Patrick Rylands: a hero of toy design

Patrick Rylands' toys were once in virtually every household. He talks here about his classic designs – including those beloved primary-coloured floating ducks – and his thoughts on modern toys

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  • theguardian.com, Wednesday 25 June 2014 07.54 BST
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Patrick Rylands with one of his popular toys. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

The name may not be immediately familiar to you, but if you grew up in the late 60s, 70s or 80s, the chances are you had at least one of his toys in your house, more specifically in your bath. Patrick Rylands was chief designer at Ambi Toys for more than 30 years, and responsible for some of the most-loved baby and toddler toys. He combined simplicity of design with movement, sound and bright primary colours to ensure that children grew up knowing exactly how to fit three miniature plastic ducks in one big one.

Now there is a renewed interest in simple, effective toys that stimulate the imagination (perhaps it's a backlash to the abundance of tech-heavy toys now on the market) and Rylands' work is beginning to be properly appreciated again. He talked us through his very first creations, and his thoughts on modern toy design.

PlayPlax

Invented by Rylands in 1966, PlayPlax has sold over a million copies – and is still in production today. Rylands had the idea while still studying at the Royal College of Art, and manufactured the prototype in his holidays, back home in Hull. "I'd become interested in the idea of play in itself and what I was trying to do was to make something that was just stuff, rather than anything that was predetermined. This is the least you can do to a bit of plastic and still make it useable for something else," he explains.

PlayPlax, 1968, still available at playplax.co.uk

As he was working at the Hornsea Pottery during his summer holidays, he showed the design to the boss, Desmond Rawson. "He came in and said: 'Eh, that's interesting lad, I know someone who'd make that for you'", recalls Rylands. "And he spoke to the people that were making stoppers for salt pots and lids for spice jars. And they as it happened were looking for their own product at the time, a company called Trendon."

The interlocking, brightly coloured design, which allows you to build infinite 3D combinations of squares, is a classic – the first of many Rylands was to produce.

A typically complex drawing – this one for a Humpty Dumpty toy

"I learned on the job," says Rylands. "There was never a drawing for PlayPlax or the first things, I just made a model – then the next things I did do drawings for. And we just sent the drawings straight to toolmakers. Little by little, things got more complicated. The boss was very cost-conscious so we never made prototypes. We always worked straight from drawings – in the end I was doing really quite complicated things straight from drawings, with huge complicated drawings, everything detailed."

Bird and Fish

Bird and Fish Toys, 1970.

In 1970, Rylands won the Duke of Edinburgh prize, awarded to the designer of a product "distinguished by its elegance". The judges particularly singled out the abstract qualities of these Bird and Fish toys, "which encourage children to use their imagination and introduce them to ideas of structure, form, colour and balance". Both are bath toys, made from ABS plastics, with just eyes for decoration and internal ballasts to keep them upright in the water. The design was minimalist enough to appeal to adults and children alike (indeed there is a thriving eBay market for them still).

The bird design was actually based on an Eskimo bone carving in the British Museum. They are now part of British design history and like many other of Rylands toys are on display in the V&A Museum of Childhood. In 2012 they were relaunched by Selegiochi Toys under the MasterToys brand, but unfortunately a manufacturing fault meant they had to be discontinued. There are rumours, though, that they will be making a comeback later this year.

AmbiToys

After Trendon, Rylands worked closely with AmbiToys – orignally called Europlastic – in the Netherlands. "It was an outfit run by two Jewish friends who had fled Holland in the war, and when they came back they got together and set up import/export business. Among the things they bought and sold were fairly rudimentary plastic toys – you know, stacking beakers and that kind of thing. And being smart they realised they were paying too much for these, that if they made them themselves they'd get more out of it. So then they were in the toy business."

Rylands' time working for AmbiToys was hugely productive. "It would take me on average about six weeks to do a product, so we'd have a rolling list of things. And if I had half an idea I'd tell the boss about it and maybe send a little coloured sketch to say it could look like this … what do you think?

"Then I'd get down to the drawing board. Part of the difficulty, of course, is that you can't just draw a nice-looking thing. You have to draw a nice looking thing that will work. And if it's got parts, they've all got to come together. I'd find myself some days working on a section and then I'd discover that the part I was drawing had to go in a place where it wouldn't work. That was the downside of working alone."

Bath duck

Original drawing for the Bath Duck

The meticulous detail in what seem superficially to be the simplest of toys is evident in Rylands' drawings, perhaps more than in the finished toys. The beak on this toy was designed so that the slightest movement of the water set it into motion. It also allowed any water entering the toy to escape, thus avoiding an unfortunate duck-sinking incident ...

And the finished Bath Duck toy. Still available, £5.99 from galttoys.com

Inspiration came from everywhere. "Occasionally there would be something ready made. One quite popular toy I did was based on a 19th-century tin toy called Magic Run. That I just took directly – I remodelled it so obviously it was a completely different-looking thing, but the principle was there. But you'd see other things – bits of mechanism in other objects that could convert to toys."

Duck family

Duck family drawing. Photograph: Galt Toys

In another of Rylands' ingenious designs, three little ducklings hide inside the mother duck, or float free in the bath.

Duck family (Ambi Toys, £10.99)

Cool Cat

Cool cat (Ambi Toys, £8.99)

The faces on Patrick Rylands' toys have also developed over the years – conveying friendliness and character in a few simple lines. This cat's head spins and the body bobs when he is rolled along the floor. This cat dates from the period (around 1999) when Ambi Toys was sold to BRIO. That firm introduced the colour black into the range. Also at this time, Rylands was elected as a Royal Designer for Industry (RDI) - an honour introduced by the RSA in 1936.

Sniffer Mouse

Sniffer mouse (Ambi Toys, £4.99)

This photo shows an original design concept (right) and the current production model. In the original, the stiff rubbery tail points upwards and was designed to ping back into shape and position when flicked or pulled. But this was deemed unsuitable for children, due to risk of eyepoking, and replaced with a soft, cord-style tail. Health and safety gone mad?

