Disegno.
No.5
Kumbh Mela Donald Judd Mary Katrantzou Erik Madigan Heck UN North Delegates Lounge Paul Smith Marloes ten Böhmer Cohen and Van Balen Industrial Facility Richard Siegal Claesson Koivisto Rune Wieki Somers Gareth Pugh
UK £15 EU €18 US $28
Disegno.
No.5
A/W 2013-14 EDITOR-IN-CHIEF PUBLISHER
COVER
CREATIVE DIRECTOR
WORDS BY
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Anna Holden
EDITORIAL INTERN
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10 Disegno.
Photograph by Giles Price of a sadhu encircled by his ritual offering at Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, February 2013.
Peter Ballantine, Sebastian Bergne, Zowie Broach, Sarah Frater, Lori Marie Gibbs, Edwin Heathcote, Erik Madigan Heck, Kasia Jezowska, Ayesha Kapila, Mary Katrantzou, Magnus Larsson, Pete Maxwell, Rahul Mehrotra, Jacob Moss, Giles Price, Marcus Agerman Ross, Zoë Ryan. IMAGES BY
Michael Bodiam, Elspeth Diederix, Christopher Patrick Ernst, Erik Madigan Heck, Anthony Gerace, Hillary Goidell, Alexander Kent, Ben Murphy, Giles Price, Frank Oudeman, Linus Ricard, Kalle Sanner, Paul Smith, Chris Tang, Sonny Vandevelde. THANK YOU
To all the residents of 283 Kingsland Road for your patience during the office refurbishment, Felix de Pass for the beautiful office design and your hard work, everyone at Dinesen for your kind support, James and his team at Roger Hyde, Robert Culverhouse, Wästberg, and Amorim Cork. In order to put this issue together we are very grateful for the help of Adam Taylor-Smith and Anna Holden, Michael Maharam, Madeleine Hoffmann, Siska Diddens, Jolanthe Kugler, Neil Conley, Hazel Cross and the Hackney Wick Hound. And finally, to all the people that made the Design Picnics possible: Richard Haughton, Jerome and Alexandre from DesignMarketo, Jacopo Sarzi, Martí Guixé, Claire Catterall, Karishma Rafferty, Iris Long and One Leicester Street. CONTENT COPYRIGHT
The content of this magazine belongs to Tack Press Limited and to the authors and artists. If you are tempted to reproduce any of it, please ask first. TACK PRESS LIMITED
Disegno has joined forces with men’s fashion magazine, Jocks&Nerds to form the publishing company Tack Press.
Exposé
The Shape of Things “Why design these containers, and why now?” asks Kim Colin, co-founder of London-based design studio Industrial Facility. Colin is reflecting on Formwork, Industrial Facility’s new collection of desk accessories. A set of cantilevered pots and trays, Formwork’s shapes nestle together to accommodate items ranging from tape to mugs, pens and USB drives. “I think part of the reason we did this is that desk accessories are often too expressive, or too cheap or overly precious,” says Colin. “Desk accessories are generally bereft of good design.” >
14 Disegno. THE SHAPE OF THINGS
The Formwork trays and pots are of different depths and sizes to accommodate items ranging from mugs to USB drives. PHOTOS Alexander Kent
THE SHAPE OF THINGS
Disegno. 15
Exposé
The interconnecting trays are designed so that they also work as standalone items.
