Fashion - Ceding control to a world of random beauty

Alice Rawsthorn
They've been said to do everything from relieving aches, pains, depression, neuroses and stress, to bringing good luck, inducing deep sleep, cleansing auras, speaking to spirits and aligning our psychic selves with the universe.
Can crystals really do all of that? Whether or not they can, they're soon to fulfill a new and palpable function by making furniture. The Japanese designer Tokujin Yoshioka has developed a process of growing clusters of natural crystals in the shape of chairs, and the result is to be unveiled Friday at the 21_21 Design Sight gallery in Tokyo as a highlight of Tokyo Design Week.
Yoshioka has a flair for making exquisite things from unexpected materials. Over the years he has devised spectacular structures from everyday objects, such as plastic drinking straws and paper tissues. By combining them on a grand scale, he persuades us to forget their usual purpose and to focus on their delicacy, translucence and other aesthetic qualities. With the Venus Natural Crystal Chair, he has taken his experiments further by leaving it up to the material - the crystals - to define the final form of his work.
Four tanks of water will be installed in the gallery, each illustrating a different stage of the chair's "growth." Yoshioka begins by submerging a block of polyester fibers in the shape of a straight-backed dining chair in a vat of water, then adds a mineral to crystallize it. Crystals form on the fibers and slowly multiply to construct the chair. Yoshioka has no control over the resulting shape, its density or luminescence. By allowing the structure to evolve naturally, he creates what he calls "beauty born of coincidence."
He isn't the only designer to be doing so. Tomás Gabzdil Libertiny, a young Slovakian designer, conducted a similar experiment by making a vase-shaped space in a beehive, and leaving it to the bees - some 40,000 of them - to add layer after layer of beeswax until they had produced the Honeycomb Vase. Libertiny decided on the outline, but the bees completed the vase's construction, thereby adding a random element to the design process.
Nor is Yoshioka the only designer to be working with natural crystals. Julia Lohmann, from Germany, has been experimenting with making objects from them, as has the British designer Tom Dixon, who is "growing" undersea limestone on a steel frame to make furniture that he hopes to exhibit at the Design Miami design fair in December. He is planning to construct a couple of limestone chairs off a jetty in Biscayne Bay. The British artist Roger Hiorns is currently exhibiting a monumental crystal installation, "Seizure," in a derelict apartment in South London. Commissioned by Artangel and the Jerwood Foundation, it was made by filling the apartment with water, and cultivating copper sulphate crystals there. They formed a thick blue crystalline crust over the floors, walls, ceilings and every other surface, even the bathtub.
Crystals are not only beautiful, but beguiling, regardless of whether you buy into their New Age mysticism. Yet the most intriguing element of Yoshioka's experiments, and those of his peers, is why they've all been drawn to such an elusive, unpredictable substance, and one that's impossible to control.
The history of modern design has been all about control. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, designers and manufacturers have tried to translate advances in science and technology into things that improve the lives of millions of people. Mostly they've done so by standardizing design and production to ensure that those things can be made to a consistent quality and sold at affordable prices. This level of control produced a homogeneity that seemed seductive after centuries of quirky handcraftsmanship.
Not any more. We're now bored by sameness, and hanker after the unexpected. There are other factors too. By transforming the way we absorb information, digital technology has changed our attitude to other aspects of our lives. Think of the way we use the Internet, rambling from site to site in unpredictable paths, rather than reading printed information in a pre-determined sequence. We also skip randomly between iTunes songs or YouTube clips, rather than tuning into radio and television programs where the choices have already been made for us.
This has made us more amenable to idiosyncrasy and surprises, and less inclined to subject ourselves to other people's decisions, rather than making our own. The Dutch designer Hella Jongerius has addressed this by creating objects that seem unique, because they appear to share the flaws we associate with much-loved antiques. There are tiny irregularities on the surfaces of her impeccably made vases, and mismatched cushions on her obsessively engineered sofas. These "mistakes" are intentional, but trick us into thinking that each object is different, and therefore special.
Other designers use technology to make their work genuinely distinctive. Reed Kram and Clemens Weisshaar, a Swedish-German duo, do so by developing software to produce objects, such as their Breeding Tables, and programming each one to determine the final form at random, and to ensure that it will be unique.
Yoshioka sought the same spontaneity for his Venus chair, but upped the ante by delegating the final design decisions to the uncontrollable crystals, thereby allowing nature to take its course. By doing so he hopes to capture the spontaneity of natural beauty, at a time when we're increasingly suspicious of the artificial variety. If digital technology can "perfect" just about anything, can we really enjoy looking at a photograph while wondering whether the sea is unrealistically blue, or if the peachy-skinned teen star has acne?
That's why we're drawn to the oddities of nature, and why Yoshioka wanted to "grow" his chair organically. The $64,000 question is, of course, whether you can sit in the result. Yes, is the answer, although apparently the chair is "not for daily use," which probably means that you can't sit on it a) very often or b) for very long, and c) it won't be very comfortable.