The Enduring Appeal of “Ugly” Design
Who needs perfection? For many, it’s all about furniture that defies the conventional rules of beauty
As published in Architectural Digest, January 17, 2023
Lizzie Soufleris
There is something irresistible about the ugly duckling, even before its grand metamorphosis into (spoiler alert) an adult swan. He’s gangly, his feathers look weird, his proportions are off, and every other animal he encounters on his journey notices this and comments on it. The moral of this beloved fairy tale is that beauty and its antithesis, ugliness, are meaningful only in context. The “ugly” duckling was just the victim of a temporary category error, he wasn’t actually ugly.
It’s a question that’s plagued philosophers and artists for centuries: Is beauty really in the eye of the beholder? Two and a half centuries ago, the English artist, satirist, and social critic William Hogarth devoted an entire book, The Analysis of Beauty, to its study, delineating six elements that, together, created the right conditions for the ineffable quality to take shape: fitness, variety, uniformity, simplicity, intricacy, and quantity. That several of these qualities—variety and uniformity, for instance—are antithetical to one another suggests that Hogarth was concerned above all with harmony and balance: a little of this, not too much of that.
The “ugly” duckling was just the victim of a temporary category error, he wasn’t actually ugly.
These principles have worked their way around design throughout the ages, from the simple elegance of a Shaker chair to the just-right proportions of a Gio Ponti desk. But today, among aesthetes in interior design, furniture, fashion, and more, there’s currency in the objects that defy these rules. What are we to make of them?
Consider the English designer Faye Toogood’s recent exhibition at Friedman Benda, “Assemblage 7: Lost and Found,” which draws inspiration from an imagined archaeological dig. Works of mammoth furniture bearing clear evidence of hand-tooling have names like Barrow, Mound, Plot, and Cairn. For a viewer unaccustomed to furniture that looks like this, an internal dialogue not unlike the well-trod response of “my kid could do that” to a Jackson Pollock painting could ensue. Chances are most kids can’t do exactly that, and even if they could, the implication is that by definition kids lack the decades of skill that make an artisan a master.
Toogood’s three-dimensional works in this exhibition are made from oak, a signature material of both medieval and Arts and Crafts makers in Britain, and as the gallery notes, they look as though they’ve been excavated. Curator and critic Glenn Adamson, who contributed an essay to the 2022 monograph Faye Toogood : Drawing, Material, Sculpture, Landscape from Phaidon, tells AD PRO that these works “engage with materiality on its own terms, letting the wood assert itself in a semi-raw state. There’s an idea there of minimal transformation, just getting the material far enough to play the part of a functional object and no further.” They’re chunky, rounded, asymmetrical, and they sport tool marks that are the lasting trace of her every decision about the surface of each piece. Unskilled? Hardly, but there’s something rough about them that a Hogarth aficionado might find suspect.
Avery Trufelman, the host of Articles of Interest and a former member of the 99% Invisible team, knows that there are pockets of surprising beauty to be found in the prehistoric. In 2014 she produced a story about the humble Acheulean hand ax, which, at over a million years old, is arguably the first designed object on earth. Carefully chipped to form a palm-size object, it’s rough but recognizable as a cutting tool of some kind. Or is it? “The intriguing thing about it is that no one knows exactly what it was used for,” Trufelman says. “And I think that is part of what makes an object ‘ugly’: its lack of clarity, its muddled sense of purpose.” It may have been an all-purpose hand-tool; it could have been made primarily for display to suggest sophistication and prowess to a potential mate; it may have been designed as a throwing ax to subdue prey, and it might have been for something totally different.
The muddledness that Trufelman points out is both conceptual and literal. In the case of the ancient hand ax, we truly do not know. But in the case of one of Aaron Blendowski’s floor lamps, for instance, or Rogan Gregory’s immersive sitting environments, we can’t really be sure: Are they for use? Are they art? Are they something else? All of the above? Some of this ambiguity comes from their shapes and the way in which these objects disrupt what we’re used to seeing. “In a market where ‘design’ reigns supreme and objects are built for increasingly specific subsections of every conceivable need (a knob to help you hold your iPhone! a plug for the hole in your to-go coffee cup!), there is something nice about ambiguity. Mystery. Freedom,” Trufelman says. “An object that makes you feel like you have to get to learn it rather than expecting that it automatically caters to you.”
“Casey McCafferty is a carver, it’s an aesthetic choice. Ryan Belli makes all his pieces in his garage by himself. These makers have to choose: Do I want it perfect or wobbly?”
Monica Khemsurov, cofounder of Sight Unseen, says this was the genius of Surrealism—but its effect was only temporary. “The reason people were creating these objects was because they wanted to shock people or make people feel scandalized, and it was meant to freak people out. Think of the Lobster Telephone: you were supposed to feel uncomfortable. But people got used to it, and it was the same with postmodernism. Eventually nothing is shocking.” There’s a section in her new book, How to Live With Objects (coauthored with her fellow Sight Unseen cofounder Jill Singer), called “Uncomfortable Objects” that “advocates for living with things that are uncomfortable or ugly,” she says. Technique and vision don’t always go hand in hand with superficial perfection these days, she adds.
Phillips x Sight Unseen, their recent collaboration with Phillips Los Angeles, features a constellation of whimsical objects that could aptly be described as chonks, in the manner of an endearingly rotund pet. It features sublimely substantive footstools by Chrisopher Norman, totemic sculptures by Casey McCafferty, and Ryan Belli’s furniture, which is inspired by rock formations in Bryce Canyon and looks almost ancient in its simplicity. “The reason [these objects] look chonk-y is that they’re handmade. Casey McCafferty is a carver, it’s an aesthetic choice. Ryan Belli makes all his pieces in his garage by himself. These makers have to choose: Do I want it perfect or wobbly?” Norman explains that in traditions like woodworking or ceramics, focus is often less about perfection and more about ideas. “People want things that are unique and not perfect,” he says.
And this, it turns out, is what the avant garde Italian design polymath Gaetano Pesce has been arguing all along. Decades ahead of his time, Pesce—affectionately dubbed The Pope of Gloop by Curbed in 2021—developed an aesthetic mode of working called malfatto (literally “badly made” in Italian) that he describes as “a way of creating that admits mistakes, which allows us to be different. Making mistakes is human; repeating the mistake is stupid and diabolical.”
“What’s ugly to me is mass-manufactured knockoffs. Maybe there was an original design once, but now it’s gone through this process of endless reiteration.”
Trained as an architect at the University of Venice, Pesce did pioneering work with resins, plastics, foam and molds in the 1960s and ’70s. His iconic chair Nobody’s Perfect is quintessential malfatto: He uses molds to cast each element by hand, but the colors and dimensions are always different. Each chair in this series even came with a birth certificate to underscore its unique status in the world. For Pesce, this way of working is much more than aesthetic; he predicts that manufacturing itself will become radically customized. “I am certain that in the near future, aleatory [random] production will involve many types of products such as cars, clothing, and any other object that is needed for everyday life. In other words, the future will give us the opportunity to each possess the one unique product, such as it was in the past to possess art, which by its nature is unique.”
Sight Unseen’s Khemsurov agrees. “What’s ugly to me is mass-manufactured knockoffs. Maybe there was an original design once, but now it’s gone through this process of endless reiteration. So it has no soul, no personality, it doesn’t move you.” For Trufelman, the challenge and pleasure of contemplating beauty and ugliness is all part of being open to new ways of seeing the world and reenvisioning one’s aesthetic place in it. “Not like I can afford a couch that looks like it’s made of boxes or a lamp that looks like a lava flow,” she says. “But I really dream about it.”