11/12/2014

Daily Tips: Hidden Crafts Revealed

Ever wondered where you could buy a Japanese broom, a cherry bark tea spoon, a designer stool and a beautifully cut tunic, all in the same place? Well, two stores might offer exactly this sort of experience: an eclectic selection of typologically different yet meticulously crafted objects, brought together by the shop owners’ impeccably attentive eye. Momosan Shop in London and iKO iKO Space in Los Angeles both present a distinctive mix of Japanese utilitarian objects, small furniture, home accessories and clothes that bring together local designers, small businesses and traditional craftsmen, that you might not otherwise have known of. What might be a more adequate place for that perfect last minute holiday gift?

The Blogazine 
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24/06/2014

Vitra Campus Grows: Slide Tower by Carsten Höller

When Vitra Campus first opened to the public back in 1984, showing the sculpture Balancing Tools by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, it was immediately clear that this was going to be no ordinary factory and retail space. Since then, some of the most significant and prestigious contemporary designers and architects have left their mark at Weil am Rhein: from Frank Gehry’s 1989 museum to the most recent factory building designed by SANAA, completed in 2012. While last year we saw Renzo Piano’s utopian “Diogene” cabin being installed among trees of the Campus, this year the visionary Mr. Fehlbaum decided to commission a new work to Belgian artists Carsten Höller.

Scientist by education, Carsten Höller holds a doctorate in agriculture and his works are often structured as a chemical and meticulous analysis of human emotions and reactions. His most famous and theatrical work – a series of corkscrew slides started back in 1998 during Berlin Biennale – calls on the interaction between work and public in a playful and disorienting manner. Vitra Sliding Tower builds on this ongoing series, with the most famous edition being the one realized for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2006, consisting of three diagonal columns that meet at the top, with a revolving clock mounted at their point of intersection measuring six metres in diameter, and a 38-metre-long corkscrew tube slide.

“A slide is a sculptural work with a pragmatic aspect, a sculpture that you can travel inside. However, it would be a mistake to think that you have to use the slide to make sense of it. Slides deliver people quickly, safely and elegantly to their destinations, they’re inexpensive to construct and energy-efficient. They’re also a device for experiencing an emotional state that is a unique condition somewhere between delight and madness,” says Höller. The loss of control and the induction of a particular state of mind related to freedom from constraint, reduces the distance between work and viewer and reflects on the peculiar relationship between public and work of art. On the other hand, Vitra Sliding Tower is another addition enhancing the power of Vitra empire and their unreachable, visionary role as guardians of modern design.

Rujana Rebernjak 
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20/06/2014

3D Printing, From Emotions To Functions

When it comes to emotions, 3D printing has recently proved to be an accessible means to please our fancies. Forget about computer numerical control machines used in advanced material manufacturing or robotics, and turn to the first, grassroots experiments that involve end users and their irrepressible impulse for consumerism and fun. Isn’t the chance to scan and print our own face a democratic way to narcissism? And aren’t the open-source platforms like Thingiverse one of the new easiest channels of access to indiscriminate possession, no matter that they really propose in terms of aesthetics and uses?

Nevertheless, it’s because of design that a new politique des auteurs comes to life through 3d printing, showing that a beautiful way to express ourselves is at our fingertips even when technologies are still immature. At the latest Salone del Mobile, the “Desiderabilia” exhibition promoted by In Residence – Design Dialogues showcased a collection of fairy inventions describing the emotional relationship between people and objects. Thus, this unpredictable series of 3D printed creations – for example a virtual ikebana (by duo Minale Maeda), a mole mailbox (by Matteo Cibic), a dreams’ dome (by Giorgia Zanellato) – were conceived by curators as a means to tickle designers’ imagination and provide an affordable way of materializing their oddest fantasies.

