Word: designate
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Such influential furniture design should certainly be displayed at Carpenter Center, which is actively dedicated to education of the eye in all its aspects. But as impressive as Thonet and his chairs are, the greatness of this exhibit depends mostly on the relationship wrought between the industrial designer and Carpenter's architect. This relationship is welded by Toshiro Katayama...
Katayama came to Harvard in 1966 and has since been doing all the graphic and exhibition design at the VAC, as well as starting this year a course of his own on the theory and work-shop of graphic design, Vis Stud 136. He is shy about his command of English but need not be about the excellence of his work. His posters for the Center's lecture series and his exhibition designs in the hall on the third floor mark some of the finest work available in the greater Harvard area...
...recognition by the international journal of graphic design, Graphis, as being in the tradition of Josef Albers and Paul Klee seems hardly to do justice to the originality of the work he is now doing here...
Katayama was trained in Japan, worked as a director of the Nippon Design Center, and later was with the Geigy Corporation's design studios in Basle--there and in his work here he credits as a pervasive influence the Japanese tradition of katachi, the merger of form and shape, the inseparable attention to both form and process which makes him so perfect a designer of the Thonet exhibit...
...display furniture. All is appropriate and sufficient, no more. Katayama takes van der Rohe's maxim "less is more" as his own--his aim is to parry and eliminate, always saying with the barest essentials more than would be said with much encumbrance and ornament. The beauty of his design is that he leaves the chairs to talk for themselves. In fact, he forces them to do so, by arranging them in groups by kind and occasionally setting off a masterpiece alone, like the bentwood and black-leather rocker that is number 36 (see photo on page three). This chair...