Winds Of Change Have Turned Monsieur Fantastic Plastic

Sun Herald

Sunday September 21, 2008

Alice Rawsthorn

There's no point in arguing with Philippe Starck (pictured left) because it generally goes like this: (1) The world's most famous product designer makes a well-meaning and sincere but slightly preposterous claim. (2) You feel obliged to question the preposterous bit. (3) He comes across all hurt and boyish. (4) You feel mean.

Take Starck's claim to have "invented a concept called democratic design", which, he says, gives everyone high-quality products at affordable prices. Sounds great but didn't modernism try to do that for most of the 20th century? And how can he claim to have "won the battle" by designing "a chair that sells for less than EUR100", or $156, when that's still too expensive for most Western consumers? And what about the nine out of 10 people worldwide who are too poor to afford many of the products most Americans see as essentials? What has democratic design done for them?

"Oh please, I'm not God," Starck pleads. "I'm just a designer and I'm doing my best."

Luckily for the underprivileged 90 per cent, other designers are trying to help them, as illustrated by the recent Cooper-Hewitt exhibition Design For The Other 90 Percent at the National Design Museum in New York. Starck, meanwhile, is battling on another front - developing relatively cheap, attractive, energy-saving products to "introduce everybody to ecology".

The first of his so-called democratic ecology products, a line he is developing in collaboration with Pramac, an Italian industrial group, is to be introduced in Europe before Christmas and in the US next year. It is a miniature roof wind turbine, priced between $US780 ($975) and $US1250, which, Starck says, can produce up to 80 per cent of a home's energy.

Starck's turbine is one of dozens of alternative energy sources that have come on to the market lately, but there are sound reasons for taking his product seriously. One is that it's deftly designed, not least because the blades are made of transparent plastic, which will be virtually invisible up on the roof.

Another is that it's designed by him, and Starck has been so successful at persuading people to buy visually seductive but slightly silly objects - plastic Louis XV chairs, gun-shaped lamps, garden gnome stools and so on - that he may well be able to do the same for something that is actually useful.

That said, it's been a long time since the design world felt it had to take Starck seriously. He's a gentle giant, who bears a distinct resemblance to Fred Flintstone. Now 59, he rose to fame in his native France during the 1980s, when his flair for reinventing everyday objects by casting them as something else - a lemon squeezer as a lobster, plastic stacking chairs as ornate antique ones - was hailed as a playful and very commercial take on postmodernism.

Starck has since sold hundreds of thousands of those lemon squeezers, and nearly 1 million of one of his models of "antique" plastic chairs, the Louis Ghost, claim their respective manufacturers, Alessi and Kartell. Starck cast himself as a media star by spouting his design philosophy in Franglais sound bites, and bragging about being able to design a chair in the time it took for an aircraft seatbelt sign to go on and off. No other designer could beat him for brio and bankability, but by the mid-1990s he was complaining about being bored by design.

Commercially, he's still a colossus, bagging plum jobs such as the creative directorship of Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic space venture, which he took on in 2005, and seizing the media spotlight - most recently with a reality TV show he is shooting for the BBC. But at times he seems like design's equivalent of a dinosaur rocker.

Starck's confession in March, to the German weekly Die Zeit, that he was "ashamed" that "everything I designed is unnecessary" drew derisory roars in the blogosphere.

Does he still feel that way? "I regret that my job is design," he says. "Design stupidly produces more things, and for years I've spoken about the importance of living with fewer things.

"But my position is a little ambiguous."

Indeed it is. To his credit, Starck was advocating environmentalism long before it became fashionable, but he hasn't embraced it fully in his work. Nor does he seem to see the incongruity in rattling off a list of eco-responsible activities - his organic diet, the solar-powered oyster farm he owns in Arcachon Bay in south-western France, and so forth - ending with "the least polluting plane on the market", his private jet. But now he's hoping to redress the balance with Democratic Ecology.

The turbine is an encouraging start. Made from the same transparent plastic as his best-selling Louis Ghost chairs, they and the other Democratic Ecology products are to be manufactured by Pramac.

The timing is propitious, with oil prices way up and everyone from General Electric to the veteran oilman T. Boone Pickens investing in alternative energy. Next up from Democratic Ecology is a solar panel, a film that covers existing windows.

Starck is also designing a prefabricated house with glass walls that can be changed from clear to opaque at the push of a button. The prototype is now being built for him and his family outside Paris.

An electric car is being developed, too, and an eco-moped. His solar and hydrogen-powered boat will be ready for delivery to its future owner, the Hotel Bauer, in Venice early next year.

"We're seizing every opportunity to create affordable, high-technology ecology products," Starck says.

"It's very, very important that they're beautiful, because ecology should be a pleasure, not a punishment. One of the most beautiful boats in the world is the Venetian taxi, and our boat will be even more beautiful."