Ultrasuede

Author: George Wagner Year: 2006 (first published 2002) Source type: chapter (Intimus: Interior Design Reader, eds. Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston, Wiley, 2006, pp. 380–386; excerpt of the essay's pp. 91–95) Raw file: raw/chapters/wagner-2006-ultrasuede.md

Summary

Wagner reflects on textiles, the body, furniture and buildings in postwar North America, arguing that the modernist "instrumental vision" scaled seamlessly from furniture to city by subjecting every scale to "the binding operations of aesthetic unity" — a unity that came at the price of the individual design disciplines' autonomy. Tracing a lineage from Gottfried Semper's textile theory of architecture (via Adolf Loos's revision in "The Principle of Cladding") through Eliel Saarinen's carpet-collages, Eero Saarinen's conversation pits and "slum of legs," Schinkel's tented room, and Billy Baldwin's continuous-surface interiors, Wagner shows how "the enveloping continuity of the whole and its governing surfaces subsumed and refigured the parts" — furniture, body zones, even paintings absorbed into a continuous, inwardly focused, enclosed space. The excerpt (of Perspecta 33, pp. 90–103) closes on Eero Saarinen's North Christian Community Church as the type-case: monolithic, monochromatic, light-washed, "a sort of space dome."

Key Claims

The modernist instrumental vision "panned easily from the piece of furniture to the design of the city," and did so "by subjecting diverse scales to the binding operations of aesthetic unity" — a unity purchased by silencing the individual design disciplines under architecture's "ambitions and economic imperatives of larger orchestrations."
Postwar domestic and urban questions were viewed together: the design of the domestic interior imported the social vocabulary of the postwar city — Saarinen's "slum of legs" describing the space under a dining table in the terms of "the decaying postwar American city" — while suburbanization was "an attempt to increase the physical distance" between social issues and the domestic realm.
The wainscot historically demarcated the body's space in the room, but was "merely a veneer applied to the wall"; in monolithic, plastic modern architecture "another, more radical and discontinuous method was necessary" — floor-inflection replacing wall-veneer.
Eero Saarinen's most innovative buildings "fused floor and program, furniture and field," banishing furniture (conversation pits, Noyes House at Vassar) and treating the floor "as more than inert surface, but as a domain actively inflecting" (TWA terminal).
Eliel Saarinen was "the Michelangelo of carpet": at Hvittrask he fixed a traditional carpet to the wall so it fell over a bench onto the floor, "serving as backrest, seat and floor covering" — the carpet not as the room's unit of measure (its historical role) but "as a textile that engaged and defined a localized space of the body and the zones of its tactile encounter," marking the body's posture across three spatial zones.
Semper theorized textiles — especially wickerwork and carpets — as the material motives through which architecture's origins are comprehensible; his writing dwelt on "the incremental technique of their fabrication – the knot," fusing "decoration, structural forces, spatial dimension and human presence," and "polarized the material distinctions between frame and wall, mass and space, seen and unseen."
Loos's reading of Semper ("The Principle of Cladding," 1898) refused the ethical orchestration of parts: the covering is "the oldest architectural detail," a continuous veneer "more a mask than a joint," and the architect owes the material facts no honest disclosure — Loos "offers a way of conceiving architecture unburdened from responsibilities of ethical expression."
Schinkel's tented room at Charlottenhof (1826–33) — stretched and hung fabric devising "a purely local space" as a Roman campaign tent — "suggests most clearly the role that textiles came to play in the second half of the twentieth century: producing a purely local reality in a space with a continuous surface, eminently spatial and inwardly focused."
Vogue's 1970s tented rooms and Baldwin's interiors sold the same commodity — "the element of separation from the world was the very commodity these spaces offered" — produced always by the same means: "the room's interior surface was treated as continuous, and fabric, mirror or canvas… were applied."
The Newhouse bedroom (brown velvet walls and ceiling, wall-to-wall carpet, floor-to-ceiling Morris Louis and Rothko) conflates the space of architecture and painting: "the architectural space of the room was subsumed by the pictorial space of the pictures," the room's soft enclosure finding "its visual foil" in the color field paintings' hermetic depth (Greenberg's 'color-space').
Greenberg's "openness" is architecturally legible but inverted: the openness of color field painting "is more a product of chromatic restraint than intensity," derived "more from the field than from the image" — and the Newhouse bedroom realizes it as enclosure, interiority and delimitation rather than openness. Newman's own account ("space-dome," "complete space," "I work with the whole space") is read as the painting's claim to an architecture of fullness against "object-matter" clutter.
The absorption of furniture into architecture initiated "a new formal economy": the older mirroring of architecture and furniture was replaced by erasure — furniture replaced by "an inflection between a reprogrammed architectural shell and its object – throbbing space" (Rudolph's 'spatial velocity,' "escaping from the room").
Eero Saarinen's North Christian Community Church (Columbus, Indiana, 1959–63) is the type-case of the whole: "a sort of space dome; caught between a molded floor and an inflected roof, two shells in tension, pulled away so that they never touch," iconography body-scaled, "the interior is monolithic, monochromatic and very subtle," the ceiling reading "like canvas that absorbs all the light and reflects all the color."

