21/12/2011

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Karin Kellner / Giorgetti

There’s a reason Made in Italy resonates. In a world of cost-cutting it’s about the best materials, it’s about beauty, and it’s about sustainability and superfluous quality regardless of price. And it’s embodied in those select design and fashion firms who carry the torch: there’s a reason Bottega Veneta and Ferrari and Alessi are much more than mere brands. Giorgetti, based in Meda, is certainly one of them. The manufacturer has in its century of existence acquired an unparalleled knowhow in material and processes, and from selection to workmanship Giorgetti is synonymous with Italian quality.

The company selected 2DM’s Karin Kellner to tell the story of the voyage of their signature material: wood. Karin’s dreamy, earthy watercolors do a splendid job of communicating the tactile warmth of wood, and her soft pencil strokes feel as natural as the materials they reference. Great job Karin, and warm wishes to another century, Giorgetti!

From the Bureau

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14/12/2011

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Direktorenhaus / Alpenglühen und Edelweiss

Direktorenhaus, the space for contemporary applied arts and experimental design (best known on these pages as the host of Illustrative), is hosting Alpenglühen und Edelweiss, starting tomorrow. The event will feature two exhibitions, Down By The River, showcasing the hypercolor and fantastical imagery of Erik Mark Sandberg, which show “quite plainly the topics beauty craze and consumer culture,” and a second exhibition, Graphic Tour, which takes a look at the vanguard of graphic design with artists such as Erik Mark Sandberg and Damien Poulain and others. Meanwhile Sean McGinness is finishing up his sprawling, work-in-progress exhibition Somewhere Over The Rainbow elsewhere in the space.

So if you happen to find yourself in Berlin this week, stop in for a look see. In addition to the talent on display and the prime space, they’re serving hot honey wine and tangy Berlin Mules.

Tag Christof

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13/12/2011

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Where They Create by Paul Barbera – Book Launch

Does space influence the way people work? This is the issue behind Paul Barbera’s project that documented, through images and interviews, creative working spaces all around the world. With Where They Create, the Australian photographer – who started taking pictures of interiors almost by accident: “it’s the thing I do without thinking” – changed his voyeurism into a sort of anthropological research. Looking for absurd and hidden things, Barbera entered 32 studios of international creative people – artists, AD, architects, designers, stylists, editorials – and captured all the details of their personal stories and artistic processes.

From Wallpaperand Fantastic Man studios to Matali Crasset design space, Olaf Breuning’s atelier or fashion house Acne (and many more), the Australian photographer peeked into different places with their peculiarities: organised, chaotic or dominated by a chaotic order, empty or with people working, sober or recalling a teenage bedroom.

Barbera’s curiosity, naturalness and good eye for interiors, together with his ability to transmit emotions and warmth make this project unique. Creatives need to transform their offices into intimate spaces (like a home), and to keep his/her own things close to be able to create. Other could work anywhere, travelling with the bare essentials as does Paul. But everybody, even if for a while, leaves personal traces, aspects that don’t pass unnoticed… if you are able to catch them.


Initially thought only as a blog, Where They Create turned into a book thanks to the interest of Frame Publishers.

Presented in NY on September 2011, this sort of diary will be presented in Italy, for the first time, at DesignLibrary (via Savona, 11 Milano) on December 14, from 6 to 10pm.

Monica Lombardi – images courtesy Frame Publishers

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05/12/2011

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The Editorial: My Own Private Mississippi / Place

The two cities we work most heavily in, Milan and London, are both in the midst of being ripped up and partially rebuilt in wait of two massive events, the 2012 Olympics in London and Expo 2015 in Milan. The cities’ drastically different approaches to cleaning up for their guests are reflective of the larger cultures that surround them, as well as their respective visions of their role in the work: London fancies itself the cultured world city, while Milan sees itself as the world’s epicenter of design and fashion. But those imagined roles are both at risk, and while they spruce up their major squares, make token improvements to their infrastructures and add some very expensive new baubles their larger backdrops are being largely ignored.


Milan is unconventionally beautiful and holds tons of hidden gems, but is mostly dark, heavy and alienating brutalist architecture with a subpar transportation infrastructure. Outside Piazza Duomo, it is certainly a city that has a hard time impressing tourists. London, on the other hand, is modern, sparkling and gentrified (read: generic) in many of its more central districts, but is still mostly spaces of shabby, low-slung buildings studded every so often with hideous, dehumanizing estate blocks and slums. Beyond its world-class venues, cafes and green spaces, London mostly oscillates between generic and ghetto. Not surprising, then, that the UK boasts the lowest quality of life in western Europe, according to the Guardian.

