Ornamental Modern at MoCC January 2008

This weekend marks the last for the Museum of Contemporary Craft's The Living Room, which ends March 23rd. With a novel cutaway layout, the show has had 3 different iterations, Mid-Century Modern, Ornamental Modern and the current Eco-Modern. My favorite is the current Eco-Modern, which sports a great 1970's weaving by Mike Walsh and an excellent Peter Voulkos or 2.

Lately with Dwell, Ikea, Design Within Reach and the mass appeal of Target's ad campaigns, modern design has enjoyed a pretty amazing resurgence. One of my favorite baristas refers to Dwell as yuppie porn but I think curator Namita Wiggers is going beyond the "simplify your hectic life" dream that seems to be fueling the interest. Instead, she looks at the links between craft and modernist furnishings and how the modernist aesthetic was mostly a "truth in materials and production" movement. She also mixes the new with vintage.

Here are two of my favorite living rooms:


Eames' Case Study House living room

The Eames (case study) house in Southern California: ... well here's one thing that most of the Eames fetishers don't know, their living room was chock full of very cool stuff. Everything in it is awesomely ordered but to me it has a bit of the look a Mayan ruin has after the jungle recalims it a little, it isn't the Miesian Farnsworth house style deserted (but clean) wasteland that a lot of modernism has come to be known for.


Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin East living room

Frank Lloyd Wright's Wingspread and Taliesein East in Wisconsin: These two are pretty much the apotheosis of the craft meets modernist design arguement. I grew up in a house designed by one of Wright's apprentices so this sort of thing is in my blood, I can't shake it.