Amidst the Grids Photographs Theresa Marx
Rem Koolhaas loves a grid. In his 1978 book Delirious New York, the architect called the 1811 grid-plan for Manhattan “the most courageous act of prediction in western civilisation”. To Koolhaas, the design’s “two-dimensional discipline[…] creates undreamt-of freedom for three-dimensional anarchy”. Strict belt and braces, then, with a devilmay-care belly pouring out between the lines. A little bit of structure, the argument runs, is a fine basis for embellishment and subversion. You know who doesn’t love a grid, though? Art historian Rosalind Krauss, that’s who. In her 1979 essay ‘Grids’, Krauss cuts to the chase: “it is safe to say that no form within the whole of modern aesthetic production has sustained itself so relentlessly while at the same time being so impervious to change[…] development is precisely what the grid resists.” Koolhaas v. Krauss – it’s a battle of titans and there’s no telling who will win. Over the following pages, seven contemporary designs step forward as foot soldiers in the fight. 22
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Revealing – A white metal wall-hanging, Chris Kabel’s Hidden Color Card is painted on its reverse with a brightly coloured dot. The strength of the dot’s hue is such that it reflects off the wall and back through the grid, creating a softly glowing coloured shadow. Hidden Color Card, Chris Kabel
Observation
Balkrishna Doshi Architecture for the People 30.03. – 08.09.2019
#VitraDesignMuseum #VDMDoshi www.design-museum.de
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Vitra Design Museum
The Good Neighbour Idea Introduction Oli Stratford!Photographs Jermaine Francis
Towards the end of my time at Studioilse in Bermondsey, the studio’s principal Ilse Crawford logs onto YouTube. “There’s a video I wanted to show you,” she explains, cycling through clips. “You can’t believe that he was president of the United States when he gave this talk.” Given contemporary politics, you might be forgiven for having a hunch as to where this is going.
Roundtable
for Spanish brand Nanimarquina, founded in 1987 by textile designer Nani Marquina. The Wellbeing collection is made from afghan wool, nettle, jute, linen, Tussar silk, and organic cotton, all of which were utilised according to four criteria set by the studio. The first criteria, local fibre, specified raw materials sourced from as close as possible to the brand’s production centres in Pakistan, India and Nepal. This criterion further ensures that the materials are traceable back through their supply chain. In addition to this emphasis on locality and provenance, three further criteria were specified: hand spun; no bleach; no dyes. Crawford identifies these as “pain points” – areas within the design process where the studio might make the greatest impact in terms of limiting abuses within the supply chain and cutting down on the environmental damage caused by chemical dyes entering the water system. All commonsensical design restrictions, then, but ones which are rarely taken as red lines within wider industry. The Wellbeing collection is intended as a manifesto for Crawford’s thinking around design, but she is keen to stress a continuity of approach and link it to earlier projects in the studio’s portfolio: the intricately carved Touch collection of wooden furniture for Bosnian brand Zanat, which deploys handcraft as a means of promoting economic opportunity; the Refettorio Felix community kitchen in London for non-profit Food for Soul, which aims to present soup kitchens as spaces for social cohesion rather than just sites of emergency; and the Sinnerlig furniture collection for Ikea, which prioritised the use of sustainable natural materials such as cork, seagrass and bamboo. All of these topics were on the table when Disegno met with Crawford to discuss wellbeing, something she describes as a “self-evident[…] starting point of all good design”. Joining her in conversation were Studioilse co-principal Oscar Peña, former global creative director of lighting at Philips Design and head of DAE’s BA Man and Activity department; and Mickaël Wiesengrün, a designer at Studioilse who worked on the Wellbeing collection and who is a former student of Crawford’s.
