13/02/2015

Museum of Islamic Art in Doha: a Design Perspective

The Museum of Islamic Art (MIA) in Doha represents an accomplished balance between content and container. Inaugurated in 2008 and soon transformed into the most celebrated landmark of the Qatari capital, this ziggurat-like building of staggered cubes, designed by archistar I.M.Pei, ignores the megalomaniac ambitions of the overlooking skyscrapers and evokes, instead, a gentle, human-scaled dimension. Even its permanent collection shares the same values of prestige and accessibility, offering an instructive yet intriguing introduction to Islamic art for the numerous, unaware, Western visitors who see the museum for the first time.

Collected from Afghanistan to Spain, with a prevalence of pieces from Iran, Turkey, and Morocco, MIA gathers Islamic artworks dating from 7th to 19th century. The different artefact typologies correspond to the museum’s sections, which are divided between ceramics, metal works, textiles, patterns, astrolabes, and calligraphy, thus representing the major themes of this specific art tradition.

The museum experience, however, is not limited to the time spent admiring objects of extraordinary craftsmanship, incredibly elegant in their decorative synthesis. Instead, the shift toward a different cultural perspective soon becomes a subtle but significant invitation that involves design as a potential interlocutor. In the Islamic vision is there a line of demarcation between minor and major arts? Is function accepted as a legitimate prerogative of a piece of art? How can horror vacui and hyper decorativism coexist with a dry, sophisticated object?

From a Western point of view, thus, MIA’s collection soon becomes a matter of design. Not only it shares the same typological partition of similar institutions – is there a significant difference with, for example, Victoria and Albert Museum apart from the geographical origin of their pieces? –, but the graphic essence of its recurring patterns and types are a clear symptom of a project-oriented attitude. Thus, this legacy could be a significant inspiration for worldwide contemporary design. At a first hint, it could suggest us to re-dimension the primacy of “less is more”, highlighting on the contrary a historical perspective that has always given space, not only in the Middle East and bordering countries, to “the better and the more” as a compelling approach.

Giulia Zappa – Images courtesy of MIA – Museum of Islamic Art Doha 
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09/02/2015

Konstantin Grcic: The Future Landscape for Design

Konstantin Grcic is one of the most influential designers of our time. Serious and functional, unwieldy and occasionally disconcerting, his works combine an industrial aesthetic with experimental, artistic elements. Many of Grcic’s creations, such as Chair_One (2004) or the Mayday lamp (1999), are widely acclaimed as design classics. Opened this Sunday at Z33, “Konstantin Grcic – Panorama”, developed in collaboration with the Vitra Design Museum, is the largest solo exhibition on Grcic and his work to date.

Specifically for this exhibition, Grcic has developed several largescale installations rendering his personal visions for life in the future: a home interior, a design studio and an urban environment. These spaces stage fictional scenarios confronting the viewer with the designer’s inspirations, challenges and questions, as well as placing Grcic’s works in a greater social context. The highlight of these presentations is a 30-metre long panorama that depicts an architectural landscape of the future. A fourth area of the exhibition takes a focused look at Grcic’s daily work. This section presents many of his finished objects, but also prototypes, drawings and background information along with artefacts that have inspired Grcic – from an old teapot and an early Apple computer to works by Marcel Duchamp, Gerrit Rietveld and Enzo Mari. In the shift of perspectives between larger and smaller scales, the exhibition demonstrates how design is more than mere problem solving for Grcic, but a highly complex process that integrates coincidences, ruptures, chance discoveries and a profound engagement with the visual culture of our time.

With “Panorama”, Grcic enters new territory. Never before has he so fundamentally reflected on his own work and so thoroughly disclosed his own understanding of design in general. The exhibition is based on an extensive analysis of current technological shifts, innovations and upheavals in contemporary design. It was developed over three years of close collaboration between Grcic, Vitra Design Museum and Z33. The result is a striking presentation of narrative and visual intensity, situated on the cusp between present and future, reality and fiction.

