By Karen Fisher. The Viking Press © 1972. 112 pages. Hardcover. Full color photos depicting various apartment interiors which express the inhabitant's unique personality. Focus on multi-purpose room design and everyday objects as art.
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Excerpt:
Ours is the world of the two-year lease . . . the one-year job, six-month fashion, and three-month love affair. All of us are transients in some way or other, yet we want to live beautifully -- without giving up our flexibility.
While pace dictates our decorating problem, we aren't willing to let anyone dictate solutions. Even if we could afford a professional to tell us what to buy and where to put it, we wouldn't want one. Preassembled furniture groupings, the predesigned total look' are for another generation. Rather than beating out the Joneses, we care about a more personal and amusing challenge: being different from the Joneses, somehow arranging a look that illustrates who we uniquely are.
Yet the challenge becomes tougher every time another high-rise building goes up. Most of us live in small, boxlike spaces that seem designed for anonymity. Decorating them no longer means simply embellishing surfaces with paint, rugs, and furniture. The new decorating involves problem solving.
One of the most important solutions to the challenge of arranging small spaces is multiple use. Most modern living areas simply don't offer the luxury of one-room/one-function. In a studio apartment the living room must also provide a place to sleep and eat. Even in a larger apartment we may need work space with a desk, or an extra bed for out-of-town guests.
The multiple-use room is thus converted into a total environment. Guests are no longer relegated to the living room' -- they may lounge in the bedroom.' We experience our rooms as clusters of multipurpose areas, overlapping spaces, instead of boxes-within-a-box.
Even our furniture has multiple functions. What is a dining-room table'? It may be a desk metamorphosed by a bright cloth, or a coffee table surrounded my a casual mass of pillows, serving as seats.' A bed can be a fur-covered mattress on a platform, replacing a sofa as the focus of a lounging area.
Because we tend to do more furnishings with less furniture, we ask more of what we buy. Luckily, young designers understand the way we want to live, and new industrial processes help them shape inexpensive furniture to suit us. Plastic, for instance, is no longer a low-grade imitator of wood; designers now use plastic for its own beauty, in transparent tints or strong colors, molded into striking designs and interesting, unexpected shapes. But whatever its material, the new furniture is often multipurpose, always cleanly styled and comfortably scaled for small living areas.
The artists are on our side, too, helping us redefine beauty and value. Because art for us is not restricted to an oil painting with a famous signature, we live with art as easily as we do with chairs. More artists are using inexpensive materials and processes, placing fine lithographs and even sculptures within nearly everybody's reach. Artists have also directed our attention to popular culture, so that a highway poster, and enormous supergraphic, a collection of framed comic strips or old movie stills all seem wonderful ways to give a room beauty and individuality. Living on such intimate terms with art, we needn't be deadpan about it, and may hang our best picture on the bathroom ceiling if we feel like it.
Since we are design conscious, useful objects are often converted into a new kind of sculpture. The best industrial design is a accessible to us as to any elite. A replica of our teapot, telephone, or typewriter may be in the design collection at the Museum of Modern Art. In choosing and displaying these things, we express our not unreasonable feeling that everything should look good. If something has to be hidden away, we can't afford it.
Because we choose to make our environment a form of self-revelation, we can't always buy exactly what we want. Perhaps the furniture we need doesn't exist, or costs too much, or maybe no amount of furniture will conceal a structural defect. So we do more work ourselves. We build in platforms, shelves, sleeping balconies -- space-savers with the architectural look we like, and often less expensive than the ready-mades. We make our own art, paint in our colors, create our own lighting effects. With new materials like stick-on tiles and fast-drying paints, making a room conform to an idea becomes easier than ever.
The world of the two-year lease is a demanding one, but it needn't demand anything we don't have or want to give . . . like more time or money than we can afford. Vital materials are a good eye, a clever idea or a fresh use of somebody else's clever idea, and the willingness to experiment. It is possible -- even necessary -- to create a personal environment within the confines and limitations of conventional living spaces.