Architectural Designs on a User-Friendly Scale

The bristly metal terrier stands stiff-legged beside your front door. As you come up the steps the brass and steel animal opens its snout, turns on a beam of light and barks a friendly welcome.

The terrier’s throaty bark is triggered by a heat sensor. Afterward, the owner snaps his fingers and a sound sensor closes the dog’s jaws and makes the tail wag. A fond pat on the head and the faithful all-weather beast goes back on guard.

The $7,000 Dog Lamp--designed by Morphosis--patrols the doorway of Santa Monica’s Gallery of Functional Art where an exhibit of “Architects’ Art” is on display through March 1. The exhibit will offer for sale a collection of furniture, ceramics, textiles, jewelry and other more or less usable items designed by architects. As a star example from that increasingly popular genre of architect-designed or functional art, the dog is a fitting sentinel.

“The Dog Lamp is always good for a giggle whenever we show it,” Morphosis’ Thom Mayne said. “Even as part of a slide show. It has a sense of play, as all good architecture should.”

Even though more and more architects are producing designs that blur the distinctions between architecture and art, gallery owner Lois Lambert spent two years searching out the architect-designed objects on display in her new space in the Edgemar Mall on Main Street. (Designed by Frank Gehry, Edgemar occupies the site of a former dairy, and also houses the new, privately funded Santa Monica Museum of Art.)

“The charm of functional art is that it’s unintimidating,” Lambert explained. “People can sit at a Morphosis dining table or sleep on a bed by Michele Saee and not feel they have to assume a posture of false awe.”

The $13,000 Morphosis dining table has a glass top on an elaborate rusty steel undercarriage. Set on springs to take the jolts of earth tremors, the table resembles a Star Wars dinosaur.

Saee’s $10,000 polished steel bed looks like a giant water lily pad. Its rolling surface requires a special mattress to make it comfy for any sleeper other than an Indian fakir.

A tall sedan chair designed by Paul Lubowicki, made of shredded telephone books bound by metal straps, embraces its occupier like a shaggy Big Foot. A delicate trephine--a surgical instrument used to remove sections of skull--is offered as a kind of home lobotomy kit by designer Bill Adams.

More conventional designs include an elegant plywood love seat by Stephen Ehrlich, and Gregg Fleishman’s rocker and dining table fabricated from molded Finland birch. Fleishman’s birch furniture, sometimes finished with sprayed metallic surfaces, is among the most user-friendly of all the objects on display.

Much of the furniture designed by architects has the air of shrunken buildings. Ted Tanaka’s “high-rise” magazine stand in black lacquered wood and metal could be 8 feet or 80 stories tall. Marc Dillon’s welded steel “torso” chest could easily be an act of full-scale Deconstructivist architecture.

“Designing things like love seats gives an architect an opportunity to examine a small-scale structure,” Ehrlich said. “You can walk around the object, comprehend it in one glance, as you never can in a building. It’s very satisfying and controllable, as architecture seldom is.”

‘It’s Happening Fast’

“I have to educate--or re-educate--my clients about the whole concept of functional art, by architects or anyone else,” Lambert said. “But it’s happening fast. My clients include everyone from housewives to movie companies, and also several major museums.

“In Los Angeles, the Gallery of Functional Art is unique,” Lambert contends. “In fact, there’s nothing quite like it anywhere in the U.S., though galleries in New York and Chicago do offer functional art along with their regular stuff.”

The fashion for architect designed objects has grown in popularity in the 1980s. Michael Graves and Richard Meier have designed teapots, Robert Venturi has done a line of dinnerware, Charles Moore has dreamed up a series of miniature architectures that resemble tiny opera sets to decorate a coffee table. Jewelry, chairs, lamps, carpets and textiles are included in the range of functional art by architects.

Reviving a Tradition

This recent fashionability is a revival of a 20th-Century tradition that suffered a decline in the decades following World War II. Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s now-classic high-backed chairs; furniture by Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Breuer and Mies van der Rohe; and the 1920s German Bauhaus’ integration of all the arts from architecture to ballet are all examples of the traditional interest architects have had in “total design.”

For Thom Mayne, objects such as the Dog Lamp, though seemingly light-hearted, are part of his search for “a process of total design.”

Mayne links his lamp with such objects as the lanky steel “orrery” that dominates the decor of the Kate Mantilini restaurant in Beverly Hills, or the constructions that enliven the interior of the Cedars-Sinai Cancer Center. These constructions in turn link up with the sculptural qualities of Morphosis’ full-scale architecture.

“Architecture is by definition a functional art,” Mayne declared, “so all functional art is inherently architectural.”