Design for Deception?

Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex in 2009.
courtesy latimes.com

The images and news from Japan continue to reach us – faster than the radiation, I hope. But despite the advanced technologies that allow us to remain hyper-informed, it is easy to feel helpless. You make a donation to a charity, you write to people who know people, you even pray. To make sense of such a nightmare—so incomprehensible in its scope—we begin to narrow in on the details. News clips that focus on a single house far offshore, a beautiful fishing boat far inland, a baby born, an elderly person found in the rubble, collectively seem better able to convey a reality that is difficult for most of us to imagine.

Ever since the Vietnam War, my generation (and those that followed) simply don’t believe what the government tells us, Republican or Democrat. Most of us on the Left don’t believe what corporations tell us, either—they have even more resources than the government to create campaigns of deception. (Remember BP = Beyond Petroleum? Now they are “shrimping again.”) In the 1970s I remember attending anti-nuclear meetings at SF State and writing letters of protesting the dangers of nuclear power. One of the anti-nuke arguments was that the government and industry were in cahoots to deceive the public. But in 1979, it was the release of the movie China Syndrome and then the Three Mile Island accident that truly dampened enthusiasm in this country for nuclear power. The lesson was the same as the war: those in power lie to the citizenry. And they do so in different ways.

Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex in 2011 after tsunami.
courtesy latimes.com

It is this detail that I focus on this afternoon. It’s pretty clear by now that Tokyo Power, or TEPCO, has not been transparent with the Japanese government, the Japanese people, or the nuclear power regulators about what is going on in Fukushima. Of course, this isn’t the first time TEPCO has been in trouble for deception. In September 2002, five executives resigned after it was discovered that thirteen of the company’s sixteen power plants had inaccurate records regarding their reactor core structures.

The Fukushima nuclear power station in Japan.
courtesy vancouversun.com

But the deception that caught my eye today, like the odd boat in a landscape, was the graphic design on the side of the four reactors closest to the water. What do the powder blue and white fragmented square patterns suggest? A serene future? My first thought was a vending machine at an Asian airport. Then a container of disposable diapers. Or perhaps a cardboard container of milk or baby formula. Look at those disintegrating forms. Or do are they in some strange way prescient? They are just strange.

The number 1 reactor building is seen before an explosion
at the Fukushima nuclear power plant.
courtesy thetelegraph.co.uk

Perhaps TEPCO wanted to diminish the scale of the structures against the water and the sky? More likely the design was, like most advertisements, an attempt to suggest that nuclear energy is clean and pure, like a baby after a bath. The most telling pictures so far have been the before and after juxtapositions of the pristine, light blue and white ‘gift boxes’ with the now-destroyed structures that hold the seemingly melting panels.

The number 1 reactor building is seen after an explosion
at the Fukushima nuclear power plant.
courtesy thetelegraph.co.uk

Frankly, I prefer the concrete monolith that is the Diablo Canyon Power Plant. (Never mind that the plant was not designed with an Earthquake Emergency Plan according to Huffington Post’s Chris Kirkham: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/16/california-nuclear-emergency-response_n_836751.html?ref=fb&src=sp). The structure is not decorated like a tissue box—it looks like the bearer of mass destruction that it may well be. For once, the much-maligned utility Pacific Gas & Electric engaged in some truth in advertising. While I admire the Japanese tendency to impose a little aesthetic improvement on the most banal objects, the decorative touch at Fukushima just seems cruel now. And while design so often reflects our ideals and not our worst fears, I prefer design to not disguise the truth of what we build.

The Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant
in San Luis Obispo county, California.
courtesy slocounty.ca.gov

Placewares: A Big Well-Designed Circle

Maynard Hale Lyndon and Lu Wendel Lyndon

Maynard Hale Lyndon and Lu Wendel Lyndon were integral parts of the famous Design Research (D/R) store before they founded their own firm, Placewares. They are part of the history of modern design in the United States. When they moved up to Sea Ranch, retirement wasn’t in the cards, so they set up a small shop and gallery in Gualala, the town immediately north of Sea Ranch. It is very much like an updated but miniature version of Design Research, without all the furniture. It is one of my favorite stores anywhere, and I wanted to know the Lyndons’ story. When you look at Morley Baer’s photographs of MLTW’s early Sea Ranch houses, you see they feature a lot of Marimekko fabrics, one of the mainstays of D/R and now Placewares. It’s a wonderful big circle.

