Contents 09 Introduction The value of free movement 14 Contributors 16
Masthead The people behind Disegno
19 Timeline March to May 2016 in review 22 Interview Trans-Curation MoMA’s Martino Stierli on curating the interdisciplinary 31 Observation Coat from Outside by Junya Watanabe Man Outerwear built around solar panels 32 Observation Ring Soap by Sebastian Bergne A resurrected, self-produced bathroom accessory 34 Photoessay Routine Rituals: Found Objects from India Parsons & Charlesworth examine Hindu ceremonies
58 Observation Shit Mug by Luca Cipelletti for the Museo della Merde Tableware made from cow dung
136 Advertorial Mini Living – Do Disturb Mini presents a new schemata for modular living
61 Review Rêveries Urbaines Public space reimagined by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec
140 History Eames and Film
65 Project Advanced Ordnance Cambodia’s next generation of bomb-disposal equipment 75 Observation Fixpencil by Mario Botta for Caran d’ache An architect’s take on a classic tool 77 Review Slow Burn City Rowan Moore’s book about London’s unchecked growth 81 Travelogue Return to Sarajevo Furniture as an escape from social stasis in Bosnia and Herzegovina
47 Comment Brutalist Greenhorns The latter-day revival of brutalism
97 Gallery An Experiment in Sitting Dancer Adrien Dantou in dialogue with Konstantin Grcic’s Hieronymus collection
48 Comment So Long, Farewell The shortening lifespan of fashion’s creative directors
113 Report Under the Hammer The importance of auctions to contemporary design
50 Profile Spectacular Tales of Adventure and Yearning LA Film noir with the architect Liam Young
127 Comment Cutting Their Teeth Redesigning the toothbrush
57 Observation The Lucky, Plucky Chairs by Rolf Fehlbaum for the Vitra Design Museum A fairytale about furniture
128 Comment Gender Bias No Sir’s women-first attitude towards design 129 Project Reidentifying the Victoria Line Artist Giles Round designs tiles
Contents
Movie Sets (141) Charles Eames captures Hollywood scenography Understanding Schrader (146) Unravelling director Paul Schrader’s relationship to the Eameses
oetry of Ideas: The Films P of Charles Eames (148) Paul Schrader on Charles Eames as the saviour of Hollywood
161 Review Manus x Machina Haute couture and prêt-à-porter blur at the Met in New York 165 Roundtable Identity Politics The impact of the EU referendum on culture 174 Reflection Haptic Feedback HaaT’s Makiko Minagawa on the importance of touch 179 Review 2016/ Arita An international scheme to promote Japanese ceramics 183 Reflection Developing Systems Industrial Facility breaks down its Run table for Emeco 188 Index Short stories from the creation of this issue
Trans-Curation Introduction Alexandra Lange Photographs Dean Kaufman
In mid-April, The Architect’s Newspaper reported that MoMA was closing its galleries dedicated to architecture and design, prompting a game of telephone as the news bounced from blog to blog, tweet to tweet. That Martino Stierli, the museum’s Philip Johnson chief curator of architecture and design, quickly moved to assuage fears mattered little. It was all very apocalyptic, implying that architecture and design would now be homeless at MoMA, forced to fight for space against the stronger, better-fed disciplines of painting and sculpture.
Now, if you had been to the museum recently, you might have noticed that the permanent collection galleries have already made way for the temporary exhibit on contemporary Japanese architecture, A Japanese Constellation. MoMA is in the process of a three-year renovation and expansion, masterminded by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, that is attempting to reorganise MoMA’s multiple buildings from within. If you’re thinking, “Wasn’t that what Yoshio Taniguchi’s 2004 expansion was supposed to do?” you would not be wrong, because that is where the deep suspicion of MoMA’s motives and taste, vis-à-vis architecture and design, began. That is when, for many, the museum began to seem less like a friend and more like a corporation – a perception heightened by the decision, in 2014, to demolish Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects’ 12-year-old American Folk Art Museum. “MoMA wants more gallery space, and the expansion that drives the planned demolition is just more MoMA madness,” wrote Michael Kimmelman in The New York Times. Barry Bergdoll, MoMA’s erstwhile chief curator of architecture and design, called the decision “painful”, but didn’t question the drive for flexibility. The credibility MoMA once had with the architecture and design community – built upon founding director Alfred Barr’s embracement of the fields – had been blown. Stierli, who joined MoMA in March 2015, was perhaps never going to quell the storm. Having studied the work of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown in his earlier academic post at the University of Zurich, and by defining his curatorial strategy as “both/and”, Stierli appears to refrain from choosing between approaches. When I met with him to discuss the museum’s curation strategy, I asked about the decision to offer minimal labels for the architecture and design included in the museum’s new multi‑disciplinary hang of 1960s works. In response, he called himself a postmodernist, saying objects “should be able to stand for themselves”. By his account, all the museum’s curators are in the same boat, rethinking the classic MoMA approach to its walls as chronological strings of superstars and displays of strength alone. I think it would be a shame if, in the end, MoMA were to have no quiet display space for design treasures unlikely to fit into any curatorial agenda, but I’m willing to wait and see. Our houses usually look different when we move back in after a renovation, especially when things had gotten a little stale.
