DESIGN. `Fast' furniture from the sketch pad of Philippe Starck. French designer considers his job as `a service for others'

It was seated at a lounge in Tokyo sipping a drink, that French designer Philippe Starck sketched out one of his latest successes -- a folding table with ``baroque tendencies'' --on the back of a coaster. Pleased with the result, he immediately telefaxed the drawing to the Italian furniture firm of Driade. That simple sketch was produced almost unchanged for the latest furniture show in Milan, where the designer recalls it drew rave reviews. Says Starck: ``I design things very, very quickly.'' Considering all the projects he has designed, and all he has in the works, the 36-year-old Starck has to design quickly. Within a few minutes, he rattles off a list of projects that includes a train bridge in southern France, the set of a science fiction movie, a ``bizarre'' new pasta shell, a champagne bottle, and a toilet. While he is still best known for furniture, his credits also cover a night club in Dallas (known as the Starck Club), caf'es in Paris, shopping centers in Singapore, and the private

apartments of French President Franois Mitterrand at the Elys'ee Palace.

With his designs acclaimed in Europe, Japan, and the United States and his products breaking onto the mass market, Philippe Starck is among the brighter stars in the design world today. A recent profile in the Paris weekly Le Nouvel Observateur described him as ``one of those visionaries who help give an identity to our time, because they fundamentally change the essentials of life, in other words its details.''

Driven as he is by a bubbling store of creativity, Starck would probably agree. He accepts his success calmly, but not without a hint of braggadocio. ``For any person who uses his head,'' he says, ``who tries to be creative, who considers his job as a service for others, who is honest, who is a little hysterical, who is a little agitated, who doesn't mind spending his life in a plane and drawing all night, there is no reason why it shouldn't work out.''

While he refuses to accept any label or school for his style, Starck's lean, simple lines do represent something of a reaction to Italian or Memphis-style formalism. His furniture, for which he is best known, is almost another revival of the art-deco revival of the 1960s.

``There is a sort of sobriety and purity . . . that is breaking through in France and elsewhere,'' says Philippe Vindry, a manager for the Paris department store Au Printemps that has been showcasing Starck furniture for the past year. ``There is a tendency to return to simple decors that Philippe Starck does very naturally.''

Starck, a round-faced man, with tussled curly hair, a wispy goatee, and a kindly smile, says he tries to impose a logic on his designs rather than follow a fashion. ``There is not Starck style, there is a logic in the face of a problem,'' he says. ``There is a constant between all these things.''

He strives, he says, to make products that are useful, durable, and creative, while meeting a dozen other parameters imposed by current times.

While once a designer could concentrate on creating a chair for a person to sit on, Starck says there are now many more considerations.

Ecologically, the designer ``must know that the production of a piece of furniture will hurt neither the earth, nor the people who make it.''

There are concerns about the the semantics of an object, about its portability in a mobile society, and even about its ``mediagenic qualities.'' Says Starck: ``It must be mediagenic because that is the only way it can become known by the public and can penetrate the public and be of service to the public.''

Recent flamboyant designs of the formalists have lost their ``freshness'' says Starck, as designers simply substituted one color or shape for another.

The results are ``things that are expensive, that are culturally cut off from the masses, that go out of style, and that once again prevented people form living in their generation,'' he says.

At Au Printemps, Starck bookcases start at $300, and chairs at about $100. He sells other designs through a mail order catalog at often lower prices.

Perhaps the more unusual of Starck's chairs is a sort of ``kneeling stool,'' marketed under the name ``Mr. Bliss,'' that is said to help people with back troubles. The angle of the kneeling pads and of the seat are intended to give a person good posture.

Starck says he borrowed the design from a team of American doctors, and he says it will become part of a trend to create especially comfortable furniture in the computer age. ``Computerization will make furniture more comfortable because people will use it for longer periods, since many of them will be working at home,'' he says.

So then he is a modernist. Or a futurist? No, Starck just doesn't like his work to be considered as part of a trend.

``I don't have a great consciousness of all these movements,'' he says. ``I do, instead of theorizing. . . . Instead of writing books about architecture, I design architecture. I consider that fundemental, and I think a lot of people should do what I do.''

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
QR Code to DESIGN. `Fast' furniture from the sketch pad of Philippe Starck. French designer considers his job as `a service for others'
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/1985/1127/ifurn.html
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe