A 'Starving Artist' Whose Half-Glass Is Full

NEW YORK -- One in a series of encounters with emerging artists

How do you design half a mirror? You can make a whole mirror, easily enough. And a skinny or a squat one isn't hard. But how about one that seems 50 percent missing?

That's the kind of challenge Paul Loebach likes to give himself. He's a 33-year-old designer who lives and works in a cubbyhole of a loft -- a real artist's loft, with a bed up by the ceiling and work in progress down below -- in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. The warehouse he lives in is just around the corner from the Marcy projects, childhood home of Jay-Z, Memphis Bleek and other hip-hop hoodizens -- but there are not nearly as many shootings, Loebach says, as when he moved to the area six years ago.

"I'm definitely a starving artist," says Loebach, who answers the door in skinny black jeans, a baggy beige T-shirt and hipster running shoes. His life on artist's rations -- he's slight enough to be 18 -- may have something to do with his habit of treating design as conceptual art.

Loebach's "Half Mirror" seems almost deliberately planned to scare off any of a young designer's standard clientele. The basswood moldings that frame his looking glass seem entirely traditional. They avoid a look that's sleek and modern, the standard sign of "high design" among aficionados of the new. (In fact, those moldings, designed by Loebach, were specially milled for him by an ancient Frenchman who's a master of traditional woodcraft.) Yet any pleasure that a more traditional client might take in the mirror and its crafting disappears exactly one foot into the piece, where its molding simply stops, along with the glass behind it. It looks as though the whole object has been cut lengthwise on a table saw -- as though someone had chosen a mirror for the front hall, then decided to cut it down to fit the back of the dressing-room door. "It's sort of fascinating how little you can do to go from something traditional to something very new," says Loebach. "Everyone gets this as 'There's something wrong' right off the bat. . . . We've been raised on symmetry our whole lives."

That's Loebach the radical speaking -- the same guy who's made mirrors by first shooting them point-blank with a .22 (ricochets were an issue) then inlaying the shards into laser-carved chestnut. His "Half Mirror" is for sale at Brooklyn's Future Perfect gallery, a rare home for avant-garde design. But there's another side to Loebach -- the guy who loves the cross-section drawings of old-time moldings, called "profiles." And who laments the fact that once a molding gets put around a frame or nailed along a wall, the public only ever sees it stretched out lengthwise, from in front. By slicing his mirror in half, Loebach opens up his molding's lovely end-on view -- a traditional designer's pleasure -- to anyone who buys it.

"I'm always trying to push and pull, to ride that line: Is it traditional or avant-garde?" Loebach says. "I'm interested in this idea of the new modern style as something that draws on old styles, but is also recognizable as something completely new." Others seem interested, too.

In April, Loebach was invited to present his latest line of furniture -- it also happens to be his first -- at the Milan furniture fair, in the curated Salone Satellite that's reserved for innovative talent. "That's where I felt, 'Oh, there is an audience for my work." Jason MacIsaac, a design curator and dealer in Toronto, came across Loebach's designs and offered him a solo show, coming up Sept. 18.

The design press wasn't far behind. As near as Loebach could tell, every editor of just about all the world's many editions of Elle Decor visited his booth in Milan. Several magazines have run features already, in Chinese and Japanese and other languages Loebach cannot read.

More important, an Italian manufacturer actually wants to put a chair by Loebach into production.

The "want" came as a surprise, says Loebach -- here in the United States, mainstream companies keep well clear of the cutting edge. But even more of a surprise was the fact that the Italian firm had the know-how and equipment to do it.

Except for his hand-assembled mirror, most of Loebach's new objects, for all their nods to tradition, depend on the most advanced digital technologies. Thanks to aerospace and the military, Loebach says, such technology is the one area where this country is still in the lead, and it's therefore the one area in which an American designer might have a natural edge over rivals from Europe or Asia.

