19/04/2012

.

Salone 2012 – Tortona Second Round

Zona Tortona has caught our attention, again. After the yesterday’s quite satisfying Superstudio visit, we have decided to take a lazy stroll on the via Tortona and other neighbouring streets to see what else one of the busiest design districts in Milan can offer. Even though the cloudy day could have made us change our mood, the disappointment of the day was actually the Tortona district itself. After a few blind shots, where we couldn’t but ask ourselves what is actually the point of the design week, we thought we had found our goldmine.

The huge banner announcing ‘The Leading Figures of French Design’ had caught our eye and we entered the French Design exhibition. A 1200 square meter exhibition space was a miniature fair featuring what should have been the French design excellence. Well, besides a few singular projects, to be really honest, the exhibition was kind of a disappointment. You could blame us of being too tired or too meteoropathic, but this was the pure first impression it made on us. There were few interesting, funny or quirky projects like Normal Studios‘ bar set up using Tolix‘s chairs or some of Y’a pas le feu au lac‘s vases, but unfortunately it’s not what we think great design should really be.

Rujana Rebernjak 

Share: Facebook,  Twitter  

19/04/2012

.

Salone 2012 – Tom Dixon & MOST

Tom Dixon is one of those design entrepreneurs that manages to turn into gold everything he touches (in some cases literally). Most, the bombastic event promoted by Dixon held at National Museum of Science and Technology, is one of the highlights of this year’s Salone. Most is a collective exhibition whose goal was to transform the museum’s scientific environment in what resembles a design research center. The juxtaposition of historical transportation exhibition with contemporary design, stood almost as a reminder for today’s designers of what actually good design should be like, offering a perfect situation for sharp confrontation and critique.

As far as single exhibitors are concerned, they were distributed between five of the museum’s buildings. The first part of the exhibition was obviously Tom Dixon’s show called Luminosity where he presented new lighting and furniture projects. With an eye on new production methods as well as materials, the project that struck us most was the Lustre lamps collection that uses glazed ceramics in order to create an effect reminiscent of hidden colours in nature. Also Dixon’s Eclectic collection of everyday objects was eye candy, showing how big design companies haven’t forgotten the simple daily pleasures we all can find ourselves in.

Among other exhibitions, Studio Toogood‘s La Cura project has to be mentioned. Designed as a shelter place from the chaos of the Salone, it offers a series of performances that serve as a retreat for our senses. There you can find the sound installation by Kite&Laslett, a re-energizing elixir created by Arabeschi di Latte while the air is filled with a scent by the scent designer 12.29.

One of the most interesting stands is the one by a new french design company called La Chance. Presenting its first ambitious collection called Jekyll and Hyde where each piece comes in two versions, the company has inaugurated a hopefully long collaboration with designers like Pierre Favresse, Luca Nichetto, Susane de Graef and Note Design Studio.

The astonishingly enormous museum space actually offered a lot more than we could possibly summarize in these few lines. If you’re into work like the one produced by Areaware or want to discover companies like Resident from New Zealand, take at least a few hours to wander around these beautifully designed spaces and check what Most has to offer.

Rujana Rebernjak

Share: Facebook,  Twitter  

19/04/2012

.

Salone 2012 – Superstudio

After the first two days of this year’s Salone we are slowly but steadily approaching its more consolidated venues. The fulcrum of Fuorisalone is obviously Zona Tortona, with the massive presence of Superstudio. With yesterday’s pouring rain here in Milan we couldn’t but take shelter there and soak in the best from the Temporary Museum for New Design. Arrived at its fourth edition this year, Temporary Museum for New Design has presented more than 50 exhibitions with the participation of 40 international brands and more than 200 designers.

Among this myriad of projects, we would lie saying that all of them were interesting, some have really caught our eye. As we have a soft spot for Scandinavian design, we were obviously intrigued by the collective exhibition organized by Inredia. Their bold statement about Scandianavian design being much more than Ikea and H&M, has certainly been heard as companies such as SA Möbler or designers like Formforyou and institutions for research like Steneby, have really a lot to say.

Another inevitable installation was Past, Present, Future by the german furniture company Kusch, made out of chairs floating in a bouquet-like composition, connecting the realities of contemporary design and artistic sensorially.
The third stop was New Duivendrecht, the newest of contemporary Dutch furniture manufacturers. Presenting the projects of nine young designers, the company has successfully promoted their ideals of high quality, sustainability and both formal and technological innovation.

Without any further waffling, the other musts are definitely the works of NgispeN, Cube on Cube, Nendo and Fritsch-Durisotti, to name but a few. Even though the weather in Milan is giving us a break and you may not be looking for a shelter, Superstudio is definitely an inevitable stop.

Rujana Rebernjak

Share: Facebook,  Twitter  

18/04/2012

.

