Search for the most iconic chair designs in the world and you'll likely come across a list that includes:
Wassily Chair by Marcel Breuer (1928)
Barcelona Chair by Mies van der Rohe (1929)
Grand Consort by Charlotte Perriand, Le Corbusier, and Pierre Jeanneret (1928)
The various Eames Chairs (starting in 1945)
Wishbone Chair by Hans Wegner (1949)
Wiggles Side Chair by Frank Gehry (1972)
And the list goes on.
Most of these chairs also look as if they were just designed yesterday. Meaning, they're timeless and have stood the test of time. But they are mostly older designs. Which raises an interesting question: How much does the passage of time play in a role in determining whether or not something is "iconic"?
There are some more recent designs that you could call iconic. The Roly-Poly Chair by Faye Toogood (2014) and the Louis Ghost Chair by Philippe Stark (2002) come to mind. This suggests that really great designs can become immediate classics. (Though, this latter example is a reinterpretation of a classic French chair that in and of itself is an icon.)
What I think is the mostly right answer is that, yeah, sometimes you can catch lighting in a bottle. The Louis Ghost Chair, for instance, is one of the top selling chairs of the 21st century. It's a clever and modern take that used new technologies (as is often the case) to revisit an old classic. Starck nailed it.
But more often than not, you probably need time. Time is what allows the object to form cultural associations in our mind and to prove that it is, in fact, timeless. However, if this is truly the case, then it makes it difficult to determine if we're still producing as many design icons today as we did in the past. We won't really know until they become old.
Image: Louis Ghost Chair via Knoll
La Foundation Louis Vuitton (which is housed in a building designed by Frank Gehry) has an exhibition on right now that displays the art collection of two brothers: Mikhaïl Abramovitch Morozov (1870-1903) et Ivan Abramovitch Morozov (1871-1921). The collection contains mostly early modernist work from the late 19th century and includes pieces by Cézanne, Van Gogh, Renoir, Monet, Matisse, Picasso, as well as others, including some Russian avant-garde work. We went through the exhibition last week when we were in Paris. Partially to see the collection and partially to see the architecture, which is, you know, very Frank Gehry. See above photo.
As I was going through the exhibition I was reminded of how much I like the Impressionist movement. I like the work, but I also really love the story. The Impressionist movement started in Paris in the late 1800s and many consider it to mark the beginning of modern art. It broke free of tradition and violated the rules of what was considered to be proper art work at the time in France.
Because of this, the Impressionists were heavily criticized at the outset. So much so that they were routinely rejected from exhibiting in the traditionally accepted art venues in Paris. The annual Salon de Paris was the big and most prestigious one as I understand it. This forced the group to organize their own exhibitions and circumvent the incumbents in order to get their work out into the world, which is pretty much what any "startup" has to do. Obviously the rest is history and now people to go to museums like La Foundation Louis Vuitton to look at Impressionist art work and talk amongst their friends about how we don't make art like they used to back in the late 19th century.
I mention all of this because of what is happening today in the world of NFTs. Non-fungible tokens and their application to digital art feels to me like history is repeating itself. We are at the dawn of something new and a lot of people seem to think that what's happening today is pretty stupid: Why pay thousands or even millions for a JPEG? I can just download a copy to my computer for free. This is not art. How do you even display it? I don't get it.
I am sure that most of the NFTs that people are buying today will go to $0 in value; just like a lot of the paint that has gone onto canvasses over the years hasn't created much value. Art is a funny thing. But that doesn't mean that cultural value will not be created over time. When people are talking and they think what you're doing is dumb, you may actually be on to something. The Impressionists taught us this important lesson well over a century ago.
Photo: La Foundation Louis Vuitton
“Every unemployed American is a failure of entrepreneurial imagination.” -Edward Glaeser
At the end of September, economist Edward Glaeser returned to the Manhattan Institute to deliver the 2017 James Q. Wilson Lecture. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you may remember that he was there in 2016 and delivered a presentation called “The End of Work.”
This year’s talk continues that theme, but focuses on joblessness and economic stagnation in the US Heartland.
The solutions he puts forward are based on a very simple economic model for growth that he refers to as “rules and schools.” Simply put: The rules of a place need to support business and entrepreneurship and the people need to be educated.
One example he gives is of a woman in Detroit who was trying to start a food truck business but had to wait 18 months for a permit. There’s no reason that should happen. He blames the insider restaurant lobby for working to keep competition at bay. The rules are bad. We have similar problems here in Toronto with our food trucks. I think it’s wrong.
He also pokes fun at the Bilbao effect. Yes, Frank Gehry created a beautiful piece of architecture. But did it lower the unemployment rate?
The last thing I’ll mention are his comments regarding Amazon HQ2 because I like how he frames it.
Firstly, Amazon is going select a city that doesn’t need Amazon. It’s going to go where there’s already abundant human capital.
Secondly, “smokestack chasing” is not the right economic development strategy. The key questions should be: How will this benefit our human capital and how many new firms could it create?
If you have an hour, check out Ed Glaeser’s talk. If you can’t see it below, click here.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8LvHpRCUYk?rel=0&w=560&h=315]