Contents 15 Introduction What is New is Young 18
Contents
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Contributors
22 Masthead The people behind Disegno 25 Timeline June to August 2017 in review 28 Photoessay They Left the Trees Dispatches from the Arctic town that mining forced to move 44
Observation Covering and Covfefe Five forms of designed veiling
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Interview Consider the Garment Paola Antonelli prepares for MoMA’s return to fashion
72 Comment Death Knells Big Ben and the public purse 75
Comment Made in Nowhere A deceptive rootlessness at the base of manufacturing
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Comment Iconic Leadership Disegno issues a come-and-get- me-call to the world’s museums
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Report The Battle for Palmyra The challenges of cultural preservation in war zones
95 Special Project Furnishing Silences Yuri Suzuki revisits and recuts Erik Satie’s Furniture Music
106 Comment I’ll Have One of Those Narcissistic short-circuits in the age of dating apps
177 History The Driver The future of autonomy at the advent of the autonomous car
109 Comment The Ongoing Adventures of K5 – Robot Extraordinaire An ode to crap AI
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110 Comment Green at Sea The ethics of aestheticising the refugee crisis
203 Index Short stories from the creation of this issue
113 Conversation Club Catharsis Loverboy’s Charles Jeffrey on fashion as cultural event 129
Travelogue Contested Spaces Istanbul through the lens of Taksim Square
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Gallery The Ceramic Mundane The pottery of Matthias Merkel Hess, set loose in Chinatown
161 Reviews
Guide to the Architecture of London (162) The psychogeographer’s handbook goes digital
States of Undress (166) Hailey Gates lays waste to the traditional fashion documentary
The Museum of Failure (170) Lessons learned from revelling in the world’s many mistakes
Mosaics of the Former USSR (174) A trio of books reviving a now forgotten history of public art
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Anatomy Banners Unfurled Glenn Adamson’s history of democratic protest
208 Endnote Where It’s At Paul Lukas, designer, must find a new commercial medium to go large
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They Left the Trees Words and photographs Klaus Thymann
Kiruna is a mining town located just inside of the Arctic Circle in Swedish Lapland. It serves the largest underground iron ore mine in the world, with a depth of some 1,365m and a vast network of subterranean roads and tunnels. The mining company LKAB, which was founded in 1890 and fully nationalised in the 1950s, has run the mine on an industrial scale for over a century. If anyone had had the foresight that in a hundred years’ time the mine would still be going, they wouldn’t have built the town so close to it. In 2004, LKAB presented forecasts of how the subsidence caused by the mining would eventually threaten the centre of Kiruna and so in 2010 Kiruna’s municipal council announced plans for a huge and decades-long moving project, which is being overseen by the Swedish practice White Arkitekter. Certain historic houses in Kiruna were to be lifted intact and moved, with others bound for demolition. LKAB would pay residents 125 per cent of market rate for properties marked for demolition, or offer similar housing at a nearby location. The end aim is to move the entire town of Kiruna 3km to the east. The announcement got a fair amount of coverage in the international press. When I found out about it, I thought it was the craziest thing I’d ever heard. In my practice, I tend to work on longterm projects that often use the passage of time to show change, so I thought it would be interesting to create an ongoing documentation, with pictures of Kiruna
pre-move, during the move, and postmove. I have visited four times so far: in April and August 2013, in May 2015 and in June this year. From the start, I took GPS coordinates of all the camera locations, so I’ve been able to go back and replicate exact positions. In many instances, the buildings have been moved, but the trees have been left in place. A selection of the resulting images can be found in the following pages of Disegno. What you immediately realise when you visit Kiruna is the codependency of the town and the mine – they are entirely symbiotic. In fact, the entire economic development of the region depends on the mine. It’s difficult to comprehend just how big the operation is, but if you imagine the 12m-long shipping containers you see trailing behind big trucks on the motorway – there are around 70 of those leaving the mine every day with a full load of refined iron ore pellets. The mine’s economic importance is such that closing it is absolutely out of the question, but it’s obviously not acceptable for the town to fall into a sinkhole either. It’s a problem everyone has been interested in solving. Kiruna is actually quite an old town. There are wooden houses and a wooden church from the turn of the previous century. And there’s history embedded in the buildings; the church was donated by LKAB to the local parish in 1912, for instance. A selection of the historic structures are being moved, but what’s
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difficult – and this relates to what is happening in London and other cities around the world – is that some of the brutalist architecture from the 1960s is being demolished. What a project like this brings about is a stark curation of history. Of course, you can have a photographic archive of what’s lost, but it’s not the same as having the building. And even with the buildings that are moved, the transition – the dislocation – means the historic structures that are saved will read differently nontheless. If you walk around a big city, you use landmarks to navigate. In New York, for instance, it used to be the Twin Towers, and in Kiruna you have this huge slag heap – a mountain really – of soil that’s been dug out of the mine. It sits there like a monument to what is currently happening and what has happened in Kiruna. Some would say it’s a scarred landscape. I don’t really mind it though – I think it looks interesting. Based on an original interview by Kristina Rapacki.
