At the Corcoran Gallery of Art this week, a futuristic designer in pink leather shoes crashed through the symbolic morass.
Karim Rashid, creator of pastel plastic trash cans, sexy squeeze bottles for dish soap, high-fashion bags, seating for lounge lizards and, lately, digitally enhanced hotel rooms, had come to talk about living fabulously in the here and now. Overhead, a shapely lime-green DJ station gave way to an undulating "pleasurescape" for sprawling in style on the floor. Images of dozens of new designs flowed in Kool-Aid shades of strawberry, tangerine, kiwi and grape. The colors were sweet, but the message was tart.
Karim Rashid's design of a mosaic for the pool of the Semiramis Hotel in Athens, above. Rashid, below, dismisses conventional furniture as "a derivative of a derivative of a derivative." Right, his Ego Vase.
(Above And Right: Courtesy Karim Rashid Inc.)
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"The whole problem of the human race is nostalgia," Rashid said.
Neckties and weddings are high on Rashid's list of absurdities. So is conventional furniture, which he dismisses as "a derivative of a derivative of a derivative" of something created back in the 16th century.
"Why do we keep hanging on to these things?" he asked. "Why are we afraid to evolve? I have no idea."
On Tuesday night, Rashid raced into the auditorium with enough energy to melt one of his plastic chairs. He was the second major design-world figure in the "Eye on Design" lecture series, which coincides with the launch of the Corcoran College of Art and Design's master's program in interior design. On Sept. 28, Frank Gehry reflected on his struggles as a revolutionary architect. The dean of American interior designers, Albert Hadley, will dissect 20th-century style on Tuesday. Rashid used his appearance to introduce the elements of Nutopia.
The 44-year-old industrial designer has been orchestrating a glamorous nirvana of the new and now from his New York studio since 1993. Creative vision is deeply rooted. The child of Egyptian and English parents, Rashid was born in Cairo and grew up in London and Toronto. His father, Mahmoud, who died last year, was an artist and designer. Brother Hani Rashid, who practices architecture in New York with his wife, Lise Anne Couture, as the firm Asymptote, is considered a leading force of a new generation of avant-garde architects.
On a visit to Washington last year, Hani Rashid explained the origin of the brothers' futuristic vision. "When we were small and lived in London, my father told us we were moving to Canada," he said. "He told us we were going to the New World."
Upon arrival in Montreal, the boys were taken straight to Expo '67. There, on two islands in the St. Lawrence River, the world's fair offered the most futuristic skyline ever seen. Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome bubbled up 20 stories. Everything was linked by monorail.
"That's where we thought we were going to live," Hani said. "We thought we had arrived in the New World."
Instead, the Rashid brothers grew up in the suburbs of Toronto. As designers, Hani said, "what we're both trying to do is kind of a correction. We really believe in a powerful, poetic, magical future."
Karim Rashid's laboratory is an apartment over his Chelsea studio. A palette of pink and acid green has a techy quality, like colors on a computer screen. Materials are tactile and slick. Shapes are softly rounded, never sharply angled.
Rashid's favorite pink can be as unrelenting as cotton candy, but it's hard to argue with the essential question driving his work: "Why isn't our whole world beautiful?"
In a new monograph, "Karim Rashid: Evolution," due next month from Universe, the designer describes Nutopia as a place where "everything is beautiful, romantic, positive, energetic, intellectual and seamless, with no banalities or tedious human paradigms, where we live in constant inspiration -- where we are smarter, faster and stronger."
