Second Glass: The Industrial Design and Architecture of Henry P. Glass

Originally posted May 7, 2009 on interiordesign.net

I posted last week about Henry Glass’s furniture designs. This week, I’m going to look at his industrial design and architecture, or at least at sketches thereof. In perusing his self-published catalog of 1970—his portfolio, actually—I responded time and again to fanciful and often boldly colored proposals for designs and structures that likely never went into production. More than this, that never stood a chance of going into production, and can best be classified as romantic or utopian. I suspect that Glass felt the same way I did about these projects—he featured them in his portfolio, after all—and I’d guess they provided him with an ongoing source of intellectual and creative nourishment.

For all his interest in mechanisms and modules, and for all his rationalist theory, Henry Glass had a fertile and vivid design imagination, and was given to flights of expressive visual fancy. How do we characterize the visual aspect of his sliding ponds and phone booths, his cars and jungle gyms? By and large, they are biomorphic, fluid, curvilinear, colorful, and visionary. They convey a sense of plasticity and malleability, and hence of possibility. They appear people-friendly and optimistic. The word “imagineering” comes to mind—some Disney-esque combination of imagination and engineering; this was Glass’s work zone, and the Disney reference may not be far-fetched given the range of children’s furniture and playground equipment he designed.

Glass’s architectural thinking is a direct extension of his design thinking (or vice-versa—Glass trained as an architect in Vienna, though he was never licensed here).  Once again, in looking through his catalog, I was drawn to unrealized sketches more so than to built structures. Glass showed an early interest in pre-fabricated, factory-produced housing, an interest directly related to his modular furniture designs. The 1944 sketches for Interiors Magazine are reproduced here. The freeform styling of the rendering in itself suggests a core concern with people—human scale, biomorphic shape, and an organic relationship between people and the environment.

Glass’s 1969 apartment building proposal depicts box-like shapes more conducive to fabrication. That Glass was still planning pre-fabricated housing in the late 1960’s, when few other Americans were, shows a sustained and admirable commitment to working out ideas he deemed important. Note also the model for the collapsible aluminum shelter, an architectural analog to his fold-up, knock-down furniture designs.

Glass produced something on the order of 20,000 drawings during his career. This is a prodigious output that bespeaks a passionate discipline for the process of designing. Some of these drawings have been sold through Architech Gallery in Chicago, which represents the Glass estate. Many of Glass’s design ideas, as well as the forms that expressed them, were simply out of step with commercial realities and prevailing tastes. To his credit, Glass kept drawing. That a number of his abiding concerns—pre-fabrication, modularity, affordability, waste, ecological responsibility—are now topical suggests that Glass’s legacy, as embodied in his drawings, is due for re-evaluation, and for belated recognition of cultural relevance.

From top: Moulded phone booth sketch for Gladwin Plastics, 1966; study in factory produced modular housing for Interiors Magazine, 1944; suburban car proposal for Science and Mechanics, 1951; metal fireplace sketch for Technology/Welded Products, 1967; pre-fab metal slide sketch for Miracle Equipment Co., 1969; sketch for pre-fab modular apartment for Mobile Homes Mfg, 1969; Accordium folding mobile shelter for ALCOA, 1960. All images from the Henry P. Glass Association catalog.

Glass Plus: The Furniture Design of Henry P. Glass

Originally posted April 30, 2009 on interiordesign.net

“In contrast to good music, good literature, good food, or even good art, which are all subject to personal taste, style, fashion, or fad, good design is governed by indisputable, eternal rules, unalterable by conditions of historic environment or location.” -Henry Glass, from “The Shape of Manmade Things” (1994)

While debatable, the above assertion is explicable in terms of Henry Glass’s mindset and life experience. At root, Glass was an industrial designer, not a craftsman or artist, and he brought an engineering sensibility to bear on all aspects of his work, including furniture design. Born in Vienna in 1911, and schooled in architecture at the Technische Hochschule, Glass arrived in America in 1939 via Buchenwald. His experience in a concentration camp likely exaggerated any tendency he had to see his own work in absolute terms, and his rescue likely fueled his desire to spread the benefits of good design to the general public, another part of his lifelong agenda.

An ardent environmentalist, Glass was heavily influenced in his thinking by Buckminster Fuller, a debt explicitly recognized in “The Shape of Manmade Things.” From Fuller, Glass drew lessons in nature, structure, economy, and ecology. In nature, Glass found a model for man-made objects: all things serve a purpose, little is superfluous in terms of ornament or material, and the results are often beautiful. Rigid economy is fundamental in design for serial production; more so when resources are recognized as finite, as they are on Spaceship Earth. As Glass observed, “It is hard to think of an object that was designed with economy in mind, which wouldn’t also respond to ecological considerations, and vice-versa.” Glass built a solar house for himself in 1948, one of the first such structures in the country. Clearly, he was an early proponent of what is now green design.

