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Disegno.

No.2

Central Saint Martins Craft Fetishism Paulo David K2S Architects Tadashi Kawamata New Domestic Landscapes Harri Koskinen Look, Animals! Murray Moss Miuccia Prada Palmer Harding Elsa Schiaparelli Giambattista Valli Inga SempĂŠ

UK ÂŁ12.00

162

On being

A creative cookbook

Murray Moss has moved

INTRODUCTION

HAUTE COUTURE

Giambattista �alli on his �irst of�icial haute couture collection

COMMENTARY

2011 was the start of a new century

NEW APPOINTMENT

Harri Koskinen is the new design director at Iittala

SELECTED READING

Konstantin Grcic shares his reading list

NEW WAVE

The new design brands are moving in

LOOK, ANIMALS!

THE POLITICS OF SENSE AND SENSIBILITY

Paulo �avid’s in�luence on Madeira

THE MOVE

Has Central Saint Martins settled in?

ITALY: THE NEW DOMESTIC LANDSCAPE

An exhibition with a lasting legacy turns 40

TAKE SHELTER

An architectural type under investigation

108

NEW START

166

COLLECTION

The art of the shirt

168

Contents

Forecast

Features

Exposé 9

NEW BUILD

A room for contemplation by K2S architects

170

MEMORIAL

Tadashi Kawamata builds a tower of tsunami debris

172

EXPERIMENT

Wood like you’ve never seen it before.

176

STOCKISTS

IMPOSSIBLE CONVERSATIONS

Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada are the subjects of a new exhibition

124

“I LIKE SCREWS”

Inga Sempé in her own words

140

CRAFT FETISHISM

Why we yearn for long-lost craftsmanship

153

PAPER SECTION

The winners of Fedrigoni’s Top Application Awards 2011

Disegno. 13

Having been a guest for one season, he joined the official ranks on 16 December 2011 when his ”appellation” was announced by the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture. >

PHOTOS ALEXIS DAHAN

Exposé

The institution of haute couture is well guarded. There are currently only 11 official members and the Italian-born, Parisbased fashion designer Giambattista Valli was the last to be accepted into this rare circle.

14 Disegno. EXPOSÉ

Backstage at the Giambattista Valli spring/summer 2012 Haute Couture show on 23 January 2012 in Paris.

EXPOSĂ‰

Disegno. 15

Haute couture

tempting to look to Valli’s early education in his native Rome’s Vatican schools for the inﬂuences. Because although Valli’s creations reveal quite a lot more than the religious robes of the Vatican, there is something ceremonial about the stiff coats, jackets and skirts that he crafts so eloquently. The concept of haute couture feels prehistoric in an era where the cost of clothing has plummeted and the availability has never been greater. The time and expense spent on these rarities feel surreal in the depth of an economic crisis, but haute couture nevertheless serves as a crucial reminder of the value of clothing. It’s a commodity that we have learnt to take for granted, with an adverse affect on both the environment and the health of the people working with the mass production of clothing. Haute couture is like an organic,

> The recent spring/summer 2012 collection was his first in this capacity. Presented during the couture days in Paris in late January, it showcased the full spectrum of Valli’s craftsmanship from meticulously applied paillette patterning and embroidered floral flourishes to spectacular puffs of ruffled tulle. It’s a day after the show and Giambattista Valli’s showroom on Rue Boissy d’Anglas around the corner from Place de la Madeleine, is busy with “re-sees” – the term the fashion industry uses for looking at a collection up close, after it’s been shown on the catwalk. The looks, presented in the elegant Hôtel de Crillon the night before, are now deconstructed, with each piece carefully hung from gilded rails or placed on mirrored cubes, as is the case with the accessories by jewellery designer Luigi Scialanga. Valli is seeing clients who are being measured for the garments. After all, this is what haute couture is about; made-to-order clothing that requires a minimum of two fittings, created in a Parisian atelier by at least 15 full-time employees. It’s all laid out as law by the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture. One of the outfits from the collection, look number 35, is already destined to end up on the frame of a young Hollywood starlet at the Oscars a month later. It’s a good PR 16 Disegno. EXPOSÉ

