People and Events

Los Angeles urban designer William Morrish is flushed with victory. His designs for bathroom fixtures just won a $10,000 award in a national contest on the “celebration of water delivery systems.”

Morrish enthusiastically hopes his designs will get people to look at their bathrooms in a different light. His winning line of faucets, sinks, tubs and toilets--which he calls “The Private Spring”--are also intended to remind Los Angeles residents of where all that tap water came from originally.

A USC architecture professor who owns a design company, he got the idea from his studies on how the shape of Los Angeles was affected by its aqueduct system. “The point is we have these grand sources of water such as the Colorado River and Owens Valley, but when you walk into the bathroom you don’t see that. And you don’t think about the conservation aspects of water. All you see is a plain old white sink.”

Morrish’s sinks, which he hopes to market someday, are anything but plain.

For example, there’s one that represents a desert watering hole, complete with ceramic cactus faucets and a shallow basin, “like in a desert setting where you could only splash a little water on your face,” he explained. His Grand Canyon sink has faucets that spill water like a river into the basin. His favorite, however, is the Parker Dam design, which is styled so that the water spills over the bather’s head as it makes its way into the tub.

“The individual looking at The Private Spring is romanced by the water,” concluded judges in the contest, run by the Indianapolis-based Delta Faucet Co.

In a design contest at the Fashion Design Center at Los Angles Trade-Technical College, 60 students were given identical packets of cotton gauze, rubberized lining material, shoulder pads, shoelaces and other offbeat scraps and material and told to make a garment to be worn on the upper part of the body. They could use no other items but did not have to use all the items furnished.

The results were startlingly diverse, if not something you’d want to wear to the office. One student used only the white rubberized lining to make a military jacket. Another covered the same material with black gauze and fashioned it into a bodice to wear with an evening skirt. Another designer shredded all the fabric in her packet and wove it into an entirely new material. One seamstress made an elaborate bikini-like top, transforming the shoulder pads into bra cups.

The winning design was a black and red number with long puffy sleeves, which when not worn retains its three-dimensional look, like someone is still in it. Anita Kwong, 25, of Los Angeles said it took two days to create it. She may have to wait a while to wear it, she said, because it’s more like something you might wear to a costume party. Explained Joyce Gale, an apparel design instructor: “We were trying to stress that the imagination can do wonderful things even given absolute parameters.”

Speaking of designs, feminist attorney Gloria Allred let it be known months ago that she might have her sights on Senate President Pro Tem David A. Roberti’s job. Now, Allred, who once staged a sit-in in Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner’s office, is apparently also considering running for Reiner’s job. Some of her supporters have been urging her to challenge Reiner next year, she says, and she just might take them up on the idea--reluctantly.

“I really do not wish to run,” Allred said. “I would prefer it if Reiner would just do the job he was elected to do, and do it well.” Her main beef with Reiner is his failure to meet with her to discuss child support enforcement problems--the issue that resulted in her 1985 sit-in.

One Allred fan--though he says he never endorses undeclared candidates--is former Dist. Atty. Robert H. Philibosian. Asked about the difference between Allred and Reiner, both of whom are fabled attention-getters, Philibosian said: “When Gloria Allred gets publicity on a case, she ends up winning it.”

Reiner, speaking through a spokesman, had only one comment: “She’s entitled to run for the office, just like anybody else.”