Salone 2012 – Ventura Lambrate

In the last few years the more independent young designers as well as universities of design have been moving away from the center of Milan to Lambrate. This year the Lambrate fever has reached its higher peak as far as number of participants is concerned. Distributed between Via Ventura, Via Massimiano and Via Oslavia, this year’s exhibitors have included both the usual young as well as superstars like Jaime Hayon and established companies such as COS and Ikea.

As far as design schools are concerned, The Royal College of Art has made an almost impeccable exhibition. In a long series of experimental projects entitled Paradise, the strongest impression was made by ‘Fan Table’ by Mauricio Affonso, ‘Red & Blue Stacking Vessels’ by Pia Wustenberg.

The University of Bolzano was also there, with less projects but a nicely designed exhibition space curated by the school’s professors.

The most interesting young and independent designers would make an endless list, so we’ll only point out a few: “Edition of 9″ curated by Something Good that explored the relation between local crafts and contemporary design, “Think +” by Studio 248 which concentrated on the exploration of gestures and usability in design, Nino & Svenja that concentrated their research on the use of simple materials with innovative production and assembling methods.

Rujana Rebernjak

Share: Facebook,  Twitter  

18/04/2012

.

Salone 2012 – Spazio Rossana Orlandi

The Salone fever has begun this year, punctual as ever. Hundreds of events have overflown the city, be it small independent designers that try to make their way into the design elite or already well-known companies always ahead of their time. On the first day of the Salone we had the thoughts on all the choices. Looking through the Salone’s agenda and picking the right start of our week-long design tour wasn’t an easy task.
So in order to kick this week a good start, we’ve decided to begin from one of the unmissable events – the fascinating collective exhibition at Spazio Rossana Orlandi.

Besides the charming garden where we spotted one of the Bouroullec brothers sipping wine (you can imagine how excited we felt seeing one of our heroes), the space has presented more than forty new projects from both acclaimed designers as well as new talents. Although Spazio Rossana Orlandi, as usual, offered a huge amount of experimental projects that both raised questions about form and material as well as production and distribution methods, we still had to pick a few favorites.


The first one is Luca Nichetto with his Swell series. Designed for the french design editor Petite Friture, the Swell series consists of a pencil case and a key holder made in colored concrete. The other objects produced by Petite Friture are Cairn boxes and Vertigo pendant lamp by Constance Guisset, Ikebana vases by Edward Robinson and Hollo stool and tables by Amandine Chhor and Aissa Logerot, to name but a few.

Another collection that has made an impression is the ceramics collection by Taruhiro Yanagihara for 1616 / Arita Japan. Together with Dutch designers Scholten & Baijings, Yanagihara as the creative director of the company coming from the birthplace of ceramic art in Japan, has decided to design a collection that reflects the European perspective on the Japanese tradition.

The last but not least, Ercol Furniture presenting beautifully crafted oak, ash, elm and beech chairs, that combine modern machinery with hand craftsmanship and intelligent design.

Without pretending to be exhausted from the first Salone visit, we have actually managed to give the week a real kick-start!

Our official Salone reporter: Rujana Rebernjak

Share: Facebook,  Twitter  

18/04/2012

.

The Editorial: Mr. Stevens’ Salone

For the occasion of this year’s Salone del Mobile, The Blogazine will be bringing you behind-the-scenes and up close and personal looks at happenings around Milan. From today until Monday, we’re diving into design and we hope to see you both here and out on the streets! Happy Salone!

It was many, many moons ago that industrial designer Brooks Stevens popularized the seductive idea of planned obsolescence. The formula was straightforward and seductive enough: design objects would come with an abbreviated lifespan built-in that would pay dividends both for producers and consumers. A constant need for new would ensure a steady stream of demand, and by keeping the populace steadily supplied with the latest goodies their quality of life would ostensibly rise. The bold postwar logic paid off handsomely for decades.

And while our unbridled consumer society is still very much entrenched in this vicious cycle, we have at the very least begun en masse to question the deeply unsustainable system on which our throwaway culture is based. Demand for durable goods continues to rise in tandem with a vibrant DIY culture. And Brooks Steven’s successors, the designers of today, must consider any product’s birth to death cycle as a central matter in its conception.

Except, it seems, at our hometown’s signature event, Salone Del Mobile. Behind the flashy kitchens, clever new chairs and utopian marketing speak lies a post-postmodern version of planned obsolescence that is perhaps even more toxic than its forbear. A kissing cousin to fashion’s dramatically accelerated throwaway cycle, design objects at Salone are sold both on the basis of their implied quality and innovativeness, as well as on pure considerations of cool. Since it’s more than a bit difficult to actually make a chair obsolete, the impetus is to put it out of fashion. Translucent plastic is in! Now wood! Metal! Now formica! Curves! No, angles! Neutrals! Come on, neons!