Fortunately, it’s not the present incumbent of the White House who shambles onto the screen. Rather, Crawford’s phone lights up with a black-and-white clip of Franklin D. Roosevelt, wearing a stiff woollen suit and looking directly to camera as he records a radio broadcast for Brotherhood Day on 23 February, 1936. “I like to think of our country as one home in which the interests of each member are bound up with the happiness of all,” he intones. “We ought to know, by now, that the welfare of your family or mind cannot be bought at the sacrifice of our neighbour’s family; that our wellbeing depends, in the long run, on the wellbeing of our neighbours.” Eight years later, Roosevelt would attempt to enshrine these ideas with his Second Bill of Rights – a set of economic tenets that would work alongside the 1791 Bill of Rights in order to achieve “new goals of human happiness and wellbeing”. “It’s of its time,” says Crawford, “[but that bill] was going to embed wellbeing in the American Constitution.” Such ideas matter to Crawford, who, since 2000, has led the Man and Wellbeing BA department at Design Academy Eindhoven (DAE) and whose practice describes its mission as being to place wellbeing “at the core of everything that we do”. It’s a striking idea, albeit one grounded in a term that Crawford herself acknowledges is open to ambiguity and misuse. “Rather like ‘design’, ‘wellbeing’ is a word that is often [mis]appropriated,” she says, “but I don’t want to abandon it because I think it has real meaning.” To explain, Crawford hands me a piece of paper printed with a mind-map. It’s a teaching resource from DAE that covers the 25 components that make up her definition of wellbeing. From a central circle stating “We are the system” a series of lines wriggles out, leading to subsections with titles such as “Cool head, warm heart”; “Data privacy”; “Design for economic nutrition”; and “Whole systems/materials, production, citizens”. From amongst this thicket of terminology, Crawford believes a working definition of “wellbeing” might be drawn out. “It means rigour,” she explains. “What’s great about being a designer is that you can realise and materialise values. In my case, I think that what you can do is bring together a product’s effect on people [who buy it], and integrate that with the effect it has on the people who make it – who the product sustains economically – and the effect it has on the environment. That’s wellbeing.” These ideas have recently been materialised in a new collection of textiles that Studioilse has developed
Oli Stratford You say it’s self-evident that wellbeing
should be the starting point of all good design, but what do you mean by that? Ilse Crawford All design ultimately expresses the values embedded in it. For me, wellbeing is being conscious of the product’s impact on people: not just on the
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Ilse Crawford, photographed in her studio in Bermondsey.
Roundtable
Save Us From Beauty Words Kristina Rapacki Illustration Leonhard Rothmoser
“A stranger is following me down a deserted street, but never mind: look at this beautiful row of multi-facade buildings!” said no woman ever. Consider this anecdote from the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister: “I was late for a dinner in Tokyo and I was rushing through an underpass. It was fairly dark and there was no-one around other than a woman walking in front of me. Now, I[...] wanted to overtake that woman, but I also knew that if I did, I was going to scare the shit out of her.” Pause. “If this would’ve happened in a neighbourhood where there were multi-facade buildings, neither me nor the woman would’ve given it any thought.” I was interviewing Sagmeister about Sagmeister & Walsh: Beauty, an exhibition at Vienna’s MAK that he co-curated with his business partner Jessica Walsh, and which opened in autumn 2018. The show made some rather sweeping claims about the impact human-made beauty can have on behaviour. For instance, it proposed beauty as the reason New York’s High Line has seen no serious crimes since opening in 2009. Even alongside such claims, the Tokyo anecdote was baffling. Baffling, and indicative of a new conservative turn in thinking about architecture. In the last year or so, it’s as if the culture wars of the 1980s have been resuscitated. Architectural beauty – often defined as anything Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe would not have built – does social good in and of itself, certain commentators argue. According to this topsy-turvy logic, women do not fear strangers creeping up on them if the surrounding buildings are stylistically varied enough. Consider another example: the philosopher Roger Scruton speaking at a panel event in January of this year. “If it hadn’t been so ugly to begin with,” he said of London’s Grenfell Tower, “the whole problem would never have happened.” The “problem” was, of course, the catastrophic fire that engulfed the tower and was stoked by its flammable cladding in 2017, killing 72 people. What’s so ugly about these claims is the way they distract from important discussions. Why do women still feel unsafe in public? How was it possible to install flammable cladding on a high-rise building? Whatever’s at the root of these issues, it’s unlikely to be Mies and Corbu.
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Even in the Face of Adversity Words Kristina Rapacki Photographs Olaf Otto Becker
Back in October 2017, the US Consumer Electronics Association (CTA) was on an outing in Napa Valley. The scenic north Californian wine county was the setting for the organisation’s triannual board meeting. On the agenda: the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show (CES), one of the world’s largest tech fairs, which takes place in Las Vegas every January and is organised by the CTA. When the board members woke that morning, however, the power had gone out. “Most of us thought there was something wrong with our hotel rooms,” recalls Gary Shapiro, president of the CTA. But then the phone service died. “It turned out that the wildfires had really enveloped the area,” says Shapiro. Some from the group tried to get information on their car radios. Others ran into town. “We didn’t know whether to evacuate or not.”
