Phil Patton — Rendering the Ordinary Extraordinary
By Molly F. Heintz
When you walk into a room of strangers and then suddenly see a familiar face, it’s like the sun coming out from behind clouds. That’s how I felt in the fall of 2009, when, at a reception for new MFA candidates in the Design Criticism program at the School of Visual Arts (SVA), I overheard the distinctive drawl of Phil Patton. “You don’t happen to be from North Carolina, do you?” I asked, having loitered nearby while he finished his conversation. Indeed he was, he said, and in the chat that followed, we found that not only did we have the requisite basketball and barbecue in common, but also we had both graduated from Needham B. Broughton High School in Raleigh.
I had already known of Phil the journalist from his byline in the New York Times and I.D. Magazine, where he had written about the designs for cars, presidential-debate sets, and watches, among other topics. Over the next few years, I got to know Phil as a teacher, thinker, and colleague. Southern gent that he was, Phil was modest to a fault, quick to make a good-natured joke. Even when disagreeing with you, he was never dismissive, often expressing his skepticism or critique in the form of a question: “Hmm. But don’t you wonder how . . . ?”
Hypothetical — not rhetorical — questions were a favored stratagem, and he used them deftly as a provocation in both his teaching and writing about design. Phil genuinely sought answers to all types of inquiry, from philosophical to scientific, and he pushed the graduate students in his SVA “Typologies” seminar to seek those answers, too. The concept of his course riffed on Aristotelian classification systems: “ . . . insight comes from analyzing what is the same and what is different in classes of objects,” stated the syllabus. Above all, Phil made you look.
In the classroom, Phil was not a lecturer but an instigator of debate and conversation, and in true Socratic style, he usually met a student’s question with a counter question. Each class meeting was foregrounded with yet more questions: “What can design learn from the material culture all around us? How does design reflect society?” The import of these questions, which could render even the most voluble of graduate students mute, was diffused by Phil’s preferred subject matter for our investigations: folding chairs, potato peelers, and plastic coffee-cup lids.
Phil reveled in the design of the everyday. No object was too insignificant to escape scrutiny — the design of the new Euro, the Sears catalog, fruit labels, you name it. (His “Top This: Coffee Cup Lids” appeared in I.D. Magazine in 1996.) He was particularly interested in the history of American design, so it’s no surprise that Phil often invoked the Renaissance man of the Colonial United States, Thomas Jefferson. But as an archaeologist of material culture, Phil never failed to put his own observations into context. For example, in his book Made in the USA (1992), Phil describes some of Jefferson’s household inventions, but also notes, “Some of the gadgetry — the dumbwaiter and the revolving serving facility, for instance — served to hide the fact of slavery from his consciousness, even while much of this furniture and equipment was fabricated by Jefferson’s slave Thomas Hemming.” From a single object, Phil could unfold a universe.
He dissected the enmeshed layers of design, from its materials to its systems of mass production, drawing on other fields like statistics, sociology, and engineering to do so. With a graduate degree from Columbia in comparative literature and hundreds of hours logged writing on deadline for a newspaper, Phil wove this knowledge into engaging, accessible prose that often prompts the reader to nod at an observation that rings true or chuckle at an apt but unexpected comparison. In “Home of the ‘Potato Chip,’” a 2001 article about the modernist movement in Raleigh for Dwell magazine, Phil managed to include references to the mid-century Italian engineer-architect Paolo Nervi and Bigfoot trucks in the same paragraph.
Phil regularly finessed these feats of design writing and criticism, and it was that combination of analysis and style as distinctive as his accent that led me to commission Phil to write exhibition and book reviews for The Architect’s Newspaper, where I was managing editor following my tenure as Phil’s student and teaching assistant. Phil also wrote for Departures, Esquire, and Slate, among other publications, and authored multiple books on design-related topics over the course of his career, which was tragically cut short last September.
As a journalist and mentor, Phil wasn’t only curious; he was also generous — passing along story leads that he didn’t have time to pursue himself or proposing young writers and editors as alternates for coveted spots on a press trip that he couldn’t make. This generosity of spirit was also evident in his writing about design. Phil wasn’t in the game to build his own brand. He was performing a public service informed by intelligence, honesty, and empathy, especially for consumers and readers. Like a ray of sun, with a few words and no fuss, Phil could make you see the familiar in a whole new way.
Molly F. Heintz is the cochair of the graduate program in Design Research, Writing & Criticism at the School of Visual Arts and the cofounder of the editorial consultancy Superscript. Heintz currently serves as a contributing editor at Fast Company magazine and The Architect’s Newspaper.
This article first appeared in the Spring 2016 Design Journal, published by Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.