Interview
Alexandra Lange Since you took up the post as MoMA’s
chronology because we thought it would be fascinating to see things that have a totally different temporality but which happened in the same year. In 1962, for example, you have a photomontage by Mies van der Rohe showing one of his late museum projects for Munich, which then gets built as the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. So it’s a master of modernism at the end of his career next to somebody like Claes Oldenburg, who is a totally different generation and has completely different interests. We didn’t want to just present what we already knew about art history or the history of architecture, but rather to try to establish new connections and juxtapositions between objects. You could say it’s a formalist approach, although we’re not saying this is necessarily the way we want to continue. It was for us as much about starting a conversation between the objects of the different media as it was to start a conversation between the different curators and the different departments in an institution that has traditionally been very segregated. We wanted to bring people into a conversation and I think it was a great success.
chief curator of architecture and design you’ve travelled a lot for research. Where have you been? Martino Stierli I made two trips in the fall to the Balkans: to Kosovo and Macedonia. Those trips were actually in preparation for a large exhibition project which is going to deal with architecture in Yugoslavia from 1945 to 1991. That is going to be my first big research undertaking here, for the summer of 2018. I have always been interested in doing something on brutalism and specifically about the cultural meaning of concrete. Rather than doing something obvious – like Paul Rudolph for example, which would have also been great – I wanted to do something a little more strategically directed towards what I think we as a department and museum ought to be doing. It’s a more inclusive and revisionist approach to how we have understood modernism, which has been very eurocentric and North American-focused. There’s a lot of interesting research going on about Eastern Europe and in particular Yugoslavia. It’s a really under-studied field – especially in the United States, but also in Western Europe – and it’s interesting as a pre-history to globalisation, because Yugoslavia has a unique position between the Eastern Bloc and the Western world, capitalism and communism. It’s sort of a third way, right? So I was interested in exploring how these specific socio-political and economic conditions shape design culture. I’m doing this with Vladimir Kulić as a co-curator and we have a team of about 10, so it’s a big project.
Alexandra Did you feel like you had to choose a certain
kind of object to work in that context? Things that were by famous people? Things that were iconic? Martino There is always the problem of the canon and the need to represent it. So it was clear to me that we needed to have some Mies van der Rohe in there, we needed have some Andy Warhol, but we also deliberately tried to open the horizon and push artists and designers who are not part of the canon. That’s easier in other departments than it is in architecture and design, because design is a completely singular story. Very often designers are not even famous: there are great objects that were collaborative efforts between people. For example, look at 1967 and the radical Italian landscape — many of these people aren’t terribly famous, but their objects are iconic.
Alexandra The recently reinstalled galleries
dedicated to the 1960s incorporate architecture and design along with painting, sculpture and other disciplines. How did you approach that and how do you see architecture and design speaking within it? Martino That exhibition is an experiment rather than a model for future undertakings. The idea was to form an interdisciplinary team and test out how far we could go in bringing together all the media represented in our collection. This was not an easy task because it’s actually difficult to find a common language that applies to painting as it does to design. We thought about thematic issues and about art-historical categories, none of which worked. So we eventually decided on a straight
Alexandra Are there things in the show that haven’t
been exhibited before? Things that were kept in the vault because they didn’t fit into the story? Martino Many things. There is a film by Kenneth Anger from 1965 that is very colourful, in which you see a young man in a light-yellow suit polishing a car. It’s very sexually charged. Anger is a West Coast artist who we’ve had in the collection but has never been shown. Strangely, even something like the model
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Stierli photographed in MoMA’s fourth-floor galleries devoted to displaying works from the 1960s. The exhibits are drawn from across the museum’s archives and curatorial departments.
