AROUND HOME : Notes on Hooked Rugs, Front Doors, Cooing Doves and Restaurant-Supply Stores : Porcelain Swid Powells

FORMER KNOLL International designers Nan Swid and Addie Powell were accustomed to the notion of architects designing furniture. The next logical step, they figured, when forming Swid Powell in 1983, was to commission tableware from post-modern designers such as Robert Venturi, Hans Hollein and Charles Gwathmey.

But their concept took courage: “You’d think that young marrieds would want something groovy and modern, but they don’t,” says company spokesperson Johanna Semple, citing a Bride’s Magazine survey of the most popular china patterns in bridal registries: “Old-fashioned and traditional, just like grandma’s heirlooms.” So, to paraphrase Monty Python, Swid Powell’s collection of 20-odd patterns was something completely different. Happily, it was also a hit, and not just with the cognoscenti. Says Semple: “Buyers in Oshkosh, Wis., who’d never heard of Richard Meier (he’s designing the new J. Paul Getty Museum), bought his plates just for the beauty of the design.”

Swid Powell commissioned emerging Young Turks as well as established superstars, among them Columbia University architecture professor Steven Holl. At the time, he had recently renovated an apartment (published in Architectural Record) by dividing it into three zones exploring the geometric modes: The linear area featured a lamp comprising straight, zigzag and curved lines; the planar area included pivoting walls, while a custom-designed sofa with big chunky cylindrical armrests graced the volumetric room.

Holl translated his mathematical obsession into a dishwasher-safe, porcelain dinner-plate triptych. “Linear” has drafting-paper blue doodles on the bare white china, “Planar” a surreal smorgasbord of Mobius-strip spirals, accordion-folded paper airplanes and skewed rectangles whizzing above the rim’s black background. “Volumetric,” which combines cones, cubes and columns cavorting on a fashionable pastel-blue field, was instantly canonized by appearing in a retrospective at New York’s Whitney Museum.

“There’s a theoretical notion I was exploring; I didn’t just want to decorate a plate,” Holl says. Indeed, the project’s unusual blend of playful shapes and colors with underlying profundity--the progressive fleshing out of the geometric idea--insures that the plates will be no mere nine days’ wonder.

Swid Powell plates are available throughout Southern California. DR