The Quarterly Journal of Design #12 Autumn 2016
This issue includes: Interdisciplinary practice with Roksanda Ilinčić and David Adjaye; Iran’s design community after the sanctions; OMA’s Venetian department store; nine techniques for contemporary toasting; Italian Limes and the permutations of a glacial border within post-Schengen Europe; Studio Swine’s expedition to the Amazonian model town of Henry Ford; the secrets of UNESCO’s world heritage list; an ode to styrene by Raymond Queneau; and the forgotten history of the people’s teapot. UK £8
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Contents 13 Introduction Changing of the Guard 18 Contributors 20 Masthead The people behind Disegno 23 Timeline June to August 2016 in review 26 Photoessay Fordlândia Studio Swine on the Amazonian trail of Henry Ford 37 Observation The Sea and the Shore by Werner Aisslinger for Axor Reflections on the value of water 38 Observation KUFtwist by Kia Utzon-Frank A blind that honours the louvre 40 Interview Human by Design Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley consider how design reshapes the species 49 Comment Her Meet Amelia – the digital town planner 50 Comment Autonomous Decisions What the first fatality means for driverless vehicles 53 Process When Genius Isn’t Enough The divergent UNESCO fates of Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright 63 Observation Reflex by Raf Simons for Kvadrat A cultural history of stripes in textiles 64 Observation Panini Colette Some football stickers are more equal than others
67 Observation NikeLab Windrunner x Kim Jones Reconstructing a jacket 69 Comment Voices from the Ether The hypocrisy of gendered AI 70 Comment Tulip Chairs, Glass Houses and Bombshells Eero Saarinen and violence in design 73 Report The Case for Repackaging Redressing shipping for the age of e-commerce 84 Made for Gaggenau Industrial Craft An advertorial about process 89 Travelogue After the Sanctions An exploration of Tehran’s design communities 105 Special Project Investigations in Toasting Nine experimental strategies for raising a glass 121 Gallery Pre-Commerce The empty spaces of OMA’s Fondaco dei Tedeschi, Venice’s first department store 137 Review
lay:ground (138) P Architectural history by way of junk playgrounds
T he Aftermath of Brexit (142) What happens when our designs for power fail?
The Great Animal Orchestra (145) Abandoning frames for soundscapes Kindle Oasis (149) The future direction of e-readers
Contents
153 Conversation Intersections: Roksanda Ilinčić and David Adjaye Decoding the relationship between architecture and fashion 169 Project From Border to Threshold Mapping nationhood in post‑Schengen Europe 181 History Unknown Brews Raymond Queneau, B&B Italia and the subtle allure of mouldable materials 190 Anatomy Teapot Genealogy How authorless design created the people’s teapot 196 Index Short stories from the creation of this issue 200 Endnote Fragile Chaos Fabrics not as we know them by Stefanie Tschirky
Fordlândia Words Alexander Groves and Azusa Murakami (Studio Swine) Stills Juriaan Booij
When living in São Paulo in 2013, we heard rumours about Fordlândia: an American town established in 1928 by Henry Ford in the Amazon rainforest. As designers, we have always been drawn to crossovers and mix-ups. Fordlândia promised to be the ultimate incongruence. In August, we travelled to Brazil. We were there to research wild rubber, the harvesting of which has not changed for thousands of years. Despite the invention of synthetic rubbers in the early-20th century, natural rubber is unsurpassed for elasticity and grip. As global demand increases, more primary forests in Asia are being cleared for industrial plantations. Fordlândia’s contemporary rubber tappers, by contrast, extract latex from wild trees. They begin work at 4am and
walk forest trails for six hours, making cuts in the bark of more than 100 trees. After lunch, they repeat this trek, collecting the raw latex that has flowed out. This process is essential to the health of Hevea brasiliensis, the rubber tree native to the Amazon. Fordlândia’s history reveals the difficulties of producing rubber on an industrial scale. Ford cleared more than 8,000sqkm for his plantation, and built rows of Cape Cod-style bungalows for workers, as well as a school, hospital, golf course and dance hall. Yet the project was beset with blight and disease. After several failed seasons, Fordlândia was sold to the Brazilian government in 1945. What’s left today is a time capsule: around 1,500 residents inhabit the old
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workers’ houses. Living in the shadow of deserted warehouses and the factory with its rows of tools still shelved and labelled, they fish the Tapajós river and grow produce in the fertile soil. This is a ghost of small-town American utopia. Ford’s vision for merging industry and agriculture – now overgrown and melancholy – has important lessons for the future of the Amazon, an ecosystem that faces constant pressure to yield economic value. Studio Swine’s expedition was supported by Fashion Space Gallery and the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust. Fordlândia, an exhibition of furniture designed in response, opens at Fashion Space Gallery in London on 22 September and runs until 10 December 2016.