Rujana Rebernjak – Images courtesy of Vitra Design Museum 
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04/02/2015

Reframing History: Bouroullec for Artek

A myriad of de-contextualised references, historical re-appropriations and insufferable, outright arrogant replicas characterize the sphere of product design today, blatantly pointing to the practice’s complex relation with its history. In fact, historical contextualisation and awareness is one design’s greatest challenges today. Can contemporary design – especially furniture and interior design – propose an authentic vision for the future of the practice? Or is everything we see just a re-interpretation of modernist canons, re-packaged and re-vamped for a contemporary audience, oblivious to the discipline’s past? Can these questions even be addressed through practice, rather than through theoretical discourse?

Rather than plainly ignoring or subverting design history, Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec’s new project for Artek, the Finnish company founded by Alvar Aalto that has shaped design history, claims to acknowledge historical influence and Aalto’s insurmountable legacy. Kaari Collection comprises a series of products that emerge as a direct result of the company’s history: “Both wood and steel banding are traditional materials and a fundamental part of the Artek heritage – however, they have never before been combined in this way,” Ronan and Erwan state. A well-coordinated series of everyday objects – a table, a shelving system and working desks – supposedly follows Artek’s tradition of bent metal and laminated wood, re-proposing it for contemporary aesthetic sensibility and, above all, commercial viability.

The Bouroullec’s deliberate use of historical references does not, in any way, reform contemporary design’s position towards history. On the contrary, seen within a broader context of Artek’s recent evolution – the company was acquired by Vitra in 2013 – it says more about design’s commercial strategy rather than constructively contributing to its debated relationship with the past. In this specific case, design history is used as a means of validating projects that, in an over-saturated market, might not have any success or even reason to exist. Moreover, it poses a critical question about sustainability: if, as the Bouroullecs say, the table as typology of object has only undergone minor alterations over the past 100 years, is there really anything left to add? Perhaps a more thorough reading of design history might be the right antidote to such superficial appropriations, and just what contemporary design practice desperately needs.

Rujana Rebernjak 
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30/01/2015

Maison&Objet 2015: From Crafting to Making

“Birthday cakes meet birthday plates” is the unusual claim that Maison&Objet has chosen to celebrate its twenty years of activity. The anniversary represents the culmination of an acknowledgment: not only the Parisian kermesse is the major symbol of French Touch in the domestic fields of design and decoration, but it has also gained the status of a not-to-be-missed rendez vous for the international design community (we are indeed speaking about the most hardened competitor of the Salone del Mobile, aren’t we?).

Two indicators measure its state of health. First, in 2015 the tradeshow expands its foreign presence and inaugurates the first edition of its American brand-extension, Maison&Objet Americas, which follows the opening of the Maison&Objet Asia branch in Singapore last year. Secondly, previews stop to be a monopoly of the Milan Design Week, and get more and more numerous at Parc Villepeint: De La Espada inaugurates the personal brands of Autoban and Luca Nichetto, La Chance presents the new pieces of the Art Decò star Jacques Emiles Ruhlman, Matali Crasset unveils her concrete furniture collection, Multifacet by Concrete LCDA, Ligne Roset re-edits 1953 Daybed by Pierre Paulin, while Jean Louis Iratzoki launches bio plastic chair Chair Kuskoa Bi, just to mention the most accomplished results.

Beside this host of proposals, a stimulating contribution is offered by the exhibition that the fair forecasting department, Maison&Objet Observatory, has organized to enlighten the emerging trends that are having a wider impact on design culture. The show’s title – “Make”, further declined in three sections “Nature Made”, “Human Made” and “Techno Made” – seems at first sight a delayed proposal if compared to the multiple initiatives that have already introduced the wider public to fab culture (“Open Design Arcipelago” in Palazzo Clerici still remains unequalled). Nevertheless, this approach à la français is an effective attempt to trace a red line between the world of Makers and that of Crafters. Often confused with one another, these two domains have different roots – notably engineering and handcraftsmanship -, but show an increasing continuity as they all conceive design as the open outcome of a conceptual and material process rather than the search of a finished, given product. The works of Erik Klarenbeek, Lex Pott, Sebastian Cox, Seraina Lareina clearly disclose a common tension toward aesthetic uncertainty and, thus far, seem to burst with the most vital and inspiring energy spotted at the fair.

