Schwarz
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Design's cutting edge has been removed because there are too many children at the table now for anything sharp, and the fashion heat of only a few years ago - which generated singles-only magazines like Wallpaper, with its label-lust crossovers from clothing to interior design - has become a usable stylishness, as in casual work clothes that translate easily to the occasional party.
Wallpaper's place in the sun has become Dwell's, with its young family-values version of high design: the return of domesticated thinking like Mary and Russel Wright's. And not coincidentally, of prefabricated housing: a prefab FlatPak house, designed by Charlie Lazor, a Minneapolis architect, was exhibited as a product, the largest piece of furniture at the fair.
But in terms of design's potential to invent and imagine, to solve and foresee, to anger or excite, it's a post-fab, as in fabulous, moment. The proliferation of makeover shows on television, on which your home can be shown the door in 30 commercially interrupted minutes, makes it clear just how shallow the pool of thought is in contemporary design.
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