Maynard and Lu thought New Year’s Day would be quiet and a good time for a conversation. But design devotees are a loyal bunch, and customers began calling almost as soon as we sat down. The seasoned shopkeepers slipped in and out of conversation with grace, and it was only later I realized they had sold a fair amount of merchandise during our interview.

Interviewer: How did you get started in design?

Lu Lyndon: When I was out of college, I moved from San Francisco to Cambridge and discovered D/R. And like many people, it’s where I went on Saturday, what I did for recreation. I would just go hang out in the store because it was so beautiful.

Maynard Lyndon: This was the original store in the wood frame house on Brattle Street?

Lu Lyndon: Right. This was in the early 1960s. A year later I moved back to San Francisco and worked as a legal secretary. A woman I worked with said to me one day that her sister was coming to visit. She told me that she worked for Design Research and that she was scouting a location for a store in San Francisco. And I said, “I have to meet your sister.”

The sister didn’t think I was tall enough, blond enough, whatever enough, and sort of said she didn’t think she was interested in my working at D/R. And I said, “Well, I’d be happy to come and help. I know you need hands to set up the store. I’ll do anything you need.” I just wanted to be there. So I helped set up the store. And then I managed to worm myself into working there on Saturdays. I had a fulltime job during the week, and on Saturdays I put on my Marimekko dress and went to work at D/R. Over time I was given a fulltime job and then became the assistant store manager. When the Beverly Hills store lost its manager, I worked there temporarily before being promoted to be part of the buying group in Cambridge—talk about a big circle!

Ben Thompson's D/R store in Cambridge.
Courtesy Chronicle Books

Interviewer: Did you have a design background?

Lu Lyndon: I never really had much design training. I was an English Lit major in college. But my passion is design. And so it’s been a lifelong career and love for me. And I met this guy. That helped.

Interviewer: Did you meet in Cambridge?

Lu Lyndon: No, I actually met Maynard after I was given the position in Cambridge, while I was still in Beverly Hills. The president of D/R at the time said, “You need to find a replacement for yourself and train that person before we can move you, because we can’t let Beverly Hills flounder.” Meanwhile Maynard was interviewing for a position as product development director. D/R was trying to put together a team of three people to develop new products— Ristomatti Ratia, the son of Marimekko’s founder, Armi Ratia; Craig Hodgetts, an architect from Los Angeles; and Maynard.

Maynard Lyndon: One of us being in Boston, one of us in Los Angeles, and one in Helsinki. That was the plan.

Craig was designing a new building for D/R to be built in Beverly Hills, which never happened.

While D/R was setting up this department, they needed a store manager for Beverly Hills. They said, “You might as well learn the culture of this company directly by managing the Beverly Hills store; when the board gets the funding together, we’ll begin the design department back East.”

Lu Lyndon: So a year later, Maynard came back to Cambridge. But by then things started going really awry with D/R. Once Ben Thompson was out of the picture, there was a succession of different people who were in charge, and the heart and soul went out of the company.

We both left and started our own business, which was a design-build firm. We did graphics. We did space planning for lawyers, for medical people, and for people in their private homes—whatever work we could find. This was 1973—there wasn’t a lot of work.

Maynard Lyndon: Annual reports, a whole series of things. Wielding hammers, paint brushes, Letraset—whatever was needed to get the job done!

Lu Lyndon: We were very poor.

Maynard Lyndon: We called that company Placemakers. We were making places for people.

Lu Lyndon: One of the projects that we had was for a couple who owned the train station building in Concord. There were a number of little stores within the train station, but there was no system for moving people through the building, so we came up with a signage scheme. At one meeting, the owners were all down in the doldrums, and we asked, “What’s wrong?” They said, “Well, our major tenant just stole away in the middle of the night, leaving the main store space empty.”

