Altered States

What's in a room? The first time I saw an architectural environment by Verner Panton - an image of his 1970 Phantasy Landscape for 'Visiona II' in Cologne - I wondered what on earth you might do in it. It wasn't so much a kind of no man's land, like a waiting room or departure lounge, in which you are supposed to do nothing, but just the opposite: the space seemed to prescribe very particular yet unidentifiable types of activity. Phantasy Landscape is disorientating: a series of parallel cut-outs in rippling organic curves that recede into the distance like a set of Chinese moon windows on acid. Looking through the trachea-like tube of the room, space shifts from blue to magenta, to pink, orange and yellow, then back again. The Dralon upholstery is backlit in sections so that the lighting changes colour with the fabric of the room itself. The projections that emerge like uvulae from the walls, floor and ceiling (although these reference points no longer make sense - there are no corners) suggest that a body or bodies would fit snugly against them. You might want to sit, recline or lie on their variously contoured, synthetic woollen surfaces. Would you want to get stoned and sink into the padded softness of the room? Would the tactility of everything make you desire another's touch? Or would you simply be inclined to daydream, absorbed in the light and space themselves?

I want to show a total solution for an environment [...] I want to make an environment totally free from bric-a-brac. I want to give people the possibility of using furniture in a completely new way. Why always think about sitting down in the way we always sit down?' wrote Panton in 1969 1

The photographs of his environments for 'Visiona II' suggest some introverted, enclosed world, sealed off from an outside that is not really specified, but it might be the past, or it could just be other people. The sense of enclosure is a feeling reminiscent of the interiors in 2001 (1968) or the capsule of Jane Fonda's spaceship in Barbarella (1968), with its techno-organic fetishism and excessively draped surfaces. And indeed visitors to Panton's 'Visiona II' displays were contained in a capsule of sorts: a ship chartered by the manufacturer Beyer to cruise up and down the Rhine as a floating exhibition space. Panton had remodelled the ship for Beyer once before, in 1968 on the occasion of 'Visiona O', but in the intervening two years his work evolved considerably. The trippy organicism of 'Visiona O', with its palm-of-the-hand printed fabrics and mock fish restaurant featuring langoustine motifs and Art Nouveau tail frill hangings, had become something more abstract and far more enveloping. Something of this is seen in Panton's work for the Spiegel Publishing House in Hamburg in 1969: whereas his earlier spaces cohere through repetition of surface colour and form, in the Spiegel project his environments are created primarily through light and warps of scale. You start to feel that familiar sense of disorientation - the breaking up of distinctions between floor, wall and ceiling. The banks of circular lighting modules that cover the walls and ceiling of the Spiegel lobby are echoed in its polished floor; the multicoloured ceiling lights of the swimming pool are reflected in its dim waters so that you seem to be diving into space as you enter it. (And when was the last time you swam in a pool that wasn't clinical, white and tiled but sullen, viscous and amniotic?). It's hard to envisage a dozen bracing lengths in the Spiegel pool; you'd want to float alone in the half-light, staring up at the ceiling and listening to your heartbeat.

Such spaces evoke intimate, empathetic experience; most of the images of Panton's 'Visiona II' environments are unpopulated, but when - rarely - figures appear, they are invariably single, or occasionally a couple drawn together by some kind of mental current. There's a room, with white ring lights on the walls and ceiling, in which a man and a woman sit face to face on plastic furniture. You can't tell what colour the furniture is, and you can't tell what colour their clothing is, because everything is bathed in a shadowless scarlet light punctuated by slippery white highlights. The two figures aren't talking, but remain in eye contact, absorbed in each other, or themselves. What are they thinking? Perhaps it's hard to think when the light gets under your skin and transforms it into a translucent, luminous shell. In other images, solitary figures appear to be caught at moments of languorous reverie. A woman sinks into the fleecy foam structure of Panton's Three Dimensional Carpet, staring out into a space that is not really there: it's an inward stare, reflected back by a looking-glass wall. In the background sits her twin, trapped in a parallel universe. Chandeliers dangle bunches of glistening, red and yellow globes that you feel ought to pop like berries if you squeezed them. Another environment encloses a woman in a satin dress, who reclines on a purple fabric rocking chair that looks like a fruit segment raised on a platform of giant purple sugar cubes. She too has that inward gaze, and beside her is a small tray bearing a crystal decanter, a glass and two small bowls. She resembles one of Ingres' Odalisques, sucking up time like a sponge so that a day passes in the blink of an eye (but you couldn't tell - there is no natural light and it is impossible to orientate yourself to the outside world). Time gets twisted and space is fragmented, reflected at varying scales and levels of detail in the embossed foil wall panels, the spikey metallic ceiling and the microcosmic complexity of chandeliers like silver gilt acorns.

Perhaps Panton's great achievement was understanding how to transform space and create a sense of shifting scale through illuminated walls and ceilings, and macro-micro reflective surfaces. But although the spatial dislocations are extreme, the resulting sense of temporal stasis is even odder. Ultimately, these rooms appear as intimate environments for 'being' - a very 60s-into-70s notion, or as Jonathan Meades put it: 'Most of the state-of-the-art super hippies seemed to live in a totally different world. It was a closed and not talking world. [...] They didn't say anything, didn't do anything - just sat there.' 2 Some of Panton's most complete environments are ostensibly social spaces - restaurants, canteens, lobbies, bars - but they are strangely anti-social in the conventional sense. You couldn't imagine beery laughter at the Spiegel bar, or idly chattering groups of people in the Phantasy Landscape; and who knows what kind of dining experience was enjoyed by customers of the Varna restaurant in Aarhus, Denmark, within the overwhelming beetroot pink cocoon Panton created in 1971. Unlike contemporaries such as Joe Colombo, whose Utopian visions centred around an ideal of functional transformation - portable kitchen modules and living units, glasses that allowed you to smoke and drink using only one hand - Panton's environments involve a kind of perceptual transformation, an introversion in which the notion of practical activity becomes an irrelevance - just so much bric-a-brac to be cleared away.