Rocky Jocky

Ambi Toys ground to a halt, and was bought by an Italian distributor and owner of toy shops who had been a longstanding fan of Rylands' work. But when he fell ill, it went into limbo, leaving 120-odd products without a manufacturer or a home. Then Galt Toys stepped in, bought the business and after meeting with Rylands, bought his drawings too, so it could begin manufacturing the toys again.

Rocking horse design. Photograph: Galt

Rocky Jocky (Ambi Toys, £6.99)

Rylands is now largely retired, though he consults with Galt on the range. So what does he make of contemporary toy design? "Nearly everything has got a screen and buttons to press. I find that sad because I think children need to learn through handling things. I've so often been to an antiques fair and seen something and thought 'Oh that looks interesting' and the minute I touched it I realised it wasn't, that I'd misread it. You need that extra information to make a judgment.

"I think that has to be important when you are growing up, that has to be what informs you about the physical world. And if it's all flat images that are manipulated on screen, it can't be as good. I love my computer, it's the most fabulous toy I've ever owned, but I don't think it should be the only thing."

Colours

Focus pocus (Ambi Toys, £7.99)

All of Rylands' designs are notable for their bright, clean primary colours. So what does he make of the "pinkification" of girls' toys, and the colours used in manufacture today? "It had begun to happen in my time," he says. "There was a movement to have us not make everything in primaries. We did do just a handful of things in pastel shades one year – and luckily customers didn't like them. So we went back to primaries because that's what we knew to do.

"But I can't remember that it was ever a consideration, to be honest. We were making things for very young children and we used the brightest colours possible." Then there were practical considerations: "If we stuck to primaries and white it meant we didn't have to hold immense amounts of stock of material!"

Phillip King 英國雕塑家駐台灣期間作品將在倫敦展出

2014-06-16

〔駐歐洲特派記者胡蕙寧／倫敦報導〕為慶祝英國知名雕塑大師菲利浦金80歲生日暨紀念其超過50年創作生涯，英國Thomas Dane Gallery策劃倫敦個展暨大型戶外展，展出多件菲利浦金於2012年在台灣創作。

• 
  菲利浦金喜歡用不同幾何造型組合來探討雕塑與公共環境的關係。 （記者胡蕙寧攝）

菲利浦金曾受邀至台灣擔任駐廠藝術家，短短3個月創作不少精彩雕塑，他利用鋼鐵器材與設備，以鋼為媒材創作憩、鄧斯特布爾之舞、高空閃耀、環形之舞以及突擊等作品。菲利浦金是英國皇家藝術學院院士，1999年曾獲英國政府頒發英國國家雕刻榮譽，2010年榮獲當代國際雕塑中心頒發的終身成就獎，作品廣受世界各地美術館典藏，堪稱英國當代重量級雕塑家。

倫敦展覽室內部分至7月26日於Thomas Dane Gallery展出；大型戶外雕塑展6月25日至7月25日展出一個月。菲利浦金在台創作均為大型雕塑，展出地點在位於倫敦市中心的Ranelagh Gardens。

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Quill (1971), Rotterdam

Phillip King PRA (born 1 May 1934,^[1] Tunis, French Tunisia) is a British sculptor. He is one of Anthony Caro's best known students, even though the two artists are near contemporaries. Their education followed similar trajectories and they both worked as assistants to Henry Moore. Following the "New Generation" show at the Whitechapel Gallery, both Caro and King were included in the seminal 1966 exhibit, "Primary Structures" at the Jewish Museum in New York representing the British influence on the "New Art". In 2011, his work was represented in the Royal Academy exhibition on Modern British Sculpture which explored British sculpture of the twentieth century.

Contents

• 1 Biography
• 2 Footnotes
• 3 Bibliography
• 4 External links

Biography

While doing his national service before going to university in Cambridge (Christ's College), he spent much time in Paris where he met many artists. He studied modern languages as Christ's College, Cambridge from 1954–57, and sculpture at Saint Martin's School of Art from 1957–58 with Anthony Caro.^[2] The next year he spent working as an assistant to Henry Moore and teaching at Saint Martin's.
In 1990 King was made Professor Emeritus of the Royal College and was the President of the Royal Academy of Art from 1999 to 2004, presumably declining the usual knighthood. In 1992 William Feaver wrote in London's Observer that King is "the one sculptor of his generation prepared to jettison what he has proved himself good at in order to explore what cannot be programmed." He took over at a time when the Academy was facing financial trouble and he has said it distracted him from his work.
King proved Feaver correct by turning unexpectedly to Japan and ceramics in 1993 and two years later making the powerful unglazed, vessel-themed works which were the focus of an exhibition in 2004. Richard Cork wrote about the sculptures:

Often pierced from one side to the other and interrupted by renegade protuberances, they end up conveying more emotional conflict than initially seems possible. But they possess optimism as well... That is why he is such a rewarding artist, and why each distinct phase in his ceaselessly resourceful career adds to the richness of his achievement.^{[citation needed]}

The exhibition was presented in Yorkshire, London, and New York.
One sculpture titled Zen Garden, created by King and students from the Royal College of Art, remains available to see within Tout Quarry, Isle of Portland, Dorset, England.
In 2010, Phillip King was a recipient of the International Sculpture Center's Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award.^[3] He lives and works in London.

Footnotes

1. "Birthday's today". The Telegraph. 1 May 2013. Retrieved 23 April 2014. "Prof Phillip King, sculptor; President, Royal Academy of Arts, 1999–2004; 79"
2. http://www.sculpture.org.uk/biography/PhillipKing/
3. International Sculpture Center website. 'Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award page'. Retrieved 24 January 2010.

Bibliography

Exhibition Catalogues

• Phillip King: A Survey through 50 Years. [Catalogue of the exhibition held at Flowers East 21 January - 19 February 2011] London.

