The Flower
Shop
by Leonard Koren
Stone Bridge Press, Berkeley, 2005
112 pp., illus. duotone. paper, $19.95
ISBN: 1-933330-00-7.
Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool Gent
Belgium
stefaan.vanryssen@pandora.be
This is a little book about a Viennese
flower shop called Blumenkraft,
or the power of flowers, not
to be understood as flower power
or any such historically laden concept.
For an English-speaking readership, the
name of course also carries a reference
to craft. Designed by an Austrian
architect called Gregor and
whos last name isnt unveiled,
and run by an Austrian lady who goes by
the name of Christine, the shop is situated
in a posh area of the city and offers
floreal extravaganzas to a fashionable
customer base.
The most striking feature of the book
is the fact that it is printed in duotone,
a technique most commonly used to create
an ancient look on epoque pictures and
involving the printing of practically
the same image once in black and once
in a supporting colourin this
case browns and beiges. The effect contradicts
every aesthetic normally associated with
flowers and greens, certainly because
the book isnt printed on glossy
but on a matte maco paper. Obviously the
author wanted to stress the uniqueness
and the eccentricity of the shop by choosing
a design strategy that diverges from anything
a commercial publisher of flower books
would choose. The same rhetoric trick
is used in the text, which is not much
more than a eulogy of the presumed radicality
and originality of the shop and its population
(including some customers). For example,
none of the characters in the so-called
cast (as if this shop would
be a drama acted out by the employees)
appears to have a last name, but their
biographies and motivations to work at
Blumenkraft are extensively described.
Before long, I shall expect these people
to be called knowledge workers in
a globally competitive floreal workspace
and serving the cognitive-aesthetic
idiosyncratic need for a reversal from
virtuality to sensuality of the radically
nomadic Viennese beau-monde. Basically,
that is exactly what this book does: supporting
the shops marketing strategy of
avoiding presumed petty bourgeois tastes
and, thereby, perversely planting the
seeds for a new snobbish (flower) style
that will soon be absorbed by the same
upper middle classes. Similar strategies
have been followed all over the world
by e.g. Daniel Ost, to name just one example
from my own region, and have been equally
successful. I seriously doubt that the
love story between Gregor and Christine,
with its reminiscences of La Traviata
and Der Rosenkavalier will change
this book from a marketing prop into a
scholarly book on flower shop design.