Furniture Manufacturers and the Future

Photo from the Wix Architecture and Interior Library

I. Companies like Uber and AirBnB demonstrate that the shared economy is a reality, is a trend that's destined to grow more and more along many dimensions. In the abstract, considered schematically, the shared economy is reducible to this basic proposition: People want to be able to make use of of a car or residence right away While they are making use of it they want to hold the full 'bundle' of rights. The moment they don't need it anymore they want to be free of it - to have no obligations of any kind.

II. Modernism arrived in the US from Japan. Japanese woodblock prints stimulated interest in Japan. Architects like Frank Lloyd Wright completely absorbed the simple yet profound premise of Japanese architecture. For the Japanese architect the problem consists in laying out plan space on a unit grid of tatami mats and on which are placed furniture and furnishings and only once that is satisfactorily worked out are walls slid into place - partition walls most importantly - screens which divide space - and then only secondarily structural walls are slid into place as necessary. The Japanese architectural paradigm completely inverts its Western counterpart. In the West elevations are first drawn up which convey from the exterior the proper sense of grandeur and stateliness. Next interior walls are coordinated with outside structure. From the resultant rooms, measurements are taken and furniture is selected to fit as best as possible.

III. Wright's modernism is simply the produced effect of swapping out the old Western architectural paradigm for that of the Japanese. The outside results from the inside. That's it. Walls exist fundamentally to contain space rather than carry load. In Robie House masonry cores carry steel channels which hold up the roof and pendant walls. This is the case in all of Wrights Prairie houses and subsequent Usonians.

IV. The problem arose from the fact that American architects interpreted this new modernism stylistically rather than fundamentally, rather than in terms of form following function. In the hands of architects like Mises, Gropius, and Corbusier, and their devoted followers - modernism became mannerism, the use of a style for styles sake. In fact they even called it the International Style.

V. What this has to do with furniture manufacturers is this: The problem for furniture manufacturers became the problem of deliberately throwing off all ornamentation which came from the preceding generation. Schematically the problem for creating furniture became the problem of destroying all preexisting ideas of what furniture was thought to be. Now this program of simplification - of if you like letting design dramatize furniture, to express what it is in a striking way - has produced quite excellent furniture. Yet for all its successes modern furniture has only hesitantly embraced its built in form and function Japanese origins. There is Eero Saarinen's sunken living room in the Miller House.

And there is John Lautners Goldstein House. In Goldstein, Lautner literally cast the furniture out of concrete dramatizing in the most dramatic way the builtin form and function of furniture: The only possibly place for the furniture is where it is. It is as impossible as it is unthinkable to move the furniture somewhere else. The furniture is consubstantial with the house itself cast of the same material by the same means. Like the house, the only way it can moved is if it is demolished.

VI. And so we have arrived at the point for which we set out. The Japenesitization of architecture has been underway for over a century now yet up to now it has remained incomplete. The turn toward the shared rather than the owned economy will be the driver by which the project will be completed. The all builtins residence is the necessary result of design progressing from the inside out. It is the natural design. It is analogous to nature in the sense that all life develops from a seed, germinates and organizes itself out of and around its nucleus. It is organic in that sense. In the shared economy residence must be packaged and composed as a carefully contrived whole just as the interior of the automobile, the airliner, and the yacht are composed.

VII. Sketchup is a program well suited to the amateur architect. It allows her to quickly illustrate an idea in 3D. In these drawings I've tried to illustrate ways of doing an all builtins one bedroom apartment. It is based on Frank Lloyd Wrights New York Usonian Exhibition House of 1953 and

once stood on the site now occupied by the Guggenheim Museum. Note the striking spacial similarities between Wright's Exhibition house and the contemporary house in the photo above. Now I don't pretend to be a great architect. Rather my goal is to offer a template which suggests new ways and a new approach to furniture companies so that they can begin to extend furniture design to include not just the thing itself but its expression and incorporation in the space as a whole. My mission is evangelical. The hope is that preaching the good word to furniture manufacturers and multifamily apartment owners contributes to the eventual realization of the Wrightian / Japanese / Modernist project.

Note: In the drawings the projected film image is taken from the public domain My Man Godfrey. The view of the New York Skyline is from the copyright free site Pixaby.