"Planting the Flag" @nytimes

APOLOGIES to Milan and Tokyo. Regrets to Stockholm and Paris. Forgive me, Eindhoven, Berlin, Barcelona and, most particularly, New York. But London is the design capital of the world.

Ounce for ounce, bloke for bloke, Britain produces better designers and design impresarios than anywhere else. They build retail emporiums, as Sir Terence Conran did. Or revolutionize household appliances, like Sir James Dyson has done. Or dream up impeccable furniture, as Jasper Morrison has. Or construct toasters from scratch by smelting their own ore and cooking their own plastic, like Thomas Thwaites did, a feat he undertook for his 2009 thesis project at the Royal College of Art.

And if the London Design Festival, a 10-day program of some 200 events, including exhibitions and studio tours, which ended on Sunday, failed to express the full radiance of contemporary British design, blame it on growing pains. Having just marked its 10th year, the festival is poised between being a regional showcase bubbling with spontaneous interventions and a smooth international canvas.

Once a satellite (or several of them) swirling around an annual trade show called 100% Design, the festival now extends from Ladbroke Grove in West London to Hackney in the east. You need an hour on the tube simply to travel its breadth.

Yet despite the scale, and the presence of more than 300,000 visitors, the London Design Festival is apparently still too small for many members of the British design elite.

To be sure, celebrities like Mr. Morrison and Sir Terence were visible. As were Tom Dixon, who organized a group of international design exhibitions near his canal-side studio at Portobello Dock, and Thomas Heatherwick, who had a popular one-man show at the Victoria and Albert Museum. (Mr. Heatherwick may be best known for designing the caldron for the 2012 Olympic Games, a rosette of 204 copper flambeaus that rose and converged like petals in a fiery dahlia.)

But only glimpses, if anything, were seen of work by renowned London-based designers and studios like Ron Arad, Ross Lovegrove, PearsonLloyd and Doshi Levien.

“Everyone with half a brain still launches in Milan,” said Caroline Roux, a writer for The Financial Times and other publications, referring to the international furniture fair held in Italy every April.

The London event offered many bright moments, like patchwork seating and floral wallpaper by the bespoke furniture company Squint Limited and an exquisite group of lamps by the Greek-born designer Michael Anastassiades. (The lamps, which will be produced by Flos, stood on three-pronged bases that resembled birds’ feet and were lighted with big glass bubbles that looked as if they were attached to their brass stems by little more than spit and static.)

But this festival was not the place to go for revolutionary ideas. Nor, despite all the Britishness on view in the form of ceramics, metalwork and a positively druidic devotion to hardwoods, was it simply a distillation of a regional design character.

What it offered, which was fascinating and redeeming in every way, was London itself.

Still glowing from the energy poured into the Olympics, London harmonized with the installations stuffed into its storefronts and leftover spaces. From the crooked houses of a revitalized East End to the prime minister’s residence at 10 Downing Street, which has become a revolving showcase of contemporary design and craft, new goods basked in venerable niches, mixing it up with Turners and cobblestones.

DOWNING STREET was not open for public viewing of this eclecticism, but the Victoria and Albert Museum was. For the last few years, the V&A, that warehouse of historical spoils that sprawls like a gorgeous beached whale in West London, has been the design festival’s nominal home. Dozens of exhibitions related to the event, grand and tiny, could be found there — if you managed to get hold of a map showing their whereabouts. “We’ve almost run out,” said a woman at the information desk when she handed one to me. “Would you mind returning this when you’re done?”

I might have been better off without it. En route to displays like a collection of smartly sustainable wood chairs by Royal College of Art students and one of courtyard benches commissioned from international designers by the British company Established & Sons, I stopped at exhibits of wrought-iron ornaments, Elizabethan miniatures and Buddhist shrines. Imagine what I would have seen without any direction.

And so it was throughout London: even if the festival fare was hard to find or disappointing, you were sure to stumble on something else worth looking at. A daylong conference called the Global Design Forum, for instance, was a slog (most presenters were limited to an awkward 10 minutes, too short or too long, depending on the speaker).