Nevertheless, when it comes to functions, 3D printing has recently been able to accomplish its potential in the broken ground of furniture. Deservedly awarded at the last edition of Interieur 2014 in the “Objects” category, “Keystones”, again by duo Minale-Maeda is the quintessence of a metonymic project, succeeding in rethinking the whole furniture production and distribution chains through the design of a single piece. Per se, Keystone is a simple plastic joint – nor ugly, nor particularly seductive – that through a system of integrated screws dovetails the table components in a stable and replicable solution. From a wider perspective, however, it represents a tangible attempt to concretely rethink the whole furniture supply chain, allowing people to print their joints by themselves, choose favourite materials or finishings, assemble the piece, and possibly involve local artisans in the realization of the piece.

Minale-Maeda’s acknowledgement is the result of a long-lasting research. Started in 2012 as a self initiated project, Keystones is a genuine synthesis of a contemporary mind-set which plausibly integrates in its DNA different elements: from open source inspiration– “from Rietveld’s sketches to the online Lego community”, as designers state – to downloadable design, sustainability and a DIY attitude. All issues that we rarely encounter among furniture and product design, and that has only started to show new, intriguing results.

Giulia Zappa – Images Courtesy of Tullio Deorsola 
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17/06/2014

Building Tiny Houses with Lester Walker

For as long as I can remember, I have always dreamed about the perfect house. I imagined the colour of its walls, the light coming through its windows, the size and shape of its furniture. My dream of a perfect house never included a single thought about the structure of its walls, the efficiency of its heating system or the finishing of its floors. It was all about a subtle feeling of calm, happiness and blissful peace, usually coming from months spent daydreaming about its carefully arranged, yet crooked details, and tons of shabby plants. Even though the thoughts on my perfect house never really entertained its construction, I can easily relate to Lester Walker saying that “one of the great thrills in life is to inhabit a building that one has built oneself.”

In the introduction to his book, Tiny Houses, Walker speaks about the veiled concept of a perfect house, saying: “The first tiny house I remember seeing and categorizing as a tiny, tiny house was a complete surprise. In the summer of 1963, I discovered one while hiking along what seemed to me to be a very treacherous untraveled animal trail on a remote part of Maine’s coastline. […] There it was, a tiny little gabble-roofed cabin built entirely of tarpaper and driftwood, complete with an Adirondack style built-in twig bed, a perfect little kitchen that used water from a nearby spring, and a writing desk under a window facing the sea. This home will remain in my mind as one of the most beautiful buildings I’ve ever seen.” This particular tiny house tipped of Walker’s adventure in compiling this book, while it also started what might be one of the most insightful, lightly profound and fortunate studies on the meaning of houses and building in our everyday life.

With Tiny Houses, Walker has compiled a sourcebook of different types of simple yet intimate homes: from Thoreau’s cabin to Martha’s Vineyard Campground cottages, from houses on wheels to tiny writer’s huts in which Hollywood movie scriptwriters were forced to stay until they completed their jobs. It is a practical book about building, as much as it is an ode to the pleasure of creating one’s home; a discovery of our intimate need to build a shelter and feel at ease within four walls, whatever form these may take. If a perfect house is, in fact, a dream, Lester Walker’s Tiny Houses is the most perfect tool to “inspire people of all ages and degrees of carpentry skill to take hammer in hand a build themselves” just that – “a little dream”.

Rujana Rebernjak 
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10/06/2014

Fundamentals: 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale

For the visitors of this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, the exhibition was a though nut to crack. Not because it was particularly challenging or deep, rather because the usual radical-chic architecture crowd roaming the Arsenale and Giardini during the opening days couldn’t easily decide if they loved it or hated it. Titled “Fundamentals”, the exhibition, under the guidance of Rem Koolhaas, was divided into three separate projects: “Monditalia” set at the Corderie dell’Arsenale, “Elements of Architecture” staged at the central pavilion in Giardini and “Absorbing Modernity 1914-2014”, the unique theme elaborate by all the national pavilions.

