Best of 1991

ADDITION TO NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON

Pioneering Postmodernist Robert Venturi is still given to architectural wisecracks -- an ironic use of old-fashioned forms, a cartoony application of , classical ornament -- but for this most important job of his career, he (and partner Denise Scott Brown) behaved just enough. The new wing can speak the decorous language of the old museum: the facade is the same limestone block; the galleries, naturally lit John Soane-ish spaces. But the design is also quietly irreverent: pilasters, above, pile up on one another like so much extruded Play-Doh, and the Tuscan columns inside are impossibly faux.

OHRSTROM LIBRARY, ST. PAUL'S SCHOOL

Jews were a rarity at St. Paul's when Robert A.M. Stern was growing up in the 1950s, but today Stern's son is an alumnus of the Wasp citadel in Concord, N.H., and Stern has designed its fine new library. Such happy assimilation: the $9 million structure, which fits into and improves a campus blessed with distinguished buildings, is among Stern's best work. It is Richardsonian (the arches, the churchlike massing) but not slavishly old-fashioned, and the jaunty bits (the eyebrow dormers and the tower) mitigate any neo-Victorian lugubriousness.

MORPHING

Once or twice a decade, the geek visionaries at Industrial Light & Magic concoct a special effect that wows even jaded, high-tech-savvy audiences. The latest is morphing, as in metamorphosis, a technique that reduces a film image to a numerical code that a computer can manipulate almost endlessly. One image can melt into another, for example, as when Linda Hamilton turns into Robert Patrick in Terminator 2, right, or when disparate races, genders and ages blend together in Michael Jackson's video Black or White.

ENCORE SPACE HEATERS

Ziba Design's heaters are not in production yet, but the prototypes have won a prize from the Industrial Designers Society of America. While they celebrate simplicity (each contains a single screw, and the controls are self- explanatory), they avoid both stripped-down K Mart grimness and unsmiling Germanic pretension. Just as moderne objects in the '30s suggested speed, the curves of these heaters evoke waves of warmth: form (metaphorically) follows function.

THE SEAMEN'S CHURCH INSTITUTE, MANHATTAN

The institute is so little known and so anachronistic -- a club, chapel and classroom complex for merchant mariners -- that it seems like a novelistic conceit. Its fey charms evidently inspired James Stewart Polshek as he designed its new quarters. Instead of creating a boringly deferential pseudo- 18th century building, he has both respected tradition and done something ( entirely original. From a new, neighborly four-story red brick base, Polshek has popped two prow-shaped floors clad in a modernist grid of white enameled metal. Such a building could be tricky and meretricious, but Polshek, one of the finest uncelebrated architects working today, is a master of restraint.

TEAM DISNEY OFFICE, LAKE BUENA VISTA, FLA.

Disney's patronage of famous architects has produced many entertaining buildings. Now it has produced a great one. Arata Isozaki's office block at Walt Disney World manages to be both utilitarian and whimsical, to convey a sense of gravitas and architectural boogie-woogie. For a company that prides itself on extreme frugality and makes a virtue of simplemindedness, Isozaki's building is happily improbable. After entering via a large red granite cube punched with dozens of not exactly functional windows, the army of bean counters who work there pass through a 120-ft.-tall, open-to-the-sky cylinder -- actually, a vast sundial -- whose floor is covered in loose river stones. Ever been to a cathedral on Venus?

KENTLANDS, MD. "They don't make 'em like they used to" has become an all- purpose kvetch when confronted by the shoddy and the dreary. Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, a brilliant and relentless husband-and-wife team of architects and planners, are devoting their lives to convincing Americans that when it comes to neighborhoods and towns, they can make 'em like they used to. Kentlands, a new town in the suburban Maryland countryside outside Washington, is the couple's most ambitious project to get under way. Streets are narrow; houses are close to one another and to the street; materials and basic styles are reassuringly traditional. With any luck, in Kentlands the early 21st century will be the good old days.

MALCOLM X HAT

Seldom has such a complicated knot of racial politics and hagiographic pride been expressed with such economy. Director Spike Lee's baseball hat emblazoned with a silver X -- created to promote his forthcoming film on Malcolm X -- is grass-roots iconography of a high order. Two years ago, the ubiquitous- superhero-logo-of-choice was that of a white playboy-vigilante who dresses like a bat; now it is a real-life black pimp turned philosopher.

APPLE COMPUTER POWERBOOKS

No large electronics company has set a higher standard for product design than Apple. The genius of the Macintosh was that it made using a real computer seem like children's fun and games. For the new PowerBook 170, Apple and Lunar Design have done the converse, creating a toylike object (it weighs 6.8 lbs. and has a built-in video-game-style track ball) that has serious power and looks more sexy than wholesome. And it's practical: because notebook computers are often used away from a desk, there are palm-rest surfaces between keyboard and lap to prevent wrist cramping.

DOUBLE-OR-NOTHING FURNITURE

At last, proof that a product can be thoroughly '90s -- simple, ingenious and cost- and space-saving -- yet have nothing to do with biodegradability. Marco Pasanella has designed a handsome, amusing line of furniture in which each piece does double duty: an ottoman also serves as a bookshelf, a bench has built-in reading lamps, and on the seven-drawer bureau, the middle drawer pulls out to become a desktop.