Interview
Moore’s ideas are solid and sensible – in particular the need to intensify London’s low-density suburbs and build up dreary arterial roads lined with 1930s semis. A searching eye should be cast over green-belt land. Rubber-stamp planning departments require new hands and a new mission. He concludes on a hopeful note: “There are reasons to think that London can direct itself better. The campaigns by Richard Rogers and others for better
To put it more crudely: yes, architects can make the city nicer and better. In doing so, they will make it more desirable, attract more people, drive up investment returns and make everything worse. design and public realm have left the importance of such things written into policy, into the behaviour of property companies and into the job descriptions of public officials.” Here, however, the wheels of the modern London paradox start to turn – the horrible contradiction within any architectural prescriptions for the city. This haunts Slow Burn City – possibly explaining the constant qualifying and hedging in the prose, the subject-changing – but never really comes into view. The runaway investment boom in London has, in part, been driven by architecture and design. It’s not just because of the tired old “creative cities” idea that investors and wealthy people are attracted to places with vibrant art and design scenes, although that plays a part. It’s in that line about the behaviour of the property companies: they, and the agents of property, and the politicians and newspapers that smile upon their work, have become immensely skilled at harnessing architecture and design for the purposes of ramping up value. To put it more crudely: yes, architects can make the city nicer and better. In doing so, they will make it more desirable, attract more people, drive up investment returns and make everything worse. No one
is doing anything wrong, but everything continues to go wrong. When Moore points to recent London architecture he likes, such as Eric Parry’s Aldermanbury Square building at London Wall (a genteel, Stirling-nominated office block completed in 2007), he has not found a solution, but merely a place where the problem is less offensive. And I think he might see that, because he havers and mutters around what has actually been achieved by Parry: “This is a building with little desire to challenge the status quo, but to make the most of it. Which, often, is the role architecture plays: it serves the power and money that created it and cannot without hypocrisy pretend otherwise, but can work on, negotiate and expand the interactions with the people who use and experience it.” The problem is the logic of growth itself. Ten million by 2030 – OK, let’s work to address that. But what comes next? Twelve million? Twenty? Is there an upper limit? What is the alternative? Make the city a nastier place to live, in the hope of blowing off some of the froth? In bleak moments it’s tempting to play with the idea – Berlin has some hardcore anti-gentrification and anti-tourism movements. But a good city is also a welcoming city, one that says, come. Pulling up the drawbridge just creates sharp new divisions of have
and have not. One thing is made painfully clear by this brave and entertaining, albeit muddled, book: architecture doesn’t have the solution. It might even be part of the problem. Slow Burn City: London in the Twenty-First Century by Rowan Moore is published by Picador, £20.
Eric Parry’s Aldermanbury Square building at London Wall.
80
Return to Sarajevo Words Oli Stratford Photographs Fabian Frinzel
It has been more than 20 years since the breakup of Yugoslavia, yet Bosnia and Herzegovina remains locked in the devastation caused by the resultant war. Now, however, a design-led resurrection of the nation’s former furniture industry is beginning to serve as a mechanism for social change.
Travelogue
Bijela Tabija, the rumoured birthplace of Sarajevo, sits in the foothills of the Dinaric Alps. It was built in the medieval period as a fortress, a bastion for the forested valley out of which the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina grew in the 15th century. Today, Bijela Tabija is a ruin, the surrounding scrubland given over to goats, but from its foundations Sarajevo remains visible in its entirety, advancing east to west along the brown Miljacka river. Below the fortress is the old town, the site of the Baščaršija marketplace. It’s a labyrinthine blend of the authentic and touristic – the stone mosque courtyards are old, the shisha bars new – and woven throughout are coppersmiths and souvenir stalls that muster enough sense of the souk to bespeak the region’s 15th- through 19th-century existence under the Ottomans. As Baščaršija opens onto Ferhadija Street, the 19th and early-20th centuries appear, bringing with them the dominion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A compass motif in the pavement reads “East/West: Sarajevo Meeting of Cultures” and the bazaar backs away, ceding ground to the Viennese townhouses that make up the midtown. Spot the neo-orientalist Vijećnica city hall, replete with its facade of Moorish mille-feuille, or the grand secessionist residences stately in soft pastels. Yet the Austro-Hungarians don’t have it their own way for long. Continue west and up rises socialism, the townhouses thinning out for the great, grey sleeper blocks that line the avenue to the airport. These are the remnants of Yugoslavia, the now-dissolved state that Bosnia served as a constituent republic of for much of the 20th century. Seen from Bijela Tabija, the architecture reads as a timeline. Sarajevo is a self‑excavating city, carving itself into sedimentary layers that reveal an urbanist’s syncretic history of Bosnia. It’s a settlement whose architecture flows in tandem with its past. Further blurring of time and space occurs up close in Sarajevo’s built environment. Near to the sleeper blocks is the History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a monolith designed by Boris Magaš, Edo Šmidihen and Radovan Horvat that opened in 1963. The structure is a feat of modernism, its two rectangular stone volumes kept apart by a glazed central atrium, above which the building cantilevers precariously. The architecture is beautiful, but damaged. The roof has decayed and the concrete is pockmarked, shot through with bullets and shell damage from the
A view down one of the narrow sidestreets in Sarajevo’s Ottoman old town.
heavy fighting that occurred more than 20 years ago during the Siege of Sarajevo. Between April 1992 and February 1996, the city was held hostage to sniper fire and prolonged shelling in one of the chief military operations of the war that arose between the region’s Bosniak, Serb and Croat ethnic groups. It is a war that left 100,000 dead and which saw genocide committed on European soil for the first time since the Holocaust. Its effects are still visible everywhere in the city. “I remember how this building once looked,” says Amar Karapuš, one of the History Museum’s curators. “So its present state is hard to take.” The effect of the war has been well-documented, yet the difficulty Karapuš describes is not so much the destruction it wrought, but rather the sense of stasis it continues to represent. “What you’ve got to understand about Bosnia is that there was a war 82
“We used to have really big industrial systems. Now we’re starting again. In the last few years it’s started to come alive.” —Salih Teskeredžić
The Festina Lente bridge over the Miljacka River. The bridge is in front of Sarajevo’s Academy of Fine Arts.
