July/August 2001
By Si Wakesberg
Si Wakesberg is New York bureau chief for Scrap.
One of the hottest exhibits at New York City’s museums this year wasn’t about the paintings of Vermeer or Picasso. The star of the show was none other than the light metal—aluminum.
The Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, which is part of the Smithsonian Institution, sits majestically on a corner of 91st Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Unabashed by its better-known neighbors such as the Guggenheim or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it presented an offbeat but fascinating exhibit titled “Aluminum by Design: Jewelry to Jets.”
The show, organized with the help of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh and sponsored by the Alcoa Foundation, showcased products, objects, and artworks made of primary and recycled aluminum.
One such creation was R. Buckminster Fuller’s aluminum Dymaxion House, a prefabricated structure developed in 1947 that was priced by the pound.
That wasn’t the only early architectural use of aluminum. Architects promptly recognized the virtues of aluminum, initially using it for ornamental features such as railings, gates, grills, and door handles. In 1953, the firm of Harrison & Abramowitz took aluminum to new architectural heights by designing the Alcoa Building, proving that aluminum could be practical and economical in almost every segment of construction.
Another room of the exhibit contained an array of aluminum chairs, including one by Frank Gehry made of aluminum and stainless steel, as well as the earlier all-aluminum—and still impressive—Emeco Co. chair made for the Navy in 1944. It was interesting to note that French designer Charlotte Perriand wrote in 1929: “Metal plays the same part in furniture as cement does in architecture.” (This room also offered a video on the chair-manufacturing process for those who wanted the whole story.)
Continuing on, I saw tennis rackets, baseball bats, lamps, opera glasses, playing cards, even a violin—all made of aluminum.
There were also rooms filled with aluminum jewelry, such as a bracelet by Dutch artist Grija Bakker and Arline Fisch’s “Necklace” made of pleated and anodized aluminum. According to the exhibit catalog, Fisch was the first American to work with aluminum and color in jewelry. In the field of jewelry, recycled aluminum has played an important part, as several ornaments revealed.
Speaking of recycled aluminum, an entire room was devoted to that topic, reviewing the importance of recovered aluminum in design and industrial applications. One of the exhibit’s plaques noted: “Contemporary designers and artists recycle aluminum products in their work for aesthetic, economic, social, and political reasons.” It was inspiring to see how objects that might have had an undistinguishable end in the smelter or been discarded in the landfill were given a new lease on life in jewelry, toys, and furniture.
There were, for instance, beads made in Korea from old aluminum cooking pans, toys from Vietnam created out of Coke cans, and a remarkable chaise lounge—now a prized museum piece—made by Clare Graham out of beer cans.
There were even clothes made from recycled aluminum, such as 1960s-era minidresses made out of pieces of the metal linked like chain mail. The apparel included designer Paco Rabanne’s opulent aluminum minidress, created in 1969. Use of recycled aluminum in such items “raises awareness about recycling,” the exhibit catalog states.
The exhibit also provided a concise history of aluminum, a relatively new metal compared with such old-timers as copper and iron. Though German scientist Friedrich Wöhler first isolated aluminum in 1845, the metal wasn’t introduced to the public until 1855 at the Paris World’s Fair.
In its early days, aluminum was viewed as “silver from clay,” and its initial prices matched this description. It didn’t take long, though, for the metals industry to distinguish between silver and aluminum, and soon silver prices surpassed aluminum.
In 1886, when the electrolytic process of extracting aluminum made the metal more accessible, a major industry was born. But it wasn’t until World War II, when aluminum was positioned as a “strategic metal,” that the light metal made its biggest surge. By 1944, aluminum producers were generating 800,000 tons a year, a staggering increase compared with past efforts. And “when peace returned,” the catalog notes, “manufacturers were even more eager to attract new markets in the U.S.”
This wide-ranging exhibit, which ran from March 20 to July 15, also covered aluminum’s use in packaging, transportation, and aerospace. It even offered a cautionary note for the metal, observing: “As the array of materials and technologies continues to grow, aluminum’s competitive advantage is always subject to change. For example, aluminum surpassed steel in the soda can market but found new competition from plastic containers.”
In the end, the exhibit reminded visitors that “because it can be recycled easily, without appreciable degradation, aluminum will no doubt continue to challenge designers well into the 21st century and beyond.”
That’s an encouraging and hopeful prediction for the aluminum industry. •
One of the hottest exhibits at New York City’s museums this year wasn’t about the paintings of Vermeer or Picasso. The star of the show was none other than the light metal—aluminum.