Best Of '85: Breaking Out of the Box

Out in the capital of exuberant quirkiness, San Francisco municipal authorities agreed on a set of laws meant to codify the city's piquant urban character. The Downtown Plan, a radical and ambitious zoning scheme, will protect dozens of fine older buildings from demolition, severely restrict the amount and bulk of new highrise construction and virtually outlaw the modernist office block.

Modernist furniture is another matter entirely: the stripped-down, functional aesthetic is alive and well. Particularly when it comes to chairs, the charms of rococo revivalism and campy cha-cha shapes tend to pall quickly. Enzo Mari's lithe Tonietta chair is subtle as can be. What could have been another exercise in thoughtless angularity is redeemed by the slight, supple art nouveau curvature of the aluminum legs and the natural give of the leather seat and back.

With a few prominent exceptions, design in the computer industry has tended to be an afterthought, a matter of fashioning inoffensive shells for cathode-ray tubes. Larry Vollum, a recent California State University graduate, won the first Burroughs design competition with an approach of a deeper sort. His MUSE prototype, a small computer grafted onto a versatile high-tech music stand, is the equivalent of a word processor for composers, performers, students and teachers. It enables them to add, change or erase notes and chords at will, add rhythm accompaniment, and play back part or all of a composition.

Personal computers use floppy disks. FACPACs, a line of disk storage boxes devised by Worrell Design of Minneapolis, are handsome, simple and effective. The lever that fans out and displays ten or twelve disks inside is incorporated into the recessed logo.

Artist Eiko Ishioka's stylized, otherworldly scenery for Paul Schrader's film Mishima was remarkable, a sort of reductivist baroque that seemed peculiarly Japanese. Despite the dazzling sets, critics generally found the movie a failure. Design, it turns out, cannot do everything. --By Kurt Andersen