Monographs

• Hilton, T. (1992) The sculpture of Phillip King. Lund Humphries Publishers Ltd

External links

• Phillip King on Flowers Gallery's website
• Media related to Phillip King at Wikimedia Commons
• Entry for Phillip King on the Union List of Artist Names

英國雕塑家駐台灣期間作品將在倫敦展出

BBC英倫網 子川

更新時間 2014年 6月 5日, 星期四 - 格林尼治標準時間10:48

菲利普·金的雕塑《憩》結合了動與靜的元素（圖片提供：東和鋼鐵公司）

英國知名雕塑大師菲利浦·金（Philip King）駐台灣期間創作的作品將在倫敦展出。

為慶祝英國菲利浦·金80歲生日暨紀念其超過50年之創作生涯，Thomas Dane Gallery特別策劃了其倫敦個展暨大型戶外展。

此次將展出多件菲利浦金於2012年在台灣創作的作品，呈現其在駐台創作期間的創意與能量。
菲利浦·金2012年受邀到台灣，擔任駐廠藝術家，在台灣短短3個月的期間，創作了不少的精彩雕塑作品。
他是由東和鋼鐵文化基金會與國家藝術基金會合作的「東鋼藝術家駐廠創作專桉」所選出之英國雕塑家，他利用東和鋼鐵公司提供的器材與設備，作品都是以鋼為原材料。

《 X爆》 的色彩變化凸顯不同狀態（圖片提供：東和鋼鐵公司）

菲利浦·金在台灣創作了包括：「憩」（At Rest）、「鄧斯特布爾之舞」（Dunstable Reel）、「高空閃耀」（High Sky and Bling）、「環形之舞」（Ring Reel）以及「突擊」（Lash）等等。
這些作品將大眾印象中冷硬的鋼鐵，以藝術的巧思以及色彩的靈活運用，呈現鋼凋藝術中或活潑、或柔軟、或幾何的多元樣貌。
菲利浦·金是英國皇家藝術學院院士，1999年曾獲英國政府頒英國國家凋刻榮譽，2010年榮獲當代國際雕塑中心頒發的終身成就獎。
他的作品廣受世界各地美術館典藏，為英國當代重量級雕塑家，作品以極簡造型為主，後期作品則多用不同幾何造型組合，探討雕塑與公共環境之關係。
由於菲利浦·金在台灣的創作作品都是大型雕塑，因此將擺放在戶外展出，除在台期間創作作品之外，此次也將展出菲利浦金其它大型代表作品。
此次展覽分為室內展與戶外展，其中室內展部分從6月11日至7月26日於Thomas Dane Gallery展出。
大型戶外雕塑展部分將從6月25日起至7月25日展出一個月。
展出地點在位於倫敦市中心的Ranelagh Gardens。

《環形之舞》在不同層次與距離之間建立聯繫（圖片提供：東和鋼鐵公司）

(責編：董樂)

A Corporate Paean to Frank Lloyd Wright /S.C.Johnson(庄臣)公司守護建築大師賴特傑作

很巧，月前與羅文森學長認識，讀了幾本他寫的回憶錄： 《戀戀九號宿舍》《當機會被我遇見》《難以忘懷的大學生活》(暫)《神州行》(暫)...
巧的是，這篇A Corporate Paean to Frank Lloyd Wright指的是/S.C.Johnson(庄臣)公司---羅學長的博士後服務的公司，所以有70-80年代第一手的國際各分公司的服務經驗.......
所以除了到官方網站:

SC Johnson: A Family Company | Innovative Cleaning ...

www.scjohnson.com/

SC Johnson is a fifth-generation family company that makes leading global household brands including Glade®, Pledge®, Windex®, Mr. Muscle®, OFF!

也可以參考羅先生的第2本書等......

這篇可能也可讓羅學長大開眼界。

A Corporate Paean to Frank Lloyd Wright
By ROBERT SHAROFF June 10, 2014

This week a portion of the Research Tower designed by Frank Lloyd Wright at the headquarters of S.C. Johnson in Racine, Wis., will reopen as a museum. The project is part of an eight-year effort by the company to restore its Wright campus.

If anything is eternal in real estate, it is the dance of desire that exists between chief executives and their architects.

Corporate executives tend to obsess over the bottom line while longing to erect a brick and mortar legacy. Architects — particularly the visionary variety — see every job as a way to explore new design concepts and materials.

In 1943, Herbert F. Johnson Jr., the third-generation leader of S. C. Johnson, which has its headquarters here in Racine, tangled in just that way with Frank Lloyd Wright. While Wright’s design for the company’s executive offices, the Administration Building, had been rapturously received, Mr. Johnson grew wary of enlisting Wright for a second project, an adjacent research facility.

“To be frank, Frank,” Mr. Johnson, who was known as Hib, wrote in a letter to Wright, “we simply will not consider a financial and construction nightmare like the office building.”

Wright, then 76 and in the midst of one of his periodic career resurgences, turned on the charm. “You aren’t losing your good hunches are you, Hib?” he responded. “The ones that made you what you are today?”

Being Wright, he also could not resist a dig at the preliminary plans Mr. Johnson had included with his note.

“The plan your department made is like all plans made by departmental minds,” he said. “Just a little hole for the little cat and a big hole for the big cat.”

Eventually — and not for the last time — the big cat succumbed to Wright’s entreaties, paving the way for the Research Tower, which would prove to be one of the architect’s most unusual structures.

Mr. Johnson has overseen much of the restoration of the company’s Wright buildings and hopes to build on their lure. This week, a small piece of the Research Tower, also designed by Mr. Wright, will reopen as a museum. The tower, a detail of which is shown, was finished in 1950 and includes seven two-level stories. The floors are cantilevered off a concrete core sunk 50 feet into the ground.

William Zbaren for The New York Times

This week, after 30-odd years of being shuttered, a small piece of the Research Tower will reopen as a museum that recreates down to the last test tube the way the building functioned during its heyday in the 1950s. The project is one of the final pieces of an eight-year, $30 million effort the company has undertaken to restore its landmark Wright campus.

Herbert Fisk Johnson III, current chief executive of S. C. Johnson and grandson of Hib, who died in 1978, has overseen much of the restoration and hopes to build on the lure of the Wright buildings, which draw tourists to Racine weekend after weekend.

The correspondence between his grandfather and Wright, which Mr. Johnson said had not been published before, provides a glimpse into how difficult it could be for Wright to attain his vision. In an email interview, Mr. Johnson, known as Fisk, described their relationship as “love-hate.”

