsky, is a handsome, carefully designed gadget meant to solve the problem of free-range four-year-olds. Essentially it is a set of miniature walkie-talkies on autopilot. One disk pins onto the kid, the parent carries the other, and when they get more than 30 ft. apart, the parent's unit issues its beep. If the frantic parent decides to push a button, the other unit also beeps--probably frightening the child and bewildering bystanders, but letting a relieved mom or dad zero in on the misplaced offspring. The design is both metaphorically and functionally ingenious: at home, both parent and child disks live together as one on the recharger pedestal and click on automatically as soon as they are pulled apart. 9. Bryant Park Renovation, New York City A chunk of Manhattan's West 42nd Street has been redeemed, turned from a dodgy, underpopulated void into a genteel oasis. The backyard to New York City's grand Beaux Arts public library, Bryant Park had become urbanistically wretched, closed off from the surrounding shops-and-offices neighborhood. By opening a new entrance, broadening others, ripping out the high hedges in favor of a flower border and adding Neoclassical kiosks and light stanchions, the overseers and their architects (Hanna/Olin Ltd., Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer) have achieved a small miracle. 10. Book Jacket for The Secret History Knopf is well known as the book-publishing gold standard for literary quality. Right now, thanks in no small part to designer Chip Kidd, Knopf books are among the best looking as well. Kidd is a mixed-media virtuoso. The cover of William Tester's novel Darling, for instance, combines several trompe l'oeil layers: cowhide, color photography, gilt frame and the title and author's name apparently scrawled in ink. But Kidd's is no single signature style. For Donna Tartt's best-selling The Secret History, Kidd (and co-designer Barbara De Wilde) put type on a transparent acetate dust jacket and wrapped that around a hard cover printed with a photograph--a smart, craftsman-like, viscerally compelling package for a smart, craftsman-like, viscerally compelling novel. </body> </article> </text>