Iron ore has been mined in Kiruna on an industrial scale for over a century, an activity which has had a dramatic effect on the structural stability of the land on which the town was built. In 2010, Kiruna announced detailed plans to move location. The photographs on this page show the same location, photographed in April 2013 and June 2017.
Photoessay
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Photoessay
Consider the Garment Introduction Francesca Granata Portrait Gudrun Georges
The MoMA exhibition Items: Is Fashion Modern? is only the second show focusing on dress in the museum’s 88-year history. It is a sequel, of sorts, to Are Clothes Modern?, an exhibition curated by the eminent architecture historian Bernard Rudofsky in 1944 – that is, approximately two million fashion cycles ago.
Accompanying this interview are a series of scans from the original exhibition catalogue of Are Clothes Modern?
Dashiki, door-knocker earrings, and Dutch wax interpreted for Items:
Is Fashion Modern? by Monika Mogi.
Interview
Paola Antonelli, the curator of MoMA’s Items: Is Fashion Modern?
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The show has been curated by Paola Antonelli, MoMA’s senior curator in the department of architecture and design, who is keen to underscore the urgency of examining fashion at MoMA through the lens of design. Surprisingly, dress has generally been left out of design museums, particularly in America. The Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, for instance, has traditionally collected textiles but not clothing, which to the fashion-conscious might seem the equivalent of an art museum devoted to paint tubes and brushes. Refreshingly, Items redresses this historical omission. Two years in the making, the exhibition is a culmination of a research project led by Antonelli, along with curatorial assistant Michelle Millar Fisher. Both were trained in architecture and design history, and they engaged fashion historians, theorists, designers, and curators in the exhibition’s planning stages. (Being from Milan, Antonelli has inevitably had brushes with this world before, having worked at a fashion PR firm as an after-school job while at school – the Milanese version of flipping burgers.) This inclusive approach is reflected in the exhibition, which includes 111 clothing items from across the spectrum of 20th-century fashion, ranging from Chanel’s little black dress (the epitome of fashion and modernity) to Spanx (less so). The exhibition includes more rarefied experimental fashion, such as Rei Kawakubo’s celebrated Body Meets Dress collection from 1997, alongside increasingly ubiquitous wearable technology (the Fitbit) and what many would consider fashion faux-pas: behold, the dreaded fanny pack. Discussing the selection process behind this, Antonelli emphasises the importance of well-designed objects that reach a wide range of audiences either directly or, as in the case of Rei Kawakubo, by being so widely influential that they eventually enter a wider design vocabulary. Each item is represented by a “stereotype” embodying the most representative articulation of that particular clothing item in recent history. Often, the “stereotype” is also accompanied by an “archetype”, an earlier example of that particular dress style that provides historical context, and at times a “prototype”, commissioned by the museum to build on and improve the original example. This is perhaps the most innovative aspect of the show: commissioning new work is rare in the realm of fashion exhibitions, and it also leads into the realm of both speculative design and practical design solutions. It was these treatments of fashion in a museological context that Antonelli spoke of when I met her in a room overlooking MoMA’s sculpture garden. Francesca Granata I’ve been thinking about the exhibition’s idea of modernity in relation to fashion design, because modernism as associated with architecture is seen as fairly inimical to fashion and ornament. Paola Antonelli First of all, there are many different ways to think of “modern”. There’s modernism of course, which is the style, and that’s the form that’s mostly identified with a certain type of architecture – glass, steel and all the clichés of modernism that you can think of. Then there is the “Modern” with a capital “M”, and that’s a historical moment and a way of reading the world. It’s the form of modern that
Interview
A-POC Le Feu by Issey Miyake and Dai Fujiwara, from the Issey Miyake spring/summer 1999 collection.
Mosaic in Piazza Armerina, Villa Romana del Casale, Sicily, 300–400 CE.
“I don’t look for style, but rather for a process, a type of design, or an understanding of the background of an object.”
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Interview
PRESENTED BY
CRAFTS COUNCIL REGISTERED CHARITY NUMBER: 280956
Club Catharsis Interview Susanna Cordner Photographs Carey Juliette
The fashion designer Charles Jeffrey, photographed in his studio in Somerset House, London.