stunt for any fashion brand. Valli’s first official collection was an ode to his education in the higher echelons of fashion and a celebration of the craftsmanship that he has available in his atelier. The pieces relied on an array of couture techniques, making it an evidently labour-intensive collection, sparing no expense to impress its delight at being tagged “haute couture”. Sculptural or floral embellishments were built up from macramé knotting techniques, or elaborate and sometimes gem-encrusted embroidery. Silk, muslin, and lace were the dominant fabrics. Moving from daywear to evening, the palette went from purest white to black and deep pink and from carefully structured and quite strict to more anarchic fluid shapes. When Valli works with structured volume, he is at his most interesting, and it’s

fair-trade version – you know that each piece is produced with only the best quality materials and by workers who are paid a decent salary. It is an art form that very few ateliers can afford or have the skill to perform. It’s a rarity, that for its very exclusivity and the historic skill that it supports should be protected, as Valli, excitedly proclaimed after the show: “Haute couture ateliers should be declared UNESCO heritage sites.” Studying one of his outfits up-close it is easy to understand where he’s coming from. From a distance one of the flowing long gowns looks like it’s simply printed with small flowers on a black background, but in factthe whole dress is covered in sequins creating the flower shapes, each and every one applied individually by hand.

Johanna Agerman Ross (see p. 10)

PHOTOS ALEXIS DAHAN

The time and expense spent on these rarities feel surreal in the depth of an economic crisis, but haute couture nevertheless serves as a crucial reminder of the value of clothing.

This crisp white dress suit has a waistband of embroidered flowers. Opposite: Valli puts the finishing touches to the outfit.

EXPOSÉ

Disegno. 17

Our current architectural era is being defined by a relentless over-layering of communication-rich information spaces on top of the familiar physical spaces of the architects’ domain. Events during the past year confirm that something strange is happening. It is the result of subtle, seemingly innocuous, technological advancements, all of which architects are well aware of, but to date have shown little interest in. We can now hardly imagine lived space being any other way. Walking down the street with my eyes glued to Google Maps, following the little blue dot on the screen of my phone, tweeting to friends that I’ve arrived, even though they will see me entering the lobby 30 seconds later, typing this piece while tracking incoming emails, checking the weather, listening to the news and waiting for my next Spotify recommendations – if I can’t do all of this, then I’m living in the past, in a time when all this stuff could not be experienced while simultaneously encountering the space of a room, a building or a city plaza, layer upon layer of the real, the architectural and the virtual. In 2011, a tipping point was reached. I know this because I can check it on the devices I carry with me while walking through cities. And while our portable and social worlds evolved, our physical one failed. Three examples will illustrate my point. This was the year in which Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Abu Dhabi was put on ice, at the announcement in August that even Abu Dhabi’s wealthy local economy can no longer sustain building museums the size of airports. Also in 2011, Rem Koolhaas’s gravity-defying CCTV headquarters (pictured) was “opened” in an urgent, worldwide press release, issued not by the commissioning client, the Chinese government, but by the architects who designed it, OMA. The Chinese had in fact declared the building officially open years earlier, even though it was under construction – indicating a wilful suppression of the publicity potential for the opening of a global architectural icon. So OMA chose last December for its own “opening” of the building to showcase the final completion. And 2011 saw the failure of modern architecture with the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan. After the devastating earthquake and tsunami in March – the effects of which overwhelmed the design of the reactor that was supposed to protect people from the consequences of just such an occurrence – we were left wondering if these kinds of failure could be seen as anything other than architectural? The planning and design work was undertaken by the American multinational practice General Electric, which was also responsible for delivering the safety and security standards of the reactor buildings. These standards were intended to keep the events of last March (including partial or full meltdown of the reactors) from ever occurring. In even this cursory glance of architecture in its most celebrated, sponsored or expert forms, 2011 would seem a very bad year. All three examples demonstrate a failure during the creation of what was once (back in the 20th century) imagined to be our most advanced cultural, symbolic, and engineered form of design. Namely, architecture. And all three failures, we might note, struggled to align with the contemporary global realities. Yet, compare these failures to three examples of how the appropriation of built, urban space can

18 Disegno. EXPOSÉ

demonstrate the architectural reality of the world we live in. In each case they were the result of overlaying of physical architectural space with new communication technologies. In January 2011, a few thousand protesters in Tahrir Square quickly mushroomed into more than a quarter of a million people, who occupied the square in Cairo, leading to a stunning and swift demise of a regime that had for decades dictated every aspect of Egyptian lives. What enabled this particular event was the use of Facebook and other social media platforms, where participants, observers and combatants coordinated their messages and aims. Then, in September 2011, the occupiers of a small, little known park in lower Manhattan – Zuccotti Park – offered a different sort of message, spread like a viral video on You Tube (already a prominent channel for disseminating the messages surrounding the movement). The Occupy movement was given life in the preceding months by a carefully planned online promotion originating in the hands of a Canadian anti-advertising and anticonsumer media company, Adbusters (which has since

