Design: Object Lesson in Beauty

DESIGN Object Lesson in Beauty When future archaeologists excavate the ruins of Los Angeles and New York, they are more likely to judge the 20th century’s standards of beauty by shards of Corning Ware, martini mix ers and stainless-steel subway turnstiles than by whatever fragments of painting and statuary survive. Yet the average American takes the artifacts of every day use for granted. He rarely appre ciates the well-designed objects and manages to ignore the ugly ones.

The Brooklyn Museum is shaking thousands of museumgoers out of their visual lethargy by exhibiting, as works of art, all kinds of functional things, including toys, appliances and scientific equipment. The show represents the 130 best-designed items of 1967, selected from among 1,000 U.S. entries by Industrial Design, a magazine that has hitherto saluted the annual winners by publishing photographs. Now, with the objects themselves on display, it be comes even clearer where handsome designs are prevalent in daily life — and where they are conspicuously lacking.

Computer Console. The big surprise for many is that so many prizewinning objects are both readily available and often cheap as well: a 40¢ polypropolene valve for home water heaters; Neal Small’s cleanly domed $90 chrome lamp; and a $7.95 set of “Blockmobile” cubes that double as trees, houses or vehicles. Offsetting what might otherwise be painfully stark functionalism are restrained psychedelic and op-art motifs. New plastics and transistors are responsible for many of the objects’ compactness. Advanced technology and electronics also play a role in dozens of esoteric devices, ranging from a portable medical ventilator (replacing the old iron lung) to a child’s styrene-and-aluminum balance scale. Royal’s stylishly minimal duplicator, Honeywell’s computer console and Pitney-Bowes’s addresser-printer are a visible reminder that thou sands of offices already boast such good-looking equipment.

The few items intended for outdoor and public use emphasize how relatively rare and experimental are such attempts to beautify the cityscape. The instances include Cambridge Seven’s Boston subway turnstiles and New York’s $1,000,000 vest-pocket Paley Park (all necessarily shown in photographs only). Scholars of the 30th century may well conclude that, like the Greeks and Romans, urban Americans turned inward from their streets and sacrificed freely to the household gods, glorified their public squares and buildings, but left the ordinary thoroughfares to stray cats and garbage collectors.