“The Administration Building was so over budget — it was close to half the net worth of the entire company when it was done,” he said. “My grandfather appreciated the genius and the beauty of the creation, but was embarrassed by how much it cost.”

With its meticulous brickwork, custom furniture and fixtures, as well as the sky-lit Great Work Room that creates the uncanny sensation of being at the bottom of an enormous lily pond, the Administration Building — completed in 1939 — is generally regarded as one of Wright’s signal achievements. The total cost was just under $3 million (roughly $50 million today).

While more modest, the Research Tower, finished in 1950, includes seven two-level stories, each of which contains a floating mezzanine. The floors are cantilevered off a concrete core sunk 50 feet into the ground that Wright compared to a tree root. The core also contains a narrow staircase that, with a small circular elevator, is the only way to move between floors. Total square footage is about 20,000.

The ribbon windows consist of tiers of Pyrex glass tubes, essentially oversize versions of the ones used in laboratories like those in the Research Tower.

Brady Roberts, chief curator of the Milwaukee Art Museum, calls the tower “the closest thing to a built work of 20th-century utopian architecture that you will ever find.”

Brendan Gill, Wright’s biographer, remarked, “Like so many of Wright’s works, the Research Tower succeeds as an aesthetic object, but from the beginning presented an almost endless series of difficulties.”

That it did. The fixed and unshaded Pyrex tube windows made temperature control difficult in the summer. Wright also resisted installing sprinklers in a building where open-flame experiments were often underway, on the grounds that they were unsightly. The sprinklers eventually were installed.

Still, for the next 30 years, the Research Tower functioned as the R&D heart of S. C. Johnson, which was founded in 1886 and is the manufacturer of household products like Windex, Pledge and Raid.

Cary E. Manderfield, director of research and development for the company, remembers working in the tower just before it was taken out of service in the early 1980s.

“It was a great place to do research,” Mr. Manderfield said. “Just a few hops up or down the stairs and you could collaborate with a colleague, learn what you needed to learn to do an experiment or borrow a piece of lab equipment or a chemical. A lot of very good science came out of the tower.”

In 1982, the Research Tower was officially retired; it had not been repurposed because of concerns that upgrading to meet building code standards could have compromised its architectural integrity.

“The tower is an incredible jewel and I wanted to share it with the world,” Mr. Johnson said.

An enclosed glass-tube bridge connects the Research Tower and the Administration Building.

William Zbaren for The New York Times

Almost from the beginning, the 35-acre S. C. Johnson campus has functioned as a part-time tourist attraction for Racine, a 19th-century industrial city about 75 miles north of Chicago on Lake Michigan. Besides the Wright structures, the campus includes two other architectural gems.

The first is the Golden Rondelle Theater, which was the S. C. Johnson Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York. After the fair, it was disassembled and moved here. Supposedly modeled on a Wright church, it functions today as an auditorium and visitor center.

Then, four years ago, the company commissioned Norman Foster, winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, to design Fortaleza Hall, which commemorates an expedition Hib Johnson made to the jungles of Brazil in the 1930s in search of a new source for the company’s main product, floor wax.

Fortaleza Hall also includes galleries where the company stages exhibitions about Wright’s career. The current show, “At Home With Frank Lloyd Wright,” examines three of his residences — the two Taliesin compounds, in Spring Green, Wis., and Scottsdale, Ariz., and a suite at the Plaza Hotel in New York that he occupied and modified while designing the Guggenheim Museum.

The exhibitions are co-curated by Mr. Roberts of the Milwaukee Art Museum and Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, chief archivist of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation in Scottsdale.

S. C. Johnson offers free tours of its campus on summer Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays and receives about 9,000 visitors a year. Mr. Johnson hopes to triple that number with the addition of the Research Tower and regular exhibitions.

Half a century after Wright’s death in 1959, the phenomenon of Frank Lloyd Wright tourism continues to expand in the Midwest. One of the newer attractions is the 19-story Price Tower in Bartlesville, Okla., which was completed in 1956. That and the Research Tower are Wright’s only extant high-rise buildings.

The Price Tower was built for the H. C. Price Company, an oil and gas pipeline construction firm. It was sold to Phillips Petroleum in 1981 and, in 2000, was donated to a nonprofit organization that has transformed it into the Price Tower Arts Center. Restored in 2004, it contains a hotel, restaurant, galleries and office space, and attracts 30,000 visitors a year.

“We are the most iconic building in town,” said Timothy L. Boruff, executive director of the center.

Though Wright was born in Wisconsin, the epicenter of Wright tourism is undoubtedly Oak Park, Ill., where he lived and worked during the early years of his career. It is the home of more than two dozen Wright buildings and numerous others by his Prairie School disciples and acolytes.

Back in Racine, Mr. Johnson is contemplating his own legacy. Over the years, he says, various financial executives have contended that the company would be better off moving to more modern quarters.

Mr. Johnson is not buying it. “My grandfather made incredibly bold decisions, one of which was to build these buildings in spite of the cost,” he said. “For me, they are a visual reminder of those decisions and of the importance of being bold when leading this enterprise. We are committed to keeping Wright’s vision intact.”

日化又稱日用化學工業產品(簡稱日用化工)或稱日用化學品，是指生產人們在日常生活中所需要的化學產品的工業。列入中國化學工業年鑒、單獨統計產量(產值)的日用 ...

