Word: designs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...corner shop and find a package that is not ugly or delusive or frustrating or wasteful, or all four. That is why the Japan Society's current exhibition in New York, "Tsutsumu-the Art of Japanese Packaging," should not be missed. Organized and chosen by the Tokyo designer Hideyuki Oka, it consists of 221 packages, ranging from sake bottles to wrappings for candied papaya. All the designs have a long craft history, and some are very old indeed: one type of wooden container, tied together with strips of bark and used for carrying the raw fish on vinegared rice...
Utopian Jabberwocky. But it is also different in quality and meaning from things like the mixture of Utopian Milanese-Maoist Jabberwocky and toys for the very rich that the Museum of Modern Art had in its last big design show, "Italy: the New Domestic Landscape" (TIME, May 29). Tsutsumu, of course, is more interesting because it is more real. It consists of virtually anonymous objects with actual uses, free of a designer's narcissism, refined over a long time, that work. The Japanese package is no less an aspect of the country's cultural heritage than the design...
...however, and thus origami and its related art of paper packaging came into being. Second, the package is an act of obeisance to its recipient, rather than a flat invitation to consume. In the material on show at Japan House this idea is beautifully eloquent: the studied attention to design, to the mating of materials with their contents, is part of the gift and no less touching for being destroyed at the moment of opening. "One of the reasons," Oka notes, "why traditional packaging is disappearing so rapidly in our modern society is that it is so inefficient . . . May this...
Public concern about reactor safety over the past few years, which has forced construction delays and changes in reactor design, has been the primary factor producing the cost increases, according to the report...
Europe's designers are also among the most ardent believers in the necessity of conserving basic materials, both natural and manmade. Says Britain's Martin Roberts, chief industrial designer for the successful chain of Habitat stores, which offer tasteful, basic home furnishings: "With the world as it is now, we have to restrain ourselves. We have to design to price and to process. People are going to want things that do the job well and last and look good all at the same time." In a way, it would all sound a bit familiar to the late Mies...