Photoessay
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We walked Fordlândia’s forest trails with the tappers, who stop at each rubber tree like bees gathering pollen. They score a neat line in the bark and place a cup to catch the latex. The sap will flow for about six hours and the tappers need to collect it within a short time to prevent it coagulating before it can be processed. There’s something beautifully simple about the start of this supply chain – the only tools required are a handmade knife and a pail.
Photoessay
Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, the curators of the 2016 Istanbul Design Biennial.
Human by Design Introduction David Michon Photographs Luca Pizzaroni
“Design is everywhere.” It’s an adage one finds scattered throughout the design world, slapped onto press releases and slipped into speeches – a whoop of collective triumph. We like to see design as progress, a smile on the face of human history (with the exception of the atomic bomb and its ilk, perhaps). Whether it’s an app, a laptop, a chair or an entire skyscraper: with each innovation, we take a step forward. Not so, however, for the co-curators of the third Istanbul Design Biennial, the academics Mark Wigley and Beatriz Colomina.
Professor and dean emeritus at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and director of the architecture PhD programme at Princeton respectively. Wigley and Colomina talk about “good design” as an anaesthetic, something we create to dull the pain of life and distract us from the world’s woes. Design, the argument runs, is implicit in creating the great inequalities of the world. It’s a darker side of the discipline that we mostly choose to ignore – especially when there are big sponsorship dollars involved (for those interested, Vitra bathrooms and the Enka Foundation are the headline sponsors for Istanbul). Wigley and Colomina’s biennial, which opens to the public on 22 October is not solely focused on design from the past two years. Instead, it is due to examine far more varied timescales. Exhibitors have been asked to look at anything from the preceding two seconds to the last 200,000 years, all the while considering the central question, “Are we human?” The results ought to debate how an entire human history of design has shaped and continues to shape us. In Wigley and Colomina’s worldview, design isn’t passive and it doesn’t solve problems per se. Instead, it transforms us. We create something and then we adapt to that creation, rewiring our psychology and even mutating physically. We are the sum of all the design that has gone before. It’s an approach that is discordant with the dominant thinking around design or architecture biennials – usually optimistic and reassuring. One example of the stark contrast is this year’s Venice Biennale of Architecture, curated by the Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena. Reporting from the Front demanded solutions, almost styling itself as a crusade to elevate humankind through design. Wigley and Colomina, conversely, aren’t looking for answers, let alone trying to solve them. Are they nihilists? In the wake of the violent political and social disorder in Turkey, with 265 causualites after an attempted coup in July and a subsequent lockdown on the country’s academics, the Istanbul Design Biennial’s question of “Are we human?” may be greeted with added heaviness. It is almost as if the curators have asked us “What have we done?” For their part, however, Wigley and Colomina don’t at all embody the weight of what is implied by Istanbul’s theme or the trouble in Turkey.