日化可能是中國稱呼日常使用的化學品。

日化巨頭守護建築大師賴特傑作

建築ROBERT SHAROFF2014年06月10日

弗蘭克·勞埃德·賴特為庄臣公司總部設計的幾處經典建築，將在停用30多年後，作為博物館重新開放，全面展示賴特的設計。

如果說，在房地產行業里有什麼事情是永恆的，那就是企業總裁及其建築師之間的鬥智斗勇了。

企業高管總是糾結於盈虧利潤，但又想留下一些實實在在的建築遺產。而建築師——尤其是有遠見卓識的那類，則將每份工作視為一次探索全新設計理念和材料的機會。

庄臣公司(S.C.Johnson)是總部設在威斯康星州的拉辛(Racine)的家庭清潔用品公司，小赫伯特·F·庄臣(Herbert F. Johnson Jr.)是其第三代傳人。1943年，他正像前文所說的那樣，和建築師弗蘭克·勞埃德·賴特(Frank Lloyd Wright)進行了一番鬥智斗勇。雖然賴特為庄臣行政大樓(Administration Building)做的設計獲得了極佳反響，庄臣卻不敢聘請他設計第二個項目，即緊鄰行政大樓的研究設施。

「老實說，弗蘭克，」人稱希伯(Hib)的庄臣在給賴特的一封信中寫道，「像行政大樓那種設計方案，無論在經費上還是在施工上，都是一場噩夢，我們根本不會再考慮了。」

賴特當時雖已是76歲高齡，但正處於設計生涯的又一個巔峰期。收到庄臣的來信，他開始施展自己的人格魅力。「你的直覺應該還沒有退化吧，希伯？」他回復道，「你所以能有今天的成就，直覺不是有很大功勞嗎？」

賴特到底是賴特，除了施展個人魅力外，他還忍不住對庄臣隨信附上的設計初稿做了一番評論。

「你的部門搞出來的這份設計，根本沒什麼想像力，」他寫道，「就是小人物配小房間，大人物配大房間罷了。」

最終（其實這還不是最後一次），這位「大人物」在賴特的軟磨硬泡下鬆了口，為研究大樓(Research Tower)的建設鋪平了道路。日後證明，這是賴特最傑出的作品之一。

同為賴特設計的庄臣研究大樓的一小部分，將作為博物館重新向公眾開放。

William Zbaren for The New York Times

研究大樓目前已經停用了30多年。本周（4月30日當周——譯註），它的一小部分將作為博物館重新向公眾開放，力圖全方位重現它在20世紀50年代的巔峰狀態。該項目屬於一個為期八年、耗資3000萬美元（約合人民幣2億元）的工程，是該工程的收尾部分。公司的目的是要重建其地標式的賴特園區。

赫伯特·菲斯克·庄臣三世(Herbert Fisk Johnson III)是庄臣公司的現任首席執行官，也是逝世於1978年的希伯的孫子。菲斯克親自監督了大部分修繕工作，以期保留賴特建築原有的風貌。正是這些建築吸引了源源不斷的遊客來到拉辛。

據庄臣說，他祖父與賴特的通信此前從未公諸於眾過，從這次公布的信件中，我們可以看出，要將賴特的想像力付諸實踐，有多麼困難。在一次電子郵件採訪中，庄臣——也就是菲斯克，在談到他祖父與賴特的關係時，用了「愛恨交加」這個詞。

「建造行政大樓的花銷遠遠超出預算——完工時的總開支接近公司凈資產的一半，」他寫道，「我祖父能夠欣賞這項設計的天才之處和美感，可是巨大的開支也讓他大跌眼鏡。」

精細的磚砌工程、定製的傢具及設施、有天窗照明的大工作室(Great Work Room)——這些設計營造出一種奇妙的氛圍，讓人感覺就像置身於巨型荷花池的池底一般。行政大樓竣工於1939年，被視為賴特的標誌性作品之一。工程總造價接近300萬美元（大致相當於今天的5000萬美元，約合人民幣3億元）。

相比行政大樓，1950年完工的研究大樓沒有那麼奢華。它由七座雙層小樓構成，每座小樓中有一個空中夾層。不同的樓層由一根打入地下50英尺、被賴特比作樹根的混凝土核心樁連接起來。核心樁內還有一座狹窄的樓梯，和一台小型圓形電梯，這是各樓層之間唯一的通道。研究大樓的總面積達2萬平方英尺（約合1858平方米）。

建築的帶狀窗所用的材料，是多層耐熱玻璃管，實質上就是樓內實驗室里用的那種耐熱玻璃管的超大版。

密爾沃基藝術博物館(Milwaukee Art Museum)的總策展人布拉迪·羅伯茨(Brady Roberts)把這座大樓稱為「你能找到的、最接近20世紀烏托邦建築的作品」。

賴特的傳記作者布倫丹·吉爾(Brendan Gill)評論說，「和賴特的眾多作品一樣，研究大樓是一件成功的美學作品，但是它從一開始就要面對數不清的困難。」

事實的確如此。由於耐熱玻璃管製成的窗戶是固定的，而且毫無遮擋，一到夏天，室內的溫度就會變得難以控制。雖然樓內經常要進行明火實驗，但賴特依然拒絕安裝洒水滅火器，理由是影響美觀。不過洒水滅火器最終還是裝上了。

儘管如此，在接下來的30年里，研究大樓一直是庄臣公司的研發中心。庄臣創立於1886年，該公司生產的家庭清潔用品包括Windex清潔劑、碧麗珠傢具光亮劑(Pledge)、雷達殺蟲劑(Raid)等。

加里·E·曼德菲爾德(Cary E. Manderfield)是庄臣公司的研發總監。研究大樓於20世紀80年代初停用之前，他曾在那裡工作。他回憶了當時的光景。

「那是個做研究的好地方，」曼德菲爾德回憶道，「你只需要上下樓梯，走幾步路，就可以找同事合作，學習做實驗的技巧，借點實驗儀器或者化學試劑什麼的。那裡誕生了很多非常棒的科研成果。」

1982年，研究大樓正式停用。之所以一直沒有重新啟用，是因為公司擔心，一旦按照建築規範對它進行升級改造，可能會破壞它的建築完整性。

「這座大樓是件不可思議的珍寶，我希望與全世界一起分享它。」庄臣說。

一個封閉的玻璃管橋樑，連接着研究大樓和行政大樓。

William Zbaren for The New York Times

幾乎從一開始，佔地35英畝（約合14.2公頃）的庄臣公司園區就是拉辛的一個旅遊景點。拉辛在19世紀時是座工業城市，坐落在密歇根湖畔，地處芝加哥以北75英里（約合121公里）。除了賴特設計的建築外，園區內還有另外兩座建築珍品。