Maynard and I looked at each other and thought, well, we know a little bit about retail. So we put together a store for them. The arrangement was that they would put up the money, and we would do the store—the concept, the layout, the build-out, the buying, the displays, the necessary backroom systems, hiring and training staff—and we would run it for six months or so and then we would leave. It was called Plum Loco.

Plum Loco store in Concord Train Station designed by
Maynard and Lu Lyndon
Photo by Steve Rosenthal

Maynard Lyndon: After three years there, we said, “We’ve got to do our own store.” We came up with the name Placewares and opened our first store on January 11, 1978. So this January, it is 33 years since we started the original Placewares.

Lu Lyndon: By that point, we had already put together a unique collection of products that we had sourced from all over the world.

Maynard Lyndon: Our tagline for that first store was “a newfangled hardware store.” We got a lot of attention at the time, because our store was the first to focus on storage and organization as a category. From our design/build days, we had learned that most people have plenty of living space; they simply don’t use it very well. What we offered in our stores were products that could help people use their spaces better. Our tag line changed to “specializing in places to put things” and then to “the storage and organization resource.”

Lu Lyndon: We opened our first store in Concord, because we knew the Concord customer from our years at the train station store.

Maynard Lyndon: As we expanded—at one time we had seven stores—we would literally count the number of Volvos in the parking lots.

Lu Lyndon: That was the qualifier. Volvo owners were people who were sensitive to design and function and durability—and had a degree of disposable income.

One of the Lyndons' Placewares stores in the Boston area.

One of the Lyndons' Placewares stores in the Boston area.

One of the Lyndons' Placewares stores in the Boston area.

Interviewer: And the name of your own store was Placewares?

Lu Lyndon: Yes. We coined that name, meaning “wares for your place.” Because we advertised fairly heavily in Boston Magazine, people would come out to Concord. When the 1979 gas shortage happened, customers said, “You know, you have to have a store in town.” We decided that if we opened a store in Boston, we had to go to the premiere shopping area, and that would be Newbury Street. So the second store was on Newbury Street.

Maynard Lyndon: We were there for 26 years.

Interviewer: What did you sell?

Lu Lyndon: The same product mix as the store in Concord—storage and organization.

Interviewer: Tell me about LyndonDesign.

Lu Lyndon: We started LyndonDesign, which is the second part of the name of our store/gallery here in Gualala, in 1983. We were designing product largely in response to our customers’ wishes and requests for things that they couldn’t find to fit their needs.

We didn’t want to be the manufacturer or the marketer or distributor, so we’ve always worked on a royalty arrangement.

But since we’ve moved here, we’ve downplayed product design and are doing the gallery instead. We combined the names when we reopened here—Placewares+LyndonDesign—to enable us to still design some things if someone asks, but we’re not pursuing product or interior design like we used to. In the gallery, we’re developing a coterie of artists who are doing special things in different materials. The whole focus of the gallery has been architecture and landscape.

The gallery wing of Placewares+LyndonDesign in Gualala.

Maynard Lyndon's recent collage constructions on exhibit.

Maynard Lyndon's recent collage constructions.

Interviewer: Which of course is what Sea Ranch is about. Maynard, let’s go back to how you got into the design world. I know about your father’s practice in Los Angeles.

Maynard Lyndon: Yes, Maynard Lyndon, FAIA, was my father (that’s why I use all three names, Maynard Hale Lyndon), and my mother, Jo Hale Lyndon, was a consultant to my father’s architectural practice. She did all the colors for his buildings. She also opened a store in Detroit that she and he designed together, called Contemporary Backgrounds.

My mother had gone to the New York 1938 exposition at MoMA of Alvar Aalto’s work and was so taken with all that collection of things—the glass and the furniture—that she became the second importer and retailer of Aalto pieces in America. In Detroit, my father was doing very modern, award-winning schools.

Contemporary Backgrounds opened in 1940, and it wasn’t so far away from Cranbrook and what was happening there. It was a very exciting time. I don’t remember it personally, but of course I have some photographs. (My brother, Donlyn Lyndon, FAIA, did an exhibit at UC Berkeley and then at UC Santa Barbara about Contemporary Backgrounds.)

