Hasta La Ideas

In this series, Matthew Sullivan (AQQ Design) highlights some designers that you should know, but might not. Previously, he looked at Donald Judd’s furniture designs.

Alan Buchsbaum: Born in Savannah, Georgia, 1936. Died in New York City, 1987.

Alan Buchsbaum was a key figure in three significant, consecutive design phases: Supergraphics, High-Tech and postmodernism. An upwelling of a particular style is a communal affair, though probably really only caused by the few people that have the strength to erupt it. That strength seems to require a love and care of precedent, as well as a commitment to synthesize this knowledge into a material form. From the expressed synthesis usually blossoms what is termed a “new” style. In the case of Buchsbaum, his career took its first real form with the congealing of Supergraphics in the late ’60s. Supergraphics was a style of design (most commonly realized with interior decorators and architects) where large-format text, blown-up photographs and/or oversized patterns were superimposed onto buildings or interiors to effect an augmentation of a space. The augmentation, however, is purely visual, with zero physical change to the actual structure. Perhaps Supergraphics is best understood as a marriage of ad-hocism and pop art—taking ad-hocism’s additive collage technique but eliminating its often folksy handmade quality by tightening it up with pop art’s assimilation of large-scale advertising. Buchsbaum had many designs that promoted this approach. His use of a giant, blown-up photo of a pink rose blossom is completely paradigmatic of the Supergraphics method—and, to my eye, perfectly beautiful.

Above: interiors for the Tenenbaum house (1972). Top image: a Buchsbaum kitchen from 1978 (left) and a 1980 bedroom with a custom platform bed

A 1973 modular-dining design for a show sponsored by the fiberglass manufacturer Owens Corning

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