Top Design a Dysfunctional Family Affair

Top Design a Dysfunctional Family Affair…with a Swing by Roxanne McDonald

It’s about functional design for a family of five, but the Bells add a task, art is questioned, and teamwork is tweaked and then turned out in the constricting and conforming challenge of the week.

The Top Design task is to re-design the Bell family’s garage, which is pitifully full of crap and which is the target of each family member for usable space: kids want a stage and place for costume storage; Mom wants an office; Dad, I guess, wants to keep his GMC Acadia (plugs, of course, for the car and company, who sponsors this challenge, btw).

As the design contestants identify immediately, the place is a mess and the solution (says Matt) is to clean it up. They want, says Ryan, too much for the space.

In fact, they will want more, guys—you just aren’t made privy to this until later.

Carisa hates models, but complies. Matt or Michael is not “into” them either, but all come up with the 3D rendering for the Bells.
Andrea has the upper hand, winning immunity and leadership for the job with her stage/catwalk/open area for office…oh, and a swing. Again with the swing. Let’s hope the others don’t catch on, lest we have five swings and thus a very difficult time judging the best design.

Anyway, the designers show up at the Bells, and they mention that oh, by the way, there is a shed to be redone, too. This greedy omission sets everyone off, though Carisa takes on the task…and then gets flack for not working on the focal project, not working as a teammate.

Oh, for God’s sake. I don’t care much for Carisa (or, rather, her aesthetic), but in this I am behind her. Judges, check the footage. See how the Bells conveniently said nothing about the shed in the original planning stages? See how they forced it upon the designers in the same way their crap collections forced others, like Matt, to spend all his time putting urine-soaked junk in plastic containers?

Then there’s the typically socially-cool and task-tendentious Goil, whose most clever pull-out stage design is once again way underestimated/ misunderstood. He is taken to task as Andrea’s right-hand man, she chuckles, and then is taken to criticism by the judges for not busting out on his own…. Sigh. This is getting as contradictory, as ambiguous in judging criteria as that Mad Mad House was (the reality show where the leaders had no idea what they required of the players and so just winged it, making for a crazymaking set of rules)….

The criteria, they announce, is design; teamwork; individual contributions; and how well every family member is catered to.

But then there’s the non-conformist iconoclastic Ryan, who anticipates the lack of aesthetic range in the judges and yet who doesn’t break free of the constraints of the competition with risk-taking, award-winning art of any kind. Likely, he senses how they would not know what to do with a Frank Lloyd Wright, a Michelle Kauffman, a Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen (the former I know are architects, but still…)—the perimeters of the show limited to conservative tasks and those challenges that showcase sponsorship. [Not sure the judges, professionals and successes in their own right, are all that happy about the restrictions or limitations, either, though.]

The rules keep all players tethered to an anal format, yet the judges bemoan how Ryan doesn’t go nuts with his self-proclaimed creativity. To say nothing, of course, of the nuances of subjectivity….
Ryan is of course finally given the “See you later, decorator” kiss of competing death, and just as I am thinking how he had no chance being the misunderstood one who was confined to rules that set him up for failure (he was supposed to highlight his individual skills while following Andrea’s lead at the same time), he tells us that they are “a little conservative, maybe a little uptight….”

Except, Ryan, they do love their swings.

But for the Ryan who finds it tough to find “transcendental anything in a vase,” life will be much better, as he jokes, in the “trenches with a glass of agent orange and [some] napalm.”

Now, see, Top Design would not have known what to do with that.
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