The AIC's Figuration in Contemporary Design show calls attention to an emerging aesthetic that rejects the spare geometries of Modernism

Once upon a time form followed function. But no more. Out here in the first decade of the 21st century, form follows fabrication technology. With new developments in materials and advanced software for manipulating them, architects and designers are free to imagine-and far more significantly, build--seemingly impossible objects. For all their formal grandeur, Eames chairs and Miesian boxes lose a good deal of their excitement when you can make stuff shimmy like Frank Gehry does.

An exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago offers a sense of just how much shimmying is going on at this point. Curated by the chair of AIC's Architecture and Design Department, Joseph Rosa, "Figuration in Contemporary Design" brings together pieces and plans--some realized, others proposed--by 28 studios: 14 based in North and South America, 13 in Europe, and a lonely one in Tokyo.

The show's title calls attention to an emerging aesthetic that rejects the spare geometries of Modernism (not to mention the scholastic ironies of Post-Modernism) in favor of flamboyant ornamentation, robust imagery, and sinuous, often organically inspired shapes. The real fascination here isn't the aesthetic, though, so much as the techniques that are making it possible. Yes, "Lace Fence" by Rotterdam's Demakersvan design house is a thing of beauty: a black chain link fence in which the usual diamond pattern gives way to outsized floral designs, woven with the wire itself. But a crucial element of that beauty is the wonder we feel contemplating a process capable of treating steel like so much embroidery thread. Likewise the jungle of amoebic structures created by New York's Gage/Clemenceau for an addition to the Stockholm Public Library: reminiscent of something out of Fantastic Voyage, it not only begs but pleads the question of how they did it.

Rosa's selections take a decidedly pushy approach to design. Like urban taggers, these folks can't seem to tolerate a neutral space or an undisturbed surface. Interestingly, their primary modes of ornamentation are the same as those that have recently become so popular for use on bodies: tattooing and piercing. A German library by Herzog & de Meuron is covered, like Lydia the Encyclopedia, with photographic images; Hella Jongerius' Jonsberg vase enlivens a conventional white ceramic form with designs realized by means of hundreds of small perforations.

This aesthetic pushiness can yield grotesquery (Marcel Wanders' Snotty Vase) or pathology (R&Sie's Bottleneck Mosquito House, which forces the client to confront his morbid fear of West Nile virus) or even something exquisite--like Klein Dytham's Japanese wedding chapel, the retractable, incised dome of which reminds us that stars were once thought to be pinpricks in the vault of heaven. And then sometimes it breaks all the way through to daring. Consider Zaha Hadid's proposed design for an Islamic art wing at the Louvre Museum in Paris. Surrounded by a renaissance courtyard, the gold-accented concrete structure winds upward like a three-story wave, the dynamism of its diagonals suggesting everything the Christian west fears about Islam, and especially about the Islamic populations living within its borders: a defiantly aberrant energy threatening to overwhelm our Palladian symmetries. And yet it's also beautiful. Exotic. Even intriguing.

By encapsulating the paradoxes of cultural confrontation in a building, Hadid's plan for the Louvre qualifies as an early masterpiece of the new aesthetic brought about by cutting-edge fabrication technologies. Possibly a late masterpiece, as well. I imagine that a vision this aggressive will quickly generate a backlash; look for The New Purity (a return to neutral spaces and undisturbed surfaces) before long. But until the new tech loses some of its novelty, things are going to stay wild. i4

i4