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The Quarterly Journal of Design #33 Summer 2022

This issue includes: Chromatic curation with Sabine Marcelis; technofossils and design’s future traces; beta testing for OMA’s arts centre in Taipei; multivalent futures at the Smithsonian Institution; sand casting Swiss aluminium with Moritz Schmid and Ville Kokkonen; the radio restored by Industrial Facility; a case for altruistic design from Eva Feldkamp and All in Awe; and a serotonin overload in Yinka Ilori’s Acton wonderland.

UK £15

Contents 7

Introduction

Contents

Contributors

Masthead The people behind Disegno

Timeline March to May 2022 in review

Interview Everybody Come Behind the curtain of Yinka Ilori’s Acton wonderland

Project A History of Swiss Aluminium Alpine sand casting with Moritz Schmid and Ville Kokkonen

Review Whose Future? Curating design futures at the Smithsonian

109 Roundtable All Together Now A code of conduct for altruistic design

Report Beta Testing An early opening for OMA’s belated Taipei theatre

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Essay Petrified Designers Digging out the technofossils of tomorrow

Gallery The Texture of Colour Sabine Marcelis’s chromatic curation

Project Radio Resurrection Industrial Facility teaches an old format new tricks

MAXI SLIDING PANELS, SELF BOLD CABINET. DESIGN GIUSEPPE BAVUSO

London Flagship Store 83-85 Wigmore Street W1U1DL London london@rimadesio.co.uk +44 020 74862193

Everybody Come Words Georgina Johnson Photographs Kane Hulse

Walking into Yinka Ilori’s new studio in Acton, west London, is like entering a portal of dreams. There are the sunshine-yellow and sky-blue walls adorned with the artist and designer’s archive of upcycled chairs; the flood of bubblegum pink; the submarine portholes in coloured glass on his office door. All so carefully curated and magically combined. In essence, this is joy on demand.

Interview

Moritz Schmid’s aluminium dining chair, cast by Christenguss.

Project

The resultant frame appears simple, but much like Schmid’s work contains all of the design’s complexity within its casting. Each cast contains a front and back leg, connected by a panel of aluminium that traces the V-shaped geometry of a seat suspended between its two legs. Although Kokkonen’s final casting is simple enough to mean that it could be produced conventionally if desired, 3D printing was used in order to prototype the piece and develop its final form. Initially, for instance, Kokkonen created a hollow, lightweight test version of his structure, before accelerating the design process by shifting into a more solid casting. “But I was surprised by the resultant weight, so I wanted to cut every single centilitre out of it,” he says, with his resulting amendments leaning on weight reduction methods already widely used in industry. At the edge of the casting, for instance, the thickness of the metal increases to provide strength, before thinning out in the centre to generate a kind of I-beam profile. “It gives you a particular tool-like aesthetic that I really like,” says Kokkonen, “which was the principle behind the shape of the frame.” With these castings providing the overarching structure, Kokkonen was free to experiment with the material of the seat that would be suspended between them: while the anodised casting is rough and industrial in tone, this element of the design was a space to introduce a contrasting aesthetic. “I ultimately used bent aluminium for Okro, but you could also use leather or plywood,” he explains. “Something comfortable and luxurious in the centre of the chair, but the edges of the design remain as very industrial structures which are there to support the seat. Any bent sheet material would work as that stabilising structure – you don’t need any extra stretchers in the front or in the back because it’s really rigid.” Schmid and Kokkonen’s aluminium chairs – cast by Christenguss before being assembled by the designers and exhibited at Okro under the exhibition title Al 13 – offer a reflection on the present realities of production and design in Switzerland. “Usually, Christenguss only makes a component of a larger entity, but we wanted to highlight their wider expertise,” says Kokkonen. “They work with industry, and do extremely complex parts for engines and so forth, but we felt there was more design potential there.” The opportunity to create the Al 13 castings, Schmid observes, is an opportunity for the foundry to rekindle something

of the history of Switzerland’s 20th-century aluminium furniture: an opportunity to make a mark alongside Coray’s Landi and Haefeli’s Elektron. “Typically the foundry just have orders to fill, but once we had assembled our chairs, and everyone could finally see them and sit on them, they were so happy,” says Schmid, “which is where it got a bit emotional for all of us.” This, Christen notes, is the power of the project. “It’s been nice to see that there are things that can be done outside of our usual production,” he says. “We essentially have our own product now. It’s something that we helped to develop, and not just something that a customer approached us with to produce. It’s kind of our baby, you know?” Moving forward, Christenguss can produce the designs in small-batch series according to demand, with the two chairs intended as a testament to the sand casting that makes them possible. “It sparks this sense of industrial romance,” concludes Christen. “It gives you a sense of how aesthetic production can actually be.” E N D

