Art N' About

Author: JOYCE MAN

At about the time when the first snow came and the proposal to lower campus building temperatures by two degrees arrived in our e-mail inboxes, I realized that my heater was broken. Luckily, also at the same time, Wallpaper Magazine published a small yet lightening blurb about Luigi Milinis' cubist sculpture-cum-radiator for Italian manufacturer, Officine Delle Idee. Heating, as we all know here at 44.015 degrees north of the equator, is a big deal, and though home products designers don't seem to have realized the lucrative potentials of slick, high-design heating devices, we have. Here, in the name of warm toes and mobile defrosted fingers, we investigate what's out there.

The same blurring of lines between art and practicality that has become established in all furniture and product design has also become embedded into that small niche of radiator design, if we may take the liberty to designate such a category. Molinis' radiator is a flattened-out two-dimensional rubric's cube that looks like wall sculpture but is actually a heater. Living House UK's glass radiating heaters are see-through pieces of fine art that actually heat your living room.

Bisque, the self-proclaimed "leading supplier of designer radiators and exports worldwide," may have a comical reputation, but with its hot designs, pun intended, this British company may also have the last laugh. Talin Dori and former Airbus A380 designer Paul Priestman's free-standing radiator called Pot Plant, is a stainless steel, 49-kilgram heater radiating at 1800 watts that looks literally like a spikey metal "plant" housed in a pot. The company's Zanzibar, a stainless-steel Jenga tower, and their Hot Spring, a spiral heater which won awards at four competitions, including that of the Design Council in 1999, are great reasons why the company has also exhibited their products at such exclusive art fora as the London's Design Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Modern Art.

Heat Horse, a design by Britain-native Gina Reimann that exhibited at the 2004 Milan Furniture Fair, illustrates the perfect solution to a problem that I discovered while hand-washing my mud-caked jeans in my year abroad in Russia. "People don't use radiators only to heat rooms," said Reimann in an interview webzine Modern Contemporary Design, "they play a role in drying clothes." And with this idea, she created a radiator shaped like a pair of pants, flipped it upside down, and voila, instant pants drier.

The designs are out there, but is the price right? British company Accuro Korle's Ecstasy radiator is a free-standing electric heater that imitates shapes and models of the twisting DNA spiral, a true-to-form piece of art. But, in the true tradition of fine design, it takes three weeks to manufacture and comes at an equally staggering price - at a steep 6658.73 British Pounds, it may be cheaper to heat your room by burning the cash.

Great designers have for the past few years made formidable partnerships with mass-manufacture companies - think IKEA furniture design and Issac Mizrahi for Target. If only we could pick up that cubist heater from Wal-Mart. Now that's hot.