Technology
In the end, they didn’t. The board went ahead with its meeting as one of the deadliest, costliest and most destructive firestorms in California’s history raged around them. No light, no phones, no Powerpoint presentations – and no coffee. “How do you do a meeting without coffee?” exclaims Shapiro, throwing up his hands. It’s a brief moment of levity. “For many of us it was a changing experience,” he says. “That in conjunction with climate change and all the disasters that seem to be occurring more frequently around the world. CES is about exposing our attendees and the industry to new things and new trends. It’s about innovation and making life improve in all areas. But you also have to have a life saved.” CES. You’ll know it, even if indirectly. It’s the annual week-long tech extravaganza which, since 1967, has supplied us with gadgets that we may or may not need. The first-ever home VCR player, produced by Philips, launched at CES in 1970. Apple’s failure-prone Newton was showcased there with much fanfare in 1992 and 93. In the last 20 years, CES has had its permanent home in Las Vegas, where it has grown into the mega-convention it is today, showcasing some 4,400 exhibitors and attracting almost 200,000 visitors from the US and abroad. It has also become something more than a consumer electronics showcase, with the latest speculative takes on driverless vehicles, AI, and robotics increasingly taking centre stage. Earlier this year, Wired’s Lauren Goode described CES well when she evoked its “blinking smart lights, liquid-looking displays, hovering drones, yogic phones, driver-free vehicles, newfangled wireless protocols, and intangible technologies that all come with the promise of making life better”. CES is a particularly concentrated encapsulation of 21st-century consumerism. The catastrophic 2017 board meeting in Napa Valley presaged further calamities. A few months later, CES 2018 kicked off with a freak downpour, ending a 116-day stretch without rain in Las Vegas with what became its wettest day on record. Flash floods choked the city’s streets, forcing outdoor booths such as Google’s “giant funhouse” to shut on the Tuesday, CES’s first day open to the public. Then, on the Wednesday, a major power outage threw the north and central halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center – one of CES’ main venues – into darkness for two hours. “All the flashlight vendors at CES are like, ‘Now it’s our time to shine!’” someone quipped on Twitter. Another attendee posted a video of a woman playing the violin at Intel’s booth
while visitors waited for power to be restored. “#CESblackout,” it read. “This is some titanic level shit,” a retweet shot back. It’s hard not to see the metaphor: CES as a behemoth too big to fail, beset by powers even greater than its kaleidoscopic arsenal of human-made ingenuities. For what use is a smart kitchen when it’s flooded? What’s a new VR headset in a wildfire? What can any of these things do for you, really, without power? Such questions seem to have prompted a press release issued by the CTA a few months later. “Resilience to be New Part of CES 2019,” it announced. The next iteration of CES, it said, would feature “a new conference program and exhibit area focused on Resilience and resilient technologies”. Resilient technologies are technologies that help “keep the world healthy, safe, warm, powered, fed and secure,” the statement explained. “Even in the face of adversity.” I’m hovering somewhere over the Grand Canyon, due to land in Las Vegas within the hour. Below, the darkness soon gives way to the first twinklings of the city’s famed neon lights. Some months earlier, I had convinced my editor that I should write a story about the new Resilience section at CES. I’d had some reservations initially. Resilience sounded an awful lot like a buzzword. The sheer breadth of its applications – healthcare, security, power, food distribution – seemed to void it of any concrete meaning. There was an irresistible circularity, however, to the sense of reckoning that accompanied CES’s announcement of its new section. The tech world was waking up to the realities of climate change, it appeared. Tech’s solution: to throw some more tech at the situation. Now, looking down at the approaching lights, my initial reservations flare up. The new section on Resilience remains maddeningly vague – the latest information I have from CES is that it will feature only 11 exhibitors (although “we are still growing the space,” a press officer has assured me). Some exhibitors, such as the US emergency communications network FirstNet, appear to fit what I understand the Resilience bill to be. Others seem wedged in. The conference programme looks more promising, with its panel discussions on resilient cities, crisis prevention, food and water shortages, and cyber security. I’ve been to enough such events, however, to know better than to pin my hopes for any kind of journalistic insight on talks called things like ‘Tech for Good: Driving Impact at Scale.’ I am, 46
From left: the Chubby chair (2018) by Jack Rabbit Studio; and Terracotta furniture (2016) by Chris Wolston.
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Public Crystal Words Peter Smisek Photographs Albrecht Fuchs
“He’s more interested in electronics these days,” says Ronan Bouroullec matter-of-factly of his brother Erwan, as he runs up the stairs of the workshop building across from their main studio in Paris’s Belleville. He’s keen to show off an elegant, life-size mock-up of one of the aluminium-bronze joints that the pair has developed for six new crystal fountains designed for Paris’s most famous street, the Champs-Élysées. Although both of them have overseen the project from conception, Ronan was more involved with the detailed design. These fountains, each 13m tall, will spin at a speed of half a rotation per minute, using a clockwork mechanism and illumination from above to create a moving spectacle of dancing water.