So, while you won’t hear any complaints about the benefits the two major events will have on their cities (new tube lines! new green spaces!), we can’t help but think that Milan’s alienation and London’s shabbiness will be addressed in the least. In both cases, a real sense of place and community seems to be that which is missing in both cases. Brooklyn in New York ban be both uglier and shabbier than the worst of London and Milan, but goodness! What a sense of place! And, to be fair, there are certainly spaces with a real sense of place in both of our cities (Brera and the Navigli in Milan, and Portobello Road, Brixton, Broadway Market and many other isolated spaces in London), but they are rare bright spots in a a tapestry of raggedy fabric.

The balance, then, that must be struck to make any space both livable and satisfying is incredibly delicate. Just how to go about creating that sense of place begs a series of complex questions. Milan’s Zona Tortona, which hosts countless fashion shows and is ground zero for the world’s biggest annual design fair, is downright repellent during the 300+ days a year when there are no festivities going on. It plays host to the world’s premiere designers, brands and tastemakers, yet manages to be anonymous, ugly and might as well be a warehouse district in the Ukraine. Shouldn’t you feel like you’re somewhere when you’re in a space so ostensibly special?

It comes down to community and emotion. It is much, much more than being pretty. (Oxford Street is beautiful. We don’t want to be seen there.) Think about it next time you’re in a tawdry themed restaurant. Or when you feel really good in an objectively ugly place. Dive bars. The streets of Lisbon or Buenos Aires. Those all feel just about right. Space means nothing without a sense of place. And place is the sex. So, should’t the visionary developers amping up Milan and London look towards creating a real sense of space – parsing out that which is the essence of the city – instead of spending mountains of money on one-trick monuments?



2DM’s Lorenzo Nencioni, who knows “place” better than most, has taken photographs in lands as far off as Iceland and Japan. The photos in this article, from his new series My Own Private Mississippi showcase just how tangible a sense of place can be: in lieu of a vacation to the United States over the summer, Lorenzo stayed in Italy but went on a search for the feel of Mississippi in his home country. Besides a few pieces of the built environment (spot the tricolore!), these photos very well could have been taken in Dixie, a testament to his eye as well as to that place is much more than what a space seems on the surface.

Tag Christof

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22/11/2011

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PADNY


The mood was self-consciously dapper to the point of dread last Sunday at the first annual PADNY at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City. The exhibitors, with the tips of their noses characteristically arched toward the heavens, sat at round tables and behind mahogany desks quietly sipping Ruinart Champagne and skipping their airbrushed fingers across complimentary iPads. The fair was decidedly more design-oriented than its Paris and London counterparts (the Paris version started 14 years ago; the London version began in 2007), bringing an Apple-indebted enthusiasm for simple, functional aesthetic and contrasting it with striking 20th century art sensibilities. The works were (for the most part) undeniably beautiful, blending a variety of sculptures, paintings, architecture, design, and aesthetic, satisfying many curiosities for the average 99%-er in a way a museum like MoMA or the Met never could. PAD managed to be all over the place without feeling disconnected.

The setting certainly helped. Perhaps most beautiful of all the works on display was the host, the Park Avenue Armory itself. This is no insult. Completed in 1881, the Wade Thompson Drill Hall is a pinnacle of American architecture, with its 80 foot high vaulted barrel roof overlooking more than 55,000 square feet of un-columned open space. Finding a better setting to debut such a dramatic European-indebted exhibition would be about as easy as raising the Titanic. The grandiosity of the space matched that of the exhibitors themselves. Take, for example, the John Berggruen Gallery from San Francisco. Here they were pushing iconoclasts like Georgia O’Keeffe’s Pink Roses and Larkspur for $850,000. By comparison, Anish Kapoor’s Teal Mirror, a beautiful 13 square-foot stainless steel piece from 2011, was going for $950,000. Maybe because we’re so far removed from the upper-reaches of the art trade universe, these prices seemed… (well, to most of us these prices are absurd. Right?) But maybe not: The title of recent article by the Times seemed to sum it up perfectly: “Show of Hands, Please: Who Can Buy Art?”


That the question is as rhetorical as the answer is frustrating. But that shouldn’t get in the way of the way of the work itself, and in all fairness $20 was a modest fee for the average spectator to pay to see what PAD had to offer. Sculptor Thomas Roberts’ work was there. Mr. Roberts, a Belfast-born artist who also dabbles in jewelry and furniture, seems to have struck a unique chord between beauty and functionality. His recent work draws influence from his time spent in India, particularly the concept of devotional art, and on occasion displays his sense of humor with titles such as Lingham, named for three pieces of tree trunk stacked atop one-another.