But attendees could marvel at the construction zone known as the King’s Cross neighborhood and admire the new campus of Central Saint Martins art school, where the forum was held. This proto-Brutalist building, converted from an 1851 granary, had a sea of end-grain wood flooring and a foyer where an Airstream trailer was inconspicuously parked.

More often, though, the setting was a bonus rather than compensation.

Secreted in the basement of a mews house in a pop-up neighborhood called the Brompton Design District was a show of sneaky objects by several Britain-based designers. Paul Elliman fashioned a collection of mineral specimens from discarded materials like plastic pen pieces (“quartz”) and metallic plastic bags (“pyrite”). And Sam Jacob cast a basketball in terra cotta to look something like an artifact from an Etruscan pickup game.

You might call such works deceptive. The designers called them placebos. “A placebo is an inert object that looks like it works,” said Tetsuo Mukai, of Study O Portable, which had smeared sheets of glass with cinnabar, malachite and azurite (the ancient religious painter’s sources of red, green and blue) to create a modern triptych. The work, titled “RGB,” evoked the altar of the media screen.

East of Brompton, in a 120,000-square-foot decommissioned postal sorting office, the trade show Design Junction presented the festival’s most efficient concentration of talent. Here, among clusters of well-groomed furniture and lighting (including impressive variations on the Windsor chair), noted British designers like Simon Pengelly, Bethan Gray and Simon Hasan exhibited alongside sympathetic Scandinavians, Italians and Chileans.

Americans turned up at Design Junction as well. Thirteen designers from the United States, including Mike & Maaike and Lindsey Adelman, pooled their experiments with streamlined forms and seductive materials in a show called “America Made Me.” And a transcontinental marriage was contracted between the London furniture maker Russell Pinch and the New York design shop the Future Perfect. The latter is now moving into manufacturing and will be the sole distributor of Mr. Pinch’s voluptuous new Goddard sofa.

NO milieu, however, was more transporting than the East End neighborhood of Shoreditch. It’s not just that the area harbors a disproportionate share of creative workers. Or that you can find a unique retail typology here: the combined design gallery and cafe (go for the lasagna, leave with the ceramics).

It’s that residents of this former manufacturing quarter turned their spaces and practices into time machines as they displayed their loyalty to British industry and craft.

“Shoreditch was the center of the furniture industry, which is why I’m here,” said Sheridan Coakley, founder of the 27-year-old furniture company SCP. Mr. Coakley’s shop on Curtain Road offered not only Matthew Hilton sofas and Donna Wilson poufs but also demonstrations of willow basket weaving by the young Dublin design company Makers & Brothers.

At Lee Broom’s studio on Rivington Street, which looked like a cross between a stable and a high-end saloon, sawdust covered the floor, and dozens of crystal light bulbs cut through the gloaming. Mr. Broom, an interior and product designer, worked with a lead crystal factory in Cumbria to produce the bulbs, which were inspired by traditional cut-glass liquor decanters and lighted by LEDs.

At the KK Outlet gallery at Hoxton Square, a one-man show of work by Dominic Wilcox included a pair of GPS shoes Mr. Wilcox made with a bespoke cobbler in the shoemaking region of Northamptonshire.

Wearers load computerized mapping information into the footwear with a USB cable. LEDs in the left shoe light up when the toe is pointed in the correct direction. LEDs in the right shoe turn green as the destination is approached. The shoes are activated when the heels click together — one reason Mr. Wilcox calls his invention No Place Like Home.

And at Labour and Wait, a vintage housewares store on Redchurch Street, the featured product was a 60-year-old aluminum measuring cup called the Tala Cook’s Measure, which is still made by hand in Liverpool. Vitrines installed in the tiny shop laid out its history with loving photos of the inventors and factory.

It’s not nostalgia, Mr. Coakley of SCP corrected when I floated that word. “It’s positive,” he said.

Still, an emerging generation of British designers, like their counterparts throughout the world, are finding poetry in a kind of traditionalism their parents abhorred. Sir Terence Conran might be an apostle of modernism, but evidence suggests that his son Jasper, a fashion designer who recently took charge of the family retail business, may become the Ralph Lauren of Britain.

