Kettle Call
Shaping a vessel in which to
boil water shouldn't be that difficult--more a matter of "duh" than design. All
you need is a place to put the water, a handle that doesn't get hot, and a
spout that is well away from the user's hand. You can refine it by maximizing
the surface that touches the burner, putting a whistle at the end of the spout,
and providing a lever to open the spout. And what you have is a functional--if
visually graceless--design, one that was perfected half a century ago and is
now ubiquitous and inexpensive.
In recent
years, though, the mundane teakettle has become something else: an opportunity
for designers to show off--and, sometimes, an object lesson in how easy it is
for them to mess up. Today's kettle can often serve up a searing demonstration
(searing to your fingers, that is) of how risky it is to redesign ordinary
objects. Such things often work so well that you don't even notice the parts of
their design that make them work so well. Sometimes, things look clunky for
good reason.
You can buy a kettle whose whistle is in the shape of a
brass-plated nightingale or a steam-spewing dragon. One has a handle in the
shape of a bent tulip. There are kettles shaped like some of the major Platonic
solids--cylinders, cones, and near-spheres. They come fluted like a Doric
column and mottled and horned like a Holstein cow. And one--the best of the
lot--sports a large plastic collar to ensure that you won't burn your fingers,
no matter how clumsy you are.
The distant precursors to
today's designer kettles were the cane-handled electric teakettles designed in
1908 by Peter Behrens for AEG, the German version of General Electric. These
small appliances, with their clear round or octagonal shapes, subtle texture,
and almost handcrafted look, were never sold in the United States. But
photographs of them have been published and exhibited, and they represent an
important step in the transfer of aesthetic interest from the teapot--with its
long decorative history--to the kettle, which genteel people had kept out of
sight.
But in
recent decades, even as the amount of time families spend cooking has shrunk to
nearly nothing, kitchens have become increasingly ostentatious. It was probably
inevitable that the functional but dowdy model of the baby boom era would be
replaced with something more stylish.
In 1983, the Italian housewares manufacturer
Alessi introduced what is probably still the most outrageous teakettle ever
made, the creation of the German designer Richard Sapper. Its vertical, domed
shape has a certain hauteur, not to mention a geometric purity then rare in
housewares. And it doesn't merely whistle when the water starts to steam. It
plays a note, then a second note, and finally an insistent three-note chord
with a sound somewhere between a train whistle and the Canadian Brass. Selling
for more than 20 times the price of an ordinary model, the kettle quickly
became a cult object for design-conscious consumers.
Gleaming,
elegant, substantial, the Sapper design achieves its visual power at some
expense. Its burner surface is low in relation to its volume, so it boils water
more slowly than other models. Its chief failing, however, is that it allows
you to easily pull the spout lever and release a plume of steam--aimed directly
at your fingers.
A design that departs radically from the ordinary may look
great in a museum but fail in the kitchen. But that doesn't mean it can't do
well in the store, where buyers don't get a chance to boil water. Sapper's
design paved the way for what is still the most iconic kettle of all: Michael
Graves' "Five O'Clock" teakettle, designed for Alessi and introduced in 1985,
is conical in shape, with a long spout. Its most distinctive feature is the
little pink ceramic bird at the end of its removable whistle. This removable
whistle was actually a throwback to the earliest version of the whistling
teakettle.
The
chirping-bird kettle seemed to prove that high design could also be cute.
Graves explained the little pink bird as a reaction to Sapper's kettle. Because
the bird doesn't get hot, he said, it is possible to remove the whistling cap
without burning your fingers. There is a danger that the bird might crack and
break, but it can easily be replaced.
The little bird is what told housewares
manufacturers that teakettles could be a hot commercial item and led to the
current proliferation. The Graves model is still available, for about $125,
though some might call it passé. It has been superseded by newer models, all
less expensive--and, for the most part, less memorable.
The
exception is the OXO Good Grips teakettle, designed by the New York firm Smart
Design and introduced last year. It is part of a line of products intended to
be usable by people with arthritis or hand injuries, as well as by those
without disabilities. It is the ultimate answer to Sapper's kettle, because its
form was generated by the desire to make it extremely difficult for users to
burn their fingers.
Though it lacks the simple, geometric form of Sapper's pot
and those of many of its competitors, it is unified in a subtler way. Its
complex curves suggest that it was sculpted rather than drawn. You can think of
it as two intersecting incomplete egg shapes, one of which is the body of the
pot and the handle of its lid and the other of which is the protective collar.
The lines of the handle and other elements derive from these implicit shapes.
(It doesn't photograph well; it is one of those rare products that looks better
than its picture on the box.)
When I first saw the OXO
kettle, I resisted it. That big black steam guard looked so ostentatiously
foolproof that I feared it would be clumsy, like a bicycle with training
wheels. But as I handled it, used it, and carefully examined how it worked, it
started to look better and better. This is indeed progress, both aesthetically
and functionally--even though all it does is boil water.