Giulia Zappa 
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05/01/2015

Marcin Rusak Tells It With a Flower

“Oh Rose, thou art sick”(*). London-based designer Marcin Rusak believes that flowers are a good metaphor to describe the way contemporary society feels about consumption. During his studies at Royal College of Art, and now with his own practice, he chose herbs and blossoms as a tool to inspect the multiple shades of our sense of possession, use and abandon. His family was his primary source of inspiration: his grandfather, and his grand-grandfather before him, worked as flowers growers in Poland, and Rusak spent a lot of time, during his childhood, wandering around abandoned greenhouses. This background offered him not only a technical knowledge in the field, but also made him experience the sublime aura, elapsed between ecstasy and decay, that flowers give off when their beauty is about to collapse: “And his dark secret love / Does thy life destroy.”(*)

Named Flowering Transition, his series is made up of different projects that share a combinatorial and synaesthetic approach. With Flower Monster, Rusak launched a speculative project trying to imagine a bio-tech plant which may include all possible demands that, as customers, we would like flowers to satisfy: empowered duration, saturated colours, a healthy look. The result is a 3D-printed mash-up that subverts natural order and establishes a new, artificial and hyper-performing dimension.

Perishable Vase, instead, calls into question our expectations about objects’ life cycle. Made of waste flowers and organic binders, the vase is not meant to last in time, just like the flowers it is supposed to hold. The world of scents is the subject of Flowering Transition: Fragrance. Its premise is a sad given: because of longer vase life or selected colours, flowers do not smell as much as they did in the past. With this in mind, Rusak distilled three rose scents which come from a different source – a supermarket, a market and a garden – highlighting how designation of origin is now involving all kinds of supply chains. But it is with Trompe l’oeil: Vessels that Rusak abandons the organic domain and transfigures – one more time – his beloved vase to simulate a proliferation of minerals over its surface.

As many other young designers of his generation – with a particular reference to those who completed their studies at the RCA, Rusak is not afraid to play with what could appear as, at least at a first sight, a dystopia. It’s a paradox of our times: while the industry of quality food seems to worship organic production as the only admissible pace of life, design refuses to idealize the pureness of nature and prefers to be tempted by the speculative dynamism of synthetic aesthetics.

(*)“The Sick Rose”, by William Blake

Giulia Zappa 
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29/12/2014

Campana Brothers: Staging the Woods

Within design practice, a sphere apparently focussed on rationality, rigour and functionality, speaking about the role of intuition and playfulness as a key driving force of innovation may be judged blasphemous. And yet, it is exactly a spark of intuition (often justified by recurring to a designer’s ‘creative genius’) what gives shape to some of the most revolutionary solutions in design. For Fernando and Humberto Campana, relying on intuition and, thus, its often unpredictable outcomes, forms the most defining characteristics of their work. From their first approach to design practice – Humberto Campana unexpectedly ventured into design in 1984, shortly after graduating from law school – to their visually exuberant, unapologetic designs, Campana brothers’ work has been guided by intuition, as in a desire to translate their Brazilian national character into a specific design methodology.

As such, Campana brothers’ work is dedicated to storytelling, revealing the origins and reasoning behind a project through emotion and deliberately provocative visual configurations, bridging the gap between art, design, installation and architecture. A recent example of this approach is their exhibition at Bildmuseet, a university museum in Umeå, Sweden, which features a site specific installation titled “Woods”. With their hands-on approach, playful translating physical specificities of materials (in this case, locally sourced flax and wood) into emotional qualities, Campana brothers have built a series of tree-like structures that have overtaken the gallery space. Deliberately mixing together the organic appearance of structures that look animated and dynamic, with the peculiar structure of the material and cold artificial lighting of the museum and its white-cube space, Campana brothers have both pointed a magnified lens at the museum as such, as well as invited people to immerse themselves in nature, to feel its silence, light, smell and texture. An experiment in the power of sensations, visual and material dichotomies and three-dimensional storytelling, “Woods” showcases Campana brothers’ exceptional ability to adapt their work to the specific context in which they work, and build a world of feelings, images and sensations that could not be better experienced than by immersing oneself in it and simply following the designers’ intuition.

