Intelligent Design - Brief Article

You might think the best stores sell nifty things, but those are only the second-best stores. The best stores sell nifty ideas. One such is Moss on Greene Street.

The ostensible stock of the store is home furnishings, mostly housewares, with some tables and chairs thrown in. Inexpensive home furnishings are sold at Kmart or Macy's; funky retro ones are sold at Restoration Hardware. Moss sells home furnishings of the future- designers' latest ideas of what spoons and coat hangers should look like. Every object or set is displayed, as at a gallery or a trade show, in a neat little pool of space, with a card explaining its provenance and, very often, the theories of its maker. Even when the designs are 30 years old, they have the freshness of a new sketch.

Every surface at Moss is bright: Glass and metal objects shine, plastic and rubber ones come in glowing colors. All these tiny reflections and highlights, like the flashbulbs of a hundred Lilliputian paparazzi, are seductive-

"Hey, Shmendrick," you imagine yourself hearing, "look at me!" But it is also intimidating. What would you actually do with that archangelic knife if you bought it? Stick it in a jar of Skippy?

Many of the items are funny: a soap dish made of soap; a doorbell whose buzzer activates a small hammer between two crystal champagne flutes (perfect for the home of Veuve Clicquot). A few yards away are the very glasses that would respond to such a ring: They are curved sideways, like running figures in a cartoon. "Are you thirsty?" they seem to ask. "Time to quench it!" When you have a purchase gift-wrapped, the salesman finishes the job by affixing a sticker with a picture of a bow on it. But most of the objects in the store, even the lighthearted ones, are infused with the seriousness of craftsmanship. Someone made this particular fork, not just to stick a burrito or a kielbasa, but because that is the way a fork should look.

One designer (Hella Jongerius of Droog Design) has produced a set of mismatched dishes. "The cohesion" of the set, the accompanying card earnestly explains, "comes from the consistent imperfection." The dishes are meant to recall "items of a service which have been collected in all kinds of ways over the years." The rims of the stacked plates buckle and curl against each other like the pages of a book that was left out in the rain. For $200 you can own four of Ms. Jongerius's plates. True, your Aunt Sally achieved a similar effect by buying four plates for $2 at Woolworth's during World War II, and keeping them, with all their cracks and chips, until she passed away. Half a century of wear and tear will cost you an extra $198 if you buy it brand new. But each individual plate of Ms. Jongerius's is lovely, and the care with which the set was made, and subtly unmade, replicates the devotion your aunt paid to the idea of thrift.

Sometimes the intensity of artistic creativity produces strange results. One design studio has convinced itself that, because it is near the German village where the remains of the first Neanderthal man were found, the flatware it makes looks prehistoric-its knives are like stone axes, its spoons are like cupped hands. But if the poor Neanderthals had had metal implements like these, they would have driven the Cro-Magnon men into the sea, and we would all have sloped foreheads. The artsy types are thinking of the apes in 2001 when they are really designing tableware for the makers of the black monolith.

Odder still are the designs based on Meissen, the German porcelain of the 18th century. Looking at these pieces decorated with chinoiserie and scenes of rustic flirtation induces a case of the historical bends. When Meissen was first made, Bach was composing and German princelings rented out their peasants as mercenaries. Since then, Germany has given us, in rapid succession, Beethoven, Grimm's Fairy Tales, Bismarck, the Kit Kat Club, Hitler, and the Beetle. If we are back at Meissen again, is the cycle starting all over?

The enemy of fruitful aesthetic intensity is irony. Alas, it has breached the gates of Moss. One display case features a set of bonded nickel tchotchkes called "Buildings of Disaster"-miniature models of the Texas School Book Depository, the Oklahoma City federal building, the Branch Davidian compound; there is even a set of toy cars representing O.J.'s flight in the Bronco. These tableaux morts are supposed to provide a "populist history of architecture," based on our "emotional involvement" with famous crimes and catastro- phes. The "Buildings of Disaster" need one more item-a bronze circular file. When jokes become bad jokes, and bad jokes are taken seriously, we are on the short, short road that leads to Jeff Koons.

The fussiness of designers is an elitist rebuke to the slovenliness of the age. Most of the customers circulating in the aisles of the store (including me) wear shapeless coats that look like trash bags, and shapeless caps that look like old socks. Their workplaces no doubt observe casual Fridays, unless they work at a dot-com, where the regime is casual every day. Looking at a knife no Neanderthal man ever imagined gives us modern Neanderthals a point of contrast as we rummage through our middens of video cassettes and takeout food.