DESIGN REVIEW : Ambasz’s Mythic View of a Post-Industrial World

Those with a taste for doilies and chintz be forewarned; the work of Italian designer Emilio Ambasz is not for those with a sentimental eye. A multifaceted artist who combines a fervent Minimalism with a visionary sense of space evocative of South American writer Jorge Borges, Ambasz is legendary in the field of design for his work as an architect, landscape designer, graphic and industrial designer, urban planner, theorist and critic.

Every aspect of his prolific, relatively short career (Ambasz is just 45) is reviewed in “Emilio Ambasz, the Poetics of the Pragmatic,” on view at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art through Aug. 6. The range of Ambasz’s achievement is impressive indeed and it comes through loud and clear in this comprehensive show, which, nonetheless, is a trifle dull. It’s hard to get excited about display cases of toothbrushes, lighting fixtures, pens and electric shavers of the sort one might find at Industrial Revolution, the high-tech home furnishings boutique on Melrose Avenue.

The section of the show dealing with Ambasz’s architectural plans packs a bit more punch. This clever man has some delightfully fanciful notions about how to shape the world. But really, how deeply moving can an architectural model be to anyone but the worried soul planning to foot the bill to have the model converted into a real building?

Born in Argentina and schooled at Princeton, Ambasz served as curator of design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 1970 to 1976. During his tenure there he wrote a significant chapter in the history of design with the 1972 exhibition, “Italy: The New Domestic Landscape,” which took a definitive look at the cutting edge of Italian industrial design (a field in which Italy excels). Ambasz’s best known contribution in this area of design is the “Vertebra Chair,” an office chair that automatically changes its configuration in response to the body. Developed by Ambasz in 1976 in collaboration with G. Piretti, the “Vertebra Chair”--as well as several other Ambasz chairs on view--look like prototypes for the objects of torture one presently encounters in airports.

Favoring squares, triangles and circles used with little complication or embellishment, Ambasz occasionally tempers his austere palette with flourishes of wit (as in a “Tortoise and Hare Clock” that marks time with a toy rabbit and turtle racing around a race track clock face), but most of his designs for objects for the home are stark.

His approach to architecture, however, is another kettle of fish entirely. In the face of raucously slap-dash Post-Modernism, Ambasz’s buildings may initially appear slightly conservative, but in fact these discreet structures are pretty wild. Ambasz considers any and all buildings to be transgressions against nature and he goes to great lengths to integrate his designs with the earth as unobtrusively as possible. In fact, the home he designed for art dealer Leo Castelli (could a designer ask for a heavier credential than to be the personal architect to this major arbiter of 20th-Century taste?) appears almost entirely underground.

Designed for the most part on a horizontal axis, Ambasz’s buildings tend to be long and low. Water is a favored motif, and the imaginary setting he prefers for his structures (it turns up again and again in models and studies) is an incredibly vast stretch of flat, verdant land, bare of trees, with mountains jutting up on a remote horizon. Ambasz’s affection for the hallucinatory Borges is clear in the strange utopia he envisions, while the buildings he designs reflect his admiration for the artists Michael Heizer, Donald Judd and Carl Andre; his structures are at once tough, austere and highly poetic.

Approaching architecture as a means for discovering the mythical in the modern, Ambasz has developed an Arcadian vision of post-industrial society that’s a bit extreme for your average developer; not surprisingly, few of his projects have been completed. Currently under way in Japan are a department store, a leisure complex and a pleasure park revolving around the theme of water. Ambasz has done just one major project in America.

Opened last year in San Antonio, Tex., the $7-million Lucile Halsell Conservatory in the Botanical Gardens has been widely praised by the design community, and the photos on view here suggest that it must be quite an experience to wander through this dramatic labyrinth of glass, water and greenery. The building appears to have the grandeur and intelligence of a major artwork; the same, however, can’t be said for the photographs, architectural studies, and plans that make up much of this show. Viewers with the background required to appreciate Ambasz’s innovations (architects and designers, chiefly) will no doubt find “The Poetics of the Pragmatic” fascinating, but it’s apt to strike the average museum-goer as rather academic.