Contemporary Backgrounds
Photo by Maynard Lyndon, FAIA

Contemporary Backgrounds
Photo by Maynard Lyndon, FAIA

We still have some original Aalto pieces from that store in our house here. This type of design was engrained in my childhood.

Dad went to an exposition of new housing ideas in the early 1940s in Los Angeles where he saw a house that Richard Neutra designed. It was a 1936 plywood house, two-story, a very early use of plywood, partially demountable. You could take it apart in sections and move it. My father came back to the office in Detroit and called Neutra and introduced himself as an architect. They became friends and collaborated together later. Dad bought that house from the exposition over the phone. Meanwhile, he bought a lot in West Los Angeles outside of Westwood and had the house moved to that site. As a young child, I grew up in this house; it was amazing. We lived in that house until Dad designed his own house out in Malibu in 1949.  You can see Julius Shulman's photos of it in Barbara Lamprecht's book on Neutra.

Malibu House designed by Maynard Lyndon, FAIA, 1949.
Photo by Maynard Lyndon, FAIA

Malibu House designed by Maynard Lyndon, FAIA, 1949.
Photo by Maynard Lyndon, FAIA

Maynard and Donlyn Lyndon, FAIA
at exhibit of Maynard Lyndon, FAIA's work in Los Angeles.
Pictured here is their family home designed by Maynard Lyndon, FAIA from 1949.

I went to architecture school at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, and then to painting school at the Chouinard Art Institute in downtown Los Angeles.

Interviewer: What was your first business?

Maynard Lyndon: A toy store on Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica I founded in 1967. I called it Colorform. I designed and built the store, designed the toys, made the toys. I started a little manufacturing company called ColorformLine, making a line of children’s furniture in three garages in Santa Monica.

After two or three years, I was getting a lot of attention in the press, and unbeknownst to me, the president of Creative Playthings, which was in Princeton, appeared on our doorstep. I didn’t know who he was; I didn’t even know Creative Playthings particularly. We walked around the block several times that day, and by the end of that conversation, he said, “We want you to come back East and head our product development for Creative Playthings.”

Creative Playthings had been bought by CBS, the television network. They were buying these little companies thinking that they should branch out. So within very few months, I sold my store to one of my customers and moved to Princeton to head the product development for Creative Playthings, which was an amazing experience.

I had I think 17 designers and engineers under my umbrella and a secretary. This corporate world was very new to me! Eventually, CBS rid themselves of all of these fun little companies. But it launched me into a totally different world of understanding how things are made, how designers work with manufacturers, and how things are distributed.

Interviewer: How old were you?

Maynard Lyndon: I was in my 20s. It was a fantastic situation. Later I returned to California, where I became product development director for Forms+Surfaces, Santa Barbara, an architectural hardware and finishes company.

And again, I got into another whole layer of things that was a great learning experience. But the owner had never had somebody besides himself doing the design. And finally I just said, “This isn’t going to work. There can’t be two of us.” And I begin looking for something else. I responded to an ad by this company, Design Research, and ended up meeting with then-CEO Peter Sprague.

Interviewer: He had done the takeover?

Maynard Lyndon: Yes, and Phil Doub was then president. I met with them in San Francisco and Los Angeles. And they said, “Well, we’re trying to convince the board to start a product development team of our own.” And that’s when this whole idea started, but they didn’t have the money put together.

It’s odd the way the world happens. And so there I was. Lu trained me at D/R Beverly Hills for about two weeks before D/R moved her back to Cambridge.

Beverly Hills was a totally different world than Princeton or Cambridge. And I had this staff of 15 to 20, all women except the stock boy. I had to learn how to deal with their various quirks, and they had to learn to deal with my quirks. About a year later D/R moved me back to Cambridge, where I managed their flagship store for a while.

Interviewer: How did you get from Placewares in Boston to here?

