POSTMORTEM STYLE

It's new, it's sci-fi furniture from two European pioneers, Philippe Starck and Ron Arad. 2001 ways of decorating your home, beamed up by P. J. O'ROURKE

Philippe Starck and Ron Arad both design furniture that is extreme and bizarre, and the strangest thing of all about it is how familiar it looks. That's because Starck and Arad don't take their cue from Palladian formulae, Bauhaus purities, or Robert Venturi manifestos. They get their ideas where the rest of us do, at the movies. They are inspired by the histrionic, apocalyptic, and—let's face it—silly visions of science fiction, particularly scifi flicks. Starck's three-legged "Richard 111" club chair looks as if it should be in the home of robotic lizard people on the planet Xylon, and Arad's remote-control aerial lamp resembles the thing that chased Robert Duvall through a tunnel in THX-l 138.

Starck and Arad carry none of the theoretical or ethical baggage that has plagued contemporary design since the days of William Morris. There is no hint of "progress" in their work, just the popular idea of progress coming around and nipping us in the ass (perhaps literally in the case of Arad's "Horns" chair). This is interior decorating based on popular entertainment, and the results are often brilliant but odd. What if Charles Rennie Mackintosh's taste had been governed by the English music hall, or Thomas Sheraton's by bullbaiting?

Call the Starck and Arad style Postmortem. It comes after the death of modernism, and seemingly after the death of life as we know it on this planet. It is an apres-World War III mode. Starck's designs look like we won the war. Arad's look like we lost it.

Philippe Starck, thirty-seven, studied interior architecture at the Ecole Camondo in Paris. He first garnered notoriety in the 1970s, designing for that non-cinematic venue of popular nightmares, the discotheque. His gleefully creepy interiors for two Parisian hot spots, La Main Bleue and Les BainsDouches, earned him the title King of the Night. Starck's shift to the mainstream came in 1981 with a commission from French president Mitterrand to redo several areas in the Elysee Palace. It was a perfect opportunity for Starck, and he came up with his Richard III chair, its front a model of bourgeois propriety, its back eaten away by some crazed alien sensibility.

Two other important Starck design exercises are the Cafe Costes, near the Pompidou Center in Paris, and the Starck Club in Dallas. For this Texas disco, Starck took a postwar brewery—a really dreadful piece of New Brutalism—and added a proscenium-stage entrance of big drapes hung on metal scaffolding. It looks like the compromise creation of a small independent film company that started shooting It Came from the 29th Century and ran out of money for the set. And yet the Starck Club looks hilariously like the future probably will. Inside, a combination of expensive exclusivity and raw industrial surfaces creates the ideal upper-class fallout shelter.

In Cafe Costes, Starck arranged slimmed-down versions of his threelegged chair around tiny tables and mixed these unstable elements with nasty railings, an overblown staircase, and an immense clockface. With these few strokes, he changed the atmosphere of the French cafe from annoying and inefficient to ominous. In some distant era, when mutant Frenchmen have three legs, they'll probably be sitting around eating silicon soy croissants in a place like this. So will Americans, maybe, because a second Cafe Costes has been proposed for New York, where Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager recently commissioned Starck to renovate the Royalton Hotel.

Philippe Starck wears four-day stubble and goes everywhere in a T-shirt. He says portentous things like "I have no taste, good or bad, but I know how to use the architectural symbols that will plunge people into their real lives, which they aren't even aware of. ' ' He names many of his pieces after the characters in novels by Philip K. Dick, a California sci-fi writer whose turgid metaphysics gave rise to Blade Runner. But all this Gallic hooey cannot disguise a fine artist. Starck's "Ray Menta" floor lamp has clarity of purpose, grace, and precision to match anything made since the Edison bulb, and it also evokes a little boy playing spaceship with a discarded shutter and a flashlight. Starck's "Tippy Jackson" is probably the best folding table ever made, and when it is taken down and hung on the wall, it makes a first-rate piece of constructivist sculpture. Other Starck designs include a stunning low-tech portable washstand made of plumbing fixtures, and a new shape for pasta which is supposed to keep the marinara sauce from ruining your shirt on the way to your mouth. Like any good special-effects man, Starck is obviously willing to change the shape of everything on earth.

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Postmortem is not a cause, like Art Nouveau. It's not a fad, like the Memphis movement. What it is is fun, like Star Trek.

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Ron Arad's work looks less like he's trying to build a brave new world and more like he's trying to salvage what's left of this one. Bom in Tel Aviv in 1951, he went to school in England and received his diploma from the Architectural Association. After practicing his profession for a year, he switched to the more playful world of furniture and opened a shop in Covent Garden called One Off (actually, most of his pieces are manufactured in limited runs). His first efforts were very Mad Max, making heavy use of the metal clamps used to construct cowsheds. Arad combined these with steel tubes and steel mesh to create some thoroughly frightening beds—the kind androids carry screaming beauties off to. He followed the beds with exquisite armchairs made of more tubing and leather bucket seats from junked Rover automobiles. His early tables had tops of sandblasted and broken glass, and bases made from crunched, squashed metal table legs. A house full of early Arad furniture looked roughly as dangerous as a visit from Godzilla.

Arad's designs caused a sensation at the 1984 Salone del Mobile in Milan, especially his aerial lamp, which is made from a car antenna. Using a remote control, you can swivel and extend the thing and make it come alive in Spielbergian fashion. It's not as good as having R2-D2 in the house, but it marks the first time since LSD and Lava Lites that an adult can have fun with a light fixture. Another applauded design of Arad's was his stereo set—amplifier, turntable, and speakers—encased in fractured and chipped concrete.

God knows what any of these Postmortem creations mean. Probably they don't mean a thing, any more than Tron or Close Encounters does. Starck and Arad are out to put the "decorative" back into the decorative arts. Their designs are meant to excite people visually, and that's all—hence their connection to the unprepossessing theatrics of science fiction.

Starck and Arad are today's leaders in understanding what furniture buyers do with furniture: we buy it. But when it comes to designs as radical as theirs, we buy only a little bit, one or two pieces. We use them as accents, as sculpture, and we decorate the rest of the house the way normal people do. Starck's and Arad's work is too quirky, too overpowering, too entertaining to be comfortable as general home furnishings. Therefore Postmortem is not a cause, like Art Nouveau. It's not even really a fad, like the Memphis movement. What it is is fun, like Star Trek. Postmortem represents the death of sterility, polemics, and the need to be correct. As Captain Kirk would say, Let's beam it up to Starship Living Room.