“Woods” by Fernando and Humberto Campana will remain on show until February 8th 2015 at Bildmuseet, Umeå University in Sweden.

Rujana Rebernjak 
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23/12/2014

Lina Bo Bardi in Italy

“Lina Bo Bardi in Italia” is a “small” exhibition dedicated to a “great figure,” Lina Bo Bardi, a pioneer of Italian architecture, on the occasion of the centennial of the architect’s birth currently on show at MAXXI museum in Rome. 

The exhibition retraces the history of Lina Bo Bardi, in the form of a reverse chronology: from 1946, the year she left for South America with her husband Pietro Maria Bardi, back to her graduation in Rome in 1939.
It tells the story of her intense and tormented years in Milan, prior to her departure for Brazil, a nation she adopted as her home and where she finally found personal and professional satisfaction. In Milan, together with Carlo Pagani, Lina received her first professional commissions, despite the limitations imposed by the War. In parallel, she was a member of the editorial board of various architectural journals and instructive publications.

In addition to designing buildings connoted by a significant material and expressive strength, evidence of a consistent attention toward the social responsibility of architecture, Lina also created multi–coloured imaginative worlds in her drawings: a highly personal iconographic universe that would consistently accompany her development as an architect. These are the origins of Lina Bo Bardi’s history, evoked in her Curriculum letterario (Literary Curriculum); a history of ideas at the time considered avant–garde, and extremely relevant to this day; a history written and drawn entirely by her.
“Lina Bo Bardi in Italia” will remain on show until March 15th 2015 at MAXXI in Rome.

Rujana Rebernjak 
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19/12/2014

Cooper Hewitt, the User-Centred Museum

After a full inside-out renovation, the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York (formerly Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum) has finally reopened its doors to the public on December 12th. It took three years and $81 million to accomplish the ambitious task to change the face of the only institution in the United States that is devoted exclusively to historic and contemporary design. This huge endeavour, which involved some legendary NYC architecture and design firms such as, among others, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Local Projects and Pentagram, is without doubt one of the most comprehensive efforts to reconfigure the museum experience in its most extensive meaning.

Cooper Hewitt’s historic Carnegie Mansion location is now able to offer 60 per cent more exhibition space, including a floor entirely dedicated to showcase its permanent collection of more than 210.000 objects. Furthermore, an impressive technological upgrade has been developed to stimulate an unprecedented engagement. According to director Caroline Baumann, the ecstatic but superficial contemplation of a long series of beautiful objects is an outdated approach which needs to be surpassed by a new type of display. Why was an object conceived with a particular shape? Why has it become so popular? In the new Cooper Hewitt, technology is going to make the visitors “learn about design by designing themselves”: a special hi-tech device similar to a pen, given at the entrance with the admission ticket, offers the chance to discover the information about the pieces of the collection on show and, furthermore, to create new designs on interactive tables, encouraging a problem-solving attitude to understanding design and its history.

However, one of the ten inaugural exhibitions seems to confirm the spirit of this new approach. Curated by Ellen Lupton, “Beautiful Users” explains the shift – particularly strong in the American design tradition, we should annotate – toward the user centric design methods in the past few years. Every persona, according to this vision, is a legitimate and demanding recipient of a bespoke project, even if we speak about mass production. Understanding the key points of this method is a fundamental to understand not only a few ergonomic principles, but also to understand how a broader variety of design domains – from communication, to interaction and to environmental – are conceived today.