> Formwork is a remedy to this. Like bento boxes for objects, its containers are shaped to accommodate a range of utensils and tools, with indentations in the surface acting as holders for keys and coffee cups. The designs are manufactured in neutral tones of durable plastic and rubber, with a high finish that belies their office accessory origins. “One thing I dislike,” says Colin, “is a kind of pseudowork aesthetic – the idea that people should look as though they are working because of what surrounds them. Life is not like that.” The series was designed by Colin and her Industrial Facility partner Sam Hecht for Herman Miller, the American office furniture brand that they have worked with since 2008. Like Herman Miller designers George Nelsen and Charles and Ray Eames before them, their task is to create designs that react to the evolving ways in which offices work. Formwork was unveiled in June at Chicago’s NeoCon trade fair, where it was shown alongside the studio’s Locale, an office system that promotes customisation through movable components. Just as Locale is designed around flexibility, so is the flexible interaction of Formwork’s pots and trays essential to the project. Slotting inside one another, the pieces create trays of varying depths and sizes, while nonetheless retaining their status as standalone designs. “With a storage system like Tupperware, each item looks as though it should stack and connect, so the system itself is constantly displayed,” says Hecht. “With Formwork we wanted to create a system whereby a pencil cup, a paper tray or a tissue box maintained a singular dignity, while also being able to connect to each other.” As the name suggests, Industrial Facility’s approach to design is no-nonsense. Despite the diverse projects the practice has taken on, an Industrial Facility product is always intuitive and always practical. Working with their 16 Disegno. THE SHAPE OF THINGS
in-house design team of Ippei Matsumoto and Philipp Von Lintel, Hecht and Colin have created designs ranging from the Branca chair for Mattiazzi, a wooden toy City in a Bag for Muji, and the multipurpose Jetlag clock for IDEA. Uniting all the projects is the thoroughness of the studio’s research. Throughout the design process, each object is debated by the team, its function and place in the world continually placed under the spotlight. Formwork was no exception
throughout the process of designing. Handcrafted models are generated at every stage, resulting in objects that, although industrially produced, are indelibly marked by the hand of the designer. But arriving at a design that combines the appropriate materials with the appropriate method of making is not a laborious search for something new. For Hecht and Colin, it is instead a consequence of striving to create in the most logical way possible. Their
“One thing I dislike is a kind of pseudowork aesthetic – the idea that people should look as though they are working because of what surrounds them.” to this, with the containers developed through study of the objects typically kept on desks. The penholder for instance, has a circumference exactly measured to hold a roll of tape as well. “We figured that if we built for those objects,” says Colin, “the rest would sit happily next to each other.” Hecht and Colin hold firm to a belief in industrial production, yet also value traditional craftsmanship. Industrial Facility relies on the manual skills of the studio
expertise lies in being able to adroitly reinvigorate something as banal as a desk accessory, an object whose demise would otherwise have surely been imminent.
•
Zoë Ryan is the chair of architecture and design at the Art Institute Chicago. She has also been appointed curator of the second Istanbul Design Biennial, to be held in October 2014. Formwork for Herman Miller is on display in Industrial Facility’s pop-up shop at 20 Britton Street during the London Design Festival from 17-20 September 2013.
1. PAPER CLIPS “For me, this is one of the most genius pieces of design, ever. Simple but perfect.” – Sir Paul Smith The modern paperclip is based upon a version developed by England’s Gem Manufacturing Company around 1890. An exercise in functional mechanics, the clip is formed from a double oval of elastic steel wire, with the two ovals working together to contain paper sheets slipped between them. As the ovals are forced apart by the paper, torsion in the wire’s bend causes them to grip together, while the elasticity of the steel allows the clip to later spring back into shape. Yet alongside this functionality, the paperclip has also served a symbolic purpose at one moment in history. When and where was this? A They were worn by Pittsburgh’s steel workers as a symbol of resistance during protests against the closure of the city’s steel mills during Pittsburgh’s deindustrialisation during the 1980s. B They were worn by Norwegians as a symbol of resistance to the Nazi occupation of the nation during the Second World War to denote solidarity and unity. The Norwegian word for paper clips closely resembles “binder”.
WATERCOLOUR PAUL SMITH STUDIO
C They were worn by German rocketeers at the beginning of the Cold War to communicate to one another whether they had been targeted by the USA’s Operation Paperclip in 1945, a plan to recruit Germany’s leading scientists.
42 Disegno. NINE MUNDANE BUT AMAZING ITEMS OF DESIGN
Workers perform the 75Â Watt dance in the Zhongshan City White Horse Factory against a backdrop of their usual products, electric kettles.
Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen travelled to the White Horse Factory in Zhongshan, China to stage a last dance for factory workers on the eve of the Third Industrial Revolution. WORDS Oli Stratford and Lori Marie Gibbs PHOTOS Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen
46 Disegno. 75 WATT IN THE PEARL RIVER DELTA
PHOTO GABBY LAURENT/SEBASTIAN TAREK BESPOKE SHOES
75 Watt in the Pearl River Delta
75 WATT IN THE PEARL RIVER DELTA
Disegno. 47
Z 1 Zhongshan City White Horse Electric Co., Ltd. is a large-scale electric kettle manufacturer established in 1996 in the Guangdong province in southeast China. Employing up to about 1000 people, it exports its products globally.
The South China Sea is in the western Pacific Ocean and borders the Southeast Asian mainland. One third of global shipping passes through its waters.
2
Revital Cohen (b. 1981) is an Israeli-born designer. She graduated with a Masters from the Design Interactions programme at the Royal College of Art in 2008, after completing a BA in Contemporary Furniture Design from Buckinghamshire New University.
3
Tuur Van Balen (b. 1981) is a Belgian designer who graduated with a Masters from the Design Interactions programme at the Royal College of Art in 2008, with previous BSc and MSc degrees in Industrial Design Engineering from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.