“Monditalia” was conceived as an overview of Italian in a moment of crucial political change. Thus, the exhibition presents an eclectic mix of architectural projects, films, critical reflections and historical moments that deliver a chaotic understanding of the country’s past and present contradictions, problematics, curiosities and characteristics. For the first time, Koolhaas has also brought together the Biennale’s different sections, merging together architecture with dance, music, theatre, film and art.

“Elements of Architecture”, on the other hand, looks under a microscope at the fundamentals of buildings, used by any architect, anywhere, anytime: the floor, the wall, the ceiling, the roof, the door, the window, the façade, the balcony, the corridor, the fireplace, the toilet, the stair, the escalator, the elevator, the ramp. While many have lamented that this section appeared more like an introductory course to architecture rather than a ‘state of the art’ exhibition, the projects presented were often lined with political, social and cultural implications inherent in any built environment that are all too often forgotten by architects. Spaces like sad hospital corridors and waiting rooms, stairs and elevators, socialist-style ape’s nest balconies, were shown to reveal what the discipline happily overlooks.

For “Absorbing Modernity 1914-2014”, 65 countries – in the Giardini, at the Arsenale and scattered around the city – were asked to examine key moments in a century of modernization, revealing how diverse material cultures and political environments transformed a generic modernity into a specific one. Set as one of the most ambitious Architecture Biennale ever, Koolhaas’ “Fundamentals” may not have entirely reached its initial goal, but it would be a mistake reading it as a crowd pleaser that misses addressing issues that concern the social, the political or the marginal in our everyday experience of architecture.

Rujana Rebernjak 
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06/06/2014

Design Destinations, Italians going Dutch at MAXXI

“Design Destinations” is the title of the exhibition dedicated to the new frontiers of contemporary design research by the Roman museum of XXI century arts – MAXXI. The insight developed by curator Domitilla Dardi is curious and fertile: to give voice to a new generation of young Italian designers that studied at Design Academy Eindhoven and then remained to live and work in Holland. Their means of expression: an inedited collection commissioned by MAXXI together with the City of Eindhoven, institutional partner in the project.

The whole show outdoes the value of single pieces and subtends, instead, a few crucial questions on the future of this discipline: how a “made in Holland” education influences the outcome of every personal research? How is Italian design changed by the new phenomenon of cultural migrations? And, above all, does the idea of a “national design” still make sense?

The exhibition does not offer any definitive answers. It’s up to single works to express, each in its own way, an idea of cross-contamination among different cultures. With “Perspectives”, Gionata Gatto gets inspired by Jan Van Eyck’s “Arnolfini Portrait” to design an enlightened mirror that multiplies refractions and points of view. Studio Formafantasma transforms the Bel Paese into a new barycentre between Ethiopia and Holland, updating the cartography of migrations into a new collection of blankets, “Asmara”. On the other hand, “Re-tools” by Eugenia Morpurgo explores the potential of ‘maker’ culture to transform production into a grassroots and transnational opportunity.

Heterogeneous at first sight, the works nevertheless share a common multiple which bypasses single peculiarities that characterize every designer: the predominance of a concept with a biographical or geopolitical background, which remains the very essence of the Dutch approach to project development. Beyond method, however, these “design destinations” seem above all a matter of liberty, which is the freedom to go through a globalized geographical dimension, but also to overstep the role of companies as commissioners and privileged speakers – that’s to say, the very essence of Italian design since the post-war period. That’s what this young generation seems to have unconsciously learnt: not to put aside the great resources of the Italian productive background, but simply to enlarge our host of opportunities, going beyond the problem-solving method proposed by companies and practising design through new forms and content.

Giulia Zappa 
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03/06/2014

Remembering Massimo Vignelli

When the news of an open call for letters – to be addressed at Massimo Vignelli – expressing gratitude by all those whose lives had been touched by the great designer, first spread, it was hard to grasp the truth behind it. Massimo Vignelli, the grand master, the soul and conscience of modern graphic design, fell ill. He passed away last Tuesday, 27th of May 2014, leaving many of the said letters unread. Still, those which he did manage to read, spoke about “the quality of the work and the elegance of whatever we were doing in a project,” he said, adding “Let’s say if I died soon, I would die very happy. No regrets.”

