Cityscape: Mingei showcases ‘elegant simplicity’ of midcentury furniture

Balboa Park is famous for its historical Spanish Colonial architecture, but right now some of San Diego’s finest midcentury modern designs are on view at the Mingei International Museum at the heart of the park. “Inside the Design Center,” which runs through April 12, demonstrates how the San Diego Design Center at 3603 Fifth Avenue became the hub of a midcentury design movement led by architect Lloyd Ruocco and his designer wife Ilse.

While the building, completed in 1949, became the nexus for a vital modernist design community, the focus of the exhibit is not the innovative post-World War II architecture of Lloyd and his peers. Instead, it’s the furniture, ceramics, woodwork, textiles, and other finely crafted items that could be seen in Ilse’s showroom there.

As with the best midcentury architecture, what is most striking about the furniture and household items is their elegant simplicity. Wood is never painted. It stays natural and, whether angular or curved, cuts beautiful profiles. Steel frames and furniture legs are never chunky and industrial: they are as graceful as calligraphy. Fabrics come in earthy colors and they are comfortable yet durable.

Dave Hampton, who co-curated the exhibit with Steve Aldana and Todd Pitman, got the seed of an idea for this exhibit when he was smitten with midcentury design in the late 1990s. Poring over reams of information at San Diego libraries, he came across a full-page 1950 ad from Magazine San Diego (now San Diego Magazine) featuring a photo of Ilse’s showroom with her carefully curated display of midcentury furnishings.

“I realized, ‘God, wouldn’t it be cool to try to reproduce this’,” Hampton said. “This is probably the earliest picture of Ilse’s showroom ever published. The pieces revealed themselves through Steve’s efforts and understanding, especially the regional work. Probably two-thirds of the pieces in the photo were by California designers.

With a few exceptions, the exhibit is a faithful re-creation of the magazine ad, and, while it includes furniture by famous designers like Eames and Saarinen, the real juice comes from California.

The star of the magazine ad is a sensuously curved chaise longue designed by Greta Magnusson Grossman, who made her name Los Angeles in the 1940s and 1950s with furniture, lighting, and architecture, and who spent her later years as a painter living in a home she designed in Leucadia. When the curators could not locate an example of Grossman’s chaise, Aldana, a collector and dealer of midcentury furniture, turned to his network of midcentury artisans to craft a replica. They bent and welded its tubular matte black steel frame and wrapped this armature with white cotton cord coiled 800 times. Aldana also commissioned another replica, of a dining table seen in the magazine ad and most likely designed by Dorothy Schindele.

Ilse Ruocco’s mastery of ceramics (she taught at San Diego State University for 33 years) is on view in the form of a large white earthenware pot with turquoise interior, from the Mingei’s collection. Not pictured in the magazine ad, it has an understated grace that comes straight from the core of the design center ethos.

Women had a major impact not only as midcentury creatives but as savvy business owners. San Francisco Bay Area designer Edith Heath’s glazed stone casseroles in a “sea and sand” finish came from her factory in Sausalito. Heath passed away in 2005, but Heath Ceramics is stronger than ever. My mom, who lived in the Bay Area and had great taste, left me pieces that we use every day. Also in the show are Florence Knoll’s Model 26 sofa and armchair, from the 1940s. She is the namesake of the company that continues today as a powerhouse of midcentury design.

Along with Ilse, San Diego creators in the exhibit include Walter Chapman (a softly curved walnut salad bowl) and John Dirks (wood serving tongs tucked inside the bowl). These two were not represented in the ad, but they were part of the design center community, as well as members of Allied Craftsman, an affinity group that evolved around the design center scene.

Other important midcentury California designers represented in the exhibit range from Luther Conover (two tables and a set of three steel-and-mahogany stacking stools) to Henrik Van Keppel and Taylor Green (especially two stunning matte-black steel candle holders). A perforated metal tray table by Milo Baughman is real bonus: Aldana had owned it, sold it, and wanted to buy it back for the exhibit. He was outbid, but is friends with the new owner, who loaned it for the show. George Nakashima, designer of the N12 birch table on display, with its wing-like tapered top, was based in Pennsylvania, but this object is right at home amid the Californians.

Ilse Ruocco’s curatorial eye also brought to San Diego (and the exhibit) pieces by an international array of designers led by Eero Saarinen (Model 70 aka “womb” chair) and Charles Eames (LCW bent plywood lounge chairs). Others are France’s Andre Dupre (tubular steel stacking chairs with interlaced vinyl cord backs), Sweden’s Elias Svedberg (an armless wingback chair and birch side table), Italy’s Gio Ponti (stainless steel Milano flatware), Germany’s Trude Petri-Raben (glazed porcelain Urbino cups and saucers), and Denmark’s Jens Risom (birch-frame side chairs).

While the curators could not discern the provenance of hanging textiles shown in the magazine ad, they were probably mass produced, and the show replaces them with something even better: three linen tracery pieces handmade by San Diego artisan Eve Gulick, drawn from the Mingei’s permanent collection. In midcentury homes with open floorplans, such pieces were suspended as space dividers.

If there’s a drawback to clean-lined midcentury furniture that looks fabulous in a clean-lined midcentury home, it’s that what looks perfect doesn’t always feel perfect.

A daybed by Richard G. Stein is a very comfy place to take a nap, but the green Knoll sofa is ergo-challenged: the back hits below your shoulder blades, the seat is a bit too deep, and finding a comfortable position is a squirm-fest. My wife Sally has a knockoff of Saarinen’s womb chair — an authentic new one from Knoll list for $6,156. It looks very comfy, but the back pillow doesn’t hit quite right and she instinctively flops crosswise while watching movies. My knockoff of a bent plywood-and-leather Eames recliner (an authentic one fetches $5,000) is extremely comfortable, but getting out of it is an acquired skill.

As for Lloyd Ruocco and midcentury architecture, they may not take centerstage in this exhibit, but there are wall-size photos of the design center, a home movie of him helping to build it, and a wall panel with bios of four San Diego architects who worked for Ruocco and went on to make their mark. The architecture of John August Reed, Fred Liebhardt, Henry Hester, and Homer Delawie is clearly infused with the Ruocco spirit: simple lines, harmony with a site, consideration of light and landscape, modest materials and spare interiors, a formula for basic-but-inspired living.

Pitman is the authority on Ruocco’s architecture. He lives in a Ruocco house and is the keeper of the Lloyd Ruocco Archive.  “Unfortunately when he passed away in 1981, his archive was lost,” Pitman said. “When I started working on it, there were about 45 documented Ruocco buildings. Now there are around 160 or 170.”  It’s a spectacular collection of work by a modest architect never comfortable promoting his own architecture.

Dirk Sutro has written extensively about architecture and design in Southern California and is the author of architectural guidebooks to San Diego and UC San Diego. His column appears monthly in Times of San Diego, and he also writes about houses for San Diego Magazine