The building - the Hollyhock House, in Los Angeles - had just been damaged by an earthquake so that quite sizeable chunks of it had broken off, were lying on the ground and were obviously never going to be reunited with the main building. So, while the tour guide wasn't looking, I slipped a fragment of cement, no more than a couple of inches square, into my pocket and now I own a bit of Frank Lloyd Wright. There are times when this act of theft seems rather shameful, and yet I think the impulse that led to it is common enough. There are lots of people out there who want to own something created by a great architect. But lacking the wherewithal to buy or commission an actual building, we go for something more affordable, and generally, to be honest, something more useful and decorative than a chunk of cement. Thanks to the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, fans of the great man are especially well catered for. All manner of Wright-designed - or at least Wright-inspired - objects are available. There's the Frank Lloyd Wright Clock Collection from Bulova, for instance, while in Japan the Yamagiwa Corporation is the authorised licensee of his lighting designs, so that now it's possible to buy a wall sconce very much like those you could find in the Storer House, or a table lamp as used in Chicago's Midway Gardens.There is something enormously appealing about the idea that an architect, someone who's concerned with large structures and grand effects, should be equally concerned with lamps and tables, door handles and bath taps, but in the end it's not exactly incomprehensible.
Yes, God is in the details, but more simply, architects don't want their grand schemes messed up by shoddy detailing and tacky furniture. They don't want your humble tastes ruining their flawless vision. This could, of course, be just another manifestation of their megalomania.Philip Johnson once wrote that Mies van der Rohe gave "as much thought to placing chairs in a room as other architects do to placing buildings around a square". Which makes me wonder how Van der Rohe would feel now that his chairs have become design cliches to be found in many a boardroom. You can't help thinking that the corporate owners of these chairs haven't given quite as much thought to their placing as he'd have liked But this is part of democratisation. If you buy a Mies chair, you can do what you like with it, place it on your floral carpet, put a cushion on it, drape it with an anti-macassar.
Collapse of stout architect.I suspect that architecture and furniture go together in a way that, for instance, architecture and wallpaper, or architecture and carpets, somehow don't. Buildings and furniture are both three-dimensional objects, things that you can walk around and view from different angles.But consider Le Corbusier's chaise longue basculante; a thrilling bit of sculptural form that livens up the pages of interior design magazines just about everywhere. We now know that the design owed a great deal to Charlotte Perriand, but we still think of it as a Le Corbusier item. For years I wanted one of these things and eventually bought one; a knock off, naturally.I find, however, that I very seldom actually sit on my chaise. I tend to position myself across the room from it, on my extremely undesignerish futon, and gaze fondly in its direction.
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