4
The Royal College of Art (RCA) in London is a university specialising in postgraduate courses in art and design. It was founded in 1837 and has had university status since 1967.
5
Anthony Dunne (b. 1964) is a British designer and
6
hongshan City White Horse Electric Company’s factory in southeast China makes kettles.1 Set near the coast of the South China Sea,2 the factory turns its raw materials into mass-manufactured electrical goods, shipping the results worldwide. Production at the White Horse is relentlessly efficient and embodies the industrial drive that has forged China’s reputation as the world’s factory. Yet, in March 2013, the factory hosted a dance.
For three days, the facility was transformed into a ballroom for 75 Watt, a performance piece by the London-based designers Revital Cohen3 and Tuur Van Balen.4 The project re-envisions the production process as an art piece, in which the White Horse’s workers create 40 copies of an electrical object through a choreographed dance. The workers’ movements are filmed by Cohen and Van Balen for posterity, yet the objects they create are functionless, their only reason for existence being to create the choreography of their own assembly. A study of mass manufacturing, 75 Watt questions the relationship between worker and object, and between automation and hand-craft. “At its root,” says Van Balen, “it is an examination of the tensions between biology and technology at the scale of the human body.”
Cohen and Van Balen met when both were studying on the Design Interactions MA at the Royal College of Art5 in 2006. Working under the tutelage of Anthony Dunne6 and Fiona Raby,7 the pair came to prominence as practitioners of critical design, their respective graduation projects demonstrating their potential. Cohen’s Artificial Biological Clock was a poignant glass and brass representation of the menstrual cycle, while Van Balen’s My City = My Body studied what the chemical composition of a urine sample might reveal about the area in which its provider lives. Further collaborations continued the biological slant of these early works. Pigeon d’Or (2011) created genetically-modified bacteria to make pigeons defecate soap to disinfect cities, while The Immortal (2012) linked a series of life-support machines together in a mimicry of an animal organism. By the time the pair formed their joint practice in 2012, their reputations were well established.
In the catalogue for the 2011 exhibition Talk to Me,8 curator Paola Antonelli defined critical designers as experts in “What if?” who create hypothetical objects that comment on the social, political and cultural ramifiations of new technologies and behaviours. While critical design’s history can be traced to the work of the Italian Radical Designers9 in the 1970s, it was only popularised and codified in the late 1990s by Dunne & Raby, the studio from which Cohen and Van Balen learned. Yet, while Dunne & Raby’s legacy was built on objects that speculate on nuclear war, biotechnology and food shortages, Cohen and Van Balen’s 75 Watt represents a departure for the discipline. “We’re going through an excruciating process of actually making real objects using the techniques of mass manufacture,” says Van Balen. Instead of probing >
48 Disegno. 75 WATT IN THE PEARL RIVER DELTA
Thespine project In-Ei, foldable textile The central runs the explored the with lampof shades designed by length the building tensions Issey Miyake forbetween Artemide. the galleries flanking it. workers and mechanisation in mass manufacture. Here, a worker helps to create the 75Â Watt object.
75 WATT IN THE PEARL RIVER DELTA
Disegno. 49
PHOTO GABBY LAURENT/SEBASTIAN TAREK BESPOKE SHOES
The fifth floor, or Five as Donald Judd referred to it, contains the sleeping quarters and the artwork Untitled, 1970 by Dan Flavin (far right). Other art works from left to right: Donald Judd, untitled, 1962; Claes Oldenburg, Soft Ceiling Lights at La Coupole, 1964-1972; Lucas Samaras, Box #48, 1966.
62 Disegno. 101 SPRING STREET
101 Spring Street Donald Judd’s cast-iron building in lower Manhattan opened to the public this summer following an extensive three-year exterior and interior restoration. Here, Peter Ballantine, one of Judd’s art fabricators, who earlier helped build parts of 101 Spring Street, reflects on the transformed space. WORDS Peter Ballantine PHOTOS Christopher Patrick Ernst
101 SPRING STREET
Disegno. 63
D 1 Donald Judd (1928-1994) was an American artist whose body of work ranged from paintings, to furniture, to large scale installations in the landscape. He worked between his home and studio in New York at 101 Spring Street and Marfa, Texas, his respite from hectic Manhattan. His work is known for its clarity of the constructed object and the space created by it.
The Whitney Museum of American Art was founded by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875-1942) in 1929. Originally housed in three converted houses in Greenwich Village, New York, the museum today is housed in a 1966 building designed by Marcel Breuer. With over 18,000 artworks in its permanent collection, the museum has been beset by space problems, leading to the construction of a new main building in the Meat Packing District designed by Renzo Piano that is expected to be completed in 2015.
