Share With Your FriendsLAST month at the Wooster Street showroom of Knoll International, the long-awaited furniture collection by the Philadelphia architect Robert Venturi was presented to the New York design community. It was, at one level, simply a group of nine chairs, three tables, a sofa, some floral patterns and a textile tapestry. But like much of Mr. Venturi's work - including his watershed books on architecture, ''Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture'' and ''Learning From Las Vegas,'' of which he was co-author - the collection was highly provocative: no one left without strong reactions. One viewer told an editor that the collection would ''sweep the country,'' and the editor responded, ''Yeah, like the Hula-Hoop.'' Since 1966, when ''Complexity and Contradiction'' was published, Mr. Venturi has successfully predicted much that has happened in design and architecture; like the books, the furniture promises to catalyze many changes in the field. While there are short- and long-term trends in design and architecture, rarely can the advent of a style as radically different as the Venturi collection be dated and placed so clearly.
The impact of the collection was especially strong because during its five-and-a-half-year development, it remained a well-kept secret. Knoll did not want its collection copied before it was presented. There was an overstuffed, traditional sofa brimming with Dacron and foam, covered in a tapestry weave with a floral pattern. The gray bird's-eye maple dining table for eight was so traditional that it could be the scene of a Thanksgiving dinner - a setting for the return of family conversation to the table. Another flower pattern, with pairs of chopsticks sprinkled over its surface, was inspired by a fabric owned by the grandmother of an architect in Mr. Venturi's Philadelphia and New York firm, Venturi, Rauch & Scott Brown. But while some of the pieces could furnish a Norman Rockwell illustration, others - particularly the chairs - are the furniture of cartoons. The chairs are constructed as cutouts representing Chippendale, Queen Anne, Empire, Art Deco and other styles. They seem to have been put through a wringer: flat in the front, thin in profile.
Mr. Venturi acknowledges what he calls their ''bluntness.'' If for some the furniture is difficult to like, it is also difficult to dismiss. The chairs might have an intentional bluntness, but they are also quite subtle. The Empire chair, for example, has several ripples across its front surfaces that catch highlights and shadows. The chairs, cut from molded sheets of plywood, taper elegantly at the top. Some have a natural wood finish; others are surfaced in a plastic laminate. The fine craftsmanship of the chairs is best viewed from the side, where the laminations of the plywood show in thin striations; a single joint where the back and the seat join is clearly shown. Knoll's vice president of design, Jeffrey Osborne, says, ''The front is like a Western storefront - a facade - but in profile the chairs reveal themselves as minimal and as modern.'' While the facade might represent traditional chairs, the side profile refers to the influence of pioneer modernist architects such as the Finn Alvar Aalto.
For Mr. Venturi, furniture is not an acquired flirtation. He said his interest in it dates from his childhood. ''My mother had books on furniture,'' he said, ''and at an early age I could distinguish, for example, between Chippendale and Queen Anne. Denise and I collect - we have something like 83 chairs in the house.'' Denise Scott Brown is a partner in the firm and his wife. Mr. Venturi had made sketches of the chairs before he and the furniture company started working together. Mr. Osborne said that initially in design development, the chairs were ''sweet'' and then somewhat clunky; the designs went through some 30 revisions before the final versions that were presented last month. Mr. Venturi's idea for the sofa, which originated in a house commission, was proposed at the same time. Though there are only 9 chairs, the collection adds up to 183 pieces, given all the possible combinations of surfaces, decoration and forms. ''We're not designing the perfect chair or chairs,'' Mr. Venturi said, ''but a method that can involve many variations.
It is the way General Motors can get so many variations from the standard Buick, Chevrolet and Oldsmobile models. Standardization in our case gives us richness and variety, not the universal chair.'' The collection is itself eclectic. While the chairs are manufactured by machine, they have, besides their frontal silhouettes, several qualities associated with traditional furniture. They are relatively heavy, and unlike many pieces of springy metal furniture, they are solid and stable. They are also larger than the most modern, minimal pieces. ''After World War II, chairs became smaller,'' Mr. Venturi said. He said he wants his new furniture ''to hold its own in residential and office interiors.'' ''The counterpart to this large scale is the refinement in detailing - the tapering, for example,'' he added. This generosity of scale comes from the traditional furniture that inspired the collection - furniture made for houses that were themselves large. The proportions of the chairs as seen in their facades are also accurately taken from the original models.
''The flat silhouettes are the essence of the styles from which they are derived, especially in their proportions,'' said the architect. ''As I get older, I realize that one of the essential things in architecture that no one talks about is proportion. The distinction between good and bad architecture is a matter of inches.'' ''The greatness of Borromini, for example, was not that he was original,'' Mr. Venturi said. ''It was those moldings. Their proportions are tense - they have life. This quality comes out of minute variations of detail.'' For Mr. Venturi, the difference between working in architecture and furniture has been that of size and scale. ''In furniture, a thirty-second of an inch is very significant,'' he said. ''You're also working with something that has direct contact with the human body, which has curves and which moves. You seldom really touch a building. We worked on the profiles of these chairs for years.'' Is the furniture an illustration of his theories that design should be complex and eclectic?