At this year's Design Miami, the rigorous and often gleeful questionings of form and function that have lately taken over the design world continued along two lines: among newly commissioned work shown by the event's 26 galleries (up from the 21 at last year's gathering) as well as archival pieces, many from the formerly accursed period known as postmodernism, which has lately been undergoing a kind of retro vogue. The newly minted Friedman Benda (New York) highlighted Wendell Castle's plastic lounge chairs from the seventies, but visitors were busy aiming their Canons at three pieces off in a far corner from Ron Arad's early eighties One Off series: a turntable, receiver, and pair of speakers, all tricked out in unforgiving concrete.

Over at Demisch Danant, another New York gallery known for its adventurous ways, the focus was on avant West German designers from the same period, particularly Stefan Zwicky, whose Domage a Corbu, grand confort, sans confort (1980) is a take on Corbusier's LC2 Petit Chair rendered in, you guessed it, concrete.

It was impossible not to wonder whether some intrepid collector would snap up the Arads and the Zwicky as a set--that unforgettable hair-blown-back Maxell ad (which famously featured an LC2) cast in cement.

It was also impossible not to get the point: The Corbu chair's status as an icon of sensible, enduring modernist form--and even the idea of enduring modernist form--has become stolidly monumental. And was it ever really that comfortable to begin with? Such interrogations might have seemed radical in 1980. These days, they're amusing and refreshing--like popping a mix tape from college into the cassette deck, for old times' sake. --MARK ROZZO

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