Interview
David Michon You’ve said that design always presents
Mark People use the word “design” so frequently
itself as serving the human, but its first ambition is to redesign the human. Does that hint at a deceitfulness in design? Beatriz Colomina We don’t think about it in terms of deceitfulness, it’s more that people are not aware that’s what design is doing. Consider how the invention of shoes led to atrophy of the toes. In principle, shoes protect your feet from the environment, enabling you to walk further and faster, but in fact they redesign you. That example is very physical, but this idea applies mentally too. We will evolve from the cellphone, for example. There is a closer relationship between design and the human than simply that humans design tools to serve humans – all tools redesign the human. There is a constant redesign of the human by design and the important thing is that it has always been like that. From the beginning of humanity, design has been what makes us human and has been designing us as humans. Mark Wigley Designers always say they’re just solving a problem, but consider why you went to a designer in the first place. Designers almost say, “I will make a new you. You will be much better after my work.” No designer ever says, “You’re not going to feel good after my work.” Design is never just solving a little puzzle or providing for a certain function: it always has the aspiration to redesign the human, to make the human more human than before. Beatriz Clothing stores do that all the time. You put on a new jacket and they say “That’s so you!” How can it be so you? Who were you before you had the jacket? So our ambition with the biennial is to make people think about design and what design is, and to claim a much more ambitious draw for the field. Within art we regularly ask questions about our humanity and philosophical questions about the world, but we don’t expect those kinds of questions within design. In a world in which art is becoming more and more commercialised, and more about responding to the market than questioning humanity, we want to claim that role for design and expand it to become a field for cultural contributions.
and we live in a time in which a chief design officer is equivalent to a chief financial officer. The word has become more useful and powerful than ever, but it’s not a matter of saying that it’s difficult that the word “design” seems to apply to everything, because the real issue is determining what we think given that. Now that everything is being designed, what do we think? We live in an age of total design, so what do we want to do about it? The concept of design needs to be more attuned to the world we’re living in. David Is it the concern of the biennial that the designed
world we live in isn’t as good as we believe it to be? Is it a problem that we live in a totally designed world? Beatriz The idea that we have managed to cover the planet in design is also the idea that we are the only species that has managed to design its own extinction. We are very aware that we are on our way to that goal – exhausting every possible resource, for instance. Mark We are the self-consciously kamikaze species. It’s interesting that you use the word “good”. I think a big part of this project is trying to undermine the concept of “good” design. We are surrounded by good design, heaps and heaps of it: well-designed telephones, networks, systems, communication, government products, genetic codes, the weather. These things are all being designed, but maybe the design community is a bit stranded amidst that. Beatriz We live in a world in which design has taken over; in which politicians talk about design‑thinking; in which there’s a culture of business schools with design departments; in which the success of Apple is inseparable from its design; a world in which design extends itself over everything. In that context, the ambition of designers is very small. They don’t seem to realise how design could be construed differently. David Why do you think that is? Is that a result of the
way commerce works? Mark In the late 19th and early 20th centuries there was a thought that we could redesign everything, every system, and that would make for a better humanity. It was the idea of the “new man,” the suggestion that we could invent a new version of the species. But when design went viral it’s as if the world said that it didn’t need designers any more. There’s an important lesson to be learnt there because what we’re trying to suggest is that design
David Do you not think that it gets difficult to
talk about design if its definition becomes so incredibly broad?
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All of the photographs accompanying this interview were taken in Colomina and Wigley’s New York apartment in July 2016.
Interview
Tulip Chairs, Glass Houses and Bombshells Words Jamer Hunt Illustration Leonhard Rothmoser
What should we make of Eero Saarinen’s role in the Second World War? Designer of the iconic and beloved Gateway Arch, TWA Terminal and Tulip chair, Saarinen also worked for the OSS, a forerunner of the CIA, creating and equipping “situation rooms and military schools” while providing “display equipment for conferences, pilot models of new weapons and devices”. Saarinen’s work for the OSS has been known for some time, yet was brought back to public attention in June by a Freedom of Information request by the journalist Matt Novak. The subsequent excitement was exacerbated by Novak’s story coming hard on the heels of the furore over allegations that modernist masters Philip Johnson and Le Corbusier were Nazi sympathisers and anti-Semites. What next? The Eameses were gun-toting racists? In the eye of a Twitter storm, all perceived crimes run together. You might even begin to wonder whether there isn’t some logic inherent in high modernism that links its practice to fascism, militarism or bigotry. The short answer, of course, is that there isn’t. Many modernist architects fled Europe to avoid fascist persecution or execution. Le Corbusier, Johnson and Saarinen were great designers, but also imperfect individuals. In Saarinen’s case, it is important to remember that many civilians joined the war effort expressly to dampen the flames of fascism. And many upstanding citizens (Barack Obama comes to mind) support clandestine intelligence operations. We can also look at it this way: are Saarinen’s acts any more responsible for violence than those of any modern corporation involved in gentrification of neighbourhoods, fast food retail, data capture or car production? In 2013 Paola Antonelli and I launched the online curatorial experiment Design and Violence. Our objective was not to sit in judgment, but rather to create a space where the design community could hash out its tangled relationship with creation and destruction. Critical reflection entails the hard work of understanding how best intentions might unwittingly lead to harm. The connections between the OSS and military operations are direct, but until we reckon with the true cost of design-asusual, we will only gain a false sense of self-righteousness in denouncing Saarinen. As the old adage goes, people who design Glass Houses shouldn’t throw stones.
