The Quarterly Journal of Design #34 Autumn 2022
This issue includes: A retreat to the countryside with Erwan Bouroullec at La Grange; reportage from Auroville, the utopian town whose masterplan has split a community; the case for unionisation in architecture; Janett Nichol and Forward, Nike’s new needle-punched material; contraception in the Worlds Best condom factory; the story of how the Tolix Chaise A went viral; ASMR and design’s discomfort with the weird; and a critique of queerness and disobedience in architecture with Adam Nathaniel Furman.
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Contents 9
Introduction Design Me Like One of Your Buff Boys
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Contents
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Contributors
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Masthead The people behind Disegno
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Timeline June to August 2022 in review
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Opinion Learning from Failure Second time lucky for Ineke Hans
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Photoessay Politically Erect Condom production in the maelstrom of the 2020s
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Objects in Review Essential Forms Julien Renault’s Netflix classic café collection Objects in Review One Startup’s Trash Canal-dredged design
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Review Embrace the Weird Does design get tingles?
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Report United by Design Architects get organised
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Interview Better Sensation Erwan Bouroullec retreats to La Grange
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Objects in Review Clinging On Gorping at Tom Chung’s lamp
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Objects in Review To Be Clear A see-through phone
Travelogue The Road to Utopia is Not Smooth A contested paradise in south India’s Auroville
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Objects in Review Pipe Dreams Enjoy a crystal high
Index Short stories from the creation of this issue
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Opinion Seen on Screen Plastic peepers are everything everywhere all at once
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Essay The Everywhere Chair The irresistible rise of the Tolix Chaise A
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Opinion Delft Blue Rhymes with Fake Handbags Eighteenth-century pottery meets knock-off Gucci
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Design Drafts Is Design Just a Game? New voices in design writing Roundtable Queer Refusal Architecture as a site of disobedience
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Material Fibre to Form Nike bets the future on a needle-punched hoodie
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Objects in Review It Hides a Mess! Distributed manufacture; tidy mirror
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The photographs accompanying this essay were taken at the Tolix factory in Autun, France.
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Were you to ask me what Thonet was at the time, I might have told you it was a French pastis. As a panicked corrective, I set upon a rapid study of the 20th century’s great chairs – figuring that such knowledge constituted the lowest bar for being called a design curator – and put together a kind of cheat sheet that could protect me from any embarrassing future exchange with colleagues. The chair I came across the most was the 1930s Tolix Chaise A by Xavier Pauchard. It’s an easy one to spot. Made of pressed sheet metal, it has a distinct silhouette and comes in a variety of bright colours, which are often set in contrast with a restaurant or café’s otherwise muted colour palette. It’s a 20thcentury chair that made a lot of sense for the 21stcentury food and drink industry: it provided a punchy accent note in Instagram photos to drive online interest, and its metal body made it long-lasting and versatile enough for indoor and outdoor use. It also matched well with what was probably – and unfortunately –
A Chaise A meant that the host venue met some basic – if fleeting – criteria of cool and, with that, had a licence to charge more for everything. the dominant aesthetic of the early 2010s: a kind of industrial-nostalgia-chic replete with Edison lightbulbs, unfinished wooden surfaces, and random cast-iron parts from factory surplus sales. It was a genuine thrill to spot my first Tolix, providing validation that my chair knowledge was improving. It became apparent rather quickly, however, that this wasn’t a rare find. Tolix was experiencing a moment of raging popularity in post-recession London. And quickly thereafter, everywhere, it seemed. In Shenzhen, for instance, where I regularly travelled for work from 2014 to 2018, I saw the cafés and restaurants in the popular nightlife districts of OCT-Loft and Shekou begin to fill up with the Chaise A. The same went for other places I visited: a studio in Toronto; a snack
