02/12/2014

George Nakashima: The Soul of Design

George Katsutoshi Nakashima was born in 1905 in Spokane, Washington State, where he trained as an architect at the University of Washington, before studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He first began designing furniture as an aspect of architectural ventures in India, Japan, and Seattle. An internationally renowned furniture designer and woodworker, Nakashima is recognized as one of America’s most eminent designer crafsmen. Nakashima’s work expresses a worldview that is based on a unique set of circumstances, including his formal education in architecture, his exposure to European Modernism, Eastern religious philosophy and traditional Japanese craft traditions. As a self-proclaimed “woodworker,” Nakashima became an important voice for the artist craftsmen, helping to create a new paradigm for studio furniture production in the postwar period.

Believing in the integration of a personal and professional life, George Nakashima began his business this way and continued to operate on this principle throughout his career. He developed an international reputation and received many important commissions for buildings and furnishings for churches, corporate headquarters and private homes. A master craftsman, he created a distinctive style of object that gave “a second life” to the trees he loved so much.

At any given time, today’s Nakashima Workshop employs a dozen or so workers, including family members. Nakashima’s daughter, Mira, worked as his assistant designer for 20 years and took over the task of producing backlogged orders after his death in 1990. Since then, as head of the Nakashima Studio, she has experimented with new forms, collaborating with other architects and developing new work, contributing to George Nakashima’s unique legacy.

Rujana Rebernjak 
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27/11/2014

Dan Friedman: Radical Modernist

In a playful personal text written for Dan Friedman’s 1994 book “Radical Modernism”, Alessandro Mendini writes: “It was after visiting his house (this wonderfully coherent integration of design and life) in 1986, with Pierre Restany, that I made up my mind to consider Dan Friedman ‘one of my masters’. I have very few masters and I don’t like having them, but when I do come across one, I want him or her to be much older than me (Kandinsky, Legér) or much younger (…for instance, Friedman). Masters serve this purpose: to be envied and imitated. What I envy Dan is his highly coherent merging of art and life.” For Friedman, it was precisely a significant shift in life that brought about his most revealing work, and it was an equally meaningful change in his approach to work that altered the course of his life.

Dan Friedman (1945-1995) studied graphic design at Carnegie Mellon, followed by a study fellowship in Europe, first at Ulm, until its closure in 1968, and later in Basel. It was Basel’s design school, with its prominent teachers Armin Hofmann and Wolfgang Weingart, that introduced Friedman to Modernism and its rigid rules, which he would subsequently push to the limits and subvert. Upon his return to the United States, Friedman started teaching at Yale, a career he would pursue until 1974, the year he moved to New York to start working in commercial graphics. After working at Pentagram on complex corporate projects – the most notable of which is surely the identity of Citicorp – Friedman’s firm belief in Modernism’s ethical values and ideological framework lead him to abandon the professional design sphere.

It was Friedman’s refusal to accept the exploitation of Modernist visual codes within the commercial sphere that brought the most profound change in his life and work. In the second half of the 70s, Friedman changed everything. “He shaved his head, purged his body with a macrobiotic diet, openly embraced a homosexual lifestyle and joined the downtown art scene,” wrote his friend and colleague Chris Pullman, explaining how this radical shift in lifestyle, ultimately led to Friedman’s new approach to design: “In just a few years Dan had made good on his personal vow to experience a whole new side of culture, one which he found full of energy, fantasy and optimism. […] In the end, as a student, a teacher, a designer and an artist, what set Dan apart, and accounts for his amazingly diverse but coherent body of work, is that Dan pursed an approach not a style.”

Borrowing the title from his book, AIGA, the professional association for design, celebrates Friedman’s work with an exhibition titled “Dan Friedman: Radical Modernist”. Curated by Chris Pullman, the exhibition traces Friedman’s vibrant work, from academia to corporate culture, from experimental art projects to his ever-evolving laboratory and home. “Dan Friedman: Radical Modernist” runs until January 9th 2015 at AIGA Design Center in New York.