Golden Rondelle劇院就是其中之一，它曾是庄臣公司在1964年紐約世界博覽會上的展館。世博會結束後，它被拆解運回並重新組裝。其建築藍本據說是賴特設計的一座教堂。如今，它的用途是一座禮堂和遊客服務中心。

四年前，庄臣公司聘請普利茲克建築獎(Pritzker Architecture Prize)得主諾曼·福士特(Norman Foster)設計了福塔雷薩大廳(Fortaleza Hall)，以紀念20世紀30年代希伯·庄臣前往巴西叢林的考察活動。考察的目的，是為地板蠟這個公司主打產品尋找新的原料源。

福塔雷薩大廳還包括幾間畫廊，庄臣公司在這裡舉辦有關賴特職業生涯的展覽。當前的展覽主題為「弗蘭克·勞埃德·賴特之家」(At Home With Frank Lloyd Wright)，該展覽審視的是賴特的三處住宅，它們是：兩座分別位於威斯康星州春綠村(Spring Green)和亞利桑那州斯科茨代爾(Scottsdale)、名為「塔里耶森」(Taliesin)的建築；以及紐約廣場飯店(Plaza Hotel)的一個套間。賴特在設計古根海姆博物館(Guggenheim Museum)時曾入住並改建過這個套間。

這些展覽，是密爾沃基藝術博物館的羅伯茨聯同弗蘭克·勞埃德·賴特基金會的首席檔案管理員布魯斯·布魯克斯·菲佛(Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer)共同策劃的。弗蘭克·勞埃德·賴特基金會位於斯科茨代爾(Scottsdale)。

庄臣公司每年夏天的周五到周日都會免費開放，每年接待遊客9000人次。庄臣希望通過修繕研究大樓、定期舉辦展覽，使遊客的數量增加兩倍。

賴特逝世於1959年。如今，半個世紀過去了，關於賴特的「朝聖」之旅，正在美國中西部持續鋪開。一個較新的旅遊景點是19層的普萊斯大樓(Price Tower)，位於俄克拉荷馬的巴特爾斯維爾(Bartlesville)，竣工於1956年。普萊斯大樓和研究大樓是賴特僅存的兩座高層建築作品。

普萊斯大樓是為H.C.Price石油與天然氣管道建築公司建的。1981年，普萊斯大樓被菲利普斯石油公司(Phillips Petroleum)收購，又於2000年被捐贈給一家非盈利機構，隨後改建為普萊斯大樓藝術中心(Price Tower Arts Center)。經過2004年的翻修，樓內現有一家賓館，還有餐廳、畫廊和辦公區，每年吸引遊客3萬人次。

藝術中心的執行董事蒂莫西·L·博魯夫(Timothy L. Boruff)說：「普萊斯大樓是城裡最具標誌性的建築物。」

儘管賴特出生於威斯康星州(Wisconsin)，但是朝聖者雲集的中心地帶，無疑是伊利諾伊州的橡樹園(Oak Park)。賴特在職業生涯的早期曾在那裡生活和工作。那裡有20多座建築出自他的手筆，他在「草原學派」(Prairie School)的弟子和信徒，也在當地留下了大量建築作品。

回到拉辛的話題。庄臣正尋思着留下屬於自己的建築遺產。他說，多年來，很多財務管理人員都勸他把公司搬到更加現代的地方，他們認為這會使公司的經營狀況得到改善。

但庄臣並不買賬。「我爺爺老是做一些特別大膽的決定，比如，他會不計成本地打造這些建築作品，」他說，「對我來說，這些建築物會讓我想起爺爺所做的決定，提醒我要做一個有魄力的企業領導者。我們有責任原樣保護賴特的視覺遺產。」

本文最初發表於2014年4月29日。
翻譯：顧紋天

The Urge to Strangle

T.J. Clark

• Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs
  Tate Modern until 7 September; MoMA from 25 October to 8 February 2015

Crowds gather at the heart of Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs, drawn to an artless home movie showing the master at work. He looks, and was, extremely unwell. Not even a rakish straw hat, part cowboy part Maurice Chevalier, can divest the scene of its pathos. There is a spot of time in the movie, after Matisse has finished his fierce fast cutting of the usual vegetable-flower-seaweed-jellyfish shapes (the ones he works on here are not unlike the clusters of yellow in the centre of Mimosa), when the speed suddenly slackens and the old man holds the limp paper in his hands as if reluctant to let go. He fusses with it a little, prodding and twisting the fronds in space, maybe trying to thread the shapes together, buckling them, letting them be carried for a second as they might be by a breeze or current. He seems to be waiting for the cut-outs to occupy space – to make space. Art for him is the moment at which, to quote a remark he made about Snail, one becomes ‘aware of an unfolding’. ‘At this time of year,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘I always see the dried leaves on your table, catching fire as they pass under your fingers from death to life.’

I thought, looking at the film sequence, that I could hear the paper shapes rustle. And the word – the imagined sound – sent me back to a wonderful essay by Roland Barthes called ‘The Rustle of Language’, and especially to its last two sentences:

I imagine myself today something like the ancient Greek as Hegel describes him: he interrogated, Hegel says, passionately, uninterruptedly, the rustle of branches, of springs, of winds, in short, the shudder of Nature, in order to perceive in it the design of an intelligence. And I – it is the shudder of meaning I interrogate, listening to the rustle of language, that language which for me, modern man, is my Nature.

