Design Industry Is Stuck in a Holding Pattern : Westweek: Innovative ideas of the past are being absorbed and refined by designers.

For 15 years, Westweek, the annual designers’ festival sponsored by the Pacific Design Center in late March, has mounted a mixture of displays, exhibits and discussion panels intended as a showcase for current trends in the busy West Coast market.

Although not open to the public, Westweek provides an overview of the range of interior design products, from chairs to fabrics, that populate showrooms across the United States and abroad, and a foretaste of new items you might expect to see in the coming year.

This year’s Westweek, attended by about 30,000 visitors, confirmed that the design industry is in a holding pattern.

The hectic innovations of the last decade, during which Postmodernism developed as a third-track parallel to the standard Modernism and established Traditionalism that have long been the interior designers’ stock-in-trade, are in the process of being thoroughly absorbed and refined.

Nowhere is this situation more clearly reflected than in the range of chair designs on display at the PDC. Chairs--those most basic items of furniture--allow designers a lot of freedom to experiment with radical ideas or try new variations on ancient forms.

The Hollis and the Fino, two chairs featured in the Brayton collection offered by Brayton International of High Point, N.C., are interesting examples of the Postmodern style.

The Hollis armchair, with its plump, round, upholstered back and base and inserted seat is, like many Postmodern designs, a simplified form of a traditional shape. Comfortable yet elegant, it avoids the urge to make a “statement” that distorts the proportions of much Postmodern furniture.

The Fino is a nervy, classical, square-sided beechwood chair with slightly splayed legs. The tops of the unified back and sides curve delicately outward as if to welcome you to dignified rest.

Taken together, these chairs and their matching settees, for once, validate the common claim to “timelessness.”

A punk version of Postmodern is presented by the Hopper range of chairs, from New York City’s Kinetics Furniture Inc. Created by the MDZ Design Studio, the chairs, archly named “Hippity,” “Hoppy” and “Skippy,” mix wood, metal, leather and jazzy fabrics in designs that resemble buzzing insects ready to leap around the room.

In the high-tech Modernist category, the Sulky, manufactured in the United States for the Swiss-based Sitag Co., is a marvel of ingenuity that also manages to be supremely comfortable.

Designed mainly for office use, the Sulky has a skillfully engineered chassis that allows the seat and the back to adjust in concert to the sitter’s shape.

The chairs avoid the overwrought ejector-seat look that makes so many current high-tech office chairs slightly repellent, and the Sulky’s price range, between $400 and $700 per chair, is modest by today’s inflated standards.

The Ricchio, a traditional design by Knoll International inspired by fine 19th-Century joinery in wood, is one of the better examples of a simple and ancient chair form adapted to the contemporary market. Designers Linda and Joseph Ricchio have refined the traditional model with subtly tapered legs and curving, slatted back that underscores the tensile strength of pear wood and mahogany.

Many of the main exhibits and the discussion panels that accompanied the 1990 Westweek reflected PDC President Richard Norfolk’s statement: “We have decided to place a major emphasis on Los Angeles this year, underscoring our region’s rising status in the international design scene.”

“On the Edge: Industrial Design in Southern California,” an exhibit sponsored by Artemide, the avant-garde Italian lighting company, displayed a range of highly sophisticated manufactured objects whose design originated in Southern California.

These included the Mazda Miata sports car, designed in Mazda’s Irvine studio; Apple Computer’s futuristic Work Space 2000 office work station by Patton Design; Seiko Instruments experimental flat-screen color liquid crystal display computer monitor, designed by L.A.-based S.G. Hauser Associates.

The discussion panels continued Westweek’s Los Angeles emphasis by involving a wide range of local architects, designers, art-scene leaders and public officials in forums that explored such topics as los Angeles’ avant-garde, the cultural and financial forces shaping L.A. as an international metropolis, and “Who will make the design difference in L.A. in the next century?”

The uneven nature of these panels, attended by large audiences, revealed both the need for such get-togethers in our all-too-fragmented metropolis and the frequent lack of coherence such Angeleno forums display.

Panel participants, often lacking the habit of public discussion, tended to follow personal tangents rather than enter dialogues with their fellows.

Like Westweek as a whole, the panels add up to less than the sum of their parts. Perhaps the PDC, as a major local focus for design, should make Westweek more effective and more relevant to a wider audience by integrating its annual event into an ongoing program of exhibits and symposiums to which the public is invited.