Word: tubular
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Finns take an intense, quasi-mystical pleasure in their forested countryside, and timber is the country's economic mainstay. The hard, featureless blond birch that Aalto favored had been standard material for Finnish domestic objects. But in the polemical years around 1930, his abandonment of modern, mass-produced tubular steel was a retograde act. Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier had based their famous chairs and couches on state-of-the-art tubing. Aalto became convinced that tubular steel was "not satisfactory from the human point of view." Indeed, an extreme, sometimes quixotic regard...
Aalto's furniture was never again so dashing and hard-edged. He spent the '30s making cantilevered chairs, each a reworking of an idea that the Bauhaus stars Breuer and Mart Stam had established using tubular steel in the '20s. The cantilever is springy, like an athlete's crouch. Indeed, Aalto's cantilevered chairs have a cheerfully anthropomorphic profile. His most splendid variations on the theme also seem the most characteristically Scandinavian: after he had tried seats and backs of plain plywood and boxy upholstery, Aalto designed birch frames crisscrossed with black linen webbing...
...most striking are striped cardboard columns known as Sonotubes and normally used in making concrete forms, which give stature to rented tents, support cloth pyramids, and generally lend settings color, shape and order. Rented steel scaffolding has been bolted into lighthearted, ephemeral structures from which fabric waves. Thin, tubular balloons, some hundreds of feet long, sway in the air like giant streamers. Chain-link fences, essential for security, wear miles of fabric blazoned with Sussman's colors in stars and bars, as well as a special confetti pattern...
...will be called, will replace Bethlehem Steel as America's second-largest producer, J. Paul McGrath behind U.S. Steel. After some inefficient operations are phased out, the new firm will have the capacity to produce 19 million tons annually and will concentrate on flat-rolled, bar, stainless and tubular steel. Its headquarters will be located at Republic's Cleveland offices...
...politics are those of anarchy. The group's 185 pieces of seating, storage, fabrics, rugs and accessories, produced over the past three years, loudly refute the tubular chrome-and-black-leather commandments of accepted modern style. Their form follows fantasy, and they owe more to the media messages of Marshall McLuhan than to the Bauhaus minimalism of Architect Mies van der Rohe. Memphis' latest whimsical collection of 66 pieces went partially on view earlier this month at the trendy Grace Designs showroom in Dallas, the Janus Gallery in Los Angeles and the Limn in San Francisco, and will...