Rujana Rebernjak 
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21/11/2014

Banknotes and Passports, Norway Leads the Way in Institutional Branding

It’s comforting to know that these days, design is not necessarily relegated to the private domain of single consumers, ubiquitous designers and corporations, but it can be usefully employed to shape our experience of the world to the benefit of the public sector. Institutions, in fact, are primary players when it comes to ordering commissions or promoting a contest in the design field. In a few cases, however, their role is really irreplaceable, especially when they remain the only legitimate player who can use design as a means to inclusively represent a community in an accurate, engaging, and hopefully progressive way: beyond the status quo and through unpredicted and future-oriented solutions.

Norwegian institutions have recently proved capable of fulfilling these duties with courage and originality. Two months ago, in fact, Norway’s Central Bank announced the winners of a competition for the realization of new banknotes for the Scandinavian country. The graphics elaborated by architecture and design studio Snøhetta has been spotted by all magazines and design blogs worldwide: their geometrical patterns, inspired by the sense of boundary between land and sea and expressed through a pixelated, abstract texture, represent a clean change from the past. They archive, in fact, the celebratory language usually chosen by nations to represent themselves – the rhetoric of “a nation of saints, poets and sailors”, the worlds that Mussolini engraved in the Square Coliseum he built in the EUR district – by choosing to omit illustration and depiction.

Just a few days ago, then, Norway’s National Police Directorate has selected the best proposal of the contest it had launched in February to renovate the image of Norwegian passports and ID cards. The first price was won by Neue Studio from Oslo, which has chosen abstract signs to represent what, according to their words, is a key element all Norwegian people are engaged with in the same way: the bond with nature and with national landscapes. However, their project didn’t hesitate to go for a true coup de théâtre: under UV light, the landscapes within the pages turn into a positive representation of themselves, and thanks to photosensitive ink, they are transformed into a night-time view that evokes the magical charm of a nativity scene background. Thus, an unexpected narrative dimension is included: the passage between day and night, the true genius loci of all Nordic countries.

Giulia Zappa 
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18/11/2014

Architects as Artists at the V&A Museum in London

From the Renaissance to the current day, architects have made drawings for study and pleasure, to represent their projects, document their travels and supplement their income. Architects as Artists, a new exhibition at the V&A Museum in London, examines the relationship between architecture and art. From work by Raphael to a project by contemporary Brazilian architect Isay Weinfeld, the exhibition presents examples of the many ways in which architects use and create art.

Drawing on the collections of the V&A and RIBA, this display of about 50 works includes a pair of striking digital renderings for ‘A House for Essex’, a project between FAT Architecture and the artist Grayson Perry. These images sit alongside designs for an artist’s house by E.W. Godwin, a drawing by Raphael of the Pantheon in Rome, a lithograph by Cyril Power depicting the staircase of Russell Square tube station, a watercolour sketch by Hugh Casson, a drawing by Italian Futurist Virgilio Marchi and a volume of architecture fantasies by the Russian architect Iakov Chernikhov. Recent works including Tom Noonan’s depiction of the re-forestation of the Thames Estuary and drawings by William Burges, Augustus Pugin, Alfred Waterhouse and William Walcot are also featured in the show.

Architects as Artists considers how the ability to represent a building in two dimensions and communicate space has been fundamental to architects’ work since the Renaissance, when architecture first developed as an independent profession. It looks at the importance of experiencing historic architecture and how architects make drawings of buildings and landscapes to record their travel and improve their designs. The display also explores how architects create drawings for different audiences and how pictorial conventions are often adopted when communicating with a wider audience, showing how these ‘artistic’ images often bridge gaps in knowledge, ideas and perceptions.

Architects as Artists will run until March 15th 2015 at the V&A Museum in London.