Travelogue
In both cases, the private sphere relied upon the backing of the public. Not so in Bosnia. “The greatest obstacle so far – and I think this will be the same in the future – has been the state institutions,” says Custovic. “We still have not received any support from the Ministry of Industry and Entrepreneurship and institutions such as the Foreign Trade Chamber do not respond to our letters. With this inaction and lack of understanding for my and similar business models, they could keep Bosnia and Herzegovina at the bottom of any scale that indicates a state’s success.” So where does this leave design in the country? One answer lies back in the hills of Sarajevo, in the Koševo neighbourhood close to Bijela Tabija. It’s here in the north of the city that you find Asim Ferhatović Hase Stadium, a devil’s punchbowl of an arena that is sunk into the hillside. Next door is Parents’ House, a new facility opened in April to provide accommodation for the families of children being treated for cancer at the Sarajevo children’s hospital. It’s a simple, white-clad building, whose four floors jut over and under one another at jolly angles, with coloured panels glinting in the bedroom windows. “Its a place where parents and kids who are not from the city can come and live for however long the treatment lasts,” says Emir Salkić, the founder of the Sarajevo-based practice Normal Arhitektura and the architect behind Parents’ House. “In the past, if the families were from another city, then on top of their child being sick they had to pay for accommodation in Sarajevo. We needed something for them.” Salkić leads a tour of the house. Each room is bright and friendly, each designed by a different local designer or artist. In some rooms the beds become vast moveable forts, whereas in others the space is themed around animals or the sea. An open-plan communal area fills the ground floor, while the roof houses a small community garden. “How easy is it to be a designer or an architect in Bosnia?” asks Salkić. “I would like to rephrase that question: ‘How hard is it to be a designer or an architect in Bosnia?’ We received some state funding to create Parents’ House, but not as much as there should have been. In fact, funding only started when we began to build it – not before – and we still don’t have sufficient funding to be self-sustaining. There is no governmental organisation in Bosnia that covers architects or designers, so the problem is political. To change that is a long process.”
Yet Parents’ House still exists; its presence in Sarajevo is a reminder that design is growing in the country, as well as a symbol of the positive social effects that it might have here. “You have to be a self-starter in Bosnia, but that doesn’t mean that things can’t happen,” says Salkić. “In 2001, a Bosnian film, No Man’s Land, won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Before that, there was no funding for cinema in Bosnia – and now there is. When somebody makes something good, the politicians start to see the potential. And that’s true of all aspects of society. It’s true of sport, it’s true of film. And it can be true of design.” E N D
Sarajevo, May 2016.
96
An Experiment in Sitting Five structures by Konstantin Grcic for Galerie Kreo
Photographs Florian Böhm Art Direction Annahita Kamali Styling Nicholas Galletti Dancer Adrien Dantou Photography Assistant Vanni Bassetti Location Galerie Kreo, Paris Gallery
The act of sitting has been berated of late, with several reports suggesting that sedentary lifestyles have a far worse effect on our health than previously thought. It was perhaps no surprise to Konstantin Grcic, a designer who has never been a fan of comfort for comfort’s sake. Through projects such as the 360° chair for Magis, Grcic has tried to dispel the myth of the comfortable chair form. Instead, he pushes for an alternative form of more active sitting. In Hieronymus, an exhibition at Galerie Kreo in Paris, Grcic has further explored the process of sitting through a series of five structures that straddle furniture design and miniature architecture. The starting point of this experimentation was an Antonello da Messina painting from the late 15th century that Grcic has long admired. It shows Saint Jerome in his study, an enclosed space conceived for the purpose of reflection that shields him from the external world. Similarly Grcic’s designs – executed in five different materials and techniques – support, embrace, and distrupt the body in equal measure. Here, the dancer Adrien Dantou was invited to reflect, Munari-esque, on Grcic’s structures through physical engagement. 98
Antonello da Messina, Saint Jerome in his Study Š The National Gallery, London.
Gallery
The angled seat and footrest of Hieronymus Minero is made from a composite material of concrete and resin developed specially for this piece. Limited edition of eight pieces. Jumper dress by Maison Margiela, trousers by Missoni, trainers by Tommy Hilfiger.
Gallery