Lueckenhausen, H, Studio Furniture in Corporate Interiors, Artfile, Artists and Designer/Makers of Australia, Craft Arts International, 1992, pp 268-270
Architects and Interior Designers willing to share the limelight are still thin on the ground. We have evolved a building culture, which celebrates the 'grand vision', making the architect the grand and perhaps the absolute visionary. Architecture, 'the mother of all arts', can be a dismissive parent. Opportunities for craftspeople and artists to realize their designs in collaborative projects remain extraordinary enough to be noteworthy.
Unlike the fine arts and in some respects, unlike mainstream design, the decorative arts did not, in fact for the most part could not, buy heavily into Modernism, some manifestations of which had become a cult celebrating minimalism for its own sake. The crafts share the ability (and occasionally the intent) of architecture to exploit ornament and theatricality, to make and market through a celebration of eclecticism. Postmodernism has allowed a reappraisal of the place of decoration in the built environment. We have yet to see if an enduring successor to Modernism, some yet to be named form of 'after-modernism', will allow that place to be maintained. One may contend that decoration relates more closely to archetypes of human endeavour than does rejection of it.
Designer makers of project specific or limited production run work offer a variety of benefits, particularly within situations predicated on the extraordinary.
As the idea of the optimum international formula wanes and a desire for geographically and culturally specific architecture and product waxes, the work of the designer maker can fit comfortably into interiors that are unique (in the true sense of the word) to the place, can be sensitive to the functions identified by (and aspirations of) the client and complementary to the architect's concept.
This represents a challenge for the designer/maker and the architect alike.
The former needs the confidence to be challenged rather than threatened by a brief and the basic design skill to identify and work within the informing vision.
The latter needs sufficient confidence in his/her work (as well as the collaborative skills) to offer challenge rather than proscription. Furniture can act as an informing complementary, much as complementary colours give each other life. Sometimes it takes a second or third person to step outside of the central informing vision to see how appointments might be designed to create a complementary tension.
The challenge for the client, the architect, the designer/maker, the specifier is to create the right environment for an Australian 'look' to be developed. To date we have been locked into the 'Euro-chic' aesthetic, as often as not straight out of Milan, dictating a self conscious late-industrial line. Contemporary designer/makers can now avoid the pitfalls of an equally self conscious 'Australiana' by creating furniture and objects that offer some form of local context, perhaps even narrative, without being parochial.
Studio furniture can be tailor made in response to the whole built environment equation, including culture, place, material, function image and not least, cost.
Most quality studio furniture whether intended for corporate or domestic application, holds its value (at the very least) and frequently increases its value on a relatively short time scale. In part this is because of its inherent integrity of material and method but is just as likely to be the result of a number of frames of reference within which the work of designer/makers can be seen. Included in these is the potential for craftspeople to create objects that establish significant provenance and therefore a place in the collector’s circuit.
The recent tendency of galleries and museums to collect examples of this work, along with that of the critical press to engage it (albeit oftentimes in a perfunctory manner), has afforded some designer/makers the credentials necessary for the value of their products to appreciate.
The marketing value of establishing provenance of product is paralleled in the industrial design world by the carefully manipulated 'super star' status of designers such as Phillipe Starck and the tendency of major European firms such as Alessi to have such stars orbit their balance sheets.
Similarly, architects have themselves made incursions into the interior design and furniture worlds, some of the most enduring icons of twentieth century furniture having been their work.
The problem is that in the broader context that is the contemporary built environment, architect designed furniture often does not rise much above the status of high class fit-outs and consequently its significance and value does not outlast a specific application.
The relative value of building appointments with a discreet provenance, to those without, has immediate implications within the various percentages for art legislation models being explored and in some instances already being implemented.
The benefits of project specific furniture which exploits many of the cultural, practical and financial implications of linking art, craft and design offer us one more window of opportunity.