We have already contributed to this new reality (as we click between links, blinks and messages) whose primary form is invisible. done battle with certain protesters to lay claim to the name and ownership of the movement), which says as much as any commentator might about the complex, contradictory realities of social unrest in advanced global economies today. A ﬁnal demonstration from 2011 of the consequences of our over-wiring of social and public life can be found much closer to the home of Disegno – I refer to the riots of last summer that began in a small neighbourhood in north London, but which quickly spread via social media across the city (and to other UK regions). Events unfolded on the screens of viewers

worldwide, with amorphous crowds of teenagers, young professionals, students and others caught up in moments of ransacking and shoplifting over a few nights last August. The self-proclaimed accomplishments (or unplanned failures) of architecture’s big names or trading concerns can be contrasted with the above three 2011 events to show us how unpredictable our new era of information-based architectural space will be, and under the control of many more people than the architects normally assumed to be the masters of such domains. What we as architects must admit when confronted with a change like this – no longer merely the stuff of science fiction or cultural premonition – is that we have all already contributed to the building of this new reality (which we do every day, as we click between a world of links, blinks and messages), whose primary form of experience is invisible. For a field like architecture, which has long assumed its form to be the most visible in the world, there’s plenty of challenge ahead. The events of 2011 confirm that cities, like their spaces, structures and buildings, may not look so different, but they will behave in evermore challenging ways. As one final reminder, we should recall that it was also in 2011 that the great exhibition Metabolism: The City Of The Future opened at the Mori Art Museum, atop one of Tokyo’s shining skyscrapers. Perhaps the greatest architectural exhibition of our time, it highlighted the short-lived experiments of maybe the last, great modernist movement dedicated to imagining the future of cities. That the show itself was held as a blockbuster museum event, 30 years after the end of the Japanese Metabolism movement, only confirms the degree to which architecture as we know it – even in the work of its most forward-looking protagonists – is truly a thing of the past. Welcome to architecture’s future – finally here and available for crowds of all kinds to experience (if not easily see) – in this, the first year of a new century.

Brett Steele is the director of the Architectural Association School of Architecture. He is also the series editor of Architecture Words and a writer on architectural culture, cities and design.

PHOTO IWAN BAAN

Commentary

2011 saw physical space overtaken by social pace.

The opening of the CCTV headquarters in Beijing was announced by its architects, OMA, last December, rather than the client.

EXPOSĂ‰

Disegno. 19

PHOTO GEORGE HOYNINGEN-HUENÉ, COURTESY OF THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, HOYNINGEN-HUENÉ/VOGUE/CONDÉ NAST ARCHIVE

Elsa Schiaparelli photographed by George Hoyningen-Huené in 1932. Opposite: Miuccia Prada in 1999 photographed by Guido Harari.

108 Disegno. IMPOSSIBLE CONVERSATIONS

Impossible conversations

The Met’s spring exhibition at the Costume Institute in New York has become a staple in the fashion calendar. This year, the subject is the ﬁctional conversations between two Italian fashion designers Miuccia Prada and Elsa Schiaparelli. Here, one of the the exhibition’s curators talks about the ideas behind the show.

PHOTO GUIDO HARARI, COURTESY OF THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, GUIDO HARIRI/CONTRASTO/REDUX

WORDS Andrew Bolton

IMPOSSIBLE CONVERSATIONS

Disegno. 109

Miuccia Prada Bianchi (b. 1949) is an Italian fashion designer and entrepreneur. After gaining a PhD in Political Science, she reluctantly entered into the Prada family’s business of manufacturing luxury leather bags. In 1989, Prada designed her ﬁrst women’s ready-to-wear collection to critical acclaim and in 1992, she debuted the more affordable Miu Miu (Prada’s nickname).

French for “deceive the eye”, trompe l’oeil is an art technique involving realistic imagery in order to create the optical illusion that the depicted object appears in three dimensions.

Christian Dior (1905–57) was a French fashion designer and founder of the eponymous fashion house, now owned by the luxury conglomerate LVMH.