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Jackson Pollock, Blue poles (detail), 1952. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. © The Pollock-Krasner Foundation ARS, NY and DACS, London 2016
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To mark Disegno nine designers update the toa contemporary so are new typologie celebration that ble symbolism and 106
o’s fifth birthday, were invited to asting ritual for ciety. The results es for communal end function, ritual, d social critique. Special Project
Tink-tink-tink! I would like to begin this discussion of the toasting ritual with alcohol and experience, rather than temperance or etiquette. Let’s start at home. I work in the global design industry and have a passion for contemporary art. I find myself, at the best of times, imbibing at least five or six times a week and multi-toasting throughout each evening. The 3rd arrondissement of Paris, where I live, has one of the highest concentrations of galleries in the world, yet even if a glass is raised at one of its various openings, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it will clink against another and it is usually not refilled.
Within the gesture of raising a glass is a tacit acknowledgement that the resulting semi-ritual of the toast has been deemed acceptable by the urbane. I would suggest that the toast, a comparatively universal sign with past connotations of function or historic symbolism, has shed its meaning. There is no longer any pretence that the toast involves sloshing liquid between glasses as a guarantee against poisoning, nor is the sound of clinking glasses serving as a talisman to ward off the devil as in centuries past. These days, the toast is not rendered as a special action and when deployed in the context of art galleries or cultural institutions, it is little more than a vacuous gesture. An example of this type of uncharitable cheerlessness can be seen in the French artist Valérie Mréjen’s video, Blue Bar, in which acquaintances bump into each other during a gallery opening. The toast and its accoutrements, as well as the art, are suspiciously absent from Mréjen’s film. Human beings are heavily present, yet they communicate in an isolated and disjointed fashion. So does the toast loosen social inhibition by helping us become more familiar? Is raising a glass the essential social lubricant that compels physical action, moving us outwards from ourselves and towards each other? It is difficult to imagine a design event without the ritual raising of glasses that accompanies the many design weeks spanning the globe – and that’s without getting into the cultural prolongations of commercial and international trade shows, such as the Salone del Mobile in Milan or Maison & Objet, which now stretch from Paris to the Americas to Asia. Yet perhaps design can afford to transition traditions like the toast. The far-reaching aspects of the discipline, which brings together the commercial and creative, mean that design is a consciously social activity and profession – a great unifier. New products, systems and other orchestrations of design intent engross the world, and given the social and political implications of objects, we can be thankful that there are creatives and industries that strive towards manufacturing something more than dissatisfaction. The creative industry is toasting something progressively personal. While the supposition behind the work of the artist may be intensely personal, it is not necessarily progressive. The designer, by contrast, is an enlightened generalist. The nature of design is to bring together the necessary elements to either industrialise an object or to create limited editions, 108
such that while the artist may wait for the collector or the gallerist, the designer moves forward without any mediator but their own resourcefulness. The designer adapts, all the while remaining a part of the historic implications of the objects, functions and uses that surround us. Yet the designer modifies those implications towards a tacit understanding with the user. The gesture, the action, is the triumphant raising of comprehension towards the other. We can toast to great business, to encountering new people, to hearing good news and tip fondly to someone (un)known, all the while performing an inexhaustible ritual with glasses clinking. The collective