Disegno. No.3
Shigeru Ban Nelly Ben Hayoun Maria Blaisse Design Erotica Olafur Eliasson Eley Kishimoto Orhan Pamuk Victor Papanek Julie Richoz The Fold
UK £12 EU €15 US $25
Forecast
Features
Exposé
Contents
9
37
180
Three points
16
Author Will Wiles writes short fiction
Eley Kishimoto is turning 20
A visit to Julie Richoz’s apartment
Maria Blaisse on retiring
Introduction
Newcomer
20
Digital Critique
Strelka Press introduces essays on architecture and design
22
Digital Fashion
Museums take their fashion archives online
24
Selected reading
The editorial team’s current favourite reads
Design Erotica
40
The Beauty of Completion
58
Beyond the Tin Can Radio
A look at the legacy of Victor Papanek
70
International Space Orchestra
Nelly Ben Hayoun is causing a stir at NASA
88
Museum of Innocence
184
Cardboard architecture
Shigeru Ban on temporary structures
186
Illuminations
Olafur Eliasson introduces Little Sun
188
New product
Aitor Throup on skulls and seam allowance
190
New technology
Berg’s Little Printer says hello
From the Archive
Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk on his new museum
110
192
28
An essay on the process of folding
People and brands in this issue
26
Charles Pollock makes a comeback
Design Accessories
Furniture brands release their own lines of accessories
The Fold
130
Venice Architecture Biennale
An overview of the biennale and its two Golden Lion winners Torre David and Home-for-All
150
High-tech Handmade
Italian furniture manufactuer Mattiazzi’s special brand of making
170
Masking Identities
Masks make an appearance in both fashion and design
12 Disegno. contents
Patterns
index
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CM
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A month ago, she graduated from the BA Industrial Design course at the Ecole Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne (ECAL) in Switzerland, and shortly after, she won the Grand Prix at the 10 Young Designers competition at Villa Noailles in the south of France. >
Photo LEEWEI SWEE
Exposé
There is a smell of fresh paint in Julie Richoz’s Lausanne apartment. She moved in a few days ago and a pile of neatly arranged cardboard boxes rests in the small, open-plan kitchen. This is a new beginning for Richoz, in more ways than one.
16 Disegno. Exposé
The linear Fierzo desk divider designed by Julie Richoz, made from steel bands with an ash wood base, will be produced by Alessi this autumn.
ExposĂŠ
Disegno. 17
18 Disegno. Exposé
> And, in just a month’s time, her first commercial product will launch with Italian homewares brand Alessi – the Fierzo desk divider, made from two softly curved, parallel rectangular steel bands on a base of ash wood, to screen work areas. The divider itself is constructed by the customer, from readily available office material – card and paper – which slots between the steel wires. While the immediate future often seems uncertain for recent graduates, Richoz’s already has a sudden, if somewhat unexpected, structure. Through the Grand Prix from Villa Noailles she won two residencies: one at Cité de la Céramique de Sèvres and at Centre International de Recherche sur le Verre et les Arts Plastiques de Marseille and a €5,000 prize to develop a new project for the Parisian Galerie Kreo. “So, I will be spending this coming year working on these three projects,” says Richoz as she sits down at a small dining table in the apartment’s modestly furnished living room. The balcony door is open, allowing for a breeze, a few lazy wasps and the distant sound of a neighbour’s piano playing to enter the room. Richoz is taking it all in and looks a little pensive: “It will be challenging to work on these projects because, so far, I have always worked at university with other people – in collaboration. It will be very different to work by myself; there will be no teacher and, for me, this is the challenge, to see if I can do it on my own.” In 2011, while a second-year student at ECAL, Richoz designed Fierzo, the linear desk divider. Conceived during
a workshop with Alessi, Fierzo was among five desk objects selected for production. Its strength, like all of Richoz’s projects, lies in its simplicity and it’s these minimal objects, which she enjoys designing the most. “The designs I like to create are small, like bowls or plates,” says Richoz. “When I think about an object, I try to find the easiest way to make it because I have to do it myself and I don’t want to use complicated technology or machinery.” As a result, her portfolio of work is deceptively simple. At the ECAL exhibition during the Milan furniture fair earlier this year, she exhibited Armand – coloured paper with
Her uncomplicated, straightforward approach gives her designs their functional and humble character. an extraordinarily delicate cut out pattern, which is formed into different-sized tubes which she inserted into each other to recreate the feeling of “soft focus”. It was a brave choice at an event where designers come to launch their careers, often with bravado and grand gestures. It is Richoz’s uncomplicated, straightforward approach that gives her designs their functional and humble character and it was this no-fuss attitude that swayed the jury, led by French designer François Azambourg, to give her the Grand Prix at Villa Noailles. The perfect example of her approach is the metal bowl Thalie. It starts
out as a flat surface – imagine a child’s drawing of a sun with a solid, round centre and spindly rays coming out of it – then, imagine it created from a fine sheet of spring steel. All Richoz does to create the bowl is, pick up the “rays” one by one and fasten them in the desired position with the help of metal wire. “I am fascinated by turning something from one dimension to three dimensions,” says Richoz. However, if it was just this ingenuity and economy of material that was Richoz’s stamp it would be easy to imitate, but her sensibility and feeling for the materials she works in and the forms she creates is what really sets her apart. Her brand is a fragile beauty which is seductive to look at and pleasant to the touch. With her two forthcoming residencies she will be let loose on materials she has never worked with before – porcelain and glass – richer, rarer, more complicated materials to the ones Richoz has favoured until now. It will be interesting to see how she treats them and how it will propel her work forward, but before then she is taking a long holiday. She’s leaving tomorrow and an empty backpack lays deflated and empty in the middle of her new apartment. For six weeks this piece of luggage is going to hold all her belongings. But it’s not a real concern; after all, Richoz has a certain talent for creating meaningful somethings out of almost nothing.