Indeed, Mr. Vignelli had nothing to regret. During more than 60 years of work, Mr. Vignelli designed some of the most iconic, bold and lasting graphic design projects. An unconditional proponent of the Modernist Movement, he understood design as a way of reducing the vulgarity of our environment, continuously educating and refining our minds. For Mr. Vignelli, to design “is to decrease the amount of vulgarity in the world. It is to make the world a better place to be. But everything is relative. There is a certain amount of latitude between what is good, what is elegant, and what is refined that can take many, many manifestations. It doesn’t have to be one style. We’re not talking about style, we’re talking about quality. Style is tangible, quality is intangible. I am talking about creating for everything that surrounds us a level of quality.”

The level of Mr. Vignelli’s quality can be understood simply by mentioning that the visual identity for American Airlines, designed back in the 70s, was replaced only last year, with much rumour from the design community; while other notable projects, developed within Unimark International – the design company he founded in 1971 -, include visual identities for JC Penney, Knoll, Benetton, rather than signage for Milan or New York transport authorities. But more than leaving behind a myriad of great project, Mr. Vignelli left a legacy of young designers eager to follow his lessons about life and work. One of them, Michael Beirut, remembers one of the most significant lessons Mr. Vignelli taught him: “If you do good work, you get more good work to do, and conversely bad work brings more bad work. It sounds simple, but it’s remarkable, over the course of a lifetime of pragmatism and compromise, how easy it is to forget: the only way to do good work is simply to do good work. Massimo did good work.” Dear Mr. Vignelli, your good work will be missed.

Rujana Rebernjak 
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27/05/2014

Thread Wrapping Architecture by Anton Alvarez

Two days ago an assemblage of strange structures, thread and machines has taken over Gustavsbergs Konsthall in Sweden. What might appear as an architectural playground, a weaving laboratory, a crafts workshop and a design research studio, is actually an exhibition by Anton Alvarez, a Swedish-Chilean architect and designer, known for his bizarre device – a spinning plywood Stargate – which he calls the Thread Wrapping Machine. Titled “Thread Wrapping Architecture”, Alvarez’s solo exhibition at Gustavsbergs Konsthall is based on a new version of his particular machine, able to produce objects and architectural elements on a monumental scale.

The aim of “Thread Wrapping Architecture” is to activate “new encounters between technology, craft skills, design, architecture and art”, questioning their mutual relationships, their influence on our everyday reality and their possibilities for future development. The particular structure of the machine also questions – what happens in the artistic investigatory process and how do alternations between a controlled order and pure chance influence the result.

“Thread Wrapping Architecture” is the continuation of Alvarez’s Thread Wrapping Machine project initiated while still a student at the Royal College of Art in London. The Thread Wrapping Machine is a tool to join different types of material with only a glue-coated thread to bind the objects. No screws or nails are used to join the different components of the furniture. By using this construction method, materials such as wood, steel, or plastic can be joined to form objects and constructed spaces, offering both a new way of understanding the use of materials and technological possibilities as well as proposing an unorthodox design process.

Alvarez describes the project: “The art of using the tool and of practicing the craft is still at an early stage and is in a state of constant development. By working with my invention I am constantly learning new ways of creating objects using the thread-wrapping technique. I can assemble wood, plastic and metal without using nails, screws or traditional methods of assembly. The object is held together by fine yarn which is covered with glue during the wrapping process. Repeated wrappings create strong, load-bearing joints at the same time that the item being created is covered with a decorative surface of differently coloured yarns.”

“Thread Wrapping Architecture” will be on show until September 14th 2014 at Gustavsbergs Konshall.

Rujana Rebernjak 
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23/05/2014

Polish Design, a Model to Refresh European Identity

In the days when Europe is called to rethink its identity through the vote for the European Parliament, we wonder if design could be able to suggest positive models for a new virtuous cycle. Indeed, isn’t design a metalanguage that has always strived for a totalizing influence? And in the midst of the crisis that Europe seems to experience, is it able to engage the users with inspiring attitudes?