In December 2007, when it came time to actually design his new line for Milan -- he'd more or less faked his way into being invited to the fair in the first place, he says -- Loebach went looking for new technologies that might give him a leg up. He found a company in the Midwest that designs and makes the very latest CNC machines. As Loebach explains it, that is a kind of milling equipment, under "computer numerical control," that is like the Terminator version of an old-fashioned lathe: At a single go, it can cut a blank of almost any material into nearly any shape a computer can dream up. He got the company to let him demonstrate how far its machines could go, with the thought that that might help with later sales in aerospace. (A machine he ended up using is designed for trimming airplane wings.)

One piece from Loebach's new line, titled "Shelf Space," looks like a heavy carved-wood mantel from a Georgian mansion, but only if such a mantel could be bent and twisted like rubber. Only the newest five-axis CNC machine, says Loebach, could efficiently execute this wild riff on traditional routing.

"I love working with engineers -- that's really where the interesting stuff comes in," Loebach says. He himself is the son of an engineer -- an early innovator in molded plastics -- whom he still calls when he runs into a problem. His father also dabbles in furniture making. His grandfather was a professional craftsman. So was great-granddad. When Loebach visits his parents in Cincinnati -- he left to get a degree from the Rhode Island School of Design, which led to work in New York -- he and his father are "always picking apart how things are made," Loebach says. It's apparently a habit that drives his mother, a professor of education, half crazy. "I think what I do is a combination of my mom's theoretical, academic side and my dad's practical side."

A piece called "Vase Space" may demonstrate that blended pedigree. It is a table elaborately machined from wood, with a tripod base and relatively standard ornamental detailing -- as well as three classically turned vases that seem to grow directly from the wood of the table's top. Though tabletop and vases are in fact milled in separate pieces, digital control permits this illusion of one-ness. That makes "Vase Space" as much a picture of a table in use -- a kind of life-size still-life in 3-D -- as it is a functional table. The vases,Loebach says, "are crowding into what could have been usable table space. It's about the balance between the function and decoration." Or rather, he elaborates, his decorative and conceptual effects are as crucial as any normal "uses" a table is put to. When it comes to most objects we cherish in our homes, says Loebach, "I would argue that the primary function is the emotional meaning."

That's one reason all his furniture is made of wood, with its special warmth and strong links to the past. And why he prefers to cite that past rather than to rely on the futuristic look and space-age materials that have become cliches of the avant-garde. "You can't just do all new, new, new. If any of these things were done in injected plastic, they'd be just disgusting to me. That would miss the point: to make something wonderful and human with these machines."

Conventionally, he says, designers have used computers and technology as "a utopian manifesto, as the future -- which is exactly what I'm working against." In fact, Loebach's fondest hope is to make high technology seem new again by making it address the historic.

Loebach's most complex and subtle piece to date barely seems modern at all, let alone futuristic. His "Chair-O Space" (intended as a riff on "aerospace") is a radical hybrid of a number of styles. Overall, the space his chair takes up is based on a Danish modern prototype that sits beside the finished object in his studio. But it also has strong links to Roman and classical Chinese models, he explains.

The chair's legs recall the complex, cabriole curves of seating you might see in Colonial Williamsburg. Yet the turned ornament on them comes closer to Victorian spindlework -- which no lathe could ever turn onto wood with a cabriole curve. The elements may be traditional, but the mash-up demands the latest in high-tech -- as though beats from Bach and Brahms were processed by computer into Indian ragas.

And then, in a small but absolutely crucial gesture, the wooden surfaces in "Chair-O Space," as in almost all of Loebach's objects, are finished with a matte invisible varnish that lets them keep the raw look of a freshly machined prototype, straight from the shop floor.

The advanced technology that's used to make them, that is, is kept as a crucial, visible part of what they are. It's not just a hidden step on their way to a neo-traditional look.

The furniture itself is meant to let us watch as Loebach asks a crucial question: "I know what this machine can do -- but what can I do with it? How can I do something that would be completely impossible any other way?"

For more information, visithttp://www.paulloebach.com.