Maynard Lyndon: Both of us have been coming to Sea Ranch since the 1960s even before we knew each other. In 1997 on a trip to visit my brother Donlyn (the “L” of MLTW), we thought, “Well, just for fun, let’s see if there’s any property available that seems right and that we can afford.” We always wanted to be out here. We found a lot, bought it, and went back to Boston and continued to work. But we began designing our house with Donlyn. He did the siting and shaping of the house and we did the interiors. Matt Sylvia built it; it was the last house he finished. Interestingly—in relation to your big circle notion—Matt used to build Neutra houses in Los Angeles before Sea Ranch invited him to come build up here. He built over 150 homes at Sea Ranch. Our house was finished in 2000, and for four years after that we commuted back and forth to Boston.

Maynard and Lu Lyndon's Sea Ranch house.
Architecture by Donlyn Lyndon, FAIA

Inside the Lyndons' home at Sea Ranch.

Inside the Lyndons' home at Sea Ranch.

The view over the sheep meadow.

By the 26th anniversary of Placewares in 2004, we said, “We’ve done this long enough. It’s time to move on.”

We gathered all our employees together at our Boston headquarters and told them we were closing the stores down and we would help them find other employment. And that’s what we did. Every two weeks, we closed a store and consolidated the merchandise and whatever remaining staff. The last location to close was our first store, in Concord. On the very last day, there were just the two of us, just the way we had started 26 years earlier.

Within months, we were out here at Sea Ranch full time with the idea to continue the design practice, because we still had various royalty arrangements. We thought that would sustain us, but we missed all the contact with people.

And so we began asking ourselves and family and people we were meeting up here, “What does this town need?” People said, “We need a quick photo place. We need a drycleaner. A messenger service.” In Lu’s Mini Cooper, we could have the Mini Messenger Service. Lu thought about a madeleine baking company.

But finally we said, “Why don’t we just do what we know how to do? But let’s change the LyndonDesign part, and let’s do a gallery because there are so many talented artists up here.”

So now we are back doing what we love and talking with people directly. And Lu, you should take over talking about it. You haven’t had a chance to say a word.

Lu Lyndon: I used to tease Maynard when we interviewed prospective new employees. When you do an interview, you’re supposed to let the interviewee do the talking. I used to have to nudge Maynard because he was the one who was doing all the talking, describing Placewares to the interviewee!

Interviewer: So do you feel like this is the essence of what you were about, getting to the pure designs and art, without the huge overhead and delivery and operations and finance?

Lu Lyndon: When we were planning this store, the big question was, what is really needed here? What kinds of things do we know about that would resonate in this community? I first found Sea Ranch in the late 1960s while I was working at D/R—I didn’t know Maynard or Donlyn then. People would come to D/R to furnish their houses up here.

On my first visit I just fell in love with Sea Ranch. And I said to myself, “Someday I’m going to live here.” And luckily for me, someday happened. But the store really is a response to the community. It is a way for us to give something back and to be able to continue our love of sourcing new products and finding interesting, good, well-designed things. And sharing them with our customers.

I have always been very careful that whatever I acquire is well-designed and beautiful and enduring. I have this attitude that that’s the way we need to live. It’s hard to be sour about the world if you’re surrounded by beautiful things—and interesting people! It’s also a very sustainable approach to living. If the things you have are things you love, you’re not throwing them away and replacing them every two years.

Placewares+LyndonDesign in Gualala.

Placewares+LyndonDesign in Gualala.

Placewares+LyndonDesign in Gualala.

The Finnish designer Kaj Franck designed a line of dishes for Iittala in 1952. They are the dishes I bought from D/R for my first apartment; we still use them today at home, and we sell them in our store. His whole attitude was to keep things simple. Buy things that you love and use them every day. Don’t put them in a cupboard for special occasions. They’re part of your life. I feel very fortunate to have known both Armi Ratia, who founded Marimekko, and Ben Thompson, who was D/R. And to be able to continue what they began, in some small way in this little outpost in Gualala….

Maynard and Lu Lyndon
at their first Placewares store in January 1978.

All photos courtesy Maynard Hale Lyndon and Lu Wendel Lyndon except as noted.