The old continent is at the crossroad of multiple legacies. If we were to discard the most authoritative design tradition becoming too international and anonymous (Italy), a leading but trendy language (Dutch), a trustworthy manufacturing tradition that’s not properly heart-warming (Germany), nevertheless, a significant benchmark could be found in a minor player that has recently demonstrated a great potential and renewed energy. That’s how Polish design is seen nowadays: a great source of new talents; a festival, the Lodz’s one, that succeeded to impose itself in the dense calendar of design weeks; and an industry which is ready to respond to the needs of one of the first European gross national products in terms of growth.

How did this notoriety begin? Oskar Zieta, leading designer, contributed indisputably to attract the spotlights to Poland. His great ability combines the capacity to develop a technical innovation and translate it into a significant transformation of forms and affordances. Zieta’s masterpiece Plopp Stool, a true icon of the ’00 history of design, is the result of a patented technology that inflates a 2d metal sheet into a 3d volume.

Beyond the influence of its most renowned designers, the contemporary Polish design system has shown the capacity to build a network of competitive players, but also to update its cultural heritage with vitality and genuineness, rather than wallow in nostalgia-oriented stereotypes. The “Polish Job” exhibition, on show at the latest Salone del Mobile of Milan, brilliantly highlighted this approach: the show offered three keys of interpretation – locality, nostalgia, innovation – that could be interconnected and juxtaposed on one single project, demonstrating the ability to go beyond a simple re-release and transforming local dimension into an appealing and original offer. A look at the future, that of “Polish Job”, whose value goes beyond the boundaries of design, able to instil optimism, and inspire a new rejuvenation.

Giulia Zappa 
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20/05/2014

Munari Politecnico at Museo del Novecento in Milan

“The designer of today re-establishes the long-lost contact between art and the public, between living people and art as a living thing. […] There should be no such thing as art divorced from life, with beautiful things to look at and hideous things to use. If what we use every day is made with art, and not thrown together by chance or caprice, then we shall have nothing to hide.”, wrote Bruno Munari in the preface of his quintessential 1966 masterpiece “Design as Art”, delivering one of the most honest and significant guides for generations of designers, as well as a key reading of his rich work.

Bruno Munari (Milan, 24 October 1907 – Milan, 30 September 1998) was the preeminent protagonist of the 20th century art, design and graphic production in Italy, as well as an eclectic member of the Futurist movement and one of the founders of Movimento Arte Concreta, the Italian movement for concrete art. The variety of his work – ranging from the initial mobiles named “macchine inutili” to his playful games, speaking forks, books, objects, portable paper sculptures, toys, furniture or cinematographic experiments, to name only a few – has often been the subject of exhibitions and events, but a new show at the Museo del Novecento in Milan sheds light on his artistic inclination.

Titled “Munari Politecnico”, curated by Marco Sammicheli with Giovanni Rubino, the exhibition, divided into different sections, is devoted to the earliest artistic orientations of Munari as seen through drawing, collage and a visual approach related to historical avant-garde practices; his relation to scientific research as an aid to insights into plastic relationships, linguistic responses and as an activating element of creative functions; art as a generator of new disciplines; the production of art during the succession of different Twentieth century movements.

In particular, the exhibition aims at exploring Munari’s relationship with the artistic production of the 20th century by revealing correspondences and influences with creative minds like Mary Vieira, Victor Vasarely, Enzo Mari, Max Bill, Franco Grignani or Max Huber, bringing to life his aesthetic imagination, rebellious spirit and tireless mind.

Accompanied by a special section titled “Chi s’è visto s’è visto (And that is that)”, dedicated exclusively to the photographs of Ada Ardessi and Atto, authors who for decades worked closely with Munari and witnessed the main events in the life of the man and artist, “Munari Politecnico” will run until July 31st 2014 at Museo del Novecento in Milan.

Rujana Rebernjak 
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