Whose Future? Words Zara Arshad

The future seems more volatile than ever in our mid-COVID world. Since the pandemic hit the UK, where I live, constant changes in governmental messaging have made it difficult to plan ahead. Should we organise that family gathering during the holidays or not? Can we continue to transition back to in-person teaching? Will I still have a job in six months’ time? Now, after more than two years of uncertainty, of constantly rearranging plans, trying to maintain hope and optimism for the future has, at least for me, been difficult. Review

The Texture of Colour Words Evi Hall Photographs Laurence Kubski

There are more than 400 objects on display at any one time in the Vitra Schaudepot. Its crisp, houseshaped silhouette, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, encases a glowing white room stacked with practical metal shelving, arranged just so. All filled with furniture, of course. The Schaudepot, which opened in 2016, began life displaying a cross-section of the Vitra Design Museum’s permanent collection, all arranged chronologically. More recently, however, in a desire to apply different lenses to its holdings, the Schaudepot’s curators have decided to use “focus topics” as a method of sampling the museum’s 20,000-plus holdings. For the first topic, the museum exhibited Spot On: Women Designers in the Collection from May 2021 to the same month this year – a display that overlapped with Here We Are! Women in Design 1900 – Today, a temporary exhibition hosted at the Vitra Design Museum. While Here We Are! focused on broader socio-political and design histories, Spot On showcased pieces from the permanent collection by women designers, and used the occasion as an opportunity to acquire work from the likes of Inga Sempé, Reiko Tanabe, Matali Crasset, and Gunjan Gupta. If Spot On was partly an attempt to explore and redress a political imbalance

in the collection, the latest exhibition in the Schaudepot is more abstract in its ambitions: Colour Rush! is a “simple, sweeping gesture” that will categorise the museum’s holdings by colour alone. “It’s a really straightforward approach,” explains Susanne Graner, the Vitra Design Museum’s head of collection and archives. “You don’t have to know the history of the objects, or the age, or even who the designer is. It’s just [there] because of its colour.” The idea, then, is that Colour Rush! will be a visual extravaganza that can appeal to a wide range of audiences. Anyone can come in to enjoy its chromatic spectacle, but, for those more familiar with design history, its curators hope the display will also provide an opportunity to reflect on patterns and make impromptu connections across time periods through colour. “For the first time we’ll include in the high shelves pieces from the collection that aren’t furniture,” says collections curator Nina Steinmüller, who was Graner’s co-curator on the exhibition. “We have a big collection of electronic devices,

Gallery

such as the red Valentine typewriter [Ettore Sottsass Perry A. King (1969)], old streamline style televisions from the late 1940s, and Dieter Rams’s pieces. We’ll show how colour was used in different design areas, not only in furniture.” To achieve the visual impact Colour Rush! required, Graner and Steinmüller considered it essential to get a third party on board: a practising designer who could find connections within the Vitra Design Museum’s collection based on their understanding of and expertise in colour. Additionally, the pair wanted a co-curator without significant previous experience of standard museological display practices. “We wanted a young designer, who isn’t yet famous for their exhibition design,” says Steinmüller. “Somebody with a new and fresh view. A designer’s approach to a museum’s collection is different from that of a scholar or a historian. Designers select objects based on other criteria and will also arrange them differently.”

All Together Now Introduction India Block Photographs Theresa Marx

Cutting corners when it comes to design is typically a false economy. The people who would benefit most from expert creative and technical input often find that it falls outside their shoestring budgets, resulting in greater expense further down the line. This, in a nutshell, is the Boots Theory of socioeconomic inequality, as set out by Captain Sam Vimes.

Roundtable

Disegno #33