Through a glass, brightly
Design Research is back - as an installation - in its old home
The iconic five-story glass building at 48 Brattle St. was originally built in 1969 by architect Ben Thompson to house his legendary store Design Research. Over the years, Thompson and D/R had introduced shoppers to bold modernist furnishings and interior designs by Marcel Breuer, Hans Wegner, Alvar Aalto, and Joe Colombo, as well the splashy graphic fabrics of Marimekko. The pioneering retailer would influence American design tastes and sensibilities in ways that are still evident today.
Years later, after D/R closed in 1978, the award-winning building would house a Crate & Barrel, which vacated the space earlier this year, leaving a hole in the heart of Harvard Square. The soaring and once color-filled storefront had become floor upon floor of empty windows, stages without players.
But those who’ve ambled down Brattle recently might think that Design Research has made a triumphant return to the square - and for the moment, it has. Modernist furnishings and fixtures fill the windows, as do bold, colorful Marimekko fabrics and dresses. Try to enter, however, and you’ll find a locked door and signs explaining that this is a temporary D/R installation only, not open to the public but meant to be enjoyed from the surrounding streets and sidewalks.
Jane Thompson - designer, planner, wife, and partner of the late Ben Thompson - found her mind filling with ideas as quickly as the Brattle Street building emptied over the winter. She was writing the forthcoming book, “D/R: The Store that Brought Modern Living to American Homes’’ and working with Caroline Van Valkenburgh on a new documentary about Marimekko fabrics and fashions called “It Wasn’t Just a Dress.’’ (The film coincides with the 50th anniversary of Ben Thompson’s introduction of Marimekko to America through D/R.)
The unique Marimekko collection, the film, the anniversary - all of it - triggered an aha moment for Jane Thompson. She would hang the dresses and fabric in the windows, truck in the modernist furnishings that D/R helped introduce to American shoppers, and bring the iconic building back to life.
“So, with no budget, we found six people crazy enough to get involved,’’ Thompson said. “Three had been key staff members at D/R, and knew the display philosophy and merchandising, and the logistics of working with high space.’’
The group included former merchandise manager Nancy Hemenway; Blase Gallo and Peter Wheeler, who’d both been display directors at D/R; graphic designer Karen Lewis; curator Susan Ward, formerly of the MFA; and Thompson, of course, who heads her own firm, Thompson Design Group.
“It was really a pick-up jazz band,’’ said Thompson. “Everybody had ideas and knew how to improvise and collaborate.’’
Meeting twice a week, on Wednesday evenings and Saturdays, with a brigade of six ironing boards, they smoothed every wrinkle from over 300 Marimekkos, all carefully conserved in plastic bags.
Photographer Elsa Dorfman, who works with a 20-by-24-inch Polaroid camera, made several dozen prints of women and families with their favorite old Marimekkos over the past two years for Van Valkenburgh’s documentary. For the D/R installation, the team brought in the photos and hung them, testaments to Marimekko’s timeless appeal.
The photo exhibit hangs on the upper mezzanine level, visible from the building’s courtyard walkway. Upside-down Marimekko umbrellas dance in a far corner, and dresses grouped by pattern - amorphous design, stripe or litter of tiny flowers - hang against stretched black and white Marimekko fabric.
The installation is not just about the dresses, however. D/R was about living - in color, comfort, and style. A longtime associate of Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius and chairman of the architecture department at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, Ben Thompson was perhaps best known locally as the creator of Faneuil Hall Marketplace. But his interests ranged far and wide. Architecture wasn’t an end in itself for him. He was fascinated by interior design and by how people used and experienced spaces. Furniture and accessories were integral to D/R’s mission - and thus to the new installation.
“We needed some important furniture designs from Design Research to build the tableaus on the ground floor,’’ said Thompson, who brought in vintage possessions from her Cambridge and Cape Cod homes. As D/R aficionados began to hear of the installation plan, “there was a groundswell of people offering . . . things and memories.’’ Thompson could barely keep up with the e-mails.
Wheeler designed the installation, and it fell to him and his associates to arrange and rearrange the amassed collection of butcher block tables (Ben Thompson’s own product), white Haitian cotton covered couches, Joe Colombo chairs, tightly woven imported benches, a Saarinen womb chair, a Saarinen Tulip dining table and chairs, and more. The tables are set with rare Valencia tableware and handblown glasses from Arabia as well as Iittala glassware, all from Finland, from Hemenway’s collection.
“When I came to Boston in the late ’60s and went into Design Research, I was just at home,’’ recalled Wheeler, now the co-owner of Sara Campbell Ltd. “I said, ‘this makes sense, I have to work here.’
“Design Research was ephemeral,’’ he continued. “It was a flower, it had this beauty, it served its purpose, and it went on to sow other seeds.’’
A huge bouquet of copper pans, sourced in France by the Thompson’s Cambridge friend Julia Child and stamped “Design Research,’’ hangs in one corner of the ground floor. Lamps include a cone style in many colors that Ben brought from Denmark. Even toys fill a corner: elephants on wooden wheels proudly bearing stuffed Marimekko bodies, a hand-crafted wooden rocking horse, stuffed sock monkeys.
A low round teak D/R coffee table, two woven lounge chairs by Hans Wegner, and a small Aalto fluted side table sit in a front window. In the side alcove is a living room tableau with the iconic white DR couches around a Mies van der Rohe glass table. Colorful pillows in striking patterns are tucked into shelves and scattered about the space, as are pieces of folk art and handmade crafts, all to complement Design Research’s mid-century merchandise.
To Thompson, the installation has become more than the sum of its parts.
“It is telling a subsequent generation what modernism was about and the people who created it,’’ Thompson said. “D/R created a movement with a great diversity. It wasn’t a ‘style,’ it was an attitude, an approach, and a way of thinking about how things are used and combined. It was a set of beliefs about form and material.’’
And no store was selling such color. Bright yellows, blues, greens, reds, and purples all made “life simpler and happier and more fun,’’ Thompson said, quoting her late husband.
She adds: “Ben always said joy was his principle product.’’
The D/R installation , at 48 Brattle St., Cambridge, can be viewed (from the sidewalk) through December.