repertoire of birthdays, anniversaries, housewarmings, et al., compounded by professional endeavours, means that we perhaps toast too often, yet something that has been socially designed is an action worthy of reflection. In both professional and personal realms toasting exists as an expression of genuine camaraderie and a proof of proper confidence. It is the assurance of a new life, marriage, year, journey, job or project. It is a materialised gesture to celebrate an action where a promise has been honoured. Taking us beyond ritual, the toast celebrates and embraces the unknown, revealing a manifestly human desire to meet tomorrow without fear. The act of toasting anchors the present in manifold possibilities. And, in its essential optimism, so does design. On the occasion of Disegno’s fifth anniversary, the editors extended an invitation to a small selection of designers to reflect on the idea of the toast and to design potential alternatives more adapted to contemporary life. The undercurrent running through each design is an implicit desire to reinterpret the toast in an age where social cohesion, confidence in the future and collective gratification are (re)considered. The designers have come up with solutions that range from the material to the immaterial, to the toast as the completion of the drink itself, and even as an expression of the democratic promise. They have translated meaning through the materialisation of ideas that bring human beings closer to an understanding of each other, and in the process deepen social inclusion regardless of cultural context. For a designer to raise issues that sometimes take into account words, brimming objects (or plastic cups), physical gestures involving the notion of two or many participants, and consideration of unexpected
outcomes is a celebratory challenge. The 21st century can, so far, be best described as a collision between geopolitical choices of remoteness and the more disconcerting shift towards individual seclusion in response to previously accepted universal behaviours or models. The pervasive and all-too-rapid nature of digital connection, of skimming, scanning and scrolling. Of boredom. Of playing. The rapidity of access that leads to adulterated access. The designer changes the game. Moving beyond any prescriptive discourse, each designer has provoked an individual design vocabulary that stretches the meaning of the toast. Attention has been paid to the critical role design may take by establishing a context in which gesture, environment and objects might be rendered by the designer’s preoccupations with contemporary life. They bring us to raise our own glasses, not to what design can do, but to thoughtful, fearless consideration of what it should be.
Special Project
Marije Vogelzang For a number of years the food designer Marije Vogelzang has been toying with the toasting ritual in the events and installations that she runs as part of her practice. Vogelzang hands her guests a champagne flute that is tied to all of the other glasses by a single, long ribbon. “It means that all the guests are connected to one another,” says Vogelzang. “It’s simple, but immediately gives a sense of togetherness. If you need to freshen up, you have to give your glass to your neighbour to hold for you.” The effect is to engender interaction between guests, thereby heightening toasting’s function as a social lubricant. Symbolically, the communality of the toast becomes embodied by a single ribbon fluttering across a room.
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Jacopo Sarzi “In these days of hate and terror, could the toast become the best symbol of solidarity, respect and willingness to learn from the unknown in front of us?” Jacopo Sarzi, a London-based designer, identifies the democratic nature of the toast as essential to its appeal, yet argues that this egalitarianism could be extended. Toasting is often tied to alcohol, which can prove alienating for those who do not drink. As such, Sarzi has proposed a series of vessels that conceal their contents. Rather than communicating the drink they contain, the vessels reflect the nature of the toast they are being used for – be it celebratory, romantic or secretive. “The choice of the drink becomes detached from the act itself,” notes Sarzi. “It’s a way of respecting differences in people’s beliefs and tastes.”