There were many others—including 20th century masters like Picasso, De Kooning, and Man Ray—with rare, less prominent work on display that added a sense of excitement and discovery to names long canonized. The Australian photographer-turned-painter Helmut Koller had two entire walls to himself, one displaying Two Giraffes On Yellow; the other, a dramatic red and white zebra against a blue background, both something you might see after eating a bag of kabenzis and walking through the Bronx Zoo. Koller’s animal drawings combine the dramatic color contrasts of Pop Art with isolated images of exotic animals in mid-motion, as if taking inspiration from Eadweard Muybridge’s Sallie Gardner at a Gallup. The price for his paintings—$20,000 for the zebra—probably more for the pair of giraffesinitially seemed like quite a bit of change, but less so after taking a few laps around the fair. Which, in the end, isn’t surprising. Because even when you know can’t take it home, window shopping is rarely this rewarding.

Lane Koivu

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14/11/2011

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The Editorial: Lytro

Photography, like painting and lithography and every other form of visual representation that preceded it, is a deliberate act. And although a photograph depends to a large degree on its subject and condition (unlike a painting which can come straight from an artist’s imagination), it is still ultimately the product of its creator’s vision. So no matter the medium, the artist has always had final control over the images he creates. A painter creates a scene, an illustrator creates brings an idea to life, and a photographer captures his very specific vision of a moment in time. Final authorship rests with the artist. Until now.


The Lytro is a little square box that looks something like an 1980s pocket flashlight. But inside, lies a powerful technology that creates a revolutionary sort of image. It is a image that captures everything you couldn’t see within a traditional photograph, and the the tech world is abuzz about it.

While the diminutive box may seem like a toy or a gimmick, its technology could very well signal a revolution in the way images are created and consumed. Its implications for serious photography could also be huge, because traditional focusing techniques like tilt shift could become redundant. And whether it eventually goes down in history as gimmick or legend, tech savvy artists will definitely have a field day with the thing.




An image from the Lytro is is essentially a capture of exponentially more data than a normal digital image. A traditional photo is a capture of a measured, set amount of light in a fixed, deliberately composed way. The Lytro, by capturing nearly all available information in its scope of view, makes for single images that contain all information in its frame of view. So a single image may be seen in entirely different ways, with deep or shallow depths of field and with as much or little light as desired.

With the Lytro, the viewer is the final author of an image, selecting for himself exactly how it is composed and viewed. And a single image now may contain information that literally remains hidden until searched for. In that way, images from the Lytro are images that you literally must interact with, not merely passively take in.


So while we hope the simple lo-tech snapshot never goes away (especially in good old chemical process film), the Lytro is an unexpected innovation whose full potential is still mostly unexplored. What possibilities will it open in fashion? In crime scene investigations? In facial recognition? In space exploration? The little Lytro makes us feel like we’re in the bold, experimental age of Daguerre and Talbot and Nadar all over again: possibilities are endless! And the future of photography is uncertain and exciting and bright! We can’t wait to get our hands on one…

Tag Christof – Images courtesy Lytro

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03/11/2011

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Rui Pereira / Lateira

Oh, canned food. That lowliest of fare, hermetically sealed for apocalyptic aftermath and just one half-step above dreaded instant noodle soup. But is it, really? In many countries–especially southern European ones–the connection to good food runs so deep that even the food permanently preserved in tins can be pretty fantastic: legumes, greens and especially fish. Good oil and prime catch are good oil and prime catch, even in a tin. It’s the mystery meat sausages and chemical concoctions like Spaghetti-O’s that are really causes for concern.



For his most recent project, Lateira, Portuguese designer Rui Pereira looked to the long history of fish canning in his country to build a new ritual around eating from the tin. And in his solid effort to de-stigmatize it, he simultaneously promotes tradition and ups the cachet of a wrongly disparaged mode of food preservation. Much like the Megaphone project we saw at this year’s Salone del Mobile, the concept mixes an old archetype and contemporary habits with handcraft to produce a beautiful, practical, culturally innovative object. Moreover, the red clay and hand drawn white motifs harken back to classic Portuguese handicraft.

The project has been shown at Show me Galleryin Lisbon during this year’s Experimenta Design. And suddenly, tuna for lunch sounds like a downright delicacy…

Tag Christof – Images Rui Pereira

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18/10/2011

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NIL28 x Expo2015

Progress has been brewing in the neighborhood between Viale Umbria and Viale Molise. In Milan, the area has become a creative hub of sorts, with a resurgent cultural scene (we wrote about Via Decembrio’s groundbreaking Genovese restaurant U Barba earlier this year). At the nucleaus of the hive is Distretto Creativo 28, the organization dedicated to pushing the boundaries of urban engagement. “The association’s purpose is the promotion of cultural activities and initiatives and project-oriented construction of a concrete world of creativity.” Sounds like just what the doctor ordered.

