Art: Back to Mohair?

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T. H. (for Terence Harold) Robsjohn-Gibbings has written witheringly about antiques (Goodbye, Mr. Chippendale) and modern art (Mono, Lisa's Mustache). In his new book, Homes of the Brave (Knopf; $3.50), he launches an attack on modern home design that may send readers reeling back to the old mohair sofa.

Says British-born, U.S.-naturalized Author Gibbings, himself an outstanding designer of modern furniture: The trouble with most modern designers is that they are less concerned with the customer's comfort than with the esthetic theories of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. In Homes of the Brave, wittily abetted by Cartoonist Mary Petty, he provides a caustic analysis of modern styles:

MODERNISMUS "MODERN" originates in Germany ("[Frank Lloyd] Wright in goose step") and creates a house that is "essentially a flat-roofed, glazed box . . . on low stilts." Its steel-and-wire inside "is as far from gemiitlich as a deep freeze."

ABORIGINAL "MODERN" brings the jungle into the living room. "In what is called 'advanced' design" fabrics must be "printed with abstract symbols appropriate only as tattoo markings on the belly of a New Guinea head-hunter."

BACK-TO-NATURE "MODERN" tries to make the outdoors "a mere appendage to gracious living." Tree trunks serve as tables and the house looks like a quarry. "One of the major problems of the builder [used to be] the removal of boulders from the site. Now his difficulty is to find enough boulders." Picture windows are designed for "perpetual daylight; in reality, the owner discovers there is night [which] turns him and his family into ghosts in a cavern of black, shining glass . . . Put up blinds [and the results] resemble an airport closed for the night."

LOW-LIFE "MODERN," imported from the Orient, rests on "a curious fact that Americans connect lowered levels with luxury" (e.g., the sunken living room).

Many Americans now eat a few inches from the floor, "achieving less the look of Roman empresses than that of Bowery bums." The most bitter objector to this sunken state is "the girl whose chief distinction was the practice of sitting on the floor willy-nilly. Now with everyone doing it, all that's left for her is to lie spread-eagled under the matting or to sit on top of the room divider."

MACHINE-FOR-LIVING "MODERN" (so named because France's famed Architect Le Corbusier once said: "The house is a machine for living") tries to be functional, but only succeeds in destroying privacy. "The 'living area' becomes an echoing cavern reverberating with every sound from children's yelling to the vacuum cleaner's whine. The open serving hatch [becomes] a television screen, showing a disheveled would-be functionalist trying to cope with a multiplicity of electric contrivances that report their broccoli and onions way beyond their allotted zone." The dining room "where families and friends got to know each other is now ... a counter behind which parents and soda jerks are indistinguishable."