Giulia Zappa 
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16/12/2014

Ugo La Pietra’s Anti-Design Cosmology

In an attempt to embrace a more inclusive, unconventional and non-aligned view of design practice, Triennale Design Museum sets up a comprehensive monographic exhibition of Ugo La Pietra’s work. “Ugo La Pietra. Disequilibrating design”, curated by Angela Rui, is the first in series of exhibition which hope for bringing commonly disregarded design narrative back to the centre of Italian design discourse. The exhibition of La Pietra’s work, thus, takes on an eclectic approach in examining his body of work, highlighting La Pietra’s critical approach to the real world. Trained as an architect, yet ultimately more an artists, filmmaker, editor, musician and cartoonist, Ugo La Pietra has sounded out, analysed, criticised, loved and redesigned reality with rare insight, revealing the contradictions inherent in culture and society. His entire activity, which is so varied and complex as to be difficult to pin down in theoretical terms of criticism and discipline, should be seen as a long militancy in anti-design.

La Pietra makes everyday life and conduct his field of action and debate, using himself, his body, his friends, his house, his town and his country – always with a touch of irony and sarcasm – to tell of the relationship between individual and environment. Here “environment” is never considered in strictly urban or environmental terms, but rather as the phenomenology of reality, expanding the significance not only of the design context but also of all the emotional, anthropological and existential baggage it brings into our lives. With more than 1.000 objects, the exhibition display follows a journey that starts out from the conceptual origins of his ideas to tell a story – through research and experimentation, objects and settings – which extends from the individual towards observation and re-appropriation, and to the design of space and reality, creating a cosmology of design which emerges from a global vision of Ugo La Pietra’s work.

“Ugo La Pietra. Disequilibrating design” runs until February 15th 2015 at Triennale Design Museum in Milan.

Rujana Rebernjak 
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05/12/2014

Design that Matters: New Materials Award

If every design era has its own chair, it shares at the same time its own elective material. Curved wood, tubular steel, plastics, have all represented the symbol of a transformation that first touched the world of industry and then affected the aesthetics and habits of the great majority of society. But what about our uncertain time? Is there a privileged material that best embodies the spirit of our age? The DOEN Foundation and the Materiaalfonds are two Dutch institutions that have, since 2009, been promoting an annual contest – New Material Award – seeking to scout the research of designers, artists and architects who are involved in the applicative studies in the domain of new material. The type of work they try to support has not necessarily been developed in a big R&D corporation department, but favours an “out of the box” research that has its focus in the intersect of geopolitical, anthropological, and scientific issues. The 2014 nominees are a faithful indicator of our “liquid” time: there’s no univocal trend that is able to speak for all, to summarize a specific aesthetics (just in case: DIY?), or to physically transform a domestic landscape. Nevertheless, a few emerging patterns are very representative of the ideas that shape our plural and atomized society.

Sustainable projects win it all. Atelier NL choses to use local, non-pure types of sand to produce new typologies of glass which are characterized by new, attractive colours and textures. Young designer Aagje Hoekstra explores they way we can reuse the cases of mealworm beetle, normally grown for the food industry, to produce a new type of bio-plastics. Tjeera Veenhoven gives a new purpose to residual tulip heads: his new compostable PLA film embodies the petals, extending their life-cycle with an unpredicted decorative function. At the same time, 3d printing remains one of the undisputed protagonists. With his “Mycelioum” project, Eric Klarenbeek has printed a chair melting vegetable waste with mycelium, which works as a living glue; the product is not finalized when it gets out of the 3D printer, but when the fungus fully grows in the designer’s laboratory. Then, DUS Architects use a portable 3D printer to build a canal house, a representative case study to deepen the sustainable applications of 3D printing to the world of self-made architecture. However, the biggest potential can be seen in the most unusual and un-politically correct proposal. “Black Gold” collection by Quintus Kropholler choses asphalt as the inedited material to realize geometrical items. Its value is above all aesthetic and questions the perceptive expectations we usually associate with this “blacklisted”, petroleum-derivative material.

Giulia Zappa 
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