From Galway's G Hotel to Drogheda's Scotch Hall, from Philip Treacy's Umbro sportswear to Microsoft's Vista system and the iPod, it seems people are hungry for beauty in everyday objects, writes Haydn Shaughnessy.
What does the G Hotel in Galway have in common with Microsoft's next operating system, Vista? For that matter what do the D Hotel in Drogheda and the Scotch Hall shopping centre have in common with a hat, an iPod, or an Umbro sports shirt?
One clue lies in the identity of the co-designer of the G and of Umbro's latest line in sportswear, Philip Treacy. A hat designer of outrageous taste and global fame, Treacy was hired by Ireland's Monogram Hotels to work with architects and designers Douglas Wallace on the G interiors.
These included a Pink Salon where, apart from the giggling at the glamour, you get to sit on a Warhol print, and see a carpet modelled on a hat.
"I design shapes," says Treacy. "Everything has a shape. And I have a point of view." And at the G he successfully translated his sense of shape, honed in hat design (hats are a laboratory for shape, form, function, balance, proportion, illusion and mystery, he says) to door handles, bed linen, lighting and much more. He recently designed a chair for Habitat and then Umbro, a company best known for making the shirts of leading soccer clubs, came calling.
Soccer shirts, chairs, door handles, lights - these are everyday objects. Australian designer Marc Newson, who originally specialised in jewellery, has since designed chairs, household objects, a bicycle, a concept car, restaurants, a recording studio and interiors for private and commercial jets.
Whatever we see is capable of making us happy, and designers such as Treacy and Newson are being invited to bury the functional values of the 1980s and 1990s with joyful, sexy glamour and beauty. "Elegance and sophistication," as Treacy puts it.
Microsoft's operating systems are perhaps the most viewed object in the world, given that hundreds of millions of people sit down and stare at Windows icons each day. Windows 2000 and XP operating systems may have been uninspiring, but Microsoft has invested heavily in the visual aesthetics of Vista, a new system due to arrive on desktops this year. And it's like something out of Minority Report, the movie where Tom Cruise organises his thoughts with the help of multiple transparent windows. Vista is built around Aero Glass, the illusion of transparency.
"Microsoft products are built by developers," says Mike Hughes, product manager for Vista in Ireland, "and where we've maybe had a change in direction is a move away from what developers think is cool to what the guy in the street thinks is cool. When we designed Vista we listened to the gut feelings of our customers."
THESE DEVELOPMENTS DO more than illustrate how we are waking up to design. We're reawakening our sense of pleasure. The mix, the confluence of people and experiences from different backgrounds, of traditions and experimental temperaments, the milieu that has always provided the edge needed for innovation, is becoming more fluid. Take the ballet dancer who extemporised to the chant of a football crowd.
It happened like this. Treacy worked on his visuals for the Umbro designs, in preparation for launching them at the London Fashion Show, with film-maker and photographer Nick Knight.
To display what are essentially sportswear products, Knight lined up the Russian ballet dancer Ivan Putrov, 50 football fans, and the singer Grace Jones.
To a wall of sound created by chants from the fans, Putrov, of the Royal Ballet in London, extemporised a rhythmic dance while Jones sang: "Come on, if you think you're hard enough."
We are still talking about football shirts and accessories. "The idea was to bring together different worlds," says Knight, whose fame as a fashion photographer has been established for 20 years.
He and his collaborators, along with Treacy, are using their aesthetic sense and experience to experiment with everyday appearances and actions, backed by a wealthy company whose customer base is everyman and everywoman.
"The old ideas about who buys what type of product used to be very clear, but it's gone out of the window," says Umbro's Simon Jobson, who says that the new glamour sportswear is a success. "Whereas 30 years ago a 50-year-old might have worn a three-piece suit, now he might well buy into this new product area. These are older, more affluent and, dare I say it, more educated people and they are staying younger longer."
So changes in the design community, design rules, and the make-up of the population are all driving a new aesthetic demand.
An investment in the beauty of everyday objects has of course been a defining feature of different periods in history. In the computer age products have technical specifications that perform functions, described in function lists, which provide benefits to users, who often need an instruction manual or a training course to use them.
IDEAS OF BEAUTY have undergone a series of puzzling transformations, too. Previously associated with diverse forms of femininity, it has on the one hand become unhealthily associated with an emaciated female form and on the other has been applied to a new notion of male perfection. New gender mores make us uneasy about beauty. Though we might think we know what human beauty is, we've become shy about talking it up. Into the void the business end of the fashion industry has created quite disturbing caricatures. Notions of human beauty have become something of a nightmare.
Beautiful objects, though, are suddenly to be seen everywhere. When Apple launched the iMac in the 1990s and right up to the launch of the iPod in 2001, computer hardware began to make up for some of the agony of the functional years. Apple remains the icon for gadget lovers, but the phenomenon reaches into all areas of life. Treacy's Python Sneakers are €250 of glamour for your feet. Sit in the restaurant of the D Hotel and the walkway along the River Boyne looks like the deck of an ocean-going liner. Its roof is emerald green.
"There's no doubt," says Hugh Wallace, of Douglas Wallace, "that design can turn a location into a destination for people who would not ordinarily visit that location." Naturally, he cites the G and Galway, but the same is true in a different way of the D and the Scotch Hall Shopping Centre in Drogheda, which Wallace says is already affecting people's perceptions of the town.
ACCORDING TO WALLACE, the D and the surrounding redevelopment are also an illustration of changing expectations. In this particular case those expectations are about how we spend our leisure time.
"People are not just going to the shops to buy things," says the ebullient Wallace, "there's been a massive change in Ireland in the way we want to spend our leisure time and the environment we want to do it in. All the graduates coming home have had a huge influence, but leisure time is spent now in malls, and it's not just shopping."
Popular perspectives on the environments that bring us satisfaction are changing as designers themselves begin to move between new roles and find new ways to experiment.
"In the Umbro film," says Nick Knight, "what is really very powerful is the sound." Knight makes the point that the high art of the fashion industry has to date only been represented in still images. Yes, we might see news clips of the catwalk at famous fashion shows but the transformation of that into permanent form has been in magazines such as Vogue. In other words, in static imagery devoid of movement and sound, two elements that allow us to experience beauty and awe.
Today, Knight works in film as much as he does in stills. And his work is leading him into three-dimensional sculptures. "We are seeing a widening of the parameters of what is beautiful," says Knight, who attributes it in part to the widening roles that designers and image-makers play and their new ability to go beyond their own limitations. He quotes Umbro's use of designers from three different disciplines, including Treacy. There's more acceptance that people don't belong solely in one niche or discipline. But he attributes it also to a growing recognition that the superficial, the surface, is very important.
"People have tended to look at fashion in two ways. Either it's grotesque bulimic models, or its vanity, all surface," says Knight. "Actually surface is enormously important. When we interact as humans we don't have much to go on at first other than surface." So there's been a period of long neglect of the superficial.
So what does the G Hotel in Galway have in common with Microsoft's next operating system Vista, the D Hotel in Drogheda and the Scotch Hall Shopping Centre, a hat, an iPod, or an Umbro sports shirt? A society hungry for beauty.