06/10/2014

Designers in Residence: Disruption

As every other area of human activity, design is subject to fashion. Different types of practices can grow and evolve exponentially over different periods on time, depending on social contexts, political climate, cultural milieu or technological development. Looking back at the last couple of decades, it is easy to trace designers’ obsession with disparate, yet equally specific issues (ranging from digital revolution to speculative design), that responded, often abruptly, to the overall climate of the time. If we look at design practice today, we can easily note how certain topics and ideas are exploited up to a point where they become part of the mainstream, fashionable, culture, often loosing their meaning in the process. Such is the case with the idea of disruption and design as a political force that can influence and shift processes in society. It is, therefore, meaningful that this year’s Designers in Residence program at the Design Museum in London would take over the theme of disruption, precisely with the aim of restoring its original meaning as a force that “interrupts established ways of thinking, diverges from traditional practices and proposes new, unexpected ideas”.

After several months of work within the museum’s walls, this year’s four designers in residence have proposed thematic projects that dealt with the idea of disruption within specific areas of activity. James Christian worked on the topic of social housing by re-examining London’s pre-Victorian slums and the chaotic dwellings that once stood on London Bridge, starting from the past to develop a series of hypothetical housing models for the city of today. Ilona Gaynor worked on the judicial system, repositioning the courtroom as a television studio and revealing the intricacies and inconsistencies of the legal sphere. Taking on a more material approach, Torsten Sherwood presents an alternative archetype for the construction toy, moving beyond the familiar building brick and offering new possibilities for builders of all ages. Lastly, questioning our use of financial technologies, Patrick Stevenson-Keating suggests new metrics by which to measure value by designing a working cash machine, a new currency and devices for credit card payments that explore how economic objects shape society’s broader values.

Exploiting different media, approaches, processes and areas of activity, this year’s Designers in Residence exhibition (running through March 8th 2015) offers an insight into the breath and scope of design practice. It shows how design can build communities, bridge gaps in knowledge and understanding, question issues and commonly accepted truths; mostly it shows how design can be disruptive and challenging, yet only when it clearly avoids being in vogue.

Rujana Rebernjak – Images courtesy of Luke Hayes 
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03/10/2014

Tomorrow Machine, New Gestures of Edible Packaging

In his 1964 essay “Le geste et la parole”, the French anthropologist Leroi-Gourhan outlined the basis for a new perspective on social sciences: the archaeology of gestures. Man’s evolution, according to Leroi-Gourhan, was mainly connected to the conquest of the upright position and the collateral development of manual coordination. Even if it is impossible to determine the way our ancestors moved their hands, artefacts can help us to investigate it retrospectively. In a functionalist perspective, the form of an object follows the way we interact with it; that’s why its affordances have frozen hominids’ gestures, offering an insight about their habits and their material constraints.

As time went by, mutations in our gestures got more and more conditioned by social conventions. The establishment of good manners, in facts, has progressively codified the way we deal with objects, and have become stricter as we get closer to the quintessential social activity, dining. “Don’t drink from the bottle”, “Sip from the side of a spoon”, “Don’t push your plate away when you’re finished”, are just a few examples of social obligations that influence our gestures and our relationship with objects.

Going back to our days, it’s the evolution of packaging in its most surprising and futuristic shapes that is challenging the way we handle food and tableware. Tomorrow Machine, a Swedish product design studio founded by Hannah Billqvist and Anna Glansén, is drastically reconsidering the way we wrap and consume our courses. Their innovative concepts are deeply motivated by an environmental concern: waste (and plastic) reduction is an issue that should engage everybody, with a particular reference to designers themselves, whose work has a clear social responsibility.

Nevertheless, their research encompasses a clear aesthetic dimension and touches the way we are supposed to touch and eat food in a social perspective. In their “This Too Shall Pass” collection, every package naturally decomposes or dissolves in water, thanks to the use of wax-coated caramelized sugar or agar seaweed gel. Thus, it implies a different manipulation: we are not only invited to break the packaging as if we were eating a soft-boiled egg, but also to dispose it in a different way, taking for granted that it disappear in the kitchen sink without our intervention. What a big difference from current etiquette: not only the contact between food and hands is going to become inevitable, but also the break of a container is soon going to become socially acceptable.

