 |
| Alberto Frias’s Transport pod |
“Science fiction interiors explore unconventional but imaginative environments,” says Alleyne, who is working on proposals for clients in the US and Japan. “The Star Trek variety is minimal but soft, with the greys, whites, pastels and aluminium suggestive of a luxury liner. It’s an ideal living space. There’s no clutter. There are no doilies in space.”
Alleyne’s aesthetic traces back to the 1960s. The decade’s race to put a man on the moon might have culminated in success 40 years ago this week but the “space-age” style that the era spawned – expressions of how we might dress our environments in the future, utilising the latest non-traditional materials and manufacturing techniques of the time – has been one of its most visually potent legacies. Suddenly, TVs looked like astronauts’ helmets, record players like robots, chairs like domestic planetoids. The look is perhaps captured best by the clinical sheen of the sets of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. If manned space exploration has since withered and public interest turned to more local, Earthly concerns, still the look of the period – white or neon bright, curvaceous, shiny, organic and yet chemical – has resonated.
“We keep imagining future living, even if we’re invariably wrong. But that doesn’t stop the looks of the space-age period from being revived,” suggests Sheridan Coakley, proprietor of interiors retailer SCP. “The 1960s seem to be a constant influence on furniture design and there is the appeal of a certain inconceivability: ‘There’s no way I’m sitting on that now but I may be forced to in years to come ...’ The look has almost come to be a nostalgic one. It’s what people used to imagine the future would be like. In 2001, they even used Harry Bertoia chairs from the 1950s. They were already from an older period to that contemporary to the film.”
If not nostalgic, then the look is tinged with history. So striking were the images that came out of the space race – burning themselves into all sorts of expressions of popular culture – and so definitive was the look of the period – thanks to visionary designers such as Joe Columbo, Vico Magistretti and Eero Aarnio – that today the same style tends to blur at its edges with retro and kitsch.
“The very term ‘space age’, like ‘jet set’, seems to belong to a certain age,” argues Deyan Sudjic, director of London’s Design Museum, which opened its exhibition on the Czech “architect of the future” Jan Kaplicky this month. “And there’s some irony in the fact that the spacecraft themselves were devoid of the ‘space-age’ aesthetic altogether.”
Certainly, and perhaps more than any other style, sci-fi has been championed by films and TV programmes offering visions of future space travel as much as future homes. A stripped back, wipe-down, germ-free vision of living space evolved from Kubrick, the BBC’s Blake’s 7, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris and the original Star Trek and alongside it an alternative, deliberately dystopian, grubby, industrial “used future”, as George Lucas called it, in the likes of Star Wars, Alien, Bladerunner and, more recently, Serenity.
“But I think space-age design’s real appeal lies in its being a product of all that offered hope, in terms of what new technologies and materials could bring at the time,” suggests Jane Pavitt, curator of the recent Cold War Modern exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. “And while it runs the gamut, from the visionary to the kitsch, underlying all the styling was a lot of important experimentation. The problem is that stylistically it dates very quickly. Laura Ashley wins out over Pierre Cardin. But it’s always ripe for a return with a twist.”
This uncertain pose – seemingly suggestive of the future, the past and the past’s vision of the future – is also why Sean Topham, author of Where’s My Space Age? The Rise and Fall of Futuristic Design, thinks space-age items have for the past 40 years found a place as feature pieces in the modern home. Certainly the collectibles market is a healthy one, with the original furniture of the period, such as the Moon lamp by Verner Panton, the office desk by Maurice Calka, the Djinn chair by Olivier Mourgue (which also starred in 2001) and the Ribbon chair by Pierre Paulin, who died in June, all selling well at auction.
“Maybe the anniversary of the moon landings will prompt a reconsideration of the space-age style again,” Topham says, “but unfortunately the space programme doesn’t capture the public imagination in the same way now. It’s too much about probes rather than people.”
What hope is there for a new space-age design? “Well, you can’t deny your formative years, especially when they’re so influenced by such momentous events as the moon landing,” says industrial designer Karim Rashid, who, along with fellow baby-boomer designers such as Zaha Hadid and Ross Lovegrove, continues to design in the spirit of the era, if not always aesthetically then philosophically, in the use of the latest materials and manufacturing techniques. Rashid suggests that we are even entering a post-space age, in which design is digital rather than mechanical, with inspiration taken from software.
“I remember going to an Expo as a kid and telling my mum she’d never have to vacuum again,” he recalls. “The space age offered that utopian dream. And although the reality was that by the 1970s we had rejected it in favour of more nature-based, earthy living – all those browns and avocados – by the 1990s we still hadn’t evolved our physical landscape very much. But I think the past 10 years’ focus on biomorphic forms and seamless space is a search for that ‘optimism of the future’ aesthetic again. It’s not retro-ism. It’s that now we have the tools, such as rapid prototyping, to move forward.”
Indeed, young designers too, showing at this month’s New Designers exhibition in London – the likes of Thomas Stanley, with a bird feeder that is more space capsule than nut holder, and Patrick Morris, whose more whimsical, upside-down plant holder seems to be suspended in low gravity – continue to use a style informed by a period from before they were born.
“I didn’t grow up in the 1960s but, for me, the space age will always be alive because of its suggestion of utopia,” says Mexican designer Alberto Frias, whose Transport pod presents furniture as an artificial womb and whose glowing chair is described, fittingly, as a “landing port for three”. “Its simplicity and organicism is attractive, even if, in redefining the space age now, there needs to be an awareness that the aesthetic alone won’t solve problems. Attempts to just make products that look space-agey rarely work out.”
Product designer Lovegrove agrees. He argues that the real and important legacy of space-age design is not so much its aesthetic as the deeper rationale of the space programme itself, citing today’s satellite designs or that of the new Hubble space-telescope as works of art “because the way they look is a consequence of their purpose”. “You wouldn’t paint a spaceship black just because it looked cool. In fact, you wouldn’t even see it. But there is a distinction between what looks modern and what is modern. Original space-programme design was fat-free but had glamour embedded in it; there is glamour in technology. In fact, what the space-age aesthetic really did was break free of aesthetics.”
While Lovegrove laments that even the most humble of modern materials, such as carbon fibre, can inflict a harsh penalty on a product through cost – he cites the fact that the US government spent millions developing a pen that could write in zero gravity while the Russians took HB pencils to space – he suggests that many of the attributes of space-age design could hardly be more apposite, given the green agenda.
After all, at their best, space-age-type products epitomise low-energy production, recyclability of materials and a lightness that is suitable not only for our increasingly nomadic lifestyles but that will prove all the more essential for global transportation in a post-oil world. “There seems to be a schism between those designers interested in form-making and those in materials and technology, such that it is becoming almost immoral to discuss the aesthetics now,” argues Donna Goodman, lecturer at the New York School of Interior Design and author of A History of the Future. “Of course, part of the appeal of space-age design is the way it looks. It fitted right in with loft living and minimalism, which today’s take on space-age design is really carrying forward. And with new environmental building standards it is only going to become more relevant.”
Custom furniture and prop maker Tom Spina might create the kind of pieces to set even the geekiest, sci-fi obsessed homemaker’s heart aflutter; his Star Wars-inspired desk, complete with Han Solo encased in carbonite, would set a sufficiently galactic imperial tone in any executive office. But it seems more likely that space-age design’s future lies not in suggesting the shapes of things to come but rather in the detail under the starship bonnet.