Images from top to bottom: Image courtesy Ordinary Architecture Ltd; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; RIBA Library Drawings and Archives Collection; Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Rujana Rebernjak 
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07/11/2014

Istanbul Design Biennial: Reconfiguring the Future

Has the future changed? Zoë Ryan, appointed curator of the second edition of Istanbul Biennial (1st November – 14 December 2014), has chosen a paradoxical statement – “The Future is not what it used to be” – as a starting point to rethink the performative relationship between design and the contemporary contexts where it is conceived and experienced. The 75 international projects on show, selected through a two stage call for ideas and exposed in the very heart of the Turkish metropolis at the Galata Greek Primary School hub, share a common approach that emerges despite the heterogeneous nature of their purposes (and which correspond to the Biennal’s different sections: “Personal”, “Norms and Standards”, “Resources”, “Civic Relations”, and “Broadcast”. According to Ryan, in fact, all the works “are intended to have outcomes – not only as texts – but open systems, whether actions, services, provocations, objects or buildings”.

In a country dominated by conflicting drives between tradition and modernity such as contemporary Turkey, this attitude is not afraid to side with the most progressive design analysis (and its political drifts, we presume), exposing its audience to new unexpected claims. And, in the end, neither is afraid to rehabilitate the value of Manifestoes, whose goal, always according to Ryan, is “to declare ideas and […] to frame pertinent questions”: in a time of liquid phenomenologies, the Manifesto stops to be programmatic and turns into a fertile setting for interaction, inclusion and development.

The interlocutory mission of Istanbul Biennial is the last of a promising series of design Biennials that, after the previous Ljubljana’s Biennial of Design and Kortijk’s Biennale Interieur, have highlighted this autumn’s calendar with an overdose of stimuli and open questions for design critique. Their success is not a matter of exhibitors’ selection, but on the contrary is more connected to the effectiveness of their format, which has surpassed standard design fairs and the accomplished expectations they have been generating in the latest years. Furniture showcases, together with the ways we’ve been used to enjoy them such as previews, fair off and other social happenings, may not have changed that much in the decades. That’s why the ability to give curators a more dilated time to understand new needs and emerging issues, to impose daring questions, to aggregate different projects, may prove to be the right way to boost a spent genre.

Giulia Zappa 
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04/11/2014

Out of the Ordinary by Studio Wieki Somers

Dylan van den Berg and Wieki Somers, the protagonists behind Studio Wieki Somers, see extraordinary qualities in our everyday surroundings. They experiment with forms and materials and ask themselves how the ordinary things around us came into being; they observe, contemplate, and search for the stories that lie behind our daily rituals. These narratives inspire them to make new forms and objects. The products they create are remarkable not only for their storylines but also for their use of materials and technical ingenuity. For the design studio’s 10th anniversary, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen celebrates their work with an exhibition titled ‘Out of the Ordinary’, that emphasizes their design philosophy by presenting their work in a 30-object installation that is based on the principles of a Zen garden.

Since 2003, Studio Wieki Somers has earned an international reputation for the way its work introduces extraordinary fantasy in the most common things. Developing a deep sensitivity of the materials, technological detailing and a highly demanding finish, it aims to provide an enlightened reading of our everyday environment. Through this restless experimentation with useful objects, their shapes, materials and meanings, the way they are made and the way they are used, the studio’s work questions our aesthetic impulse in a subtle and often contradictory manner. Besides showcasing projects drawn from the Museum’s collection (such as ‘Bathboat’ project), the exhibition includes two projects that have never previously been shown in the Netherlands: the series ‘Frozen in Time’ is inspired by the extreme weather that hit the Netherlands in the spring of 1987. Heavy rainfall, followed by a sudden cold snap, brought the country to a complete standstill and created extraordinary natural phenomena. The result is a series of household objects in which nature appears to be literally frozen in time. For the series ‘Mitate’ the studio took its inspiration from the seven virtues of the Samurai’s code of honour, the Bushido. The series consists of seven man-size lamps that combine traditional crafts with high-tech materials.

Out of the Ordinary by Studio Wieki Somers will remain on show until January 11th 2015 at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam.