2
The Leo Castelli Gallery was the eponymous art gallery founded by Leo Castelli (1907-1999) in Manhattan in 1957. It was the most prominent commercial art gallery globally from the late 1960s to the 1970s, showcasing artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Dan Flavin and Judd.
3
64 Disegno. 101 SPRING STREET
onald Judd1 bought 101 Spring Street in late 1968, when the building was 98 years old and he was 40. He moved there in early 1969, from 53 East 19th Street, a rented combined apartment and studio less than one-quarter as large.
Spring Street has five stories above ground and two basements, making a total area of 1,220sqm across the floors. In 1968 it cost $68,000, which was a lot of money then, especially for an artist. But Judd was boosted by the strength of positive critical reaction to his first career retrospective eight months earlier at the Whitney Museum2 in New York and, with support from his gallerist Leo Castelli,3 was able to complete the purchase. It was the first building Judd ever owned and buying it changed everything for him.
101 is a corner building set at the junction of Mercer Street to the west and Spring Street to the south. It has two plastered brick back walls, wooden floors supported by heavy timber beams, and two cast-iron facades that frame 65 windows. It was built in 1870 and designed by the architect Nicholas Whyte4 to house a ground floor showroom, with workshops and offices positioned below and above. Whyte built the structure in an area of the city razed and redeveloped following the Civil War5 and, as with many New York commercial buildings from the time, crafted the facades from cast-iron. The material could be used both structurally and decoratively. Iron’s strength in both tension and compression meant that wider horizontal spans and narrower vertical supports were possible than in stone or masonry, while the material could also be shaped into decorative elements such as acanthus leaves.6
The two most famous cast-iron buildings at the time were London’s Crystal Palace,7 first erected in Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition of 1851, and an 1853 New York version of the structure that was built in Reservoir Square as the centerpiece of another industrial exhibition.8 But without the 1848 development of cast plate glass, stronger and available in larger sizes than earlier forms of glass, neither of these structures would have been possible. Nor would Spring Street. Whyte exploited cast-iron close to the material’s limits, but his heavy use of plate glass, with sheets as wide as 1.95m on the ground floor, defined it. No other castiron building in New York compares to its high percentage of glass-to-iron-structure. Although its large windows were heavy, drafty and expensive, the amount of light they admitted, even in winter, felt modern.
Spring Street’s huge ground-floor display windows, separated by pencil-like columns, are combined with decreasing floor heights in the upper stories. But because of an attempt to maintain consistent window proportions, the windows higher up in the building become shorter and narrower, while the separating columns become wider. In this sense, Whyte’s building is upside-down – light supports heavy, and its masonry rises impossibly from thin >
A vintage children’s desk and chair by Alvar Aalto from the 1930s on the third floor of Spring Street.
101 SPRING STREET
Disegno. 65
86 Disegno. LEARNING FROM KUMBH MELA
Pilgrims flock to the Kumbh Mela to bathe in the Ganges river. Here is the Sangam main bathing area on the morning of 10 Feburary 2013, the main bathing day of the Kumbh Mela.
Learning from Kumbh Mela In January 2013 millions of pilgrims gathered in Allahabad, India for the Kumbh Mela. It is one of the world’s most spectacular events, yet out of what could be chaos emerges a highly organised and functioning temporary city. WORDS Rahul Mehrotra and Giles Price PHOTOS Giles Price
LEARNING FROM KUMBH MELA
Disegno. 87
M
uch of the popular literature on the Kumbh Mela treats the festival as a spectacle of huge crowds and religious fervour, documented by familiar images of exotic sadhus rushing to bathe. It is an image fostered by the event’s scale. The Kumbh Mela is a mass Hindu pilgrimage and the largest public gathering in the world, seeing millions of people congregate once every three years to bathe in India’s sacred rivers.