I submit as evidence “Country,” a book just released in the United States, which is the younger Mr. Conran’s paean to rural England. The book is filled with photos of thatched roofs, rose-choked gardens and weather-beaten villagers, which all appear to have been snapped in one 15-minute window of late-afternoon September light. Everyone, no matter how broken with the effort of existing for decades without running water, is bathed in the same honeyed hue.

Also consider “Red,” a show at Conran of 50 design products that were reissued in limited editions in the same hot-pepper shade. Rather than peppers, however, Mr. Conran was thinking of the classic British mailbox.

Visually, the conceit worked well. Like the golden-light trick, Pantone 032 brought an ennobling uniformity to a Dyson heater and a pair of Manolo Blahnik boots, so that you wanted to own anything touched by that magic paintbrush. It evoked the question of how color plays against form. It also made me wonder whether a change of shade really adds enough value to make it worth spending $1,764 for a Bertoia chair that normally sells for around $500.

At a dinner celebrating the opening of “Red,” Sir Terence thanked his son for bringing clarity back to Conran in his new capacity. “There was a freshness to the shop that has been lost in the last 25 years,” he said humbly, adding that Jasper’s perspective was not “bogged down with what is happening in Milan.”

Strikingly, however, Sir Terence also referred to red as the color of Marxism. It was the feistiest invocation I heard at the London Design Festival, where most participants, far from exhorting the workers of the world to unite, seemed to be asking gently that the workers of one’s homeland be loved. And employed.

The revolution will have to wait until next year.

By JULIE LASKY

"Planting the Flag" @nytimes

 

 

APOLOGIES to Milan and Tokyo. Regrets to Stockholm and Paris. Forgive me, Eindhoven, Berlin, Barcelona and, most particularly, New York. But London is the design capital of the world.

Ounce for ounce, bloke for bloke, Britain produces better designers and design impresarios than anywhere else. They build retail emporiums, as Sir Terence Conran did. Or revolutionize household appliances, like Sir James Dyson has done. Or dream up impeccable furniture, as Jasper Morrison has. Or construct toasters from scratch by smelting their own ore and cooking their own plastic, like Thomas Thwaites did, a feat he undertook for his 2009 thesis project at the Royal College of Art.

And if the London Design Festival, a 10-day program of some 200 events, including exhibitions and studio tours, which ended on Sunday, failed to express the full radiance of contemporary British design, blame it on growing pains. Having just marked its 10th year, the festival is poised between being a regional showcase bubbling with spontaneous interventions and a smooth international canvas.

Once a satellite (or several of them) swirling around an annual trade show called 100% Design, the festival now extends from Ladbroke Grove in West London to Hackney in the east. You need an hour on the tube simply to travel its breadth.

Yet despite the scale, and the presence of more than 300,000 visitors, the London Design Festival is apparently still too small for many members of the British design elite.

To be sure, celebrities like Mr. Morrison and Sir Terence were visible. As were Tom Dixon, who organized a group of international design exhibitions near his canal-side studio at Portobello Dock, and Thomas Heatherwick, who had a popular one-man show at the Victoria and Albert Museum. (Mr. Heatherwick may be best known for designing the caldron for the 2012 Olympic Games, a rosette of 204 copper flambeaus that rose and converged like petals in a fiery dahlia.)

But only glimpses, if anything, were seen of work by renowned London-based designers and studios like Ron Arad, Ross Lovegrove, PearsonLloyd and Doshi Levien.

“Everyone with half a brain still launches in Milan,” said Caroline Roux, a writer for The Financial Times and other publications, referring to the international furniture fair held in Italy every April.

The London event offered many bright moments, like patchwork seating and floral wallpaper by the bespoke furniture company Squint Limited and an exquisite group of lamps by the Greek-born designer Michael Anastassiades. (The lamps, which will be produced by Flos, stood on three-pronged bases that resembled birds’ feet and were lighted with big glass bubbles that looked as if they were attached to their brass stems by little more than spit and static.)

But this festival was not the place to go for revolutionary ideas. Nor, despite all the Britishness on view in the form of ceramics, metalwork and a positively druidic devotion to hardwoods, was it simply a distillation of a regional design character.

What it offered, which was fascinating and redeeming in every way, was London itself.