All of which is well enough in isolation: just as runway fashion influences the wider ecosystem of clothes, Salone’s whimsy and taste making serves as an important reference point for a constantly richer world of designed objects, and its influence inevitably trickles down through all levels of culture. Nevertheless, its most unfortunate byproduct happens to be that, as with fast fashion, concerns of sustainability almost always take a backseat to a gotta-have-it mentality amped up by powerful marketing and masterful branding.

As an added downside, the fast fast fashion ethos on display in Milan’s design seems also to have drowned out the radical innovation the fair was once known for. A sense of “Salone is nothing like it used to be” is nearly universal among those who were lucky enough to attend the fair in the 1980s and 1990s. And the very sad truth is that design’s vanguard is no longer in Milan: the hyper-imaginative works of the likes of the Memphis designers have given way to pricey “design” trinkets designed by celebrity designers. The only real innovations on display have recently come from optimistic students and other young designers and are relegated to Lambrate and other cubbyholes around the city. But the real problem solving, visionary and radical design moved on a long time ago.

So, hit the fair this year with a critical eye. Listen to the young designers. Listen to the very old designers. If we look beyond the trends to to the good design beneath, if we keep asking the right questions, we might just bring Milan back.

Tag Christof, Images courtesy Vitra

Share: Facebook,  Twitter  

13/04/2012

.

Delfina Delettrez – Metalphysic

We’ve seen and fallen for the jewelry work of Delfina Delettrez, the globetrotting fourth-generation Fendi, on The Blogazine before. But as the seasons tick by, her uncommonly intelligent and sophisticated brand of design always manage, however impossibly, to turn up the wow factor. Each collection is boldly, drastically different from its successor, as well as both subversive and beautiful.

This newest collection, called Metalphysic is Rome in jewel form. “Metalphysic celebrates the miraculous architecture in Rome’s churches and palaces from antiquity and the modern day, blending these two radically different eras. The neoclassicism of Canova and Piranesi combined with the intriguing metaphysics of Giorgio De Chirico.” And in spite of the usual grandiose marketing speak, we really do see it – the pieces not only look say “Rome” through their shapes and compositions, they also make fantastic use of materials not generally used in jewelry to solidify the image. By going back to her Roman roots, Delettrez has mined some powerful inspiration to imagine a collection that we daresay might be her best yet.

For the occasion of the new collection, 2DM’s illustrator Diego Soprana went way Dada for a collaboration with Delfina. Soprana’s trademark style proves a perfect match for Metalphysic, bringing out its Romanesque character while injecting it into a canvas charged with absurdity and decadence: a perfect foil to the collection’s rigorous neoclassical/metaphysical bent.

Excellent job, Delfina and Diego!

Tag Christof – Images Diego Soprana

Share: Facebook,  Twitter  

10/04/2012

.

DIY – Can We Make It On Our Own?

There’s no need to say that the modern man is a lazy beast. While our brains are getting more and more fuzzy, our hands are becoming a mouse shaped claws. While our lives were getting more and more comfortable, we were left our homo habilis nature sink into oblivion. While our fathers were able to build houses from scratch, we get anxious at changing a lightbulb. The materialist culture has taken away our autonomy, depriving us of the happiness only crafting things with our hands could bring.

The recent ‘revival’ of DIY culture is only a myth or pure fashion, as we still rush to Ikea as soon as we need a simple shelf or a working desk. Even though probably we are all fed up with the DIY preaching, it doesn’t seem to have taken real effect on us. As the spring cleaning sessions have already begun, it should be important to remember that you can actually re-use stuff we want to get rid of and maybe even make something by ourselves.

Among the endless DIY book list, there are three we feel you should be looking at. The first in order of appearance, given its recent publication, is Thomas Bilass‘s “How to Make it Without Ikea”. The second volume in the series isn’t that much about actual practical advice, but more about teaching us how to think outside the box, doming our materialist impulses and rethinking our daily routines.

Scaling up on the list, we can’t but remember Vladimir Arkhipov‘s “Home-Made: Contemporary Russian Folk Artefacts” book. The russian collector has gathered an enormous archive of anonymous objects that people made for themselves, conditioned by limited resources and an overabundance of problem-solving spirit.

Last but not least, even though you might have it over the top, Enzo Mari‘s “Autoprogettazione” can’t be left out. With the recent “Autoprogettazione Revisited” and “Autoprogettazione 2.0″ (to be presented this year during the Salone in Milan) it remains a true Bible. Not only because of the quality of Mari’s projects, but because its true intent was building awareness regarding the process of design while crafting these beautiful objects.

