In a country where the only non-couture designer people know is Target’s Michael Graves, Prouvé offers a nice appetizer into the world of design. A simple place setting in the Pacific Design Center, the exhibition features Prouvé’s Kangaroo chair, wall light, façade panel with portholes and ventilated wall panel all over a shiny waved membrane. It’s like being on a cruise without anyone trying to sell you your picture every two minutes.
It’s the waves that are the most astounding. Technically, Prouvé wanted them to act as a "curatorial game board," giving the museum designers infinite possibilities on which to display his work. Talk of the waves’ "indeterminate oscillating wave pattern" and how "a single computational unit was selected as the primary building block" may only interest those with a math fetish. Although, considering how perfectly blue that plastic is, it’s hard to deny the beauty of an algorithm.
The entire exhibit simultaneously embraces/flaunts its natural influences and repudiates them as lesser, teasing the Pacific for being marred with seaweed blemishes while its pool is Oxy Padded clear. Yes, here architecture triumphs over nature. And best of all, no sunscreen is needed.
MOCA Pacific Design Center is located at 8687 Melrose Ave., in West Hollywood. Museum hours: Tue and Wed 11 a.m.-5 p.m., Thu 11 a.m.-8 p.m., Fri 11 a.m.-5 p.m., Sat and Sun 11 a.m.-6 p.m., closed Mon. Price: free. For more information, visit www.moca.org.