WYLIE'S WERKSTATTE: THE NEW COMFORT ZONE Would you like to wait here in the sitting room or sit here in the waiting room? - Firesign Theatre We spend a considerable chunk of our existence(s) sitting and waiting, waiting for doctors, lawyers, clients, (potential) employers, jury foremen, auto repairmen, planes, trains, restaurant seats, ad infinitum. Why do we dread such down time? Because everything about the spaces in which we wait reinforces our sense of suspension, our sense of lost time, our sense that, no matter what work or reading we manage to accomplish in these interstices, we are doing nothing but aging. We sit in waiting rooms. Cynthia Wylie would have us wait in sitting rooms. She re-Imagines the transitional space as a welcoming locus, a warm and lively-looking environment whose smart and charming details are boldly described and, ultimately, reassuring, reintroducing natural forces otherwise conspicuous by their absence. It doesn't matter whether these handsome prints and delicate images define a public or a private room; they enliven the domestic setting no less than the common. Wylie's approach to design - her dedication to an integrated approach to interior elaboration no less than her complex but highly ordered and carefully stylized "language of form" - harks back to concepts and styles we regard as from a much different time and place. But, if we know that the decorous yet sensuous approaches of Art Nouveau, the Craftsman style, and the Wiener Werkststatte - not to mention their progeny, including Art Deco and the Bauhaus - are the day-before-yesterday's avant garde, we find that the spirit, and even the manner(s), they unleashed upon a thirsty world a century ago not only remain fresh, but quench the same thirst now. Everything old is new again - and not a moment too soon. Call it win-win Werkstatte. Cynthia Wylie has rescued and renewed the transitional space, allowing us precisely the happy transit we need."