Shopping for the ages

Joanne Furio

The title of an unusual exhibition, “246 and Counting: Recent Architecture + Design Acquisitions,” refers to the number of items SFMOMA has acquired during Henry Urbach’s nearly two years as the museum’s curator of architecture and design. We zeroed in on a few of those items and asked Urbach to let us know why they made the cut.* July 10, 2008–Jan. 4, 2009, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 3rd St., S.F., 415-357-4000


Power Mac G4 Cube
Designer: Apple Industrial Design Group
Year: 2000
Country of Origin: USA
Material: Mostly polycarbonate plastic
Collectibility: “Apple is one of the great design stories of our time. They’ve recognized that excellent design is excellent marketing.”
Cost: $

Albert Camus, The Rebel: Twenty-five Typographic Meditations
Designer: Jack W. Stauffacher
Year: 1969
Country of Origin: USA
Material: Ink on paper
Collectibility: “This is a very special portfolio of prints that combines an innovative design treatment of Camus’ The Rebel with extremely beautiful and abstract typographical elements that are not illustrations, but more meditations on the meaning of Camus’ text. Stauffacher is one of the great masters of modernist graphic design in the Bay Area.”
Cost: $$

Westinghouse 1964 New York World’s Fair Pavilion Model
Designer: Eliot Noyes
Year: 1961
Country of Origin: USA
Materials: Painted wood and Plexiglas
Collectibility: Mod­els like this are extremely rare. This model, with its incredible spherical display rooms, really speaks in a clear way about the optimism and exuberance for technology of that period.”
Cost: $$$

AYOR (At Your Own Risk) chair
Designer: Ron Arad
Year: 1991
Country of Origin: UK
Materials: Blue anodized steel and lead weights
Collectibility: “Ron Arad is a maverick in terms of exploring the conceptual edges of furniture design. In this piece, he developed a chair that rocks but, because of the lead weight in its base, quickly returns to the upright position when you stand up. Hence the title. It smacks you.”
Cost: $$$$

Revolving Cabinet
Designer: Shiro Kuramata
Year: 1970
Country of Origin: Japan
Material:: Polished metalcrylate
Collectibility: “I’m interested in works that probe the edge between storage and display. This storage cabinet is about anything but hiding things, and that interests me as an idea.”
Cost: $$

Boston Bicycle
Designer: Jens Martin Skibsted for Biomega
Year: 2004
Country of Origin: Denmark
Materials: Primarily aluminum
Collectibility: “Biomega is charting new terrain in the design of bicycles for urban use, which has progressive political and environmental implications. This bike folds, so it can fit in an elevator or a train. And the lock is integral to the structure, so if the lock is cut, the bike becomes dysfunctional, thereby discouraging theft.”
Cost:: $

* SFMOMA does not publicly reveal prices, so Urbach supplied us with the relative value of the museum's acquisitions using a restaurant-style method, from least ($) to most ($$$$) costly.