Was Matisse at the end of his life the Greek or the modern? It is the question posed by this extraordinary show, and one in which the whole meaning and fate of ‘modern’ art is, triumphantly and sometimes painfully, at stake. Only a gathering of the evidence as comprehensive and beautifully staged as the one at Tate can give the question back its true dignity. And a proper answer, as Barthes tries to signal, can only be Hegelian in the strong sense. (That is, it should learn to wait for the seemingly contrary terms of a civilisation to reverse themselves.) Nature for the Greek, to use Barthes’s paraphrase of the philosopher, is, however far back in the record we go, always ‘shuddering’, and this intimation of uncanniness or distress in the object points to the fact that in the strange activity called sculpture, by reason of the sheer relentlessness of the Greek’s interrogation, Nature is already being asked – prodded and cut and twisted – to divulge a design, an intelligibility. Heraclitus is as modern as they come. The word ‘shudder’ reminds me of Fénéon’s great, cruel characterisation of Monet: that in practice the painter could only hang onto his dream of delighted subservience to eyesight, and make art out of the dream, by ‘making Nature grimace’. Matisse, who admired Monet greatly, thought constantly about the contrast between a painting devoted to pleasure and the agony involved in its production:

A man who makes pictures like the one we were looking at [he is writing to his son about Rouault’s The Manager and a Circus Girl, but no doubt also about himself] is an unhappy creature, tormented day and night. He relieves himself of his passion in his pictures, but also in spite of himself on the people round him. That is what normal people never understand. They want to enjoy the artist’s products – as one might enjoy the milk of a cow – but they can’t put up with the inconvenience, the mud and the flies.

Matisse too, with part of his mind, was tired of his turmoil. Painting was agitation. He said to more than one admirer late in life – no doubt intending to frighten, but still, I think, essentially telling the truth – that in order to begin painting at all he needed to feel the urge to strangle someone, or lance an abscess in his psyche. There ought to be a better way. ‘Paintings seem to be finished for me now’: he is writing in 1945 to his daughter Marguerite, who was recovering at the time from the horror visited on her in a Gestapo prison at Rennes. ‘I’m for decoration – there I give everything I can – I put into it all the acquisitions of my life. In pictures I can only go back over the same ground.’
Painting versus decoration. The undialectical answer to the question deriving from Barthes seems close. Painting, in Matisse’s case, had always equalled Nature. Certainly confronting Nature – passing it under his fingers – had proved to be delight as much as interrogation: a rustling and smoothing of things into the skein of colour that was painting, so he believed, and that painting had to fight continually to keep in being, up front. But doing so was inseparable from the murderous urge, the mud and flies, the grimace, the exacerbation – ‘the accomplishment of an extremist in an exercise’. ‘He took in front of nature,’ as an early critic had it of Cézanne, ‘the attitude of a question mark.’ Decoration might be a way out. Decoration, surely, would be ambience not ethos. It would provide a surrounding, not a model of the world’s design. It was a mode that expected, and in a sense welcomed, inattentiveness. (The rooms at Tate are friendly to it.) It would be, with its fabulous battery of primitive techniques – saturated high-key colour, repetition, redundancy, vegetable sign-language, evenness enlivened by syncopated quirks of brightness – a ‘sensation delivery system’. (Like the ‘nicotine delivery systems’ that tobacco CEOs once discussed in the privacy of the boardroom.)

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Decoration, to sum up, seems regularly to offer itself within modernism as an alternative to art’s too high claims. But where the alternative leads – into what kind of accommodation with the culture industry – is never clear. I believe Matisse was right when he told his daughter that he had put into his late work ‘all the acquisitions of [his] life’, and that his skills as an artist would be sharpened by being put in the service of a new, more modest and realistic relation to the viewer. But he knew he was walking a tightrope. The best of the late murals – The Parakeet and the Mermaid from 1952, the grey Oceanias of 1946 – are remarkable for their unforced, drifting quality, the small shapes in them like knots and flutters in a vast empty field. The worst choke the field with optical buzz. The sustained unseriousness of Matisse’s brush with religion at this time, which served him so well as an artist, always threatens to collapse in the cut-outs into ritzy nostalgia for the South Seas: The Lagoon, Creole Dancer, The Negress, Women with Monkeys. Naivety – which Matisse inherited from the 19th century as a prime aesthetic value – is shadowed by simple-mindedness, as much a stage prop as the movie’s straw hat. In an exchange with Picasso about the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence, a commission that Matisse worked on from 1948 to 1951 (‘Why not a brothel, Matisse?’ ‘Because nobody asked me, Picasso’), it isn’t the smug facetiousness of Picasso’s Party Line question that matters, but rather the suspicion that Matisse’s answer may be, though he hardly knows it, the whole truth. Decoration without somewhere to decorate – applied art without a realm of pleasure or praxis to apply to – such is modernism’s ‘Why not?’
The problem that follows for the critic is not to decide whether Matisse’s cut-outs succeed, much of the time, in shrugging off these limitations of social purpose or available theme – only a killjoy or an iconographer could resist the splendour on the walls – but to speak rationally about how it was done. In many ways the most useful piece of writing about late Matisse remains an article called ‘Something Else’ published in Henri Matisse: Paper Cut-Outs almost forty years ago by the poet and essayist Dominique Fourcade. It is that rare beast in the art world, a catalogue essay of high seriousness that entertains real doubts about the quality of its objects. Naturally this means that it has been shuffled off subsequently into art-historical limbo (I can’t see that it gets a mention in Tate’s book to accompany the current show), but its arguments – coming from a writer with deep knowledge of Matisse’s art and life – seem to me worth revisiting. Fourcade begins by refusing to be impressed by the phrases from books and interviews invariably brought on to define the cut-outs’ originality. ‘Cutting straight into colour reminds me of the direct carving of the sculptor,’ Matisse said in Jazz. ‘I arrived at the cut-outs,’ he wrote to his protector Father Couturier, ‘in order to link drawing and colour in a single movement.’ But how is any of this new for Matisse? Hadn’t his painting ever since 1905 been an attempt to link drawing and colour in a single movement; that is, to make colour appear (it must be a matter of appearance, of contrivance, but if the spell works the result will be utterly convincing) to divulge its shape and extent, its internal spatiality, its proximity and distance? There is an oil painting at Tate which epitomises the previous colour regime. Red Interior: Still Life on a Blue Table is one of a cluster of works from 1947-48 that said farewell, so it turned out, to the set of objects – the intimate and agitated small world – around which Matisse’s painting had been oriented for half a century. (‘Window’, ‘table’, ‘glimpse of garden’ and ‘interior’ are tropes that the cut-outs then largely abandon.) It is very hard to pin down what makes Red Interior so beautiful and hard to bear. Partly it has to do with the zigzags of black on red being like a child’s sign-language for electric shock, or a strip cartoon’s for a punch to the head. I don’t want the head on the wall (a plaster of a long-ago lover) to be Marguerite’s in the cell at Rennes, but the idea won’t entirely go away. The dreadful, irresistible still life of apples in the foreground is like a malignancy under the microscope. The room and the movement into the garden are not torn apart by these jags of energy and absurdity – the space made by the red is finally one of shelter, even of calm – but everything is, and has to be, pushed almost to breaking point. ‘The inconvenience, the mud and the flies.’ Above all – this, I think, is what Fourcade cannot let go of – it is the unmitigated colour of Red Interior, aggravated and grimacing, which insists in Matisse, in painting after painting, that none of us has a ‘given’ place to be ourself any more, and that only painting can make one. The room turns towards us. The red is extruded as much as spread out. Whether it includes the viewer or means to hurl him into the outer darkness is undecidable. Whether the black zigzags are terrible or just jazzy, likewise. ‘Rustling’ doesn’t seem the right word.
Whatever else this painting may be, it is not a sensation delivery system. It knows that sensations belong to – or alas have been detached from – particular human occasions, ways of being, forms of life. But the exacerbation of colour in Matisse speaks, dialectically, to the lack of particularity that makes us ‘modern’. (This to and fro of contraries is dealt with powerfully in a new book by Todd Cronan, Against Affective Formalism: Matisse, Bergson, Modernism.) Colour, for Matisse – pure sensation, the stuff of the senses – will make, will be, a form of life. And at the same time it will enact the extremity – the uncanniness – of the wish.
Locked inside this marvellous echo chamber (torture garden), what painter would not dream of a way out? ‘Luxe, calme et volupté’. Matisse had spent a lifetime coquetting with the Baudelairean catchphrase – and with the flies buzzing round Baudelaire’s ‘Une Charogne’. Fourcade, understandably, ends up preferring among the cut-outs those few that seem to him still pictures by Matisse, still struggling to make colour generate and palliate a dislocated world. Snail and Memory of Oceania, we may agree, are moments of high achievement in Matisse’s late style, and essentially, whatever the artist said to the contrary, they are still paintings done with gouache-soaked paper – great unstable arrangements of dabs, blocks of pigment, traces of previous drawn ideas, colour quadrilaterals like blown-up brushmarks by Cézanne. Snail’s slow whirlpool is painting incarnate. The edges of its cut-outs are most often torn as opposed to scissored, as if the artist had not been able to resist the recollection of art’s handmade-ness. Any viewer of Snail is ‘aware of an unfolding’. Nature – the forms made by stubborn life, armoured against predators, antennae waving, soft suckers feeling for placement – is still the matrix.
Fourcade’s concern about the late style (again, I should stress that he is eloquent about exceptions, local triumphs, the intrinsic difficulty of the quest) is essentially this:

The cut-out forms never became integrated into [the unpainted white of Matisse’s ground]; the graft would not take. For the forms could never rid themselves of their built-in defect – namely, a contour which was so clearly defined, an edge so bluntly cut, that it turned the form back on itself, isolated it, deprived it of any communication with the surrounding space – trapped it, fatally.

As commentary on Acrobats or The Thousand and One Nights, this seems fair. Matisse himself saw the problem. The four tour-de-force Blue Nudes from 1952 show him fighting, scissors in one hand, charcoal in the other, to fold or force the cut silhouettes into the invading white surround. That same summer he took the blue nude idea and stretched it around the four walls of his hotel room (the resulting 54-foot Swimming Pool, which belongs to MoMA, will presumably be hung in New York): the white ground becomes an unstoppable wind tunnel, pushing the fish and weeds and desperate bathers to the side of its Mallarmé blank. Snail, a few months later, with its uncharacteristic (for Matisse) foursquare format, seems deliberately a return to framed space and Cubist interleaving.
Rationally, then – and I suppose emotionally – I am on Fourcade’s side. Snail is my masterpiece. But reason and emotion don’t always have the last word in aesthetics. The cut-out at Tate which I find will not leave me in memory, though part of me would like to expunge it, is the enormous Large Decoration with Masks from 1953. It is a preposterous, merciless, spellbinding thing – with all the button-holing fake cheeriness of a roll of wrapping paper. (Snail and Memory of Oceania seem at one point to have been envisaged as Large Decoration’s side-wings.) Standing in front of it at Tate a remark of Willem de Kooning’s came to mind. The painter was being asked about his abstract pictures from the late 1950s, and suddenly he fell to talking about the landscaping of the new parkways on Long Island. Maybe the abstracts came from them. ‘They are really not very pretty, the big embankments and the shoulders of the roads and the curves are flawless – the lawning of it, the grass. This I don’t particularly like or dislike, but I wholly approve of it.’ I turn back to Large Decoration with Masks and want to say, with and against de Kooning – as by and large I find myself saying of even the strongest attempts within modernism at a new high ‘decorative’ – that I wholly disapprove of Matisse’s ingredients, but can’t stop liking and disliking the result. It lives on in me, the muzak. It stares me down. Its emoticons are full of what happens next in art – Warhol’s wallpaper, etc – but they resist it, idiotically. Branches and winds still rustle. That there is an invocation of Greece in Large Decoration – reminiscence of wall paintings from Akrotiri, a play of masks, columns, acanthus leaf – only makes the mixture more unforgivable and moving.

‘Expulsion of Joachim’ by Giotto (c.1305)

‘I have found three reproductions of Giotto in Padua,’ Matisse wrote to his friend Bonnard in 1946, ‘and am sending them to you. Giotto is for me the summit of my desires, but the route which leads towards an equivalent, in our epoch, is too long, too difficult [his word is importante] for a single lifetime.’ It is a letter from one ill old man to another – Matisse was 76 when he wrote it, Bonnard 78 with only months to live. But the sentences are characteristic of Matisse’s humility in the face of his predecessors, as well as of his realism with respect to the present. I hope it would please him to be told that in Snail – in the step by step unfolding of the cut-out shapes into a gold infinity round the edge – there lives on the tension of temple and empty sky to be found in Giotto’s Expulsion of Joachim.