THE ART OF CRAFT | FK63 |
BOOKCASE SYSTEM PREBEN FABRICIUS & JØRGEN KASTHOLM | 1963
The FK Bookcase System embodies Carl Hansen & Søn’s commitment to craftsmanship excellence, carefully shaped from FSC® -certified solid oak into flexible modules that bear the hallmarks of great cabinetmaking techniques and traditions: elegant dovetail joints, seamlessly sliding trays and minimalistic doors fitted with brass handles.
carlhansen.com
Contents 49
Observation Bell Chair A total chair design, pallet and all
101
Observation Botanicals by Glithero Reimagining downtrodden weeds with a fresh glaze
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Illustration Ultra Cold Chain A race against temperature and time
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Gallery Assalam Alayki Ya Myriam: A Prayer Myriam Boulos documents pre- and post-explosion Beirut
Essay Lightning Rods Communicating the Covid vaccines to a hesitant public
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Observation SaltyCo Making textiles from saline crops
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Photoessay Dented, Knocked, Scraped A reflection on travel in 2020
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Observation Yo-Yo Machines Long-distance communication, charmingly simplified
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Anatomy A Dirty Secret Tackling waste streams in the glasses industry
History Enzo Mari was a Universe Students, friends and collaborators remember the late designer
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Roundtable Welcome to Contemporaries A conversation about the gentrification of Dumbo
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Review Do We Still Love Our Bookshops? The design of how we buy books online
Review The Real Feel The challenges of designing furniture over Facetime
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Introduction ★☆☆☆☆
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Contents
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Contributors
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Masthead The people behind Disegno
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Timeline November 2020 to January 2021 in review
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Interview A Moment of Crystallisation Omer Arbel’s alchemy with copper and glass
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Review Of Fashion and Gatekeepers Can fashion shows retain their sheen of exclusivity online? Report The Only Thing Left to Design is the Foot On the future of the television set
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140 Index Short stories from the creation of this issue 144 Observation OB-4 Radio revived
L AUFE N 1 8 9 2 | SWI T Z ERL A ND
A Moment of Crystallisation
Interview Anna Ploszajski!Photographs Fahim Kassam and Bocci
As the pixelated image sharpens into view, a smiling Omer Arbel condenses onto my screen, framed by some steeply sloping white wooden rafters. I imagine the rest of this loft might be a sleek converted workspace, a cosy cubbyhole perched, perhaps, above a roaring hot and dimly-lit workshop where glowing metal and glass flow freely. We are separated in both space and time – I can see cold morning light diffusing through a skylight in Arbel’s Vancouver HQ, while my own windows are smothered by curtains on this drizzly London evening. Yet despite the distance, I find that I easily fall in step with Arbel’s effusive and easy-going conversational style, as he introduces me to the works we have planned to discuss today. They are anonymously numbered 19, 28, 76, 84, 93 and 113 – the title schema a hallmark of Bocci, the design company that Arbel co-founded in 2005. But this sequential ordering is misleading, he tells me. “I’m trying to create an ambient cloud of ideas rather than a linear narrative,” he says, waving his hands above his head. “I’d like you to focus on the intuitive understanding of the two materials, rather than the sequence.” These two materials are copper and glass, although Arbel’s full body of work is by no means limited to this pairing. For 20 years it has spanned colourful resins, metals, concrete, woods, porcelain, polymers, plants and lighting across the fields of architecture, sculpture, invention and design. “Many of the connections between the projects are very tangential and occur as a consequence of coincidence,” he says of the particular material studies that have occupied his attention recently. Sharing his screen, the words “copper” and “glass” appear on a black background, with a heart in between them. “I’ve obtained a degree of intimacy with both these materials,” he says. The text is replaced by flames licking the circumference of a dark, squat cylinder: work 19. “It introduces our approach, which is to invent a process, not a form,” he says. The process in question is sandcasting copper alloy to create a highly-polished circular vessel, which glows from the centre of a coarse, chaotic halo that is itself formed by the blackened, oxidised copper allowed to overspill from the mould. “I like to think of this as the purest thing I’ve ever done because my only decision has been to determine the diameter of the circle,” he says. “And even that was governed by the flow rate of copper at different temperatures.” The next work, 28, describes Arbel’s early experimentation with glassblowing – manipulating glass with heat to tune its malleability in selected parts of a vessel, while also creating a vacuum to subsume these hot regions, in what he describes as a “controlled implosion”. Contrasting forms are produced when a hot dollop of coloured glass is sucked inwards in this way, and the results are illuminated and hung in clusters to create a bubbly multi-layered effect. “When I first discovered this process, I thought I’d invented something completely novel, but it turns out that this is a common method in glassblowing,” he admits with a selfdeprecating chuckle. These individual material studies come together in 76 and 84, the first confluence of the two materials in Arbel’s work. Drawing on the idea of coaxing hot glass with a vacuum, 76 sees white glass sucked through a fine
Interview
The 28 blown glass pendant, suspended on copper tendrils. The piece is created by manipulating the temperature and direction of airflow into blown glass.
