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Idealizing the cool, the killer, the cutting-edge, our author argues, denies
an essential piece of our souls.
By Natalia Ilyin
November 2002
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The author's aunts--vivacious Marinka (above left) and reserved Tanya (above
right)--came to represent the duality of human nature for author Ilyin.
Courtesy Natalia Ilyin
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When I was 12 we moved to California, where I met my twin aunts Tanya and
Marinka for the first time. They looked exactly alike, such perfect
copies of each other that the FBI routinely studied them, intrigued by their
identical fingerprints. In their early sixties, they hadn't lost their
soft, husky Russian accents. And though they never tried to dress the same
way, similar choices occurred to both of them. They wore their hair in silver
pageboys and sported Miles Davis-style glasses. When they appeared
at parties, they wore slim black jeans, black turtlenecks, and small (yet
dignified) black high-heeled boots. We were charmed senseless.
Split from the same egg, they shared the same genetic constitution. But
on the inside, they were completely different. When she was young, Marinka
developed an uncanny resemblance to Carmen, Bizet's wild operatic young
thing. I understand she learned to play the castanets with quite a bit of
flair. The young Tanya--so shy that meeting a stranger caused her physical
pain--bowed her head and tried to hide her face under her hair, a silent
Veronica Lake. Marinka threw things; Tanya refused to dodge. Neither was
a wimp. They mellowed in later years, but the differences remained--and
intensified.
I grew up in a house of old sofas and tumbling dust balls. When my family
went to visit Tanya for the first time in her Asian-inspired home,
we trampled in and found ourselves standing on a large expanse of white
rug. An Eames chair stood marooned in the middle distance. Somewhere far
off to the left, a white leather banquette registered in the dazzled mind.
Not a spot, not a spill, not a variation of shade: Tanya's living room was
the white of Plaka, an untracked marvel unaccustomed to the reality of visitors.
My sisters and I stood amazed and a bit cowed, each privately wondering
about the condition of her soles.
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Likewise, she feels Modernism's geometric perfection--as
seen in Pierre Koenig's Case Study House #21 (1958; top left and bottom
right), Charles and Ray Eames's CSH #8 (1949; top right), and Killingsworth,
Brady & Smith's CSH #25 (1962; bottom left)--is a denial of our inherent
emotional messiness.
Julius Shulman
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A portrait painter, Tanya kept her studio in perfect order. Everything was
composed--clean brushes, heavy easel, sitter's chair--like objects in a
contemporary Vermeer. Her house stood in homage to all things essential
and elegant, designed and controlled. It was a refusal of all things illogical,
perplexing, and--I must say it--typically Russian. (You'll notice how quickly
Constructivism came and went in the USSR. Some say it was a political crackdown.
I say it was a bad fit with the Russian mind: too much white space,
not enough mumbling and bowing or murky lampada light.) Tanya was
my first Modernist. Though I did not know what a Modernist was, the
dappled light on her bamboo terrace spoke to me of a heaven where all things
were clean and free of dark corners, arranged on a perfect white rectangle.
I kept that world in the back of my mind, as a bunker of calm. It was a
place I could go to should the going get too confused.
When our car stopped in front of Marinka's house in Davis, our family plunged
into a place that looked as if a small incendiary device had gone off right
before our arrival. This was the kind of thing that we were used to--my
mother had a penchant for making something out of nothing--and none of us
thought anything of eating around a dinner table on which a large sewing
machine sat at one end.
Marinka was a costume designer. To sit, one had to move the stack of half-finished
velvet doublets lying on the sofa or redistribute the feather masks piled
on the chairs. Expressionist paintings leaned three deep along the walls.
It was warm and creative and inclusive, but it was too much like home for
me. I kept thinking back to Tanya's house--the order, the white, the light.
By the time I was 20 I had cultivated Tanya's minimalism--the same cool,
the same calm--except I wore longer black jeans and lower black boots. Sadly,
all this was not innate, and something broke in my forties.
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These vernacular examples of International
Style architecture, with their whimsical decorative elements, attempt to
embrace a fuller range of human nature.
Judy Fiskin
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As the years went by Tanya slipped into reclusion. She would sit silently
for hours, pondering her topiary, then gathering her nerve, make the thought-through
cut. She began avoiding other people, preferring the company of her secateurs,
and finally wafted into a home for the aged, where she is today. Marinka
continued to mix it up. She listened to the love lives of her students while
the pasta water boiled; she listened to the love lives of their professors.
She did not comment on overlap. She listened to the political woes of university
administrators (the love-life substitute of the career educator), and when
she died they named a building after her.
I followed Tanya. I wanted that streamlined life. I went to design school;
memorized the names, objects, and theories; and later taught the names,
objects, and theories. And it was only a while ago that I understood how
much I had denied myself. For me, Tanya and Marinka represent the two halves
of human life, human consciousness. Our bodies are dual: two legs, two arms,
two feet. Our brains are dual: left and right. Sex is dual. Language is
dual, depending on a speaker and a listener. But when we design today, we
work in a language and mind-set that is not dual.
As a student I sat in the dark and watched the same design-history slides
every other student watches--images that begin with the caves at Lascaux
and end with someone like Irma Boom or Tadao Ando or Mark Kapka. These slides
link together the unlinked. They make design's past appear seamless and
premeditated--a logical progression out of the caves and into the sunlight.
It is as though only Tanya lived, as though a celestial plan of progression
is borne out in those slides, as if it was only a matter of time until,
say, Futurism developed from all that had gone before it. This is hogwash:
it's picking up only one warp thread of a wide weaving.
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