110 Disegno. IMPOSSIBLE CONVERSATIONS

Despite their predilection for provocation, Schiaparelli and Prada are both notoriously reserved. In fact, it’s their shyness that imbues the conversations presented in the exhibition with their poignancy. Presented as a series of videos directed by Australian �ilm director Ba� �uhrmann , the viewer is placed in the role of voyeur, illicitly observing and eavesdropping on the private thoughts of the two women. Their intimacy, however, belies the arti�ice of the exhibition’s premise – a series of �ictional conversations between two women separated by time. These �ictional conversations are based around two concepts that are central to the understanding and appreciation of fashion – namely that of chic and that of the body.

Chic is generally associated with a consensus of fashionability. Schiaparelli and Prada, however, challenge this consensus through subversive, countercultural associations. Three ideas of chic, as articulated by the two designers, are presented in the exhibition. The �irst is �ard Chic comprising designs that reference menswear, military and service uniforms, and industrial materials and fastenings applied with deliberate severity and sobriety. The second is Ugly Chic, and focuses on materials with colours and patterns in discordant combinations that both Schiaparelli and Prada exploit for their unappealing sensibilities. The third is Naif Chic which takes the sugary sweetness of children’s wear and transposes it somewhat disconcertingly to the “not-so-young”.

In terms of the body, the expressive possibilities are limitless, but, again, we chose three ideas that emerge directly from the fertile imaginations of the two designers. The �irst, the Classical Body, alludes to Schiaparelli and Prada’s engagement with antiquity, especially the opposition of Dionysian and Apollonian ideals; that is to say wild, visceral, and ornate on the one hand, and cerebral, restrained, and classicist on the other. The second, the Exotic Body, cites the two women’s attraction to traditions outside the European fashion system, speci�ically references to the styles of Asia and Africa. The third is the Surreal Body which examines how both designers circumvent conventional meanings of dress to assert sexual and psychological connotations through trompe l’oeil3 illusions and unexpected juxtapositions of materials and imagery.

While the themes in the show re�lect shared interests between Schiaparelli and Prada, the conversations often reveal strikingly different intentions, in�luences, and design strategies. Repeatedly, the themes serve as foils to the conversations, which frequently foreground the distinctive philosophies of the two women. �isual af�inities between the fashions of Schiaparelli and Prada often turn out to be deceptive, as both designers articulate radically different design methodologies. This paradox is played out in the fashions on display here, such as the two “sari dresses” (p. 114-115) . While they share formal similarities, the source of inspiration is manifestly different. Schiaparelli’s orange “sari dress” was inspired by the 14-year-old Indian princess Karam of Kapurthala, who enthralled Paris during the 1930s with her striking beauty. Prada’s gold “sari dress” was inspired by Christian Dior4. It was featured in her spring 2004 collection, which was based on the concept of the European traveller who experiences the countries he or she visits from a strictly European perspective, hence Prada’s citation of a “sari dress” seen through the eyes of a European designer. Unlike Schiaparelli’s exoticism, which tends to be direct and literal, Prada’s is more circuitous and conceptual. When she references other cultures, it’s usually a vehicle to express a complex idea or to present a personal narrative. >

1 Elsa Schiaparelli (1890-1973) was an Italian fashion designer who lived and worked in Paris and New York. She started out in the fashion business in 1926 and ﬁnally closed her fashion house in 1954. However, Schiaparelli was a self-taught designer as she had studied philosophy at the University of Rome.

airing Elsa Schiaparelli1 and Miuccia Prada2 for this exhibition originally emerged out of rather super�icial similarities, such as their gender, their Italian birthright, and their feminist posturings. Over the course of organising the exhibition, however, more fundamental similarities emerged. For both Schiaparelli and Prada, fashion is a means to express rather complex ideas; ideas that not only re�lect but also respond to the prevailing artistic, cultural, and political attitudes of their respective eras. At the same time, both designers use fashion as a vehicle to provoke, to confront normative conventions of taste, beauty, glamour and femininity.

Wallis Simpson in Elsa Schiaparelli, British Vogue, July 10, 1935.