Special Project
kerns, and the addition of drop caps and other features. All the same, the Oasis’s 300dpi screen still does not match the fine typographic placement of a real book or even an Apple product’s screen, a point that’s made more evident by the Oasis’s clear but subtle front lighting. More subtly, it also hasn’t addressed
But the convenience of the Kindle was far too attractive, our library of unread impulse-bought e-books too big to ignore, and so we ploughed on into the future. the way that every book has its own character, through cover design, typeface and typography, thickness and paper. On a Kindle, every book feels the same. The Oasis lacks other esoteric reconsiderations of presenting books on a screen. In particular, it still hasn’t matched the way that books afford a sense of progression. Kindle’s software has always used progress bars and percentages, which are entirely efficient but can’t mirror that satisfying instinct you gain with a book of the relationship between reading time and thickness. The Oasis does not have a progress bar, a feature I’ve always favoured because it represents the breadth of a book, but it does have the option of displaying an estimated time it will take you to read to the end, which I found rather unreliable. When I accidentally flicked through a number of pages, it started to estimate me reading the next 100 pages in 12 minutes. It also lacks the sense of occasion of a page turning, flipping to the next without animation and with such instancy that I found this hard to register. This issue was compounded by how regularly I’d unintentionally trigger a page-turn by brushing the touchscreen (despite having buttons, you can’t switch this off). It has a new navigational feature called Page Flip, which allows you to hold your place while skipping back or forward through thumbnails of pages, but it’s a long way from being as intuitive to accomplish as placing a finger among a real book’s pages and thumbing. While Kindle still struggles with the affordances of the page, the Oasis is home to a couple of new softwareand network-powered features that can perform tasks beyond the scope of the
traditional book. I always valued the dictionary on Kindle, to the extent that I still find myself wanting to highlight words in printed books to get their definitions. That feature, joined by a Wikipedia search, is still on Oasis. But a set of newer functions aims to add more, although with dubious value. X-Ray, which is only available for certain books, provides a database of facts about characters, locations and other details. You get to see where mentions lie in the book, along with quotes, and Wikipedia entries explain certain terms. X-Ray aims to be a simplified and instant CliffsNotes, but it’s rather inconstant because it’s largely computer-generated. Word Wise inserts short definitions for words it deems difficult between lines. This certainly adds to the cruft alongside Kindle’s weird world of highlights, which allow you to choose to see the often inexplicable passages that have been selected by other readers. These features have an air of sporadic usefulness, but hardly mine Kindle’s value as a networked computer. It’s been argued that the Kindle’s greatest opportunity is to build in more social connectivity, something that takes advantage of its nature as an internet-enabled device. You always could share quotes on Facebook and Twitter, and the highlights system continues to give a fragmentary sense of the world reading the same book as you. As with some earlier models, Oasis also integrates Goodreads, a social network for rating books and seeing what others are reading, and I’m sure it’s useful for some. But all these features ignore another social dimension of books: people around you knowing what you’re reading so that books act as a form of self-identification. Even though a Kindle only does one thing, its anonymity still gives it the indefinite air of selfabsorption that swirls around anyone using a tablet or smartphone. You’re just staring at another screen. Naturally, for many, that’s an appealing notion. Reading doesn’t have to be a social act, and connecting readers together so they might share insights and opinions can distract (or worse) from the words of the book itself. For many of those for whom the words are enough, the sheer convenience of the Kindle far outweighs the aesthetic allure of paper, binding and print. But it strikes
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me as strange that so many of those conveniences are identical to those that appealed to me in 2011; I was wrong to think Kindle couldn’t meaningfully be improved. Five years is a long time in technology, and while the Oasis’s physical form is a great step forward – for a hefty price – its software and technology haven’t managed to answer many of the book’s sensory properties. The Kindle Oasis is still just a Kindle, but it is so very nice to hold. And for now, that’s proved enough to reintroduce it to my bedside table. Sometimes on top of and sometimes beneath a paper book. The Kindle Oasis is available from Amazon for £269.99.