bar in Bangkok; a creative district in Dubai. More than its Instagram-friendliness and rugged functionality, the Chaise A seemed to be playing another role. It served as an immediate signifier of “design”, in that annoyingly superficial and pecuniary sense of the term. A Chaise A meant that the host venue met some basic – if fleeting – criteria of cool and, with that, had a licence to charge more for everything. Like all things that ride on a rubric of trends, the Chaise A has likely started its slow decline into the unfashionable. Its ubiquity has already been noted. In January 2019, Vox published an article about the chair titled ‘The Metal Chair that’s in Every Restaurant’, highlighting how the Chaise A is, unusually, available for purchase at style guardians such as Design Within Reach, high street mainstays like Urban Outfitters, restaurant-specific retailers including Superior Seating, and at bargain sellers like Bob’s Discount Furniture – all at the same time, all at wildly different price points. Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue, uses a distressed metallic version as her main work chair (which either means she doesn’t work very much, or, like the chair, has a back of steel), while Leon, the popular fast-food chain, provides red versions in all of its restaurants. Just two months after the Vox piece, Vice waded into the world of design criticism with an excoriating hit-piece bluntly titled ‘Dear Restaurants: This Chair Sucks’. Simply referring to the offending item as “The Chair”, without ever mentioning its actual name, the piece equates it to a disease that has taken over the restaurant world, subjecting sitters everywhere to millions of hours of discomfort. Clearly, the Chaise A must go. All of this mystified me. How did this chair become so popular? Its manufacturer Tolix was hardly a global brand. It had no major marketing campaigns that I knew of. It didn’t fit the model of any other company that achieves global domination. And yet, in Chaise A, it had seemingly produced a chair that had joined a limited group of designs both celebrated and reviled for their ubiquity. Perhaps a closer look at these chairs could offer some clues. For decades, the all-injection-moulded-plastic chair referred to as a monobloc – more a type of chair than a specific design – was widely derided (and then partly revered) by design enthusiasts for its worldwide success. The monobloc was popular because it was cheap, but its global spread was aided by the fact that
Essay
Comparsa drag in Buenos Aire: a queer crowd taking over a street corner after meeting at Silvio Lang and Endi Ruiz’s workshop on drag performance.
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Roundtable
Embrace the Weird Words Sophie Tolhurst
What do the following have in common? Björk taking apart her cathode-ray tube TV and comparing its innards to a cityscape; a fluffy, white dog being groomed in a salon, satisfying scissor snips revealing a glimpse of an eye here and there; the tinkling of an aeroplane drinks trolley as the captain is heard over the intercom; a woman whispering, “for those of you who love to hear people whisper”; the BBC’s Shipping Forecast from 16 February 2022.
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All images courtesy of the Design Museum and ArkDes.
ĒTER’s pillow-based exhibition design for Weird Sensation
Feels Good, accompanied by a Neumann KU 100 Dummy head binaural stereo microphone for immersive 3D sound.
Review
Better Sensation Introduction Johanna Agerman Ross Photographs Philippe Thibault, Charles Pétillon, Charlotte Vuarnesson and Erwan Bouroullec
In recent years, Erwan Bouroullec’s practice has diversified dramatically. Previously known for his work in furniture and lighting design with his brother Ronan, Bouroullec has become increasingly interested in consumer electronics, coding and forms of creative practice that sit outside of the traditional design industry. While the Bouroullecs’ design studio still operates from its Paris office, the brothers have both found spaces outside the French capital for more independent research work: Ronan in their native Brittany, Erwan in Burgundy. It is to the latter – to Erwan’s converted barn, La Grange – that I’m heading on a hot July day to talk to him about this new phase of personal and professional life.
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An EB-LG-F71 HIMD stool, produced using materials and labour sourced from within 5km of La Grange.
Portrait by Florian Böhm.
Erwan Bouroullec, photographed at La Grange.
One of the farm buildings at La Grange.
Interview
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Visitors at a viewing point overlooking the Matrimandir complex.
Travelogue