Conversation
When the fashion designer
Jeffrey launched the Loverboy night in 2014 while still studying, partly in order to fund his MA in Fashion Design. A less mercenary interpretation of the venture, however, was that the night aimed to provide a cathartic outlet and safe space for his contemporaries to celebrate the joys of dressing up. The party is now on hiatus, but went on to inspire Loverboy the brand, for which Jeffrey’s fellow partygoers remain a core field of primary research, as well as key collaborators in the media, events and wider ethos that has grown up around the brand. The cultural and social significance of Loverboy is underpinned by the execution of Jeffrey’s work. The designer pairs his idiosyncratic DIY ethos with a growing interest in cut and quality. The garments blend bricolage and illustration; silhouettes sourced from historical costume, redeployed in contemporary garments; bold tartans and houndstooth suiting; T-shirts emblazoned with repurposed news headlines (“CHILDREN HIGH ON DRINK AND DRUGS”), as well as cut-up jumpers bonded with electrical tape and hand-painted trousers. The whole effect, from the garments upwards, is one of joie de vivre and speaks of an inclusivity towards outside influences and new ideas. It is an approach that the industry has quickly recognised. While still a student, Jeffrey worked as an intern at Dior, as well as winning Graduate of the Year and Young Designer of the Year at the Scottish Fashion Awards in 2015 and 2016 respectively. His brand is supported by Fashion East and has shown as a part of their Topman-backed Man initiative. For 2017/2018, Jeffrey has also received funding from the British Fashion Council’s Newgen scheme and he is currently working towards an exhibition with the NOW Gallery in Greenwich, London. With community comes culture. Meeting in his studio, Jeffrey and I discussed working as part of a diverse team as well as exploring Loverboy’s multiple meanings as a brand, a moment, a movement, an invitation, and a term of endearment.
Charles Jeffrey emerged from Central Saint Martins in 2015, he was credited with reviving a tradition of club culture within both London’s fashion scene and its nightlife. Evolving from the free expression evinced at his Loverboy club nights in Dalston’s Vogue Fabrics, Jeffrey’s designs and his collection presentations play as elated calls to arms. More than just commercial ventures, his shows and short films – replete with cacophonous energy and stark individuality – stand out as quasi-political acts: invitations to stay bravely joyful in the face of growing social adversity.
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The Museum of Failure Words Kristina Rapacki
One of the central exhibits at the newly opened Museum of Failure in Helsingborg, Sweden, is a slightly scuffed first-generation Segway from 2001. In a museum devoted to flopped products, gadgets, and business ventures, it stands as an unlikely centrepiece. Pop cultural reference may have the Segway down as the quintessential twerp-mobile (think of Gob’s cringeworthy manoeuvring on the vehicle in Arrested Development), but many variants of this self-balancing electric scooter are still in production today, and continue to enjoy relative popularity. The city of Barcelona, for instance, recently banned their use in the historic city centre and seafront areas, having found itself inundated with Segway-riding tourists. In short, it’s not exactly a flop. “So why is it here?” I ask Samuel West, the organisational psychologist who directs the Museum of Failure and has amassed most of its collection. “Because I think it illustrates what a failure is,” he says. “The definition of a failure is a deviation from a desired outcome. The expectation for the Segway when it launched in 2001 was that future urban infrastructure would be built around it, and that the Segway would be to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy.” Sixteen years on, it seems safe to say that cities around the world have not reconfigured themselves to accommodate the Segway. “Had they [Dean Kamen, the Segway’s inventor, and John Doerr, its chief investor] just said ‘Hey, we’ve got a fun thing to ride,’ it wouldn’t be in the Museum of Failure,” explains West. The question of definitions is an interesting one, especially given the scope of the 70 products on display in the single-room exhibition space on
Helsingborg’s Södergatan. There are medical instruments (a mid-20th-century orbitoclast, used to perform lobotomies), toys (My Friend Cayla, invented in 2014, an interactive doll banned by German authorities because it sends everything your child tells it to a US company which can then sell that information to third parties), and beverages (Coca-Cola BlāK, a foul-tasting concoction that targeted the swelling numbers of premium coffee drinkers in the 2000s). When consumer products deviate from their makers’ desired outcome, it usually means they don’t hit sales targets. “But there can be other failures, not just bad sales,” says West. The orbitoclast failed, horrifically, to perform its desired remedial function. Aimed at “curing” a host of neuroses, the psychosurgical procedure of lobotomy – which consisted of severing connections between the prefrontal cortex and part of the brain’s frontal lobes – tended to leave patients in a near-vegetative state, or dead. Other products failed to reach their desired technological potential. The website boo.com, displayed in the museum on a clunky 1990s desk computer, was live from 1999 for a year, and supported proto-versions of most of the functions of a contemporary e-commerce site. However, the restricted bandwidth of most households at the time rendered the site impossibly sluggish to navigate. The website was only a failure in that it was ahead of its time. The Museum of Failure takes its basic model from the Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb, Croatia (“the only museum in the world that’s better than mine,” says West), where relatively unspectacular objects are used to tell complex stories about human behaviour and interaction. “We know that most