Rujana Rebernjak 
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28/10/2014

Andrea Branzi: Pleased to Meet You

To understand Andrea Branzi’s work, one simply needs to ponder upon his own words: “The link that connected me with my Archizoom friends was a huge creativity. A creativity resulting from the crisis of ideologies, rationalism, and modernity. Our creativity came from that huge void produced by the collapse of the certainties upon which the whole of our society had been founded. In a way, the youth culture of the day, which we were part of, was a vitalist and instinctive reaction to the erosion and breakup of the value system that had come into being in the postwar years.” Andrea Branzi, born in Florence in 1938, is an Italian architect, designer and theoretician, who, as one of the main actors of the Radical Movement, challenged the way we understand the design sphere today.

Perpetually critical and unapologetic, Branzi gave voice and shape to issues concerning the role and core meaning of design, through projects that spanned architecture, critical design, crafts or everyday tools. His work with Archizoom Associati, founded in 1968, the year he graduated in Architecture at the University of Florence, and, later, with Alchimia and Memphis, broke the myth of functionalism and the idea of design-for-all in favour of a practice that was centered on the human condition, with its contradictions, difficulties, passions, realities, inherent beauty and sometimes messy poetics.

Spanning over 50 years and different media, Andrea Branzi’s career is currently celebrated with an exhibition organized by the Museum of Decorative Art and Design in Bordeaux titled “Andrea Branzi, Pleased to Meet You. 50 Years of Art”. Split over two different venues outside of the museum itself, the former church of Saint-Rémi and Arc en rêve, centre d’architecture, the show is divided into seven sections that narrate the story of Branzi’s career from the initial, radical, experiments until today. Though different in terms of media and subject matter, these sections – chosen and arranged through a dialogue between Constance Rubini, the curator of the show, and Branzi himself, aim to make a clear point: they show Branzi not only as designer, architect or theoretician, but as a thinker capable of re-imagining the human condition through the humble yet unbearably powerful means of design. The show will run until January 25th 2015.

Rujana Rebernjak 
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24/10/2014

Biennale Interieur: “SMQ, The Quantified Home”

Founded in the little Flemish town of Kortrijk in 1968, Biennale Interieur has a distinctive place in the fast-growing multitude of international design fairs. Mainstream, yet sophisticated, it is often considered as one of the most avant-garde destinations for design trade-show enthusiasts. Its unique positioning is the result of a fine-tuned combination of commerce and culture: the offer of the small-scale expo, in fact, is enhanced by a wider exhibit programme, which takes place in the city centre and has the ambition, since the very establishment of the Biennale, to tease its audience with a provocative concept about design’s state-of-the-art.

For the 2013-2014 period, the task to anticipate new domestic imaginaries was assigned to British architect Joseph Grima and his Space Caviar team. The choice to label their curatorial effort with a smug and ironic payoff, the “The Home does not Exist”, is mainly due, according to their accurate research, to the explosion of social media in domestic storytelling and to the recovery of real estate financialization. Nevertheless, the headline has a subtle charm: if a trade-show is meant to encourage people to buy stuff and renovate their interiors, the denial of the home nullifies not only our emotional common sense, but also the very meaning of organizing and attending the trade-show itself.

“The Home does not exist” program’s explosive semantics, however, oversteps the boundaries of the expo and infects the fair off with the same incendiary spirit. That’s the case of “SMQ: The quantified home”, the very epiphany of the whole Interieur curatorial programme. Set up in an abandoned school, the exhibition is all about a sequence of rooms that are saved from the burden of objects. The first glance is the most sensational one: the room is almost empty, the furniture and the cases that we instinctively search are missing, and the only element that gains our attention is a tiny caption informing us about the first guide to home management, written in 1861 by François Hennebique, of which two millions copies were sold. The progressive timeline continues in the following rooms, retracing the history of modern domesticity without disappointing the same taste for rarefaction.

The space is distinguished only by the ephemeral traces left by the school’s past life, while little construction and demolition interventions, the result of a workshop conducted by Space Caviar, intensify their echoes through unexpected formal compositions. Would the visit to “SMQ: The quantified home” be the same without a wider semantic recall to a home that no more exists? Probably not. If this Biennale Interieur has a virtue, it is that of creating a cohesive net of captivating cross-references.