Intersections: Roksanda Ilinčić and David Adjaye Words and interview Sabrina Shim Photographs Max Creasy
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Conversation
The architect David Adjaye
Consider the case studies. OMA created the Prada store in New York, Zaha Hadid devised Seoul and Hong Kong stores for Neil Barrett, and David Chipperfield designed Valentino flagships in Milan and London. Yet in spite of the calibre of these collaborations, they are often rashly dismissed as purely commercial transactions. The few projects that do seek to offer serious commentary on the intersections – such as MOCA in LA’s 2007 exhibition Skin & Bones, theorist Kazys Varnelis’s essay ‘Architecture After Couture’ and OMA’s The Harvard Guide to Shopping – are notable as exceptions to the rule. That architecture and fashion are capable of enhancing each other’s value is undoubted, yet discussion of that interplay is undermined by ambiguities or laziness in language; garments are frequently described as “architectural”, but what this actually means is notoriously hard to pin down. In an effort to untangle the relationship, Disegno invited Adjaye and Ilinčić to meet and discuss the connections between their fields. The resultant conversation is a first-hand account of interdisciplinary design between practitioners. While theory in this area may lag behind, the designers themselves feel the links between architecture and fashion keenly. The discussion between Adjaye and Ilinčić, reproduced in the pages that follow, is testament to this. Over the course of their meeting, the two discussed their distinctive approaches to design, the importance of diverse practice, the value of fashion design and architecture as independent disciplines, and the purpose behind encouraging dialogue between their fields. It is a conversation between two creators who are curious about the work of their contemporaries, no matter which area they may operate in. Adjaye established his practice in 2000 and now has offices in London, New York and Accra. The practice works across typologies that span public buildings, social housing, retail spaces, temporary pavilions and private residences. This month, Adjaye will unveil his most important work to date – the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington, DC. Uniting all of Adjaye’s projects is a sensitivity towards materiality and colour, as well as a thirst for embedding cultural discourse in built environments – a tendency likely to reach its zenith with the NMAAHC, the ornamental bronze facade of which references the metal balustrades and screens produced in towns
and fashion designer Roksanda Ilinčić are longstanding collaborators. They first worked together in 2004 and their most recent joint project was the flagship store for Iliničić’s brand Roksanda, which opened on Mount Street, London, in 2014. Such collaborations between architecture and fashion are now common. In the last 20 years architecture has become recognised as one of the most powerful tools for expressing corporate and creative identity within the fashion system, and collaborations are rife. So why aren’t these partnerships being considered more closely in critical discourse? 156
such as New Orleans by freed African-American slaves. Alongside his work in architecture, Adjaye has collaborated with artists Chris Ofili and Olafur Eliasson, as well as working across music, furniture design and television. Ilinčić is similarly multidisciplinary. Born in Belgrade, Serbia, she initially studied architecture and applied arts at the city’s University of the Arts, before moving to London to attend the MA course in fashion design at Central Saint Martins. After graduating, Ilinčić showed her nascent womenswear label at London Fashion Week in 2005, quickly becoming known for her sophisticated silhouettes, use of opposing fabrics on the front and back of garments, and striking colour blocking. Her eponymous brand now has stockists in more than 40 countries and has branched out into jewellery and handbags, as well as ceramics executed in collaboration with the Swiss company Linck Keramik. Throughout Ilinčić’s career, her design work has been led by art and architecture – her pieces frequently allude to the creations of 20th-century modernists such as Ellsworth Kelly, Josef Albers, Lygia Clark, Niki de Saint Phalle and Oscar Niemeyer. Yet in spite of Ilinčić’s pool of references and her architectural training, her garments are rarely described as “architectural” in the way that those of other designers are. Instead, her voluminous constructions and fluid shapes are typically discussed solely in terms of their femininity, sometimes at the cost of recognising their tailoring and materiality. Adjaye and Ilinčić first met when she invited him to convert a warehouse delivery yard in King’s Cross, London, into a home. The result, the Lost House, was completed in 2004. Built around a black reception room illuminated by three light wells, the house features two hallmarks of Adjaye’s design: a barely perceptible entrance and a complex interplay between interior and exterior. At the time of the Lost House, both designers were at formative phases in their careers. Adjaye was in the middle of his first largescale international projects, while Ilinčić was about to launch her label. When reunited for the Mount Street store project 10 years later, they were both riding high. Completed in eight months, the store brings alive Adjaye’s fascination with contrasting surfaces, as well as Ilinčić’s striking sense of colour. A herringbone, monochromatic marble floor and angular brass racks zigzag across the Grade II-listed Georgian building,
while tiers of pebbled cement cover the interior walls. Floating shelves in brass or blush pink jut out seemingly at random, while mirrors bounce natural light from the windows in front to frame the lush courtyard garden at the back. Downstairs, the same pink as upstairs is mixed with burgundy, aubergine and chartreuse to form the plush carpeting and felted walls of a salon and fitting rooms. It is a warm and intimate space, and an environment that embodies the connections between architecture and fashion design that its creators advocate. The store has not been designed to satisfy the intellectual curiosity of critical discourse, but rather as a space in which consumers can experience the interplay between architecture and fashion in the context of the everyday. It is a place in which the collaboration can play out in real time. It was in this space that Disegno invited Adjaye and Ilinčić to meet.
Conversation