IMPOSSIBLE CONVERSATIONS

Disegno. 111

“I like screws” The French designer Inga Sempé was guest of honour at this year’s Stockholm Furniture Fair. There, she staged one of the week’s most interesting and beautiful exhibitions – a display of sketches and miniature models of her work. Here, she writes her account of the process of making some of her most celebrated designs. INTRODUCTION Johanna Agerman Ross OBJECT TEXTS Inga Sempé PHOTOS Linus Ricard

124 Disegno. "I LIKE SCREWS"

"I LIKE SCREWS"

Disegno. 125

s 1 The Österlen chair and table launched in 2011 and is produced by Swedish furniture producer Gärsnäs (see p. 134).

The Ruché sofa is produced by French furniture manufacturer Ligne Roset. It launched in 2010 and a bed in the same range launched in 2011 (see p. 136).

Lighting company Wästberg launched W103c in 2010 (see. p.128) and a pendant light in the same series launched in February this year called W103s.

Italian furniture manufacturer Edra made the Brosse shelf in 2003.

READING LIST Inga Sempé by Johanna Agerman, ICON 083, May 2010, iconeye.com Inga Sempé – Illuminated by Wästberg with an introduction by Daniel Golling, WÄSTBERG 2012

wollen and yellow, the winter sun hangs low in the sky, bouncing its rays off the new February snow. It’s painfully bright as every frost-bitten tree branch, snow-covered bush and car roof re�lect the light. �It’s a beautiful day,� concludes Inga Sempé as she sips her morning coffee at Hotel Skeppsholmen in central Stockholm. She’s alone and she looks content. It’s the �ifth day of Stockholm Design Week and the French designer, who is in the Swedish capital as the Guest of Honour of the Stockholm Furniture Fair, is about to pack her bags to go back to Paris. But only after making one last stop – a visit to the Old Town to buy a traditional Swedish sailor-suit dress for her three-year old daughter. It’s navy blue with three rows of white ribbons around the square collar and it comes with a matching bag with an anchor emblem. Nothing could be further away from the week’s many launches of furniture and design products. But then again, despite being one of contemporary design’s most interesting names, design doesn’t interest Sempé very much. Her own apartment is sparsely furnished and her favourite haunts are the �lea markets, second-hand shops and hardware stores of her native Paris.

Being the Guest of Honour at the Stockholm Furniture Fair is a double-edged privilege, because while cementing her status and raising her prospects of getting more commissions, she is also expected to give talks and countless interviews, none of which she enjoys very much. In addition, she is doing a large-scale installation at the fairgrounds and for Sempé this means hands-on involvement. Despite setting up on her own in 2000, her studio still takes up the living room of her apartment and she has just two part-time employees. So the logistics of putting on an exhibition of this size uses up all available resources and time. The display is a 160 sq/m area at the fair’s entrance, competing with information desks, hot-dog stands and newsagents. To avoid this visual noise, Sempé has enclosed the space with a white, translucent fabric, creating a Sempé oasis of Österlen wooden chairs and tables1, the Ruché sofas2 upholstered in bright green and light-blue fabrics, the mushroom-pink desk light W103c3 and Brosse shelves4 with long bristles concealing each shelf. It’s a showcase that proves that Sempé is at the top of her game and rising. But that’s not her only undertaking this week. The view from the breakfast room where Inga is peacefully sipping her coffee is of a peculiar building. It’s called the ice-skating pavilion, but looks more like a miniature castle with a steep roof, turrets and decorative brick work. It’s a remnant of Sweden of old, before design was one of its most famous exports and when an ice-skating craze swept over these shores via the French Emperor Napoleon III and his wife Eugénie in the 1860s. The Swedish Royal skating club was founded in 1866 and in 1882 this permanent pavilion, by architect Adolf Emil Melander was erected. It speaks of class and division, something which the mostly Social Democratic government, has tried to eradicate over the course of the 20th century. Nowadays, this bijou building is used for conferences and parties and on this particular morning it is the venue of a second French vogue – another Sempé exhibition, presented by the Swedish lighting company Wästberg. Smaller in scale than the Stockholm Furniture Fair installation – all the exhibits are scale models, drawings and material samples, the pieces �it into rooms reminiscent of a dolls’ house – it has an intimate feel and it puts the sleek, �inished pieces at the fair into perspective.

126 Disegno. "I LIKE SCREWS"

It is this, that Disegno asked Inga Sempé to reveal in the following texts. Curious about language and the use of words, sharply intelligent and always observant, Sempé has a succinct and humorous way of describing her ideas. Indeed, if she wasn’t a designer, she thinks she might have become a script writer. >

Inga SempĂŠ works with two assistants in her Paris studio.

Disegno #2