SHELF LIFE
ARCHITECTURE, DESIGN AND A SUBURBAN PAST
By Sandy McLendon
The Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, is the largest retail complex in the United States, so huge and elaborate it seems to have been around forever. But its history is actually brief; the mall stands where Minnesota’s countryside used to bump up against Minneapolis, an area brought to life in journalist Brad Zellar’s Suburban World: The Norling Photos (Borealis Books, hardcover, $27.95, 134 pages, 130 illustrations in black-and-white). Irwin Denison Norling (1916–2003) was a semi-professional photographer living in Bloomington when the place straddled an indefinable line between city and country, and for nearly 30 years, he documented its rapid metamorphosis from small town, to suburb, to home for major-league baseball — a succession of changes that paved the way for today’s shopper’s paradise.
For area newspapers, Norling photographed local events. For the Bloomington police, he photographed crime and accident scenes. For himself, he photographed everything else, for the sheer joy of creating images. In 2002, the book’s author discovered a cache of Norling’s photographs in storage at the Bloomington Historical Society. After finding and interviewing Norling himself, Zellar put representative images together, linking them with a perceptive and appreciative text; the result is a book that represents the suburbia of the ‘50s and ‘60s as it actually was, uncolored by nostalgia, a place half built, half urban, but wholly hopeful. Trained technically but not aesthetically, Norling considered himself to have no particular style, but his images belie his modesty; they are the strictest of reportage, and at the same time, achingly evocative of a lost time and place. Parades, ball games, local stores, car crashes, beauty contests, house fires and weddings are all here, the legacy of a man who loved Bloomington, the possibilities of photography and American life at mid century.
John Lautner (1911–94) is perhaps the least accessible of American mid century architects; while his houses were famous, most of them were mysterious in character, not easily copied for mass consumption. Between Earth and Heaven: The Architecture of John Lautner (Rizzoli International Publications, hardcover, $60.00, 150 illustrations in color and black-and-white) concentrates on those houses, bringing their formal and structural innovations into focus. Texts by archivist and historian Nicholas Olsberg (also the book’s editor), architecture professor Jean-Louis Cohen and architect Frank Escher trace Lautner’s career from its roots at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin, through an early Wrightian period in California, to the time when Lautner’s talent came into its own, with astonishing forms springing from an imagination as disciplined as it was unfettered by custom. Curiously, Lautner’s contributions to Googie architecture, including the original Googie’s coffee shop in Los Angeles, are not extensively treated; the authors are clearly more interested in his concrete shell forms, like the Elrod House, strewn over a hilltop with casual grandeur, the beetle-like Turner House in Aspen and the flying-saucer Chemosphere House in Los Angeles, which springs from a hillside formerly considered unbuildable, courtesy of a single-point columnar foundation. The authors succeed not only in communicating why Lautner was important, but why his explorations of form and structure were inevitable, given the vast postwar changes in society and technology that set Lautner’s talent ablaze. Beautifully illustrated and laid out, the book suffers from one small flaw: a tiny, narrow sans-serif typeface that only younger readers will be able to decipher without the aid of glasses.
Modernist design is different in every country that produces it, and no country’s modernism is more recognizable than that of Germany. Often severely elegant, and nearly always of the highest physical quality, Germany’s icons of design are some of those most prized by collectors and museums. German design writer Bernd Polster’s German Design for Modern Living: The Classics (Merrell Publications, softcover, $34.95, 1000 pages, 570 color illustrations) covers the entire field, from the best-known designs of the Bauhaus to the newest and most engaging German designs of today. The plump little volume is packed full of information and photos, but the layout makes finding a particular design a bit of a chore. One section presents influential designs in chronological order, making it necessary to have a rough idea of the date involved. Another section is termed a “Lexicon of Designers and Manufacturers,” and again, it’s necessary to know quite a lot about something before searching for it. However, the author knows his stuff; once the reader’s quarry is found, it’s described concisely and engagingly. The photographs show many objects intended for modest, everyday uses, like William Wagenfeld’s hourglass-shaped Max and Moritz salt and pepper shakers designed in 1953 for WMF and Trude Petri’s 1931 minimalist Urbino dinnerware for KPM. There are also many recent designs, including the Sputnik office chair created by Arno and Matthias Votteler in 2005, looking ready for Formula One racing. This is a reference volume that may frustrate the researcher, but will most handsomely reward those who browse it.
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