TIME - Man of the Year/CompactPublishing-TimeMagazine-TimeManOfTheYear-Win31MSDOS.iso/moy/010493/0104430.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 8KB | 165 lines

                                                                                DESIGN, Page 58

THE BEST OF 1992


    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.