Yet beyond this literature, what is even more fascinating about the event is the mechanism of the city that supports this incredible spectacle. The Kumbh Mela is a massive human undertaking that involves the government at all levels, as well as civil society and religious organisations. To support the influx of pilgrims, a temporary megacity is constructed, complete with all the necessary infrastructure. It is a huge undertaking, and one that is yet to be mapped and analysed in a systematic way. With this objective in mind, in 2012 the South Asia Institute at Harvard University assembled an interdisciplinary team from various schools at the University, with the intention of sending students and faculty members to Allahabad to camp at the 2013 Kumbh Mela site for eight days. While there, they observed and mapped the phenomenon. To support itself, the Kumbh Mela deploys what is in effect a pop-up city. It consists of roads, bridges, tents of many different sizes, and an array of other temporary buildings constructed from bamboo and cloth that house social infrastructure such as clinics, hospitals and social centres, all of which replicate the functions of an actual city. The megacity seamlessly integrates layers of infrastructure and urban flows to serve the approximately 6 million people who gather for 55 days (the duration of the 2013 festival) as well as an additional influx of 10 to 20Â million who come for cycles of 24 hours on the main bathing dates. This settlement is laid out on a grid, constructed and then taken down again within a matter of weeks, after which the ground on which the temporary city sits reverts to agricultural use. Within this grid, multiple aspects of contemporary urbanism come into play, including spatial zoning, an electricity system, food and water distribution, public health programmes, public spaces, and night-time social events. Pontoon bridges connecting opposite banks of the rivers, iron plates forming streets, and cotton tents serving as residences or venues for spiritual meetings are just some of the ephemeral components that help to create this spectacular temporary city.
The goal of the pilgrims is to bathe at the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers, but even this act is organised into a larger procession, where pilgrims are given specific times and opportunities to bathe, determined by the sect and community group to which they belong, so as to facilitate crowd management. >
88 Disegno. LEARNING FROM KUMBH MELA
The Kumbh Mela is a Hindu mass pilgrimage where sadhus play a key role. Here is an unknown sadhu pilgrim.
LEARNING FROM KUMBH MELA
Disegno. 89
The first series of photographs that Erik Madigan Heck created of Mary Katrantzou’s work was in 2010 and was called Surrealist Planes.
132 Disegno. VISUAL PLAY, ELECTRONIC EXCHANGE
Visual Play, Electronic Exchange Fashion designer Mary Katrantzou and photographer Erik Madigan Heck discuss appropriation in the digital age and sexualisation in fashion. WORDS Mary Katrantzou and Erik Madigan Heck PHOTOS Erik Madigan Heck
VISUAL PLAY, ELECTRONIC EXCHANGE
Disegno. 133
W
hen photographer Erik Madigan Heck asked to shoot the collection of fashion designer Mary Katrantzou in 2010, he had no idea where it might lead. “There was no expectation,” he says. Because Madigan Heck was based in New York, and Katrantzou in London, the pair talked over email. Three years in and four collaborations later, they are still emailing.
“It’s really casual,” says Madigan Heck of the exchange. “We don’t necessarily set out to have meetings about specific collections.” The first photography series they created together is Surreal Planes (2011). The images portray a woman in a Technicolor setting and, with almost no depth of field, the photographs have a painterly quality. “I didn’t shoot in colour before that. I had dabbled, but I wanted to start experimenting with photography in the realm of illustration,” says Madigan Heck. Katrantzou’s vividly patterned garments were the perfect starting point and Madigan Heck’s photographs of her work carefully marry both their ideas.
Katrantzou came to prominence in 2009 with a collection of dresses featuring images of perfume bottles, where sinuous bottles enhanced the curves of the wearer. With each new collection she has developed her digital print concepts, and typewriters, stamps, Ming vases and Fabergé eggs have all featured in her designs. “I often like to turn an idea on its head and subvert reality into hyperreality,” says Katrantzou. “A typewriter is, for example, relevant to the body when it’s placed to decorate the wearer’s collarbone and its properties are changed through appropriation.” Such appropriation runs throughout Katrantzou and Madigan Heck’s collaborations. In their second series of images – The Surrealist Ideal – Parisian surrealism and Catholic iconography were the starting point, while their third collaboration, Florals, referenced 19th-century French painters such as Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard. In an age of countless digitally enhanced images, Madigan Heck takes a more analogue route. “All the backgrounds are actually built and painted by hand,” says Madigan Heck, who created 25m-tall surrealist sets in an airplane hangar for the shoots. In contrast to these grand productions, their latest collaboration for Katrantzou’s autumn/winter 2013-14 collection Cathedrals is muted, the images shot in black and white. “It was a total reversal. Like going back to the origins of photography,” says Madigan Heck. The geographical divide between the two means that Katrantzou and Heck are rarely together on set. “Mary is so free in letting me do what I want, which is not typically the case in fashion. It’s great for me to be able to get the collection and experiment,” says Heck. On the following pages Disegno gets an insight into the exchanges that take place between the two, all through the medium that they use the most – email. >
134 Disegno. VISUAL PLAY, ELECTRONIC EXCHANGE
Madigan Heck and Katrantzou’s first collaboration drew on fine art portraiture.
VISUAL PLAY, ELECTRONIC EXCHANGE
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