Glass was best known for his knock-down furniture designs, chairs and tables that folded, nested, and stacked. There was a wartime rationale for
such designs involving space-saving flexibility and easy mobility, but he continued developing this paradigm throughout his career. Austere and visually interesting, these designs utilized inexpensive materials such as plywood, masonite, and canvas, and through tensile strength and production technique, reduced waste to a minimum. Here, too, Glass was plainly influenced by Fuller, by the geodesics and tetrahedrons, riffing off the idea of “tensegrity,” inter-connected wires in tension, and non-connected struts in compression.

Glass’ most popular design, the Cricket chair of 1978, distills forty years of thought and experiment into a timeless-looking piece that uses an absolute minimum of material—in this case, tubular metal and canvas—and folds down to 1 inch. Represented here by a prototype in wood from Glass’ own collection, the production version was manufactured by Brown Jordan. Not all of Glass’ designs hit their mark commercially, however, and a fair amount of his work exists only in renderings, scale models, prototypes, and catalogs.

I first encountered Glass design in a basement in Mineola in 1993, when I found myself surrounded by a suite of modular and highly colorful children’s furniture. Research proved that I’d uncovered a trove of Swingline collection pieces, designed by Glass and produced by Fleetwood Furniture in the early 1950’s. I think I paid about $150 for six or eight pieces, which I promptly sold for $400-$500 a piece, a tidy profit at the time but far less than the $4,000-$6,000 a piece that these items command now at auction. Still, it whetted my appetite for work by Glass, and when the Form + Function Gallery acquired a group of prototypes from Glass in 2000, I sped over and picked up a few.  Three are shown here.

A Fairy Tale of New York: The World’s Fair

Originally posted March 19, 2009 on interiordesign.net

Once upon a time, never mind how long ago, a young boy visited a great World’s Fair. It was a signal moment in the boy’s life, and he was fortunate to return several more times before it closed.  Being a young boy, much was new to him, but in his estimation nothing could match the fair for sheer wonderment and delight.  The fair was a vast smorgasbord of sensory stimulation: visual, aural, gustatory, and tactile.  Everywhere he went there were things to see and do.  There were buttons to push and rides to ride; there were exotic smells and new things to eat.

The fair seemed to the boy to be in constant motion, what with the monorails and jitneys, flume rides and moving walkways, and the constant throng of bustling visitors.  He rode up and down and around, he soared to dizzying heights, and he traveled in time and space.  The boy enjoyed visiting the past, but the entire fair drew him inexorably toward a future that appeared bright and bursting with possibility. The boy sensed a heady synchronicity in this as his entire life was ahead of him, and he wondered if others felt the same way.

The boy reveled in the details of the fair, and they burned into his memory.  The Kodak Pavilion, with its picture carousel, the Ford Pavilion, with its car ride through time, the phone booths, the line to get onto the monorail, the costumes and customs of different countries, the tacos and Belgian waffles, the Pieta, the dolphins and flamingos, the dancers and mariachi, the map of New York state you walked across, Snow White and Sneezy, and the Disney ride that supplied the soundtrack that ran continually through the boy’s head—"It’s a world of laughter a world of tears, it’s a world of hope and a world of fears…"

And, of course, there was Dinoland. Truth be told, if the boy had his way, he’d have spent all his time with the dinosaurs, as long as someone brought him a Belgian waffle every now and then. Towering over the Fair, visible from the highway, were full-sized replicas of all his favorites—tyrannosaurus, brontosaurus, allosaurus, stegosaurus, triceratops.  He could name them all, and recite their vital statistics and food preferences.  Dinosaurs were the boy’s passion, and he felt himself lucky indeed to be walking amongst them.

Looking back years later, never mind how many, the boy--now a man--still marvels at the sheer wonderment of it all.  It was so exotic and exciting, so stylish, beautiful, and magical.  There were so many new things to see, an ever-changing kaleidoscope of shapes and colors.  The boy knew little of art and even less of architecture, but he absorbed and felt and learned.  He took it all in, and it took him in, and the visual imprint remained dormant in him for years until such time as he was ready to see things that way again.  The man now has nephews who play marvelous video games undreamt of when he was young, but to be six years old at the fair--he would not trade that for the world.

Images from top: Dino the Dinosaur overlooking fair grounds; Austrian pavilion as mise-en-scene; Upward look at elevator of New York State Pavilion; Glass dome of New York State Pavilion; Yellow and white close-up with fountain; Interior shot of the Ford Pavilion; View of Swiss Sky Ride; Larry Weinberg as a small child with dinosaur. All images by Richard Weinberg.

A Tale of Two Decades

Originally posted on February 8, 2009 on interiordesign.net

Design sometimes transcends its moment and continues to look fresh, and by virtue of this, timeless. Such is the case with some of the products designed by Braun or Olivetti. Other times—and this is not necessarily a bad thing—design gets caught up in its moment and winds up encapsulating or expressing a specific cultural or stylistic fact. These products may work well, and wind up in use for years, but they betray their production date at a glance, and retrospective interest in them is inevitably tinged by nostalgia.