Giulia Zappa 
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30/09/2014

Alvar Aalto: Second Nature at Vitra Design Museum

Right from the outset, Vitra established itself as a guardian of good design: though it is mostly known for distributing Charles and Ray Eames’ iconic products on the European market, it has also, through the years, built an impressive list of collaborations with contemporary designers and architects, who gradually gave shape to its nearly too perfect domestic universe. When, in September 2013, the news spread that Vitra had acquired Artek, it appeared a natural (though not inevitable) union of design giants.

Artek was founded in 1935 by Alvar Aalto as both an international furniture company and a gallery. Aalto was the most notable Finnish architect and designer, who, much like Carlo Scarpa in Italy, embraced a design method that was firmly grounded in the peculiarities – natural resources, history and cultural heritage – of his home country, yet without renouncing on utopian visions of 20th century Modernism. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Vitra Design Museum has recently inaugurated an exhibition that offers a new reading of Aalto’s work, in lieu of his rich relationship with 20th century avant-garde movements and its reflection on the contemporary.

“Alvar Aalto – Second Nature” – running until March 1st 2015 – explores the architect’s oeuvre through four thematic sections: the first space is concerned with Aalto’s early work up to the legendary design of the Paimio sanatorium (1928-1933). This part of the exhibition traces vividly how Aalto’s work evolved towards the modern movement. The second space revolves around Aalto’s relationship with art and his dialogue with important artists of his time, illustrated by individual artworks – such as works pieces by Alexander Calder and Jean Arp – and through an in-depth presentation of two key works, Villa Mairea (1938/39) in Noormarkku, Finland and Maison Louis Carré (1956–1959, 1961–1963) in Bazoches-sur-Guyonne, France. The third exhibition space approaches Aalto as a designer of furniture, lights and glass objects as well as surveys surveys the history of Artek. The fourth and final space is dedicated to Aalto’s international ascent in the post-war period and his large-scale projects in architecture, city and masterplanning.

Acting as a ‘chief of orchestra’, Aalto has given shape to objects, spaces, glassware, artworks, and, most notably, revolutionary ideas which continue to be relevant and influence the international design scene. In fact, in an effort to fuse Aalto’s work with the contemporary, Vitra Design Museum has commissioned the photographer Armin Linke to produce photographs and videos of the architect’s selected buildings, proving, once again, that good design often also means good business.

Rujana Rebernjak 
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26/09/2014

New York Art Book Fair 2014

Within the endless universe of book publishing, art books are a unique, particularly characteristic yet highly elusive niche: it can encompass objects as varied as xeroxed zines, art catalogues, illustrated manuscripts, unique, hand-made books, as well as artists’ editions. It is a world in constant flux whose boundaries are constantly re-defined by developments in technology and conceptual negotiation. It is, thus, fairly easy to imagine how an art book fair held in Bologna, Italy would be imbued with history and a more traditional approach to book-making, while the one held in New York would focus on emerging practices and contemporary spheres of artistic production.

The New York Art Book Fair, in its ninth edition, opening today at MoMA PS1 in Queens, represents the most innovative and experimental approaches to art publishing: from artists’ books and catalogs,to monographs, periodicals, and zines, the fair features over 350 booksellers, antiquarians, artists, institutions and independent publishers from twenty-eight countries. Organized by Printed Matter, an established institution dedicated to preserving and promoting books as a central medium of artistic production, the fair features a rich series of events, talks, performances and presentations.

Now in its sixth year, The Classroom has become a classic element of the fair, comprising a curated series of informal conversations, workshops, readings and other artist-led programs, organized by David Senior, the librarian of the Museum of Modern Art. This year’s talks sport titles like: Performance as Publishing, OHO and the Korean Avant-Garde Association, How to Hack an Abstraction: Google Warhol, Check Your Vernacular or Publishing as Research & Development. The series of exhibitions celebrating artist’s books this year include, an showcase of books by Dorothy Iannone, the American-born, Berlin-based artist famous for her whimsical, colorful and, perhaps most importantly, explicit depictions of female sexuality – which have, since the 1960s, often fell prey to censorship; an exhibition celebrating 10 Years of Nieves Zines, showing all 200 zines produced by Nieves since 2004 together for the first time; as well as a site-specific installation by Iván Navarro and Hueso Records showing the work of non-musicians who maintain an audio practice as an extension of their body of work.