19 uses sandcasting to produce “overspill”, a byproduct of the process that is usually removed, but which Arbel instead preserves as a record of the piece’s unique production.
Malika Leiper How was the cafe today? Alexandra Hodkowski It was good. January is off to
we had a rehearsal studio, and threw crazy parties and did all those early 90s things. When I left the city in 1996 for graduate school, it was starting to get so expensive – too much to raise three kids. But my children are grown now, so I moved back to New York. I live in Dumbo, with its incredible views of the East River and Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. In the 90s, the city was not as open to the water as it is now. Dumbo is a little bit like a bowl, once you enter it, it’s hard to climb out. It draws you down into the space. Coming here during the pandemic, you see that almost everything is closed. It was bold for Malika and Stephen to open Contemporaries, to create a public gathering space at this time. In our old lives, if you had a gallery opening and 10 or 12 people came, you might be disappointed. But now, the intimacy of gathering has changed that dynamic, and it’s somehow thrilling to have a place to meet new people, share in art and design, and to come together. Stephen Contemporaries for me was about action. It was about doing something in a time when we all felt paralysed and were tired of feeling like nothing was happening. We came out of a very volatile summer, marching in the streets like everybody else, and wanted to take action. Alexandra We also started Head Hi thinking we need a place for dialogue. We need a place for inspiration and a place where organic conversation leads to networks and relationships and ideas and friendships and community. One of the things that we think about a lot is what community means, because it can mean so many things. “I want to build community.” OK, well, we have the community of residents; the community of people who drink coffee; the community of people who like books; the community of people who come in from the city or work in the neighborhood. Community is so many different things on so many different levels, but we like those different communities and the tensions they create. We were excited when Malika and Stephen approached us and told us what they were doing, because it’s hard to find a design space in New York where you’re not necessarily required to buy something. They’re inviting you to think about design in a different way to normal. Stephen Contemporaries is very uncommercial. Malika In what is now an incredibly commercial neighbourhood, as Mösco was alluding to. Ebon Heath Wait until all these new buildings open up – it’s going to get real commercial on you. I’ve been in
a good start, and people are drinking more coffee than ever. Maria Cornejo Where’s your coffee shop? Alexandra We have a shop called Head Hi, which is a bookshop and espresso bar. It’s technically Fort Greene, but it’s right on the border of Navy Yard and Dumbo. Stephen Burks Maria has got a fabulous studio in the Navy Yard, although she thinks of it as a storage room. Maria It’s an archive room. I’m only there a couple of times a week and I’m mainly at Bleecker Street, where we have our main studio. But now with the pandemic, I really like working by myself in the archive – not having to wear a mask and social distance. I can get lost in there. Stephen How many of us are working between multiple neighbourhoods? Malika and I were talking about our triangle, which is living in Boerum Hill, with the storefront in Dumbo, and then having a studio in Clinton Hill. That’s our little triangle, and we don’t really have to go outside of that much. Maria Well, I’m still taking the subway between neighbourhoods – for me being on the subway is part of feeding my brain. It’s people, clothes, moving, young people. It’s energy. You can’t live in a bubble if you’re a designer. Stephen I’ve always had this love/hate relationship with New York. The brutality is real and it’s both thrilling and depressing at the same time – so ugly that it’s beautiful. But it still captivates me. Mösco Alcocer It’s a city that’s always changing and because it’s changing so often, it challenges you. You cannot just say, “This is it.” New Yorkers are people from all over the world, and everybody’s pushing. There’s an exchange every day, even if you don’t talk to people. If you’re in the subway, there’s all this information that you’re receiving. In our neighbourhood by the Navy Yard, there’s really not much going on, so we saw the opportunity to open a space. It’s a difficult location, because it’s not Nolita, it’s not SoHo, it’s not Park Slope – it’s an industrial area, literally in the middle of nowhere. Dumbo used to be like that – hip, quiet, with a lot of artists, and no stores at all. And it was a really cool neighbourhood. It’s still a cool neighbourhood, but in a very different way. It’s part of the drastic changes that happen here. Katie Swenson I moved to New York in 1990 as a modern dancer, and had a wonderful loft on the Bowery where 36
Stephen Burks and Malika Leiper outside of Contemporaries.