Still glowing from the energy poured into the Olympics, London harmonized with the installations stuffed into its storefronts and leftover spaces. From the crooked houses of a revitalized East End to the prime minister’s residence at 10 Downing Street, which has become a revolving showcase of contemporary design and craft, new goods basked in venerable niches, mixing it up with Turners and cobblestones.

DOWNING STREET was not open for public viewing of this eclecticism, but the Victoria and Albert Museum was. For the last few years, the V&A, that warehouse of historical spoils that sprawls like a gorgeous beached whale in West London, has been the design festival’s nominal home. Dozens of exhibitions related to the event, grand and tiny, could be found there — if you managed to get hold of a map showing their whereabouts. “We’ve almost run out,” said a woman at the information desk when she handed one to me. “Would you mind returning this when you’re done?”

I might have been better off without it. En route to displays like a collection of smartly sustainable wood chairs by Royal College of Art students and one of courtyard benches commissioned from international designers by the British company Established & Sons, I stopped at exhibits of wrought-iron ornaments, Elizabethan miniatures and Buddhist shrines. Imagine what I would have seen without any direction.

And so it was throughout London: even if the festival fare was hard to find or disappointing, you were sure to stumble on something else worth looking at. A daylong conference called the Global Design Forum, for instance, was a slog (most presenters were limited to an awkward 10 minutes, too short or too long, depending on the speaker).

But attendees could marvel at the construction zone known as the King’s Cross neighborhood and admire the new campus of Central Saint Martins art school, where the forum was held. This proto-Brutalist building, converted from an 1851 granary, had a sea of end-grain wood flooring and a foyer where an Airstream trailer was inconspicuously parked.

More often, though, the setting was a bonus rather than compensation.

Secreted in the basement of a mews house in a pop-up neighborhood called the Brompton Design District was a show of sneaky objects by several Britain-based designers. Paul Elliman fashioned a collection of mineral specimens from discarded materials like plastic pen pieces (“quartz”) and metallic plastic bags (“pyrite”). And Sam Jacob cast a basketball in terra cotta to look something like an artifact from an Etruscan pickup game.

You might call such works deceptive. The designers called them placebos. “A placebo is an inert object that looks like it works,” said Tetsuo Mukai, of Study O Portable, which had smeared sheets of glass with cinnabar, malachite and azurite (the ancient religious painter’s sources of red, green and blue) to create a modern triptych. The work, titled “RGB,” evoked the altar of the media screen.

East of Brompton, in a 120,000-square-foot decommissioned postal sorting office, the trade show Design Junction presented the festival’s most efficient concentration of talent. Here, among clusters of well-groomed furniture and lighting (including impressive variations on the Windsor chair), noted British designers like Simon Pengelly, Bethan Gray and Simon Hasan exhibited alongside sympathetic Scandinavians, Italians and Chileans.

Americans turned up at Design Junction as well. Thirteen designers from the United States, including Mike & Maaike and Lindsey Adelman, pooled their experiments with streamlined forms and seductive materials in a show called “America Made Me.” And a transcontinental marriage was contracted between the London furniture maker Russell Pinch and the New York design shop the Future Perfect. The latter is now moving into manufacturing and will be the sole distributor of Mr. Pinch’s voluptuous new Goddard sofa.

NO milieu, however, was more transporting than the East End neighborhood of Shoreditch. It’s not just that the area harbors a disproportionate share of creative workers. Or that you can find a unique retail typology here: the combined design gallery and cafe (go for the lasagna, leave with the ceramics).

It’s that residents of this former manufacturing quarter turned their spaces and practices into time machines as they displayed their loyalty to British industry and craft.

“Shoreditch was the center of the furniture industry, which is why I’m here,” said Sheridan Coakley, founder of the 27-year-old furniture company SCP. Mr. Coakley’s shop on Curtain Road offered not only Matthew Hilton sofas and Donna Wilson poufs but also demonstrations of willow basket weaving by the young Dublin design company Makers & Brothers.

At Lee Broom’s studio on Rivington Street, which looked like a cross between a stable and a high-end saloon, sawdust covered the floor, and dozens of crystal light bulbs cut through the gloaming. Mr. Broom, an interior and product designer, worked with a lead crystal factory in Cumbria to produce the bulbs, which were inspired by traditional cut-glass liquor decanters and lighted by LEDs.