On the other hand, the fair also includes XE(ROX) & PAPER + SCISSORS and The Small Press Dome, a lively selection of international artists, zinesters, and small presses representing independent publishing at its most innovative and affordable in the MoMA PS1 courtyard, while a special section of the fair is dedicated to contemporary book publishing in Norway as well as to books which focus on photography. If you’re in New York this weekend, join the celebration of books, art and culture at MoMA PS1 in Queens, open from today until Sunday from 11 AM to 7 PM.

Rujana Rebernjak 
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23/09/2014

Ilmari Tapiovaara: the Lost History of Finnish Design

As any other attempt to classify and preserve material history, the history of design is a “way of filtering the past.” As Tibor Kalman, J. Abbott Miller and Karrie Jacobs wrote, it is “a way of selecting what’s important to remember, shaping it and classifying it. It’s also a way of selecting what’s important to forget.” Nevertheless, not always is our choice of forgetting a rightful one and, every so often, what we choose to omit unjustly passes into oblivion. This is the case of Ilmari Tapiovaara, one of the foremost protagonists of Finnish Modernism – or Functionalism, a movement strongly linked to social reform and the role of architecture and design in shaping a better environment for the working class – who sought to change the course of history with his thoughtful, eloquent and acute approach to design.

Ilmari Tapiovaara (1914-1999) has studied design at Central School of Industrial Art in Helsinki at its department of Furniture Drawing. While design studies gave form to his aesthetic references, it was the period spent abroad, working in the UK and in France, as apprentice with Le Corbusier, as well as on the eastern front during the war years, that shaped Tapiovaara’s ideological credo and a totalitarian approach to design process. In fact, in the following years, Tapiovaara’s most significant projects would come to light not while working as an in house designer for Finland’s biggest producer of furniture, Asko-Avonius, but rather, while working as both the artistic and business director of Keravan Puuteollisuus Ltd., a small carpentry firm operating near Helsinki.

At Keravan Puuteollisuus, Tapiovaara was in charge of the whole chain of production – from design through production, marketing, packaging, graphic material, shipment, and finally, to export markets abroad. This holistic approach to design brought about some of his most iconic products: the Domus chair (from 1946-47), the Nana chair (1957), the Aslak chair (1958), or the Lukki chair (1956). Firmly grounded in the possibilities offered by Finland’s natural resources, Tapiovaara’s designs were mostly made of solid wood, plywood and metal. His designs were simple, clean, modular, resistant and affordable, and as such were extensively used in public spaces – auditoriums, student halls, dining halls, hospitals – fulfilling his ideal of creating objects that “can be produced in quantity, at low price and in high quality” as “everyone should be entitled to good, functional and moderately priced furniture.”

Despite its fundamental humane character, an attitude of social responsibility and formal innovation, the work of Ilmari Tapiovaara has until recently been largely overlooked. Partly because it was overshadowed by his contemporaries, namely Aalvar Alto, Charles Eames, Eero Saarinen, Hans Wegner or Tapio Wirkkala; partly because it was, perhaps, to rigorous, utilitarian and tied to everyday public life (in fact, many of his designs have never entered the private sphere) to be considered a rightful product of ‘design’. Fortunately, the history of design is young enough to change its course and rewrite those bits and pieces that have been lost. As is the case of Ilmari Tapiovaara, whose life and work was celebrated in an exhibition at Design Museum in Helsinki, that closed its doors on the 21st of September, leaving open a path to discovery of one of the richest bits of design history.

Rujana Rebernjak – Images courtesy of Design Museum Helsinki 
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19/09/2014

Richard Ginori: Florentine Correspondences

At the edges of the most well-established northern districts of Italian design, but still not excluded from their boundaries neither for artistic vocation, nor for industriousness, Florence keeps on representing a niche environment in the world of creation: not fertile enough to make outstanding innovation develop, but still able to keep safe the most excellent bricks of its decorative DNA.

That’s the case of the magnificent heritage of Richard Ginori, Florence’s historical porcelains manufacture founded in 1735 by marquis Carlo Ginori and still active nowadays with what, in figures, remains the biggest national production of china tableware. In the course of its three centuries of history, Richard Ginori has absorbed and reinterpreted the most relevant movements of European decorative arts, vaunting outstanding art directors and dream commissions for museums and private collections. In May 2013, after a few years of financial deep waters, it has been acquired by Gucci Group, which is now committed to defend Ginori’s brand, strengthen its commercial appeal, and to get the city closer to this important chapter of its material culture.