Further information:

Placewares+LyndonDesign
http://www.placewares.com/

Design Research Book
http://www.chroniclebooks.com/index/main,book-info/store,books/products_id,8937/
http://www.archpaper.com/e-board_rev.asp?News_ID=4886&PagePosition=4

The Sea Ranch
http://www.papress.com/html/book.details.page.tpl?isbn=9781568983868

Watching Over Point Lobos, Watching Over Us

Cynthia Criley Williams
November 1, 1915–January 29, 2011


Cynthia in August 2009

Cynthia Williams’ work, in the 25 years I knew her, was her web. And I don’t mean the electronic kind. She was like a friendly spider from some children’s book, catching almost everybody who wandered up the path to her ramshackle mid-century redwood house overlooking Point Lobos and the ocean. She could be a little aloof at first, but after you were part of the circle, her love was constant. But she wasn’t overly expressive. You just knew. When folks had problems with their parents, they could sit near the fireplace or on the wire ice-cream-parlor chairs and feel her special kind of unconditional love. On all but the rare warm days, there was a fire burning in the fireplace, and everybody was welcome for dinner. Some days there would be only a few, and other nights a dozen or more. Nobody really seemed to plan: Cynthia’s house was like Carmel Highlands’s very own special soup kitchen. Around age 90, she declared she was retiring from cooking and expected others to figure out how to stretch a dinner for two into a dinner for 20. And they did. You might sit next to a famous folksinger, an actor, a judge, an anarchist, a brilliant mathematician, a therapist, a technology millionaire, an out-of-work carpenter, a painter, or somebody’s nephew travelling from a faraway land. Generally, the dull didn’t stay.


Bird Rock at Sunset

Cynthia lived her life on the Monterey peninsula because her father, the painter Theodore Criley, settled in Carmel around the turn of the last century. He was the real deal, one of the original bohemians. His studio faced north for the light and looked west toward Bird Rock. Amazingly, the little wood building has not fallen off the cliff into Gibson Creek. Criley died young, in 1930, and the family sold off some of the parcels of the land overlooking the water. On the high point of the property that remained, Cynthia and her then-husband Russell commissioned a house from her brother, Ted Criley, Jr., a well-known Southern California architect. In this simple home, she brought up her family and helped an enormous number of wayward children of all ages. This most modest of modernist houses provided comfort and a roof to literally thousands of people. The living room was perfect for four or 40 if they spilled onto the terrace.


A typical evening

A few years ago, Cynthia was studying Greek to keep her mind nimble. As I grew portly in the last few years, she would nag me each time I showed up that I needed to lose a bit of weight. She softened the criticism by adding, “We want you around here for a long time.” In her last year, she said, “You look great.” I knew things had gotten fuzzy.

When I saw Cynthia in the fall of 2009, she spoke quite openly about death and said she wasn’t afraid of it. She treated it very matter-of-factly, the way she treated most things. She told a story about an out-of-body experience and said when she came to, she no longer feared death. I never heard her explore the mystical or talk about pop psychology, but she had some kind of faith in what was beyond the visible world.

Around Christmas 2009, she took ill and thought that was the end. Old friends flew in from all over, and the living room was full again. Cynthia rallied through Easter (always a favorite for generations of children looking for eggs). The built-in sofa in the living room was removed and a hospital bed was installed. The parade seemed to keep going. Even though she no longer recognized everybody in the room, she wanted to be where the action was. She wanted to go on experiencing the web she wove. She lasted another year or so, coming in and out of focus.


Cynthia with her presents


Cynthia with her daughter Molly and composer Paul Crabtree

This Christmas a complete stranger, a young man from Canada, wandered into the living room. After he’d learned he couldn’t camp at Point Lobos, someone suggested he ask if he could pitch his tent at the Williams’s. There was always an extra place for the unexpected wayfarer, and within minutes, he found himself first a guest of honor at a birthday party for our friend Laura and then, the next night, part of the regular Christmas eve caroling and eggnog party. He stayed through the holidays. Cynthia’s way continued even as she faded.

On Christmas Eve during a break in the caroling, I walked past the living room and ran into her son-in-law, Tom. He had been watching Cynthia through her bedroom window. The curtains were open to the view. He remarked how her shallow breathing was like the nearby ocean.