At the KK Outlet gallery at Hoxton Square, a one-man show of work by Dominic Wilcox included a pair of GPS shoes Mr. Wilcox made with a bespoke cobbler in the shoemaking region of Northamptonshire.

Wearers load computerized mapping information into the footwear with a USB cable. LEDs in the left shoe light up when the toe is pointed in the correct direction. LEDs in the right shoe turn green as the destination is approached. The shoes are activated when the heels click together — one reason Mr. Wilcox calls his invention No Place Like Home.

And at Labour and Wait, a vintage housewares store on Redchurch Street, the featured product was a 60-year-old aluminum measuring cup called the Tala Cook’s Measure, which is still made by hand in Liverpool. Vitrines installed in the tiny shop laid out its history with loving photos of the inventors and factory.

It’s not nostalgia, Mr. Coakley of SCP corrected when I floated that word. “It’s positive,” he said.

Still, an emerging generation of British designers, like their counterparts throughout the world, are finding poetry in a kind of traditionalism their parents abhorred. Sir Terence Conran might be an apostle of modernism, but evidence suggests that his son Jasper, a fashion designer who recently took charge of the family retail business, may become the Ralph Lauren of Britain.

I submit as evidence “Country,” a book just released in the United States, which is the younger Mr. Conran’s paean to rural England. The book is filled with photos of thatched roofs, rose-choked gardens and weather-beaten villagers, which all appear to have been snapped in one 15-minute window of late-afternoon September light. Everyone, no matter how broken with the effort of existing for decades without running water, is bathed in the same honeyed hue.

Also consider “Red,” a show at Conran of 50 design products that were reissued in limited editions in the same hot-pepper shade. Rather than peppers, however, Mr. Conran was thinking of the classic British mailbox.

Visually, the conceit worked well. Like the golden-light trick, Pantone 032 brought an ennobling uniformity to a Dyson heater and a pair of Manolo Blahnik boots, so that you wanted to own anything touched by that magic paintbrush. It evoked the question of how color plays against form. It also made me wonder whether a change of shade really adds enough value to make it worth spending $1,764 for a Bertoia chair that normally sells for around $500.

At a dinner celebrating the opening of “Red,” Sir Terence thanked his son for bringing clarity back to Conran in his new capacity. “There was a freshness to the shop that has been lost in the last 25 years,” he said humbly, adding that Jasper’s perspective was not “bogged down with what is happening in Milan.”

Strikingly, however, Sir Terence also referred to red as the color of Marxism. It was the feistiest invocation I heard at the London Design Festival, where most participants, far from exhorting the workers of the world to unite, seemed to be asking gently that the workers of one’s homeland be loved. And employed.

The revolution will have to wait until next year.

-JULIE LASKY

"An Architect’s Vision: Bare Elegance in China" in @nytimes

Wang Shu and his wife, Lu Wenyu, also an architect, at the China Academy of Art.

By
8/9/12
Hangzhou, China


Fusing Old and New, to International Acclaim
WANG SHU, the first Chinese architect to win the Pritzker prize, arrives at his studio here most mornings and sits at a desk with sheets of soft brown paper, a cup for mixing black ink with water, and a brush. He reads seventh-century poetry and then begins to write calligraphy, quick short strokes up and down the page. The ritual, he says, infuses calm into the day ahead.

The ancient art is not the only thing that sets Mr. Wang and his work apart from the glitzy marble-and-glass commercial architecture that has dominated China’s urban boom. His bold yet refined buildings that often recall nature fuse old-world Chinese and modern idioms, using inexpensive materials, like recycled bricks and tiles, as building material. His studio, called the Amateur Architecture Studio, does not have a Mac. A few dusty terminals, from the 1990s, surrounded by piles of old newspapers, are scattered across the tabletops. His six assistants, students at the nearby academy of art in this still, pretty lakeside city, show up as needed. This particular afternoon Mr. Wang, and his wife and fellow architect, Lu Wenyu, unlocked the front door — a big slab of wood — to find no one around.