Co-financed by the Gucci Group itself and hosted at Museo Marino Marini in the very heart of Florence’s old town centre, the “Richard Ginori and Gio Ponti: an inedited correspondence” exhibition is a proud attempt to enlighten this patrimony. Curators Livia Frescobaldi Malenchini, Oliva Rucellai and Alberto Salvadori have made a conscious choice: to present a restricted selection of Gio Ponti’s creations and to match the 50 pieces on show with the epistles that Ponti addressed from 1923 to 1933 to Ginori’s production departments representatives. Illustrated and annotated as a sketch book, each letter is not only an ironic attempt to describe the art director’s insights, but also a concrete example of what industrial design really is: an inclusive team work that reaches the highest peaks only through an obsessive attention to detail along the whole supply chain.

Not far away from Museo Marino Marini, a visit to the historical Richard Ginori’s showroom in via Rondinelli, recently reopened after the financial handover, bring us apart from the creative intensity of Ponti’s research. The stylistic choice of the new interiors, a shabby chic revisitation of neoclassic taste, can be seen as an indicator of what the new management has in mind: to leave apart the most iconic and imaginative pieces, including the mix&match experiments developed by the latest art director Paola Navone, and to encourage the stable business of traditional high-end tableware.

Giulia Zappa 
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16/09/2014

London Design Festival 2014

Have you ever considered design to be overwhelming? Touching realities, objects, disciplines and crafts as different as glassmaking, automobile industry, packaging or motion graphics, design gives shape to nearly any sphere of human activity. It can be simple and straightforward or conceptual and inquisitive; it forms such a complex and articulated ecosystem of activities and artefacts that it is sometimes unbearably difficult to grasp. And yet, when all those spheres of activity collide, the result is often an exuberance of intelligence, wit and insight or, on the contrary, of uselessness, waste and superficiality.

As any other grand design fair, this year’s London Design Festival presents a healthy mix of both. It is insightful and innovative, as well as somewhat repetitive and futile. As such, it is, in fact, an accurate representation of the many faces that form the design sphere. Founded in 2003, London Design Festival has opened its 12th edition with a program of around 300 projects scattered between various design districts, small independent spaces and established design institutions. Lacking a well-defined core such as Milan’s ‘fiera’, the Festival shifts its focus between talks, exhibitions, presentations, events and specially commissioned projects, such as two Landmark Projects – one at the V&A developed by Barber and Osgerby and one in Trafalgar Square by Morrison, Patternity, Raw Edges and Studioilse –, a series of installations at the V&A Museum, Global Design Forum panel, six design districts – Brompton, Chelsea, Clerkenwell, Islington, Queens Park, Shoreditch, rather than designjunction, 100% Design, Focus/14 or Tent London creative hubs.

Lasting a little more than a week – the festival opened on the 13th of September and lasts until the 21st – London Design Festival explores design’s diversity and apparently endless limits. It shows its relationship with the past and monumentality with Barber and Osgerby’s installation in V&A’s Raphael Gallery; it shows design’s reflection on design itself with Formafantasma’s “From Then On” project for Established & Sons; it demonstrates its relationship with subtle gestures and peculiarities of everyday life with Fabrica’s “Extra-Ordinary Gallery” at the Ace Hotel in Shoreditch; it explores its storytelling abilities through “Crafting Narrative” exhibition at Crafts Council; and, most of all, it explores its inevitable, fundamental relationship with the industry with projects that range from new furniture designs for Vitra to a conceptual mini market set-up by Hay, eloquently showing the dense, seamless and perpetuate transformation of contemporary design practice.

Rujana Rebernjak 
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09/09/2014

Robert Stadler: Back in 5 min

With Back in 5 min, Robert Stadler has produced a suspenseful juxtaposition of historical and contemporary spatial impact and design for the MAK DESIGN SALON #03. Similar to a director, the Viennese-born and Paris-based designer studied intensely the “script” of the Empire and Biedermeier-era décor of the MAK Branch Geymüllerschlössel in order to produce his own reinterpretation of the location. Memorable room installations combine tradition-steeped furniture with newly created objects and toy on many levels with the unique character of this former summer residence.

Stadler contrasts the summer residence’s bourgeois furnishings with simple pieces of furniture from rustic cottages like stools and benches, “whose multifunctional, reductive, and mobile design can be interpreted as a precursor to Biedermeier furniture,” says the designer. Provocatively blending into the setting, the stools Aymeric (2014) and the benches Cora and Dora (2014) can be interpreted as “work furniture,” for example. In keeping with the period’s contemporarily crafted materials, they were produced using an aluminium honeycomb sandwich panel, and seem to suit country life just as well as the Biedermeier period or the present day.