•
The 10 Designers exhibition closed 30 September at Villa Noailles. Malgorzata Stankiewicz is a freelance writer based in Zurich.
Photos LEEWEI SWEE
Newcomer The Thalie bowl transforms from a flat metal sheet to an object by picking up the fine rays.
Julie Richoz sits in her new apartment in Lausanne, Switzerland near ECAL, where she graduated from earlier this year.
ExposĂŠ
Disegno. 19
The Dutch designer Maria Blaisse demonstrates the flexibility of her bamboo structures, part of this summer’s exhibition programme at the Domaine de Boisbuchet in southwestern France.
40 Disegno. The beauty of completion
The Beauty of Completion Maria Blaisse, the Dutch designer who came to prominence in the world of experimental sculpture in the 1980s, is in the process of rounding up her career. Disegno met her at the Domaine de Boisbuchet in southwest France to talk about her love for bulbous shapes, bamboo and beautiful endings. WORDS Kristina Rapacki photos Linus Ricard
The beauty of completion
Disegno. 41
A 1 The Domaine de Boisbuchet is a historic estate located between the Poitou-Charentes and Limousin regions in France. Run by Alexander von Vegesack and affiliated with the Centre Pompidou and the Vitra Design Museum, the estate has organised workshops and exhibitions within the fields of design and architecture since 1992.
Maria Blaisse created a line of hats for the Japanese designer Issey Miyake’s (b. 1938) spring/summer 1988 collection.
2
Kuma Guna was a dance performance initiated by Maria Blaisse and performed by dancers at the Bickersgracht Studio in Amsterdam in 1996.
3
A torus is a ring-shaped form created by revolving a circle in three-dimensional space.
4
5 In the 1980s, Blaisse’s children asked her to make them firemen hats for a
42 Disegno. The beauty of completion
n image of sand dunes lights up the screen when Maria Blaisse opens her laptop. Undulating with geometric precision, they are a very conscious choice for the designer. Blaisse explains that the dunes can be found in the Atacana Desert in South America, and exist as the result of a toroidal movement within the sand’s substratum; a principle she has explored throughout her career as a designer. I must look perplexed, because she adds: “It’s science. But don’t worry, I’ll explain.”
We have just sat down for a cup of coffee in a quiet room at the Domaine de Boisbuchet1 in the southwest of France. Moving Meshes, an exhibition of Blaisse’s flexible bamboo structures, opened earlier in the summer at the estate’s 19th-century chateau. Now, Blaisse has come back to lead a week-long workshop entitled Awareness of Form, one of several summer workshops organised by Boisbuchet. We have reached the end of the week and have found a moment to pause and reflect; on the workshop, her exhibition, and her career.
Blaisse clicks away at her laptop to show me an image slideshow. Her most well-known projects flash by; the rubber headpieces and wispy veil hats from a collaboration with Issey Miyake in the late 1980s2, bulbous foam costumes for the 1996 dance performance Kuma Guna at Bickersgracht Studio in Amsterdam3, and the kooky C-shoe for Spanish footwear brand Camper. But it is an image of a rubber torus4 from the 2003 project Gomma, a series of rubber vessels5, that becomes the fulcrum of our conversation. This essential form looks like the inner tube of a car tyre, a vortex ring, or more prosaically, a doughnut. “I have the torus in my system,” says Blaisse. This shape, and the infinite formal variations latent within it, has preoccupied the designer for decades. In rubber, mesh, felt, leather and bamboo, the shape is a constant in her work. Even though the final product may not be a recognisable torus, its form will often be derived from it. Blaisse takes my notebook and sketches a circle within a circle.
