Design Goes High-Tech

Design Goes High-Tech
The walls of the room curve in a way that can only be called cochlear. A chair looks like a mass of spaghetti rendered in Day-Glo red. A lamp floats in the air, mimicking the forms of a cloud.

Your living room may never be the same. All this in-your-face curviness may be an antidote to last century's obsession with boxy sofas and rectilinear coffee tables -- but this is anything but crunchy-granola organic.

It may mimic nature's curves and textures, but it's likely to have been designed by up-to-the-minute software out of the latest in "techno" materials. It encompasses elements of what's been called biomorphism, zoomorphism and neo-organicism. But for this 21st-century synthesis of ideas, an equally 21st-century tag has cropped up in places like Wired magazine to describe it: tech nouveau.

Dov Goldstein, the director of Toronto's Interior Design Show, which opens next Saturday, says it's still unabashedly modern.

"What's happening in the world of design is that there seems to be less hard edge," he says. "Modernism was always about minimal, hard edges. The hard edges are being softened physically by rounded corners and the use of material and textiles -- and pattern and colour."

There may not be chintz, Goldstein says, but there are plenty of references to flora and fauna.