Stadler’s complex scenography for Back in 5 min displaces its visitors into a “moment between,” as if the location were on the point of reconfiguring itself. Illuminated with strobe lighting, the viewer can only briefly catch a glimpse of two rooms’ interiors before they disappear into the darkness. Comparable to peepshows, this flashing intensifies the designer’s intended effect. “Robert Stadler is part of a new generation of designers whose intense authorship in terms of content and form—ignoring the boundaries between disciplines—means they don’t run the risk of lingering self-referentially in the art or industry system,” says Thomas Geisler, curator of the MAK Design Collection, of this year’s choice of artist for the MAK DESIGN SALON #03. Stadler follows on from design interventions by Studio Formafantasma and Michael Anastassiades, and his installation will open on the 13th of September and will be on show until 30th of November 2014.

Rujana Rebernjak 
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05/09/2014

Light from Cold War: the Neon Muzeum

On the other side of the Iron Curtain, when communism ruled over the Eastern block and Poland was undergoing an unprecedented reconstruction through the rigour of Soviet architecture, the best artists and graphic designers of their generation found a unique way to warm up the hearts of post-war gloomy landscapes: transform neon lamps into the privileged means to create innovative and inspiring signs for public places.

Neon signs weren’t a novelty in Europe. In Paris, the Champs-Elysees had already been illuminated by a huge Cinzano neon advertising sign in 1913, and right away the experiment was repeated in other cities. Nevertheless, no other country like Poland has ever transformed the potential of this tube and gas medium into a preponderant urban aesthetics. Restaurants, movie theatres, local milk bars, nothing escaped the contagion of neon lights. Even the most enduring symbol of the capital – the noble Warsaw’s mermaid – wasn’t kept out of the trend, demonstrating how much the city that had been wiped out by bombings needed an injection of warm, sexy and inspiring visual renewal.

It’s a pity, then, that after the Wall’s fall this original language didn’t survive the impact with the Western world. Preserving this culture, then, has become the mission of the Neon Muzeum, a private institution founded in 2005 by David Hill and Ilona Karwinska to store the neons that were progressively dismantled in town. At the present time, the collection is made up of 50 neon pieces and 500 letterforms, which have all been restored, catalogued and promoted through an photographic exhibition by Ilona Karwinska that in the years have already touched several European cities.

Based in the Prague neighbourhood, which is considered the most veracious among Warsaw’s districts, the Neon Muzeum has found its perfect environment in the so-called Soho Factory, a hub for creative talents founded on the ashes of an ancient power station. All around, design showrooms and studios – but also restaurants, food markets, fashion boutiques, etc… – are the most visible symptom of the city’s new energy, and recreate a contemporary landmark that spontaneously includes and relaunches this iconic heritage.

Giulia Zappa – Images courtesy of Ilona Karwinska 
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01/09/2014

Sharpen Your Tools

More than a set of attributes, a precisely defined discipline or a range of products, design is a thought process, a constant learning curve that can free itself of its material confinements and teach us about life. Design as a state of mind, as Martino Gamper and, long before him, Ettore Sottsass, said, is the precise idea that comes to mind when looking at Stian Korntved Ruud’s hand-carving project.

The project (which, perhaps unsurprisingly, resembles Gamper’s “100 Chairs”) aims at exploring the qualities of different types of wood by hand-carving a spoon a day for 365 days. Using traditional techniques and starting from a preliminary sketch, each spoon takes between half an hour and three hours to carve, depending on the complexity of the design and the type of wood. As opposed to machine carving, hand-carving explores the organic qualities of wood and Stian Korntved Ruud often follows the natural grains, patterns and twists, revealing the inner structure and beauty of the material – leaving the process to be guided by the inherent qualities of the material rather than by preconceived ideas.

Despite being long and repetitive, the rigid limits and rules of “365 spoons” allow the designer to be unexpectedly free and the project to evolve and grow. By committing to a specific task for a year, Stian Korntved Ruud is revealing the thought process, often painful research and endless learning, that come with every design project. Even thought the overall quality and originality of “365 spoons” might call for a subtle frown from the insiders of design world, this 1st September The Blogazine wants to celebrate it as a fun manifesto for the upcoming fall: learn, learn, learn, every day learn something new!

Rujana Rebernjak 
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