“If this is a torus and I slice it in half,” she says, demonstrating with two short lines, “it has so many possibilities.” With pen and paper, Blaisse proceeds to outline some of the reconfigurations of the toroid. Cut at various axes and reassembled imaginatively, the toroid can reform into sleek convex or concave cones, globular mushrooms, and strange rumpled textures similar to the South American sand dunes (no coincidence, according to Blaisse); and these are only a handful of options. >
“I have the torus in my system,� says Maria Blaisse. Here, a bamboo mesh is gracefully looped to create a torus, an essential circular form.
The beauty of completion
Disegno. 43
photo ANNE DENIAU
A shot from the Alexander McQueen autumn/winter 2012/13 show in Paris. The models are wearing high-shine reflective silver plexiglass visors.
170 Disegno. Masking identities
Masking Identities At a time when fashion and design are experimenting with the form and identity of the mask, Disegno takes a look at their meaning. Words Rebecca Arnold
Masking identities
Disegno. 171
Musée Bible et Terre Sainte is a small museum operated by the Institut Catholique de Paris.
1
Benjamin (see Museum of Innocence, p. 88).
2
Fashion house Maison Martin Margiela was set up by Belgian fashion designer Martin Margiela in 1989 and was acquired by Italian brand Diesel in 2002. The brand showed its first haute couture collection in Paris in July, for autumn/winter 2012/13.
3
Bertille Laguet (b. 1988) and Mathieu Rohrer (b. 1989) met at the Lausanne-based design school ECAL and have run a studio together since graduating in 2012.
4
5 Bertjan Pot (b. 1975) studied at Design Academy Eindhoven and now runs his studio together with co-workers Vladi Rapaort Marjolein Fase and is currently based in Schiedam in The Netherlands.
The film was released in 1980 and is based on the life of Joseph Carey Merrick (1862-1890), a man with severely deformed facial and bodily features.
6
Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) was a French poet who is credited with coining the word Surrealism. He fought and was wounded in the First World War and died from Spanish Flu.
7
Bogdan Dumitrica (b. 1963) is born in Romania but studied art at California State University. The series Everybody has the Right to Wear a Mask comprises 18 paintings of oil on paper.
8
172 Disegno. Masking identities
n a small museum in Paris’ sixth arrondissement there is a stone mask believed to be the oldest mask in the world1. It dates from 7000 BC and is oval in shape with two circular holes for the eyes and a half moon-shape cut out for the mouth. Even in this most basic form, the mask has the power to unsettle. Covering your face renders you ambiguous. Both absent and present, yourself and other. This slipperiness changes the rules of the wearer’s behaviour and teases onlookers, who can no longer be certain of your identity or intent. We are all in disguise. Fashion twists and toys with our identities; interior design extends these games into the home. In his 1929 essay Some Remarks On Folk Art, the German philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin2 recognised masking as part of our interior, as well as our exterior world. “Disguise seeks the arsenal of masks within us,” he wrote. This autumn, these masks have become literal, and theatricalised in the catwalk shows of fashion houses. And they are spreading from face to body and into our interiors too as artists and designers are creating masks to adorn our homes with.
In Paris-based Maison Martin Margiela’s first haute couture show3, craft, artifice, history and theatre were spun into deconstructed outfits that quoted past collections from the Maison and earlier fashion styles. References were diverse, from Edwardian tailoring, left raw at the edges to draw attention to its presence, to American sportswear, in the form of torn-apart and reassembled baseball gloves. But it was the masks that drew the eye. Models became anonymous androids, each wearing a bejewelled mask. Coloured gems or bright white “diamonds” turned their faces into jewels, while bouncing light and gaze away from their surface. In some cases, the crystals dripped down the models’ bodies to encrust their clothes and turn their whole torso into elaborately embroidered shell carapaces. This dramatised the label’s craftsmanship, and placed emphasis on handwork, while simultaneously creating a sensual link between the artisan and the disguised. Model and worker were linked through their apparent anonymity, yet celebrated in the glittering display – body and clothing masked to pull focus onto process and product. Also playing on fractured identities and the nature of craftsmanship is French-Swiss design duo Bertille & Mathieu4 who has designed paper masks that reference children’s toys, and African tribal masks. Made of layers of different coloured card, sewn together and folded into shape, they are meant to provide several masks in one, with layers tearing off, producing new faces in the process. For some years now, Dutch product designer Bertjan Pot5 has also experimented with the masked face. His masks are the failed result of an attempt at creating a rug by coiling and then stitching a length of rope together. The material experimentation instead created spirals that mimicked exaggerated facial features. The final product, recently on display in Milan, during the April furniture fair, are simian and even has a taste of film director David Lynch’s The Elephant Man6 about them. Like Maison Martin Margiela and Bertille & Mathieu, Studio Bertjan Pot emphasises the mask’s transformative element an its potential to reconfigure an identity, and it isn’t always a more attractive one. >
photo Felipe Ribon
I
The Mask mirror by Jean Baptiste Fastrez are produced for Galerie Kreo in Paris and was first shown at Villa Noailles in Hyeres.
Masking identities
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