Connections

Concepts: law-of-cladding, core-form-and-art-form, stylistic-unity, interior-as-garment, performative-envelope, modernism, homogenization, mechanization, comfort, fashion, the-decorative, enclosure, interiority, simplicity, consumerism Authors: George Wagner (the author), Billy Baldwin, Adolf Loos, Taylor & Preston (editors) Debates: interior-design-vs-architecture (Position AK — the silenced disciplines), ornament-vs-purity Related source notes: Baldwin - The Sterility of Perfection, Houze - Wiener Kunst im Hause, Braham - A Wall of Books, Vanucci - Inside-out and outside-in, Turpin - Domestic Doyennes

Direct Quotes

"I wanted to clear up the slum of legs." (Eero Saarinen, 1958; quoted p. 380)

"In nine words, Saarinen pans from city to interior, describing the broad scope of engagement in his practice of architecture. The form of the city is invoked to criticize the formal disunity of the dining set." (p. 381)

"Historically the wainscot demarcated the space of the body in the room. But the wainscot was merely a veneer applied to the wall in a building composed of planar surfaces." (p. 381)

"His father Eliel had been the Michelangelo of carpet, allowing it to transgress its place on the floor and actively mediate between horizontal and vertical." (p. 381)

"This carpet was not used, as carpets had been historically, as a unit of measure that figured and defined the space of the room, but as a textile that engaged and defined a localized space of the body and the zones of its tactile encounter." (p. 381)

"Hanging carpets remained the true wall, the visible boundaries of space. The often solid walls behind them were necessary for reasons that had nothing to do with the creation of space… Even where building solid walls became necessary, the latter were only the inner, invisible structure behind the true and legitimate representatives of the wall, the colorful woven textiles." (Semper, quoted p. 382)

"His theories polarized the material distinctions between frame and wall, mass and space, seen and unseen, and imagined architectural origins in the gentle craft of textiles." (p. 382)

"Carpets are warm and livable… But you cannot build a house out of carpets. Both the carpet on the floor and the tapestry on the wall require a structural frame to hold them in the correct place. To invent this frame is the architect's second task." (Loos, quoted p. 382)

"The detail is not a point of connection or inflection, but a continuous veneer more a mask than a joint." (p. 382)

"Loos offers a way of conceiving architecture unburdened from responsibilities of ethical expression, from the belief that the rhetorical articulation of the material facts of building somehow lie within the territory of honesty or truth." (p. 383)

"Its atmospheric reverie invokes a realm beyond the villa, to the suggestion of a Roman campaign tent. It is the isolated world of monolithic and indulgent decoration, unlike the analytic and historicizing theory of Semper." (p. 383)

"The detached reveries of Schinkel's tent room suggest most clearly the role that textiles came to play in the second half of the twentieth century: producing a purely local reality in a space with a continuous surface, eminently spatial and inwardly focused – a space for mental reflection and bodily suspension." (p. 383)

"The element of separation from the world was the very commodity these spaces offered. The means employed to produce these effects were always similar: the room's interior surface was treated as continuous, and fabric, mirror or canvas (when paintings were used) were applied." (p. 384)

"Baldwin described Diana Vreeland's salon as 'a garden in hell.'" (p. 384)

"Paintings by Morris Louis and Mark Rothko on adjacent walls spanned from floor to ceiling, so that the architectural space of the room was subsumed by the pictorial space of the pictures." (p. 384)

"Openness, and not only in painting, is the quality that seems most to exhilarate the attuned eye of our time." (Greenberg, quoted p. 384)

"the openness of color field painting is more a product of chromatic restraint than intensity. Openness and its spatial implications are derived more from the field than from the image, and more from monochromatic subtlety than from chromatic intensity." (p. 384)

"Instead of working with the remnants of space, I work with the whole space." (Newman, quoted p. 385)

"This unity came at the price of the autonomy of the individual design disciplines, which were silenced by the ambitions and economic imperatives of larger orchestrations." (p. 380)

"the dialectical possibilities of architecture's constituent elements were overwhelmed by a broad complicity. As a result, the enveloping continuity of the whole and its governing surfaces subsumed and refigured the parts." (p. 380)

"these new interiors erased furniture, and replaced it with an inflection between a reprogrammed architectural shell and its object – throbbing space." (p. 385)

"Religious iconography has been minimized, reduced in scale and made discreet, no larger than a body… The interior is monolithic, monochromatic and very subtle." (p. 385)

Open Questions

What is Ultrasuede's role in the full essay? The excerpt's title material — the synthetic-suede industrial textile (invented 1970) whose 1970s ubiquity post-dates the Saarinen and Baldwin cases — never appears in the excerpted pp. 91–95; the full Perspecta text (pp. 90–103) presumably gives material invention and industrial production their systematic treatment. How does the man-made material's technological mimicry of leather complicate the Semper lineage of handcrafted textiles?
Wagner writes of "the animated jostlings between rebellion and freedom, institutional deliberation and bodily improvisation" — does the full essay develop this social-culture register, and how does it square with the "broad complicity" that silenced the disciplines?
If Greenberg's "openness" is realized architecturally as enclosure and delimitation (the Newhouse bedroom), is color field painting the interior's pictorial double or its rival — and does the room's absorption of the paintings (floor-to-ceiling) resolve or merely stage the conflict between pictorial and architectural space?
Is Wagner's account of disciplinary silencing a history of modernism's failure or of the disciplines' historical condition — and does it describe a period (postwar North America) or a permanent structural relation between architecture's orchestration and the design disciplines?
Baldwin's continuous-surface interiors (fabric, mirror, canvas applied as continuous surface) are the decorator's radical move, not the modernist's — does Wagner's account relocate the "enveloping continuity" thesis from modernist architecture to the decorating tradition, and what does that do to the interior-design-vs-architecture turf-war framing?