Author Natalia Ilyin takes on the design establishment with ‘Chasing the Perfect.’

Bainbridge Island resident Natalia Ilyin is a design consultant and lecturer, schooled in the traditions of design that are the dogma of designers and architects everywhere.

On her way to a master’s degree in graphic design she was taught that the tenets of modernism, with its clean straight lines and detachment from anything resembling the natural world, was the only way to go. But now she is rejecting that claustrophobic box.

As she writes in her new book, “Chasing the Perfect: Thoughts on Modernist Design In Our Time,” “The choices that designers and architects have made in the last hundred years silently mold us, silently direct us through the tunnels of Penn Station or up to the fifty-third floor of the Sears tower. But they direct more than our movements. They direct us to notice one thing and not another. Modernism — the guts of it, the strength of it, the egoistic beauty of it — carries with it effects we did not expect, and fosters attitudes about ourselves and others that may have been dandy in a utopia but do little good in our world. Why have we not changed this idea, moved on with our thinking?”

Ilyin talked about her book and how it came to be recently while seated in her Winslow townhouse.

In 1999 she was living the life of a designer in New York, with “nice clients, nice shoes, nice restaurants,” when her world started falling apart. An anxiety attack in public caused her to retreat to her apartment, where she closeted herself from the world.

When a friend coaxed her out, another attack struck, leaving her feeling that her brain was shutting down, “like one overloaded transformer blowing after another.”

“I had spent years and years trying to control the pain of living by designing it out of the plan,” she writes. “And when, one by one, the structures that I believed in dissolved, my life collapsed around me like a house of Eames cards.”

Her friend ended up taking her to the airport and shipping her off to Seattle, where her sister Anna took her home to Bainbridge Island.

“It’s like Eden here,” she said, “My sister’s caring made all the difference.”

She also found herself ensconced in a cozy cottage surrounded by neighbors who actually cared about her, and knew each other by name.

“It was a really lucky break.”

Time and distance have given Ilyin the perspective to look back on the world of design, and proclaim that the emperor is naked.

“No one have ever been free enough of the hierarchy to call them out on it,” she said.

It’s noteworthy that Ilyin is not totally free of that hierarchy, as she runs a design consulting business from her home and lectures on design to grad students.

But after her breakdown in New York she was able to see that the perfectionist ideal of modernism was without a soul.

Many of the elements of modernism were taken from Asian design, but Ilyin noted that Asian design was all about connecting the soul and the material world, a lesson modernists missed in their rush to embrace the industrial.

“Westerners stole the outside of Asian design, but not the inside,” she said.

As Ilyin, a tall blonde of Russian descent, warms to the subject she becomes animated, punctuating her points with expansive arm gestures.

“They bought the bathwater and rented out the baby. They didn’t care how things would affect people.”

The passion that Ilyin feels for the subject is obvious in her book, which is part diatribe against modernism and its “chasing the perfect” and part an explanation of her personal journey in arriving at that position. She chronicles that voyage honestly and punctuates it with self-effacing humor.

She tells how going to grad school in her 30s was not the “mental spa” she imagined, and that while the other students “blithely ran around doing clever ironic subverting things . . . I trudged through the dust of mediocrity in thick-soled shoes.”

It’s a slim book — at 128 pages you could easily consume it in four ferry commutes — but it’s packed with ideas that could fuel discussions all winter.

Ilyin debuts her book 7:30 p.m. Nov. 17 at Eagle Harbor Books, 157 Winslow Way E, Bainbridge Island.

Ilyin is also the author of “Blonde Like Me: The Roots of the Blonde Myth in Our Culture.” She lives on Bainbridge Island with her dog, Jamie. wu