The constant presence of the sea’s rhythm smoothed out some of life’s tragedies. She shared this place and would always say, “It’s not mine. I am just a tenant here.” That was her business acumen showing at the same time as her spiritual side. I was lucky to know her. She was everybody’s favorite grandma.


The view from Cynthia's terrace

Verda Alexander: Artist & Designer In Dialogue

Verda in her studio
Photo: Jasper Sanidad

This morning Verda Alexander and her husband Primo Orpilla were named Designers of the Year by Contract magazine. They have ridden a few technology waves providing office spaces for all kinds of high tech companies. Their work often has a surprising edge, whether it is a form, a color, a mural. Part of that edge comes from Verda’s personal explorations as an artist. She moves between the functional and the aesthetic all the time. I thought it would be interesting to find out more about her work.

Q: What did you study in school?

I got a Bachelors in art, then a Masters in landscape architecture. After several years of practicing interior design I went back and got an MFA.

Q: Can you recount some of that process?

When I got my bachelors my heroes were artists like Michael Heizer, Robert Irwin, and Mary Miss. I was interested in earthwork artists and artists who engaged the public. I liked how Mary Miss used plywood and made these great geometric shapes in the landscape.

I thought that the way to follow that interest was to get an architecture or a landscape architecture degree. The portfolio I submitted for graduate school was all art projects that I had done at San Jose State. Then I got my landscape architecture degree, and it seemed like I'd gotten even further away from the art thing, because once you go down the practical and professional path you aren’t seen as an artist.

Verda with her husband and partner Primo
Photo: Jasper Sanidad

Q: Can you tell me more about that professional path?

The priority was starting and growing our business. That took most of my time for close to ten years. When the dot com bomb happened, I found myself with some extra time and thought, all right, seize the moment. So I went back for my masters in fine art at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Before that I was doing art on my own. When I was travelling I would be sketching nature, and then I started doing these little pattern drawings of the leaf patterns and repeating them. I was looking for pattern in the environment or some sort of motif that's taken from nature and used architecturally.

Q: Did you decide to reverse your emphasis and make art the more significant practice and have the design work be less important? Or were they influencing each other?

They were influencing each other, but I didn't realize that they were. At first I wanted them to very be separate. But after getting my MFA, I thought, well, at some point it would be great if they did come together. For example, I could design patterns for a carpet company. But there are very few who can blur the line between art and design like Jorge Pardo. I don't know if I want to do that exactly, but it's an interesting idea.

Verda's studio work surface
Photo: Jasper Sanidad

Verda's sculpture on table
Photo: Jasper Sanidad

The Orpilla/Alexander Living Room
Photo: Jasper Sanidad

Q: So talk about some of the things you started to explore when you were at the Art Institute.

My first projects had a lot to do with my landscape architecture -- I guess studies would be the best way to put it, like thinking about notions of the picturesque and landscape architecture history and trying to incorporate those in my art.

I made a garden fountain that had a virtual component and a sound component. I was interested in playing around with, how you might create public art, but more subtle public art, where you'd be walking and you'd hear something or you'd see something in the landscape, but it was very subtle. I created a Mary garden.

Q: A merry garden?

A Mary garden, which is a medieval garden form type, a garden that's based symbolically on the Virgin Mary.

Nativities
Courtesy of verdaalexander.com

Q: Where was this?

It was installed inside.

But I got frustrated, because it was like two layers -- first of all, art is difficult to understand, and then you've got all this landscape history that nobody knows anything about at all.

So I took away the layers. What I found was that I was really interested in a lot of the forms, the architectural shapes and forms, motifs, and, again, pattern. Many of them remained consistent over time. I took those shapes or patterns or motifs and mutated them or abstracted them and then transformed them into some other form. You could tell what they were, but it was actually a completely new and almost, futuristic shape or motif.

Q: Can you give me some examples?

I took some medieval window moldings in profile and put them in a 3D architectural program and rotated them on the axis so they were 3D objects. And they were just bizarre. You couldn't put a finger on exactly what they were. They could look like bombs and baby toys at the same time. But they started as an architectural feature from the Middle Ages and ended up looking quite futuristic.

I found that the idea of a picnic, which was probably a17th century idea, had several motifs to work with like the checkerboard cloth, and fleur de lys. I took it from a two-dimensional shape and made it three-dimensional installation. I was reimagining a flat still life.

