With a touch of whimsy

CRITZ Campbell affectionately recalled the bright floral-pattern chairs he saw when he was growing up in the South, the sort associated with white-haired grandmothers in the ‘30s. But when he created his own version in his Chicago studio, it was far from a nostalgic duplication: The Eudora, named for fellow Mississippian Eudora Welty, was made of fiberglass, fabric encased in resin, and fluorescent tubes lighting up the hollowed-out interior. With each custom-made at $2,800, the fledgling designer didn’t expect to sell very many; he simply wanted to establish an identity. “The chair was my runway piece,” he said.

Now it’s a museum piece too -- part of the National Design Triennial featuring the work of 80 cutting-edge designers that will open here Tuesday and run through Jan. 25, 2004. Second in a series and the only exhibition program of its kind in the country, the triennial showcases contemporary design and trends across a broad spectrum of fields -- interiors, architecture and design, graphics, film, fashion and news media.

In 2000, when the Smithsonian-affiliated design museum held its first Triennial, the focus was on technology. With dot-com optimism in full bloom, the favored aesthetic was modernist, uncompromisingly so. But as four curators began traveling the country in search of new designers, they also found new trends -- reflected in pieces such as Campbell’s quirky chair and Luna dress lamp, New Yorker Scott Henderson’s $8.95 suction cup soap dish, Los Angeles firm SuperHappyBunny’s three-pack self-heating cans of soup and its illuminated acrylic and stainless-steel table that looks like an oversized Chinese takeout box. Whimsy, or at least a certain lightheartedness, is everywhere evident. Subtitled Inside Design Now, the show focuses particular attention on the interior environment of the home and the workplace.

“In terms of interior design, something pretty dramatic has happened, and that is the return of decoration,” said the museum’s director, Paul Warwick Thompson. Decoration, however, that is rendered in distinctly 21st century terms, revealing a compelling mix of elegance coupled with wit, social consciousness with irreverence, futurism with a human touch, sensuous materials with advanced technology, traditional motifs with patterns of epic proportions, rationalism with the spirit of play.

Along with the seven-member team of the SuperHappyBunny design group, 10 other Los Angeles designers are included in the exhibition: architects Frank Escher and Ravi GuneWardena, production designer David Wasco and set decorator Sandy Reynolds-Wasco, graphics designers Lorraine Wild and Geoff McFetride, fashion designers Stefan Loy and Frank Ford, technology designer Frank Nuovo, and car designer Laurens van der Ackers of Ford Motor Co.