In awarding this year’s Pritzker Prize to Mr. Wang, 48, in February, the jury catapulted to center stage an architect who profoundly disagrees with China’s rush to urbanization and has found a way to criticize it through his own style of work. Mr. Wang, who grew up in China’s far western reaches in Xinjiang province, is an outlier in his profession here. He has designed only one apartment building, a series of 14-story blocks with deep verandas, in Hangzhou. His museums, academies, homes, and a garden of ancient tiles are all touched by old China. Yet China’s vice prime minister, Li Keqiang, a master of the economy that has produced the cities Mr. Wang abhors, embraced him at the Pritzker award ceremony in the Great Hall of the People in May. Images of the pair — the man who will most likely become prime minister in the coming leadership changes, and the architect, dressed in black — were splashed across China’s news media.

It is the rush to emulate the West and the insistence on trashing what makes China so distinctive that upsets Mr. Wang. Why should China become something it’s not, he asks. “We want to copy Manhattan,” he said over lunch near his studio. “I love Manhattan. It’s a very interesting place. But if you want to copy something that was accomplished in 200 years, it’s very difficult. New York was not designed by architects, it was designed by time.”

Part of his criticism is driven by a recognition that a nexus of government officials and crony investors have made enormous amounts of money clearing land of old dwellings and broken roads to build highways, airports, rail stations and housing. “Sixty percent of government income comes not from normal tax but from the sale of land,” he said. Some reports put the percentage of take from land sales even higher. Phoenix New Media, a company in Hong Kong that is sympathetic to the Chinese government, recently quoted a report from the Ministry of Land and Resources that said that 74.1 percent of government revenues in 2010 came from land sales, up from virtually zero in 1989.

Mr. Wang is sympathetic to poor farmers who yearn for cities with air-conditioning and supermarkets. But if given the chance to renew villages in a sustainable way, rural people would be better off, he argues. One of his latest projects involves persuading a Communist Party secretary in a village near Hangzhou not to tear down the dwellings but to renovate using the original tiles and bricks. “People see black-and-white choices,” he said. “But in fact we have much potential, and can do very simple things and have a modern, comfortable life.”

Two architects who know Mr. Wang’s work emphasize his ability to combine the old and the new, Chinese and Western. “It’s possible to see Wang Shu’s work as a new vernacular,” said Mohsen Mostafavi, the dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design. “He’s actually deeply rooted in modernism. His work is not something that is just a replica of Chinese architecture or just a replica of Western architecture. It’s a fusion of different sensibilities.”

Zhang Yonghe, a prominent Chinese architect who headed the school of architecture and planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, described Mr. Wang as enabling “us to see the vitality of the traditional in contemporary culture, that modernization is not the same as Westernization.” He praised Mr. Wang for having unusual integrity: “In today’s China it’s not easy to resist market pressures and maintain independent values as Wang Shu has done.”

His work includes an eclectic mix of museums, universities and living spaces. In its citation the Pritzker jury singled out the History Museum of Ningbo, in a port city near Shanghai, for “its strength, pragmatism and emotions all in one.” The museum looks bulky from a distance; up close the recycled ceramic tiles and vintage bricks in hues of gray, orange and blue lend a feeling of earthiness. The China Academy of Art at Xiangshan in Hangzhou, a half-dozen buildings, is dominated by white walls reminiscent of traditional Chinese homes depicted in old watercolor paintings. A work from 2000, the library of Wenzheng College at Suzhou University in Suzhou, consists of a white cube jutting into a lake with front walls of glass.

Even with the prominence that his Pritzker prize has conferred, Mr. Wang is not venturing abroad. His post-Pritzker projects include a rammed-earth building that will serve as a hotel for professors visiting the campus of the art academy.

Wherever possible he uses recyclable materials, an art he refined in the 1990s when he put aside formal architecture to work with craftsmen and builders as they converted old houses into art galleries, music halls, even hair salons. By 2000 he was appointed professor of architecture at the art academy in Hangzhou and was back in big-league architecture, entering competitions and accepting commissions.

His vision matured at a time when provincial governments and college campuses, flush with new cash, commissioned museums and additional buildings, like libraries, that intrigued Mr. Wang. In emphasizing the value of what is distinctively Chinese, he is not one of the new breed of nationalists. He and Ms. Lu enjoy taking their 11-year-old son on overseas trips, and for the last few years they jointly taught a course at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design on traditional Chinese villages as a basis for creating what they called “rustic-style” new suburbs.