Illustration by Leonhard Rothmoser.
The panel faced the headquarters of a bank that had just honoured her with an award and exhibition. Compelled, I visited the show the very next day. In retrospect, I can now see that these images were all set on the stage of a crime; captured in them are the victims and the profiteers of a cataclysm that would alter Lebanon irretrievably. What is left today of the carelessness with which Lebanese millennials danced? The music is gone, some are dead and most have left. What is left today are Myriam’s photographs. In the years that followed that first exhibition, Myriam assiduously alternated between commercial jobs and lonely portraits of naked bodies offered as prey to a country hungry to devour its most innocent. The trick never failed. She was cast off and spat on by those whose morals prevented them from ever experiencing a glimpse of freedom. Then, in the autumn of 2019, the banks went on strike and closed for several weeks. With the utmost cynicism, these private banks secured the gains they had accumulated through decades of organised theft and corruption in conjunction with the ruling mafia. When they opened again, it was too late. The country erupted in revolt, and the turbulent youth that Myriam had captured smoking, kissing and drinking took to the streets. What Myriam saw, Myriam captured. None of it is staged, none is manufactured. Her images portray the plurality and diversity of a multitude that none can claim. Ultimately, these are violent images imbued with the anger of the dispossessed. Where does this anger stem from? What has been stolen from these elderly and young faces reclaiming their streets with song, dance and fire? Their pride? Their past? Their future? Hope? Hope fills these faces and love irradiates these streets. These moments amidst the fire, when bodies collide in search of ecstasy, are what Myriam looks for. And when the repression of the security forces heightens and clouds of teargas spread through the air, she records them as great natural formations. Hope. Always, hope. Then, behind the teargas, bullets fly and the underpaid guardians of the stateless regime lash out from helplessness. Blood pours and the price of the revolution shows its true colour. It is scarlet and Myriam plunges her fingers into the wound to commit to the struggle. This is the colour of our revolution. This is the colour of our struggle. After the euphoria, in 2020, the revolution reached a stalemate. The Lebanese Lira crumbled, private
banks stole citizens’ money, and the pandemic spread. Life as we knew it vanished. No more song, no more dance, and no more revolution. Then, as we were contemplating the sacrifices yet to be made in order to reclaim the country, the unthinkable happened. Those who were not in Beirut on 4 August 2020 will never relate. It has been linkened to a nuclear explosion; it has been ranked amidst the four largest explosions in history; investigated; described; analysed; filmed; and photographed, but none of that matters to those who met their fateful end on that day. Death in Lebanon has always been a sordid lottery. However, through 15 years of civil war, 30 years of instability, death never resorted to destroying half the city through the carelessness and corruption of its rulers and citizens. Nothing prepared us for this. Yet, following the explosion, hope, always hope. If you are looking for documents to know what the city looked like before the explosion, Myriam could one day open her archive. She’s barely 30 and her photographs are already documents of a world vanished and gone. This is what Armenia Street looked like. This is downtown Beirut. This is our revolution. Here is the city’s pulse, its heartbeat and its carotid artery, all drained. We were dreaming of freeing the country, containing our anger for another confrontation, and then the port blew up, claiming its senseless tribute of blood, sorrow and destruction. Among the slain, it could have been her, it could have been me. Instead, it is she and I jerking tears at the sight of our friends covered in blood. This is not the Beirut you have heard of, the distant remnant of a city destroyed by a civil war, rebuilt only to be ruined once more. This was our Beirut, the streets and houses through which we drenched this city with love. The streets and the houses in which we communed with its love; the precarious, fragile, broken love of a city called Beirut. In the deserted streets at night, you will no longer find large LED panels illuminating the streets with the hopes, dreams and excitements of a 22-year-old girl. The electricity is scarce, the panels torn to shreds and we are preparing ourselves for a battle yet to come. In light of this latent violence, I fear for Myriam, her generation and the younger ones. In this darkness some light candles and break down in prayer. We are in 2021, this is Beirut. Assalam alayki ya Myriam. END
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