Back to furniture

“To Generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit.”

Blake was protesting against the culture of the eighteenth century in which all particularities were referenced to and judged against general standards of good taste, correctness and politeness (a quality then seen as much an essential component of art as of social behaviour).

Originality was thought as likely to be absurd as enlightening, and so slightly valued that Joshua Reynolds, whose Discourses Blake was annotating, could observe, "invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory."

T S Eliot remarked that so positive was the culture of that age that it crushed a number of smaller men who thought differently but could not bear to face the fact.

With Blake it was his own perception and vision that was positive and not to be crushed and his apprehension of the particular was not to be referenced to the general.

In our own times, we seem not to know whether we wish to particularise or generalise, and to have lost our confidence in both. We cherish the particular but have lost the sense of accumulated experience into which it might be placed. We are surrounded by a plethora of cultural signs so clamorous that they have driven out meaning. The world and its history has become a cultural and natural supermarket which we loot for our individual satisfaction.

So furniture designer-makers have recently been berating themselves for how infrequently they indulge in any critical commentary on furniture, but the response is thin, and focussed on assessment of this or that designer’s whole body of work rather than on the examination of individual pieces of furniture. Such comment puts us in the realm of claim and counter claim, some doubtless more intelligent or discriminating than others but none able to validate itself, as individual criticism could do.

The debate is more political (in a cultural sense) than critical. We have an unsatisfied need to give shape to our inchoate culture by ranking and sanctioning practitioners rather than artefacts, although usually it is done politely, by quiet selection or exclusion rather than by manifesto or denunciation. Yet, however it is done, the process of creation, whereby individual perception is transmuted into something less limitingly personal is devalued, vulgarised or commercialised.

We have lost confidence in meaning or significance: objects are classed as ‘iconic’, without any sense of what they signify, simply because they are striking and frequently referenced. Furniture is ‘expressive’ without our having any sense of what it expresses. Little did Le Corbusier know what he was about to visit on the poor humble chair when he declared it to be ‘art’. Modern designer-maker furniture sometimes seems more ‘gestural’ than ‘expressive’, typified by the extravagant curve or the enveloping surface texture, offering a route to distinctiveness, sophistication or soul, bypassing the kind of design or cultural awareness necessary to achieve that sense of newness and rightness that dawns quietly on the observer rather than loudly assaulting him.

Less is more

Who strive - you don't know how the others strive
To paint a little thing like that you smeared
Carelessly passing with your robes afloat,-
Yet do much less, so much less, Someone says,
(I know his name, no matter) - so much less!
Well, less is more, Lucrezia.

Andrea del Sarto, Robert Browning


One would not have thought Mies van der Rohe read much Browning, but maybe, as James Thurber indicated, quotations from nineteenth-century English poetry were, for some, common currency in Central Park (‘The hounds of Spring are on Winter’s traces.’)

But certainly Mies put the word play into fashion. As Le Corbusier famously explained to the woman who complained about the lack of dado rails and fluffy pelmets in La Maison du Fada, 'Your less is my gain', although he later claimed, shortly before he died of a surfeit of seawater at the age of 77, that he had meant to say the opposite: 'My less is your pain.' Modern historians agree that he was by this time suffering from Terminal Confusion (a condition common in famous architects desirous of building airports and railway stations). Possibly he was unsettled by his apprehension of a breach of copyright suit from that young whipper-snapper ('ce jeune petit malin') Mies van der Rohe. Or it may have been his enduring bitterness at the failure of his attempt to be appointed chief urban planner to the Vichy government, thus enabling the implementation of his earlier plan to demolish central Paris north of the Seine. Or perhaps he was just troubled by his growing realisation that, after he had proclaimed 'Chairs are architecture; sofas are bourgeois', every chair he subsequently designed (not to mention his sofas) bore an uncanny resemblance to a sofa.

Meanwhile more is indeed less in modern London: the Guardian reports that a penthouse at One Hyde Park has sold, via Ukrainian lawyers, for £136 million, with a further £50 million spent on fitting out (there is no information on the furniture chosen or budgeted for). The £136 million, as is also reported, would buy 1564 houses in Burnley, Lancashire, once a thriving hub of Victorian industry.