Design: Echoes of The Past, Visions for the Present

(2 of 2)

Frank Gehry's buildings are still self-conscious and perverse, but they no longer set out to disturb. Tranquillity and polish are now permitted. For a lakeside guesthouse in Wayzata, Minn., Gehry has created a kind of mixed-media outdoor sculpture. Each room is a distinct object: the living-dining room is a central tower, a bedroom is a curve of local stone, and so on. The forms are vaguely toylike (befitting rooms intended to house the visiting children and grandchildren of the owners), or like the extraterrestrial outpost of puckish, inventive earthlings.

The Majestic Theater of the Brooklyn Academy of Music is puckish too, but in a different way. An abandoned turn-of-the-century beaux arts vaudeville hall, it has been transformed into a performance space (and folly) in which Avant- Garde Director Peter Brook could present his 9 1/2-hour epic, The Mahabharata. The firm of Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates has implanted modern plumbing and electrical systems but otherwise has maintained the look of desuetude: chipped plaster and peeling paint, exposed beams and brickwork. The Piranesianism is a bit coy, maybe, but more affecting than much standard spic- and-span preservation.

San Francisco Graphic Designer Michael Vanderbyl looks to Europe for inspirational rigor. The checkerboard fields and two-tone corded trim of Vanderbyl's bed linens for Esprit recall Josef Hoffmann. The palette (peach, delft, ash) is sober and cool, Wiener Werkstatte monochrome given a pastel California ruddiness. Vanderbyl sheets would go nicely in a Christopher Alexander house. Alexander, a Berkeley architect and urban theorist, has lately turned his militantly humanist attentions to office furniture. No workstations or open plans for him. Instead, Alexander and his colleagues have designed mass-production desks and bookcases that are solid and reassuringly old-fashioned, classic but not hokey.

In the Strala, Scot Laughton and Tom Deacon have created an impossibly pretty, thoroughly thought-out floor lamp. It has steel tubes finished in black epoxy; the conical shade is spun aluminum; the green spherical on-off dimmer switch is patinated brass. The result is a lamp that alludes serenely to light -- the moon and the sun -- without fuss or frill.