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Friday, May 19, 2006

Paging Doctor Clara!


'If black is the new black, again, should its influence extend to toilet paper? Can toilet paper make it as an object of design, a touchstone of chic? More important, should it?

"The question for us was not why, but why not," said Paulo Miguel Pereira da Silva, the president of a Portuguese paper company called Renova, which has just begun testing its new product, Renova Black, otherwise known as black toilet paper, in this country.

Mr. da Silva wrote that he had been thinking about the idea of spectacle and how it relates to consumer products while at a trade show in Las Vegas. Black was an intuitive choice for toilet paper, he suggested, because it signals "avant-garde creative work."

"In a design sense," he wrote, black means "irreverence, maybe touching a bit on the core nature of art, which is to break rules and set new ones.

"Culturally, deep down, Renova Black invites people to break down whatever might be limiting as common sense ideas," he wrote.

Mr. da Silva ventured that his new product was "neither solely a product, an object or a communication tool," but some heady combination of all three.



...David Mandl, an architect, has a guest bathroom in his Manhattan apartment that's all steel and slate, and features the brushed stainless lavatory manufactured by a company called Neo-Metro. "I wanted to give the bathroom an edge," he said the other day. "With black toilet paper I think it would look awesome."



...Black toilet paper, [said one designer], "sounds so Halston, so balls of cocaine."

"My theory is that most everything can be chic at some point or for some period of time," he said.



...Henry Petroski, a design theorist and professor of engineering at Duke University, worried that "shock" and "bathroom" are an unhappy couple, at least when combined outside a nightclub setting. "In the end, I expect that many people who use the toilet do not want to be shocked," said Mr. Petroski, whose book "Success Through Failure: The Paradox of Design" was published this year by Princeton University Press. "They want to go to the bathroom in calm and solitude, without the intrusion of objects that distract them from the business at hand."

But Miguel Calvo, who is one curator for the Mobile Living Experiment, a design showcase dedicated to the props of nomadic living filling 18,000 square feet at the Skylight Studios in SoHo during the furniture fair next week, said he liked the "wow factor" of the black toilet paper, and was happily laying in a stock of it for his event. "All global nomads need toilet paper," he said. "Is this fabulous or banal? Who knows?"

His co-curator, David Shearer, said, "Maybe what's important is not the product but a sense of process: you've changed the color of something very ordinary, and so people are going to interact with it in a very different way."

Or perhaps, as David Rockwell, veteran of so-called entertainment architecture, said: "We've reached the logical end for thinking about that product. Black doesn't say anything to me about the particular use of the product. It's not really form following function; it's counterintuitive, so that's sort of interesting."'



---new york times---