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innovations fail. In fact, most of the things in your magazine will fail,” says West, “80 to 90 per cent if you want a number. But we only glorify and focus on the successes.” Failure is as rife as it is repressed, and this applies to individuals as well as companies, he notes: “I see it everywhere. ‘Oh, I’m 40 years old and I’ve lost weight’. Or ‘I quit my boring job and now I run a sourdough bakery and I’m happy’. Or ‘I have sex 3.8 times a week and my kids have shiny teeth’. The more that we glorify success, the more we demonise failure.” Nothing piques interest like censure, of course. When I visit the museum on a rainy weekday afternoon, it’s packed; its ‘Failure Confession Booth’ is plastered with bright post-it submissions; and my interview with West attracts a pair of curious visitors who chime in with their own reflections on the display. When the museum opened earlier this year, camera teams from the BBC, CNN and Associated Press descended on Helsingborg, a small town of 135,00; Christiane Amanpour presented CNN’s segment on the launch. Christiane Amanpour. The Museum of Failure’s success lies in how powerfully it can resonate with visitors on a personal level. Failure is funny (unless it’s your own), precisely because it is repressed. The exhibits elicit a whole host of titillating feelings: schadenfreude, perhaps, at discovering that even a multinational can flop with a product like Crystal Pepsi (“It would’ve been nice if I’d made sure the product tasted good,” mused David Novak, who developed the drink in the early 1990s); or a smug sense of superiority at the stupidity of No More Woof, a crowdfunded device from 2013-14 that claimed it could translate your dog’s brainwaves into human language (for the record,
All photographs courtesy of Sofie Lindberg.
A Swedish museum devoted to failure questions society’s addiction to success stories and examines what we might gain if we learned to stop worrying and love a bomb.
Makers of the 1990s beauty mask Rejuvenique claimed it toned facial muscles with tiny electric shocks. A contemporary reviewer said it felt like, “a thousand ants biting my face�.
Review
Banners Unfurled Words Glenn Adamson On the afternoon of 18 February 1908, the Royal Society of Arts met in London to discuss “Banners in Pageantry”. The main address was delivered by George Eve, a printmaker with particular expertise in armorials, the displays of coats of arms once seen at jousting tournaments and in royal palaces and chivalric orders. He traced the history of the banner form, beginning with ancient Roman ensigns, progressing through medieval standards and pennants used to identify knights on the battlefield, and on to the national flags of modern times. After this learned exposition, the chair of the gathering rose to offer a brief response. “It was a curious thing,” he said, “that in the present [and] generally considered democratic age, something like a renaissance of heraldic design was going on”. It seemed that the reinvention of long-forgotten medieval emblems was leading to a burst of unprecedented creativity. “In fact, there [is] nothing too daring for the pictorial banner painter of the present day”. The chair that day was Walter Crane, an artist and dedicated socialist. He spoke from first-hand experience, his own work having been frequently adapted for banner designs. Principally in demand with labour organisations, specialist manufacturers had found themselves inundated with work – preeminently the firm of George Tutill, which had built the largest jacquard loom in the world at its London premises in 1881 to cope with the demand. These firms made banners using a range of techniques, including weaving, painting and appliqué. These banners were compositionally complex affairs, up to 5m wide. They typically featured illusionistic swags, narrative scenes, and also slogans such as “unity is strength”, “knowledge is power”, and “God helps those that help themselves”. A proper banner was a serious investment, illustrating the political clout of the owner. They were used not only in marches, but also hung in meeting halls or on architectural facades, and in the heightened political atmosphere of the time, were treated as sacred emblems. This type of richly illustrated banner had emerged in the 1820s, when in the memorable phrase of historian Gywn Williams in his introduction to John Gorman’s 1973 book Banner Bright, workers’ associations had come “blinking out of their dark and secret conventicles into the fitful sunlight of a precarious legality”. Although collective bargaining technically remained illegal, organised labour groups nonetheless began to gain both members and strength. For their emblems, they adapted the basic format and some of the imagery of religious pageants – particularly those of
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1 Component of the Total Twit Meets the
Future banner by Stephanie Syjuco. 2 Participants hold up banners made at Syjuco's 'Reap What You Sew' workshop. 3
Resist! by Syjuco. 4 Components of Snake Oil
(Zero Proof) by Syjuco. 5 The finished Snake Oil
(Zero Proof) banner. 6 Sewn and appliquéd banners created at the Royal Nonsuch Gallery. 7 Banners created by the Chicago-based Protest Banner Lending Library (PBLL). 8 An appliqué banner designed by Ed Hall. 9 Hall's work is built up from individual elements of cotton cloth. 10 Hall's banners feature bold, simple slogans.
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Anatomy
Syjuco’s preferred aesthetic is clip art, which she sees as a populist mode that’s “easily accessible and completely ubiquitous”.
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Anatomy