With sights set on the potentially transformative energy of Expo 2015, NIL28 has masterminded an “urban regeneration project” that intends to unite the creative voices of the area for a sweeping discourse on the spaces, materiality and future of the district. Concepts for different projects have been imagined, such as a community farm, mural projects and a neighborhood pavilion for Expo 2015. The innovative platform could carry many positive implications for Milan as a whole, and should prove to be a interesting point of departure for discussions over the next year.

The event opens tonight at Via Tertulliano 68 with the exhibitions “Ritratti di Quartiere” (Portraits of a Neighbourhood) and “Empatie” (Empathy). Included among the voices of the project are DotDotDot, Yellowoffice, And’ Studio, Avantgarden Gallery, Blob Creative, several architecture studios and other creative firms active in the area.

Tag Christof

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03/10/2011

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The Editorial: Maker Faire Africa 2011

Fresh off very hopeful fashion season, good energy abounds. London Design Festival just ended and featured a handful of excellent and thought-provoking new works. The Euro this week shows signs it might just make it out of its quagmire (and mass protests in New York against corruption on Wall Street may be making progress). And this week, Maker Faire Africa opens for a third pioneering year.

This time the Faire is to be held in Cairo, quite probably the single most appropriate city for a forum on African creativity at the moment. The whole of Northern Africa itself is also an interesting platform because, unlike the prototypical central and southern nations with fledgling infrastructures and limited institutions, countries like Egypt, Algeria and Morocco have sprawling, complex systems that are in massive need of reform. These are perhaps countries that don’t fit into a prescribed idea of Africa, but for that reason could very well be beacons in an overall transformation – and a thoughtful grassroots look at creativity is just the place. All the more in the face of these countries’ uncertain, yet possibly much brighter futures.

The festival/conference/forum that believes “[hand]making is the most authentic form of manufacturing, and manufacturing is a what forges a vigorous middle class” has blazed quite a trail in its first couple years in existence. We love the idea of handicraft (and exchanges of good ideas of any kind), but on a continent that has all too often been passed over because of little consumer demand and its informal markets Maker Faire Africa. Its ideas could well become big forces in future transformation of not only Africa, but could even show the rest of the world a thing or two. And nowhere can the transformative power of good ideas in design be more tangible than where there have been traditionally very few of them.

As innovative microfinance models have emerged to free up tiny examples of good business (and Africa’s economy as a whole grows), the potential for change and massive progress is becoming enormous. More and more creative effort will certainly pour in from around the world, and Africa’s homegrown creative industry should advance accordingly. While the likes of Fuseproject’s One Laptop Per Child project is certainly a noble pursuit (and a well-executed, sustainable one), those types of charity-driven design initiatives should begin to be replaced by others by Africans, for Africans.

The Faire is, of course, a specifically African compliment to the global Maker Faire, which has grown to become one of the premiere celebrations of handcraft on the planet. We can’t help but think of Salone del Mobile’s frivolousness in the face of Maker Faire: since it’s such a tremendous influence on the design world, it really would be excellent to see more of a social consciousness behind the glitzy furniture and trinkets. Italy, Europe and the rest of the Western world could use an honest reboot right about now.

Tag Christof – Images courtesy Maker Faire Africa

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29/07/2011

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KK Outlet / Handwritten Letter Project

Always fresh KK Outlet (the UK outgrowth of Holland’s brilliant KesselsKramer, half of whom we met at the Triennale‘s Graphic Design Worlds a few months ago) has played host to a novel new project: pencil and paper. The The Handwritten Letter Project was begun as an invitation by master-of-wit designer (and ex-footballer) Craig Oldham to several of the world’s great designers as a means of mining up those “things that have been around for a while,” but which have fallen dramatically out of use in the face of digital. (When’s the last time you wrote your granny a letter?) The project’s premise is simply the sharing of thoughts in handwriting on personal letterhead, and the result is surprisingly effervescent and, well… fresh. What’s old here seems quite new.

“The project offers much more than a voyeuristic insight into the creative minds of those we revere. It represents a visual narrative on the cultural transition in which we find ourselves.”

The project begs questions of engagement with our communication, and makes it abundantly clear (as it positions letter-writing in opposition to status updates and tweets) that handwritten communication is indeed an infinitely more personal means of expression.

Contributors include some very, very heavy hitters: Milton GlaserMilton Glaser, Michael BierutMichael Bierut, Stefan Sagmeister, Ivan Chermayeff, Wim CrouwelWim Crouwel, Mike Dempsey, and many others, with the collection having grown to over 100 letters.


The project will be included in a limited edition book (and KesselsKramer books are always absolute treasures – we own the entire Useful Photography series), with all profits from the project to be donated to Literacy Trust. Exhibition opens in a private viewing at KK Outlet at 42 Hoxton Square in London on August 4th, and will run through the 27th.

Tag Christof – Images courtesy KKOutlet – Special thanks to Danielle Pender

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