The Danish Design Center, by the brilliant Henning Larsen, which opened across the street in 2000, houses a small permanent collection of modern design, with objects by icons like Eames, Aalto, Rietveld -- and Earl Tupper!
Her ambition was to create a venue dedicated to showing and selling modern and contemporary design objects in an intimate setting.
Perfecting modern design of technical objects highlights the long-known truth that the human is the most unreliable link in the human-technical object system.
And in 1998, just as the retro-modern style he had championed reached a critical mass of popularity, Walrod opened an ambitious store in SoHo called Form & Function, displaying modern furniture and design objects as if in a museum gallery.
The show of 350 works has a retro look even in the sections covering modern design, where the objects are both visually arresting and familiar in their forms, surfaces or industrial applications.
He is something of a professional art collector whose accumulation of modern art and design objects was opened to the public as the Wolfsonian Museum in 1996.
The curator Christian Larsen contextualizes his work with a surprising mix of visually related material, including ancient artifacts, modern and contemporary art, and design objects by forebears, colleagues, and up-and-comers indebted to his style.
The bet driving this development: that a new generation raised with smartphones, Ikea stores and hybrid cars understands that modern design is built into every object of their lives.
WHIMSY AND DISCIPLINE: An aficionado of contemporary and modern design, Greenberg Rohatyn is constantly commissioning furniture and objects from the likes of Martino Gamper, Rick Owens and Takeshi Miyakawa.
Much modern design is based on the principle that objects that perform wonderfully (whether paper clips or BMWs) can't help looking wonderful, whereas objects that fail to work bear the aesthetic mark of their ineptitude.
