Exploring The

By KURT ANDERSEN

The postmodern impulse of the 1970s was fundamentally a movement away from , the cerebral and toward the sensual. Today, although interest in the frillier postmodern forms is waning, many architects and designers are taking a further leap in the same direction. They are concerned less with issues of style and more with exploring the character and connotations of building materials -- the nuances of woods and stone and plaster and metals and plastics and finishes. The best designs of 1986 in almost every instance exemplify the new materialism.

W.G. Clark, 44, came of age professionally during the decline of blank-box modernism. It is a nice irony that the small hotel he and his partner, Charles Menefee, 32, designed for a river-bluff site outside Charleston, S.C., is such an unapologetically modernist work. The Middleton Inn, elegant and Miesian in the best senses, is complicated but not overwrought, decorous but not formulaic.

It is nearly impossible to design convention centers that function efficiently yet satisfy the soul. They are workaday Gargantuas that tend to be overblown shows of engineering (the Moscone Center in San Francisco) or imposing fortresses (McCormick Place in Chicago). But New York City's Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, designed by James Freed of I.M. Pei & Partners, is exceptional. The vast interior (1.7 million sq. ft.), with its weblike metal skeleton, resembles the glorious train sheds of the late 19th century and, of course, London's Crystal Palace.

Overlooking the Javits Center are the offices of Designers Massimo and Lella Vignelli. Too grand to be monastic and too spare to be imperial, the Vignelli headquarters could have been oppressive in their severity. They are redeemed by intriguing, humble materials -- particle board, panes of sandblasted translucent glass -- that add up to a winning industrial posh. Stanley Saitowitz's design for the Quady Winery in California's San Joaquin Valley embraces a kindred sort of gritty elegance. Again, ordinary materials are enriched by thoughtful treatment: plywood walls are exposed within and covered in stucco outside, while the arc of the crimped metal roof gives the building an unpretentious barnlike grace.

The long, low winery is somewhat reminiscent, in fact, of the Japanese Arata Isozaki's work. Isozaki's first major commission in the U.S., the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Los Angeles, evokes a dreamy pre-Columbian (or extraterrestrial) temple. The exterior is rich and singular: roughly cut red sandstone blocks, green aluminum panels, a barrel vault floating above the ; sidewalk. Inside, only the library, with its extraordinary white onyx window, is architecturally aggressive. The seven scrupulously conceived galleries are restrained, plain, deferential to the art.

Unlike the best of the new buildings, the most intriguing new products and graphics retain a streak of playfulness. Ron Curtis' outdoor table, for example -- a piece of painted redwood fastened to a teak stake -- seems perfect for grownup Cheever children: charmingly zany and casually handy, equipment for a movable fete or a midsummer night's drink. The View-Master 3-D Viewer, a color-slide viewer intended for actual children, has been around for nearly 50 years. In honor of its longevity, the company commissioned Designers D.M. Gresham and Martin Thaler to produce a new version. It is a $5 delight, its function and structure self-evident, its whimsical spirit exactly appropriate.

Floppy disks for personal computers generally come in bare-bones cardboard cases; the imagination all goes into the programming. For the Ability software package, though, Toronto's Spencer/Francey Group has designed a clever casing in black mat plastic that alludes to the injection-molding process itself: the shapes of computer keys and a disk stand in relief, as if actually slipped into the mold. Going to a decorative extreme, Sava Cvek Associates has designed a lamp that seems more like a sculpture than a functional object. Dauntingly tall (6 ft. 4 in.), their light is a lush, glowing monolith -- no shade, no visible bulb -- that convincingly recalls both early 20th century Vienna and late 20th century Tokyo.

The year offered no more materials-savvy work than the witty designs for Pee- wee Herman's CBS-TV show, Pee-wee's Playhouse. Each episode is a psychedelic, slapsticky mixture of humanoid furniture (a bright-eyed "Chairry" that hugs Pee-wee when he sits in it), animated clay figures (Popsicles dancing in a freezer) and blithe video effects (Pee-wee driving a cartoon car down a cartoon highway). The colors are surreal and polymorphous, the sensibility postmodern -- playful with a vengeance.