Arrived at this point, we cannot avoid quoting Richard Sennett: “craftsmanship names the basic human impulse to do a job well for its own sake, and good craftsmanship involves developing skills and focusing on the work rather than ourselves.”

Rujana Rebernjak

Share: Facebook,  Twitter  

03/04/2012

.

Richard Hollis- A Lifetime of Visual Storytelling

Richard Hollis is one of the first names you hear when studying graphic design. “Graphic Design: A Concise History” is one of those treasures young graphic designers hungrily soak in. Even though each generation of designers tend to rediscover the book year after year, its author, Richard Hollis, has been on the scene for more than fifty years.

Starting as a part of John Berger‘s team that transformed the well known television show into “Ways of Seeing” book, Richard Hollis has become an absolute genius in storytelling with words and images. It may come as a banality speaking about graphic design, but Hollis’s layouts have actually made generations more aware of how much politics can be hidden in even the most ingenuous image.

Having chosen anonymity in a world of design superstars, Richard Hollis has never been properly appreciated. Fortunately Emily King, the wittiest of design historians, has dug into Hollis’s archives in search of these overly disregarded gems to be put on display in a show curated for the Gallery Libby Sellers in London.


After what must have been a demanding but gratifying work, the author-curator pair pulled out more than hundred items from Hollis’s prolific career. Besides the above mentioned cornerstones of design and art critics, in half a century of work handling words and images, Hollis has produced catalogues, flyers and posters for the Whitechapel Gallery (from the late sixties to the mid eighties), graphic work for artists Steve McQueen and Bridget Riley, as well as work related to radical politics of the 60s and 70s and those developed during his travels to Cuba, Zurich and Paris.

The show, running until April 28th, is being accompanist by the book “Writings About Graphic Design” published by Occasional Papers. Collecting a comprehensive selection of Hollis’s essays, interviews and texts is due to become a new textbook must.


Rujana Rebernjak

Share: Facebook,  Twitter  

28/03/2012

.

The Editorial: Robin Hood Gardens, Modernist Murder

Modernism, especially in brutalist form, is an understandably misunderstood beast: its unfriendly concrete and absolutely unadorned exteriors are lightyears away form classical notions of beauty. Its major works are relics from a simpler time, when it was believed that human behavior could be easily influenced, predicted and planned for. And while many were poorly executed dilutions of their grand ideological underpinnings, others remain supremely important places that despite their controversy are key pieces of world architectural patrimony: more than Stonehenge or the Sydney Opera House, they are important because they reveal deep truths about the realities of human society.

Robin Hood Gardens, a social housing estate in London’s Poplar neighborhood designed in the 1960s by Alison and Peter Smithson, is a prime example of just such a place: its design was remarkably innovative and still distinctive and had a huge impact on successive architecture. And in a blow to the design community around the world, its definitive demolition was announced just this week. The news comes after a drawn out battle between a local council strapped for money and eager to shed its ghetto image and many prominent voices such as Zaha Hadid within the architectural community who have been outraged at the prospect of its demolition. The place was even a subject of a book, Robin Hood Gardens: Re-Visions, in which several practices pitched in ideas for its renovation and preservation.

But today in London, with the exception of the Barbican, the Commonwealth Institute (slated to become the Design Museum‘s future home), the Goldfinger towers and a small handful of others who have managed to achieve “protected” status, Robin Hood Gardens is now among many major modernist sites that are systematically being demolished to make way for other, less-offensive and less visionary projects meant to solve urban problems as cheaply and unremarkably as possible.

Still, the overwhelming truths about places like these have been well documented. From Pruitt-Igoe’s colossal failure in St. Louis, Missouri to the continued plight of South London’s rotting, crime-infested Aylesbury Estate and the notorious United Nations Plaza in San Francisco, gang violence, disproportionate poverty and blight all seem to be the standard aftermath of modernist solutions to urban problems. Apart from those which have been heavily gentrified and/or colonized by architectural connoisseurs like the Barbican and, more recently, Trellick Tower, the places are just dismal. Peter Pan Gardens is no exception: it is today in a shambles, with tons of blown-out glass and its lower floors entirely boarded up. But that’s a product of decades of neglect – what would these spaces have become under better circumstances? Perhaps models for an equally optimistic 21st century modernism?

It’s no great wonder that many want these places demolished, but it’s a nevertheless a shame that the grand ideas will be destroyed to make way for anonymous cookie cutter houses. But in the end, architecture’s role in society is that of open-minded innovator rather than sentimental preservationist. But I just can’t help but believe that many of these these last, iconic, exotically beautiful brutalist spaces can’t be preserved and responsibly updated. They could stand for centuries as reminders of the last time we humans fancied ourselves all-powerful creators…


Tag Christof – Images courtesy ArchDaily

Share: Facebook,  Twitter  
Next Page » « Previous Page