The Picnic Installation
Courtesy of verdaalexander.com

Medieval Mouldings Installation View
Courtesy of verdaalexander.com

Victoria's Desk
Courtesy of verdaalexander.com

Q: And making the still life less still?

Yes. I love history, architectural history, and landscape architectural history. I took one of Thomas Jefferson's round buildings and extruded it and turned it into an art piece.

Recently I have been working with more mundane things like hazard stripes and traffic stripes and turning those into sculpture. You can tell where it came from but again, you get something radically different.

Run A Way
Courtesy of verdaalexander.com

Freeway Sign
Courtesy of verdaalexander.com

Q: First tell me about the project I saw on exhibit about Brittany. Architecture, interior design, and place seemed like significant influences there.

I was in Brittany for about two weeks, and I researched where people lived and how many of the homes were laid out in a similar manner.

Q: Were these fishermen’s homes? What century were they?

The 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. And they hadn't changed over the years, in a lot of cases. They belonged to average people.

Q: What was the project?

I recreated the logic system of the furnishings. I maneuvered to certain shapes – most if was furniture, including tables, beds, and wardrobes. They didn’t have chairs, they all sat on benches. I looked at every house plan and created volumetric sculptures. They had a modernist feel to them. But nobody got the historical component, which is fine.

Q: The origin may not matter.

Brittany Homes
Courtesy of verdaalexander.com

Goethe's House
Courtesy of verdaalexander.com

Q: Your more recent work seems to be about more contemporary American settlements. They are like puzzle pieces of city life.

I worked with the skyline you see at night. I did all kinds of abstractions of a building window grids. I silk-screened them onto a kind of stiff paper. I glued them into an assemblage sculpture. It’s called “Berg.”

Berg
Courtesy of verdaalexander.com

Q: Like a town in Europe?

And an iceberg, because it looks like a crazy city growing out of an iceberg. It also reminds me of ‘40s graphic novels.

I also love airports and all the markings. I've been playing with and studying airports and redrawing different airports. And what I ended up finally coming up with was taking the center stripe of a roadway and creating a logic system for how I'd construct these pieces. A box with an end, a telescoping kind of idea, but it's rectangular, and just making them over and over again, and connecting them with the stripes so once it's done, it’s trying to warp it to its extreme.

Control Tower
Courtesy of verdaalexander.com

Hut for Ro Cham
Courtesy of verdaalexander.com

Q: So you're warping cardboard?

A box made out of cardboard.

I put them together and stencil on the stripe. And so it would go from big to small, to small to big. And I'd make them whatever lengths I wanted. And then I'd twist them and turn them and tweak them, and it became kind of this crazy, three-dimensional roadway system.

Q: Are you controlling the chaos?

No. The crazier the better. And really, the limitations are just the materials, and how much I could work and tweak them.

Q: How did you know when you were done?

Well, I might never have finished. It was whenever I ran out of time. So when I installed the piece at the San Jose Museum of Art, I just made them until my deadline, till I had to ship them over there. I had three days to install it, and I worked on it till I was out of time.

Q: So does it matter if you ever sell any of these?

No, because I have my day job, which most artists do.

Orpilla/Alexander Home
Photo: Jasper Sanidad

The artist walks from her studio to her living quarters.
Photo: Jasper Sanidad

Q: Does that free you to then make something that doesn't have to be marketed or commodified?

Yes. Or archival. One of the original runaways, that’s what I call the road pieces, broke in the heat. The glue melted on a hot day and it collapsed!

Q: How has your young son Apolo been influenced by your being an artist?

He has a very broad idea of what art might be; he never dismisses anything. Some of the best moments at the last Venice Biennale were with him. We had just left one of Scarpa’s buildings and we walked into this plaza where somebody left a bunch of toys to ride in a little group. They were fairly far apart from each other in this weird perfect circle, but Primo and I hadn’t noticed it. Apollo saw it and he was absolutely positive it was a work of art.

For more information:

www.verdaalexander.com
www.contractmagazine.com

The Toys in Venice