One such design, pictured above, is a free-standing speaker attributed to Phillips. The housing is plastic, the grille perforated metal. If I had to pick a date of production—and I don’t know for sure—I would pick the mid-1950’s. I would not pick the 1940’s, nor would I pick the 1960’s, at least not after 1965. This speaker looks to me like nothing so much as a Morris Lapidus hotel on Collins Avenue. I can almost picture the palm trees lining the circular drive in front, and the biomorphic pool fronting the beach in the back. I don’t know if the tweeter is separated from the woofer, but the top pivots, throwing the swooping curve into sharp relief. I think it looks cooler this way, and I think the hotel it resembles would look cooler this way, too.

In any event, the logo on the front—possibly a PH in a box—is also of the era, and the entire design exudes 1950’s style and swagger. Despite being dated in this way, I would hesitate to call this design kitschy. The best definition of kitsch I’ve encountered, outside of the one in the dictionary, is an object that conveys everything it has to convey at a glance. I’ve had this speaker (actually, a pair of them) for several years, and I am still intrigued by them, and without irony. This has something to do with the way the appearance changes when the top is straight or askew, how different it looks from the front and the back, and how the brass grille catches the light, sometimes shimmering, sometimes stopping the eye at the surface, and sometimes permitting the eye to see through—almost like architecture.  Also, I suspect the speaker would sound good if I could plug it in to anything, especially with the top part swiveled to direct the tweeter at the listener’s position.

The JVC video capsule, also made primarily of plastic, is equally dated, albeit to a different decade. As its name suggests, it looks, with the video element closed, like an Apollo space capsule, and if you guessed a production date around 1970, in the wake of the moon landing, you would be correct. The fact that my 12-year-old nephew could have guessed this really locates this object in a precise cultural moment (Actually, my nephew is really smart, and would upbraid me if he read this, saying something like “I must upbraid you, Uncle Larry.”). With the top up, the TV looks something like a robot. Being a Japanese product, I suspect that there is a specific reference to a movie or TV robot of the late 1960‘s.  In the end, I’m not sure this design falls on the good side of the kitsch line, but I’ve kept it because I would have loved to have one in 1970.

Passion Flowers

Originally posted on July 23, 2009 on interiordesign.net

Flowers have long occupied an exalted place in both the fine and decorative arts. As subject matter of still life for artists as diverse as Monet and Mapplethorpe, inspiration for patterns on textiles and dinnerware, and for applied ornament on furniture, flowers have served as a primary motif and symbol.

So there’s no reason to make excuses for an obsession with flowers, right? The reason I’m asking is that my father spent a lot of time with flowers. He grew basic ones such as roses, chrysanthemums, rhododendrons, and tulips. But mostly he shot them, with a succession of cameras from Leicas and Hasselblads to digital Canons. He shot them on trips to the tropics, the Canadian Rockies, California, New England, Old England, France, and Italy. Most of the time, however, he shot them in his own backyard, the neighbor’s backyard, and nearby parks. He made weekend trips to local garden stores, ostensibly for peat moss, but he always brought his camera.  

If you asked him why, which I never did, because from childhood I was glad when he was shooting flowers and not me, he probably would have said he was testing lenses or new cameras, or was solving technical problems of composition, lighting, focus, exposure, and depth of field. But this would have been protesting too much. The fact was that he shot the sh&# out of flowers, from as early as I can remember up until he passed away last spring.

Was he doing more than honing his technical skills and testing equipment? I think so. My father loved flowers, their colors, shapes, and textures, their translucence and delicate beauty, and he lost himself in the challenge of coaxing something out of them. It was one of the few times in his life that he stopped to smell the roses. The small, intimate, and self-contained worlds he created in his floral photographs were alternately vibrant and lush or moody and ethereal; they were often magical and, as much as I hate to say it, sensual. They were certainly mechanical and technical exercises, but, however tentatively, they were also spiritual and artistic explorations.

Thoreau once said, “Many men go fishing all their lives without knowing it is not fish they are after.” I think my father eventually came to grips with his inner poet, and with some of the lessons to be gleaned looking at flowers, and I think the tipping point was a trip to Monet’s gardens in Giverny in the spring of 2000. My father wrote ahead, submitted a portfolio, and obtained permission to shoot the grounds. Looking around at the artists sketching, and working alongside them, I think he finally saw himself as a kindred spirit.

At Giverny, my father primarily shot landscapes, another passion (and another story), but he returned to his backyard inspired and liberated, and proceeded to spend the summer vigorously and joyously shooting flowers. The images he took show greater self-assurance and confidence, they are bolder and literally more focused. The entire process seems more organic and intuitive: eye-hand-camera, experience and spontaneity, seeing and creating un-self consciously, and taking pleasure in the doing—knowing his equipment, knowing his technique, knowing flowers, and learning about himself. Thoreau would be proud.