The foundations of 1980s Downtown were, of course, laid in the decades before — in the messy-sexy Warhol Factory (really in Midtown, just barely) and the advent of the artist as Celebrity; the ever-seductive coming-of-age of the Soho loft as Aspirational Domestic Form; the minimalism of Donald Judd; the experimental wonder of Laurie Anderson. 

Rules were Uptown, ideas were Downtown. (Which would you rather?)

May we present a brief starting point of somewhat arbitrary selection of New York Downtown-ery to explain why, perhaps, we should really think of it as one of America’s greatest cultural eras. (One that thrived, it must be noted, despite a plague and crushing conservatism.)

Some key points:

AD HOC HOUSEWARES (later, AD HOC SOFTWARES)

The bible was published in 1978 — at least the bible of the newly-formalized Industrial décor style. This was Joan Kron and Suzanne Slesin’s “High-Tech: The Industrial Style and Source Book for the Home”. And, it had its Vatican; its source of wisdom: Ad Hoc, a shop that had opened in 1977 and subsequently moved Downtown in the early 1980s. They arrived in Soho when (it’s hard to imagine) it was really not a place for ‘shopping’, and its founders Judith Kress (eventually Judith Kress Auchincloss) and Julia McFarlane found the gumption to make a discernible style out of medical and restaurant supply goods, wire shelving, and much more of that ilk. The type of things that, in watered-down form, would find their way into Bloomingdale’s.

Kron is quoted as saying, of the time: “It was a time when for design purists, finding a plain black shower curtain was nirvana. Ad Hoc was the only place to find these things.” (A kind of discovery experience that doesn’t really exist anymore.) 

As the style is described in High-Tech’s introduction, it occurs as movers’ pads replace velvet as upholstery, steel warehouse shelving finds its way into living rooms, and for bathrooms, it was a hospital faucet that added “cachet” not gold-plated swans. (The same, of course, was happening sartorial: workwear!)

One note we must make, of course, because we seem so divorced from the notion of subculture today, is that industrial objects, in this context, were assigned with “pseudoliberating powers”, as Kron and Slesin wrote. The style was (at its very start, at least) an anti-consumerist moral protest — remember those? To repurpose, to “rebaptize” objects for domestic use was to made-do but also make-new. It’s not cute, like “upcycling”, it’s empowering and political. 

THE INTERIORS OF JOE D’URSO and his work for KNOLL

One man featured in “High-Tech” is Joseph Paul D’Urso, a.k.a. Joe D’Urso, who really did make some spectacular interiors work — both furniture and also very handsome New York apartments. He did really nail the industrial vibe, for one, which allegedly he got into via an appreciation for the 19th-century architecture of northern England. But as with anyone that is particularly skilled at looking forward (and side-to-side) instead of just navel-gazing, D’Urso does that thing where he makes up his own language. See, for example, the loft he did for the journalist Peter Carlsen — minimal, but also not austere; mixing some different energies (i.e. Tizio lamp, plus curvy wooden rocking chair); gallery-white-vast walls but no pretentious “loft-scale” art (or any art at all, for that matter). 

D’Urso is responsible for the 1980 “Low Table” for Knoll — a sort of corporate-energy on-wheels coffee table that now is extremely commonplace; and also the 1981 model 6048T table (also Knoll), that is glass-stainless steel and very glam-yuppy. This is what we call “range”, folks! 

Yet, let us head Downtown, and though we’re leaping a little back in time to 1974, it’s got a very 1980s edge to it — because we’re in the Washington Square home of Larry Kramer (designed, of course, by D’Urso). Kramer is a hero, as probably the foremost AIDS activist in the United States, and Downtown New York in the 1980s was a front line.

Kramer’s apartment was so much of what the Downtown spirit was and then would be throughout the decade. It was kind of sexy-impolite; unbound (note: a kind of hammock-swing chaise); and, it embodied a certain defiant bachelordom (that was not exclusive to male bachelors, it must be said) — very much not an apartment for a suburban nuclear family.

David Michon is the author of FOR SCALE, a weekly newsletter on the supreme potential of domestic interiors. He is an independent brand consultant and writer, the former editor-in-chief of UK design magazine Icon, and former managing editor of Monocle magazine.