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DESIGN NOTEBOOK; Design's Endless Summer By WILLIAM L. HAMILTON (NY Times) 1891 words But for those interested in modern design, a small exhibit at the Pasadena Museum of California Art could be the portal to equally amazing discoveries -- an antechamber to lost riches of the last golden age of American design. The museum's second design biennial, which will end on Sunday, is a juried selection of contemporary California design that includes examples from obvious suspects like Apple Computer in Cupertino and Oakley, the eyewear designer, in Foothill Ranch. But in the spirit of a remarkable series of exhibitions called ''California Design,'' mounted by the now defunct Pasadena Art Museum and its director, Eudorah M. Moore, from the 1950's to the 1970's, the biennial also includes independents like Lauren Saunders in Ventura, who knits paintings as pillows; Trina Turk, a fashion designer in Alhambra; Bluelounge Design, a four-man office in Pasadena that designs everything from footwear to furniture; and Osborn, an architectural firm in Glendale that developed a set of paint stencils able to reclad an elementary school building quickly, with energetic color and pattern. This is California, where even the weather feels both fortuitous and designed. ''California has a sense of -- why not, let's try it,'' Ms. Moore said in a telephone conversation last week. She said of her exhibitions, ''There was a brilliant optimism to what people were making and doing, and I thought it was important to record it.'' The shows, which were hugely popular at the time, are now largely forgotten outside the state. ''California Design: The Legacy of West Coast Craft and Style,'' a book by Jo Lauria, an independent curator, and Suzanne Baizerman, a curator of craft and decorative arts at the Oakland Museum, to be published next month by Chronicle Books, will revisit Ms. Moore's work and California's midcentury moment in the sun. With its integral interests in craft and design, from furnishings to products to environmental art, outdoors as well as indoors, and fashion, too, California's contribution to the American imagination at home is something so ubiquitous now as to seem commonplace. We call it lifestyle. California, characterized by the pop culture it created in music and movies, insisted that design was pop culture too, there to be used by all, in its every aspect. As Pasadena's current biennial makes clear, California as a force in design, relevant precisely because it is regional, is not a thing of the past. It is an endless summer. If globalization is now a fond idea for industry looking to design to increase sales, California designers and their output seem continuing proof of the potential of the local climate. ''If Columbus had discovered California, there wouldn't be an East Coast,'' said Gere Kavanaugh, a designer in Los Angeles whose clients have included Nissan, Hallmark, Max Factor and PepsiCo, and who was included in ''California Design.'' Ms. Kavanaugh shared a studio with Frank Gehry, now one of the state's favorite sons, in the 1960's and 70's. ''All the major car companies in the world have a design studio here, I mean every single one, whether Japanese or European,'' said Dominic Symons, who founded Bluelounge. ''They do all the advance concepts out here, and you wonder why that is.'' Bluelounge is currently at work on interface design for Panasonic DVD and DVR players. Ms. Turk, the fashion designer, said, ''I think a lot of major trends that have happened over the past 30 years have come from California.'' Ms. Turk mentioned the importance of denim, especially innovative denim, the current surf wear influence, and the gradual ''casualization'' of fashion generally. ''A totally California thing,'' she said, sitting in her office at a plywood desk designed by Charles Eames, a California designer. ''I think California is the center of the universe,'' she said, laughing at her prejudice. For anyone not familiar with the original ''California Design'' exhibits or their catalogs, now highly collectible books, Ms. Moore's exhaustive project is an astounding treasure. For every recognizable name like Sam Maloof, the dean of studio furniture makers, or Harrison McIntosh, a pre-eminent potter, there is a wealth of influential unknowns: ceramists, weavers, industrial designers, glassblowers and jewelry makers. But what is California design? ''I think it's fair to say the climate and culture and geography are a big influence,'' said Michael Downes, a designer with Giant Bicycle Company in Newbury Park, whose ''Fashion Bikes,'' a pair of women's sport bicycles that look more like flip-flops than machines with gears, are included in the Pasadena biennial. The bike's foot pedals are flower petals. ''If you imagine yourself riding these products, it's a perfectly beautiful day in California, as opposed to winter in Minnesota. It's an illusion, but California represents an ideal.'' But would Mr. Downes consider himself a California designer? ''It's an interesting question. Technically, I'm English and I work for a Taiwanese company,'' he said. ''But, yeah.'' More broadly, as values that helped form designs, Ms. Moore and others characterized California's cultural climate and landscape as open and permissive, like stretches of blue sea or sky, explorative and adventurous, ripe with possibility and peopled by those who sought that out. ''Designers came here because they could do what they wanted to and not feel constrained by conventions,'' said Bill Stern, director of the Museum of California Design, which organizes traveling exhibitions and education programs. ''In the postwar period, there was an enormous influx of people to California because of employment. In 1943, 640,000 people came to California in one year. All those people needed houses, and they needed things in their houses. Designers were coming from all over the country, because there was competition to have things that were new, fresh, that hadn't been seen before.'' Charles Hollis Jones, sometimes called the father of acrylic furniture, moved to Los Angeles from Indiana in 1963, at age 18, to pursue a career in design, because the excitement in materials and technology was there, something that still draws designers over 40 years later. ''They were making canopies for airplanes, casting sheets of acrylic four inches thick and curing them in the ground for 22 days,'' Mr. Hollis Jones said of the aircraft industry in California. ''They weren't making canopies for airplanes in Bloomington, Indiana.'' He used the techniques on furniture, developing an A-list clientele that included architects like John Lautner and Paul Williams, decorators like Billy Haines and Arthur Elrod and the local citizenry -- Hollywood stars. ''I did 40 tissue boxes and wastepaper baskets for Sinatra,'' said Mr. Hollis Jones, who was included in Ms. Moore's ''California Design'' in 1970 and 1976 and who is experimenting now with blowing acrylic by glassmaking techniques. ''What California design is for me, is the fact that it bends the rules and exaggerates everything,'' he explained, as though the process were a sheet of plastic to work with. ''We're not afraid here. You can have a dream and you can make it come true.'' Lauren Saunders, who is included in the Pasadena biennial, quit an important job in the apparel business in 2001 and moved with her fiancé, Daniel Vehse, an industrial designer, from Los Angeles to Ventura, where they live and work in a small law office built in the 1950's, on a street that overlooks the ocean. For Ms. Saunders, it was something of a political act, an element of design not unknown to California, where by the 1970's, and the end of Ms. Moore's series, designers were vociferously invoking craft as a reaction to mass production and corporate inflexibility. Though her hand-loomed pillows show a range of local influences -- one collection, Cypress, was inspired by the colors and shapes of driftwood picked up beachcombing after a storm -- Ms. Saunders is also a California designer by intent. ''I wanted to lead a more satisfying life,'' she said, sitting in her living room, her work stacked on the dining table. ''Create something that had value that I could be really proud of.'' Ms. Saunders, who designed apparel fabrics and described the business as ''a bunch of people running around like they're curing cancer,'' talked last week of her interest in working with other small independent companies run by women, and the idea of employing women who could bring their children to work, with a rotating responsibility for child care. A native of Michigan who studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, Ms. Saunders moved to Los Angeles reluctantly, to take a job in 1993. ''I didn't want to come out to California,'' she said. ''It might as well have been the South.'' Now, Ms. Saunders speaks comfortably of being a California designer, in part because of the artistic individuality it implies, and in part because of what she calls her ''weird utopian desire'' to do the right thing. If you measure success by who succeeds you, Ms. Moore has every reason to be proud. Copyright 2005 New York Times.
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