Hello, Hybrids!

It’s a material world. Now, more than ever. The birth of the aerospace industry in the early part of this century launched an ever-expanding market of high-tech materials, and by the ‘50s and ‘60s, metals, plastics and plywoods were landing in the living room. After decades of advancement, today’s designers--as well as the environment--continue to benefit as hybrid materials take the spotlight in the home.

“One of the most important things about materials of the future,” says Santa Monica-based architect and manufacturer David Hertz, “is that aside from being stronger, lighter, more economical and more restorative, they also have to be beautiful.”

With a plethora of industrial materials to choose from, here’s a quick look at just a few that California’s contemporary designers are embracing as the medium of modern design.

Concrete Composite

If Hertz succeeds, more and more people will be taking in the trash, and this century’s garbage will fast become next century’s custom furniture, counter tops, bathtubs, fireplaces and floors. His aim is “to create a symbiotic relationship with society’s waste.”

After years of working with heavyweight concrete, Hertz developed and patented the composite Syndecrete as an alternative to limited, nonrenewable and petroleum-based products. It’s lighter, stronger and more sculptural than cement, and it utilizes urban waste such as reground plastic or glass bottles, plastic strawberry baskets, broken records, car parts and computer chips.

“I have a medium more like an artist has a medium and perhaps find myself through the process of working with one material,” he says.

His Santa Monica architecture, design and manufacturing firm, Syndesis, has been commissioned for custom installations from Southern California to Tokyo.

Aluminum

Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald referred to the ‘20s as the “cut glass bowl age,” because of the object’s prevalence on the American coffee table. But he didn’t address aluminum, which was still on the back burner. After years of leaving it relegated to pots and pans, engineers combined it with other alloys to increase its strength and hardness. The material burst onto the design scene in the mid-1930s. Today it is the coffee table.

“Aluminum is like a liquid skeleton,” says Venice-based designer Ilan Dei. “I don’t build boats, airplanes or missiles. At the level of what I do, using high-tech material is more a form of artistic expression.” The super high-tech look of his OP Table, made from cast aluminum, stainless steel and glass, is softened with organic lines.

This is the aluminum age, emphasizes Neil Stratton, AZCAST Products’ premiere designer. The Venice-based artist utilizes this mutant metal--which the company’s foundry retrieves from auto wrecks and airplane and boat parts--in his unique designs.

His Acrylic Recurve chair is made from sand-cast aluminum and green-edged acrylic. The seat and back are also available in ABS plastic or maple and cherry veneers. To Stratton, furniture making is the bridge between sculpture and industrial design, and he describes his line as “functional yet sexy.”

For a man who can easily spend 100 hours designing one chair, he is quite enthusiastic about the idea that in 100 years’ time, that same chair might be broken down and recycled, too.

Plastics

The advice given to Dustin Hoffman’s character in “The Graduate” more than 30 years ago--plastics--has never rung truer. In its 100-year history, plastics have made their way out of the kitchen and into high design. They fell out of favor in the ‘80s, but advancements in recycling have made them fashionable again. And engineers have given designers more types than ever from which to choose.

Los Angeles-based designer Lisa Krohn’s objective is to “design objects and systems to increase people’s enjoyment of their material environment.” Krohn--whose work includes LAX’s Close Encounters theme restaurant--puts polyethylene terephthalate glycol to playful use in her Squeeze Lamp, which changes shape with the squeeze of a hand.

Fortunately, plastics can now withstand the heat, as evidenced in Dei’s vacuum form polycarbonate Boat Lamp, giving designers an even greater flexibility of artistic expression.

Wood Fiber Composite

Designers are not completely out of the woods yet. Finply is Finland’s answer to plywood, and Los Angeles-based designer Gregg Fleishman has been using it to make furniture since the late ‘70s. The all-fiber composite is made from Baltic birch harvested from managed stands. It’s thinner, stronger and has a smaller percentage of defects than regular plywood, and the ultra-thin, or “aircraft birch,” can get down to the millimeters in multiple plies.

Although the Russians have long been using Baltic birch, the Finnish are the only ones utilizing colors. The first veneers introduced in the late ‘70s were browns and reds, but the spectrum has since broadened to include yellow, greens, light browns and black.

Fleishman bends the flexible Finply after cutting spring-like coils out of a flat board. The result is a chair that moves with you, or as one chiropractor so characteristically noted, results in “spinal exercise without effort.”

David Hertz will be a keynote speaker in the panel discussion “Material World: Trends and Influences,” to be held at 10 a.m. Wednesday at the Pacific Design Center as part of WestWeek 99. New York architect and design critic Joseph Giovanninni will moderate.