Giulia Zappa 
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22/10/2014

BIO 50: Design Biennial in Ljubljana

Looking at the history of design and its main narratives, it might be difficult to believe that the oldest biennial of design in Europe was founded in one of the continent’s smallest and design-wise underdeveloped capitals, Ljubljana. “Biennale Industrijskog Oblikovanja”, or shortly BIO, was founded in 1964, after a decade of great economic and cultural growth in former Yugoslavia, with the aim of promoting the country’s industrial production and establishing its role within a wider European context. Im a country that is often defined as being ‘in between’ – the East and the West, Socialism and Capitalism – BIO served as a pretext to compete with both spheres of influence and show the quality of Yugoslavian design (both product design and graphics) to the country’s expanding cultural milieu as well as its wider public.

This traditional biennial model based on national participations subdivided into different productive categories was kept (more or less) until this year, when, under the creative direction of Jan Boelen, the BIO decided to change. To celebrate 50 years since its foundation, Boelen has arranged the biennial around 11 themes that aim to reassess the meaning and role of design today. With themes that span different areas of contemporary life – from the way we eat, to the idea of travel, from affordable housing to fashion, from our relationship with plants to the space – Boelen set up the biennial as a process rather than a showcase of finished products, with creative teams working on each topic for several months following a call for entries closed in January.

Therefore, the final exhibition – split between the Museum of Architecture and Design and the Museum of Contemporary Art – was conceived only as a one in a series – the fact that it was the final one was considered less important to the project as a whole – stages undertaken by the participants in their journey geared towards re-examining contemporary design practice. On the other hand, though, a viewer who hasn’t participated in BIO 50′s process might consider the final result underwhelming and particularly difficult to grasp. The projects remain at the level of proposals and their potential reach is not communicated appropriately. Among the projects, the ones that stand out are probably those more traditional – the section dedicated to Nanoturism and Hidden Crafts – whose final can be easily understood and appreciated, though these same projects may not contribute to a broader reconsideration of the role and potential of design practice. While trying to innovate the biennial’s formate is surely a difficult and extremely long process, the final result lacks in focus and clarity, making us leave feeling that BIO 50 is still as it was nearly fifty years ago – ‘in between’.

BIO 50 will run at different venues in Ljubljana until the 7th of December 2014.

Rujana Rebernjak 
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10/10/2014

Fin de Siècle at the Swiss Institute

Throughout history, creating chairs has always provided the occasion for furthering formal and structural experimentation, critical discourse and play in design practice. Both one of most frivolous as well as technically demanding design tasks, designing a chair appears to be a compulsory exercise and a necessary step in any designer’s career. Due to its simplicity and straightforwardness of use, as well as its established visual code and centuries old history, looking at a chair design can often seem like reading Raymond Queneau’s “Exercises in Style”, where the content (in this case, the function) remains unvaried yet the meaning subtly changes with each formal perpetration.

Fin de Siècle, a recently inaugurated exhibition on show at the Swiss Institute in New York, approaches chair design with a similar spirit. Drawing from Eugene Ionesco’s 1952 absurdist play “The Chairs”, the exhibition is designed to communicate the objects’ inherent narrative. “In ‘The Chairs’, an elderly couple recounts the demise of civilization to a stage full of empty chairs. Absent of any sitters, the audience is left to imagine the invisible figures that the increasingly incoherent Old Man and Old Woman address. In Fin de Siècle, the chairs themselves speak asynchronously, cast as characters and imbued with life. Directed into small vignettes of imagined conversations and actions that transcend periods and design movements, their dialogue echoes the modernist promise fading away.”

From mass produced objects to experiments in utopian design, Fin de Siècle includes projects by some of the greatest minds in the history of design – Le Corbusier, Alessandro Mendini, Marcel Breuer, Charlotte Perriand, Gaetano Pesce or Andrea Branzi, leaving their designs to narrate the story of design practice, its intricate dynamics, peculiarities and contradictions. Fin de Siècle, curated by Andreas Angelidakis, is the inaugural edition of the Swiss Institute’s Annual Design Series, and will remain on show until the 23rd of November 2014.

Rujana Rebernjak 
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