They are an inseparable couple, with an around-the-clock working partnership that seems easy, sometimes jokey and truly collaborative, so much so that the Pritzker jury contemplated giving the award jointly. They met in architecture class at the Nanjing Institute of Technology, when he eyed the “girl in the green sweater,” he said, who also, it turned out, came from Xinjiang. “In terms of our work, I’m more responsible for the design while Lu Wenyu is more responsible for the implementation,” he said. Mr. Wang is the serious personality, almost professorial in demeanor. Ms. Lu is more outgoing. When they met, she said, she laid down a condition: She would be his girlfriend but would not attend the after-class seminars he conducted for eager students in the university dormitory.

The new campus of the China Academy of Art at Xiangshan was one of the works that most impressed the Pritzker jurors when they visited China last fall. Mr. Wang often drives to the campus with Ms. Lu. More accurately, she drives. He does not have a license and sits in the passenger seat of their modest station wagon. No Porsche, the preferred vehicle of some Chinese architects, for Mr. Wang.

As the jury toured the site, Thomas J. Pritzker, the scion of the Hyatt hotel fortune that finances the Pritzker prize, asked Mr. Wang the cost of building the campus, he recalled. “I said the first phase was 1,500 yuan per square meter, and the second phase was 2,500 yuan per square meter,” Mr. Wang said he replied. Even before hearing the translation into dollars of about $235 and $392 per square meter, Mr. Pritzker intuitively understood. “It cost nothing,” Mr. Pritzker told his colleagues. In contrast, a prestige office building in Beijing costs $952 a square meter, according to Langdon & Seah, a project management consultancy, in Hong Kong.

The campus was a dream assignment, Mr. Wang said. The bid called for an international caliber building for 5,000 students on a low budget to be built on abandoned rice fields. The art academy’s president, Xu Jiang, an artist, was Mr. Wang’s friend, and, in this case, his client. The first decision: to keep as much of the natural environment as possible. The buildings were erected on the edge of the fields, leaving open space all around. Second: no marble clad on concrete pillars in the wasteful style of the art academy in downtown Hangzhou. The campus is distinctive, Mr. Mostafavi said, because unlike most university campuses it is not subsumed by a master plan. “Here are buildings that come together as a series of fragments that produce a sense of unity,” he said.

As he showed the academy, Mr. Wang acknowledged that the finishes were not perfect. Along the internal walkways, jagged holes were punched through the exterior walls, to bring the outside in. Reddish wood from local yew trees was used for walls and doors. “It’s very cheap and grows very fast,” he said. In 20 years the wood will need to be replaced. Bamboo railings will have to be renewed in five to seven years. “It’s sustainable,” he said, “all very easy to replace.”

That such an unconventional architect should win the Pritzker in a country that has embraced foreign architects — including the past Pritzker winners Norman Foster and Zaha Hadid — for the design of buildings in China’s big cities astounded the powerful construction interests. Mr. Wang calls them the “normal group,” professionals who greeted his award with public silence.

In his acceptance speech at the award ceremony, Mr. Wang confronted the establishment with questions, a rare and brave act. Would it be possible, he asked, to ensure that alongside “the top-down professional system of modern architecture, ordinary people’s right to initiate their own building activities is also protected?” Did China really need to “resort to gigantic symbolic and iconic structures?” Were there “smarter ways to address environmental and ecological challenges?” Such difference of opinion before top government officials was striking, said Hong Huang, a columnist for the liberal newsmagazine Nandu Weekly. “It’s voices like that that will start to change China,” she said.

Behind the scenes, among the young Chinese architects who are developing an alternative architectural style inspired by Mr. Wang’s work, he detects chatter. “Young architects are very happy,” he said. “They can see some hope.”

 

Bree Feng contributed research.

A version of this article appeared in print on August 12, 2012, on page AR1 of the National edition with the headline: An Architect’s Vision: Bare Elegance in China.

‘Century of the Child - Growing by Design, 1900-2000’ at MoMA in @nytimes

Librado Romero/The New York Times
Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900-2000, at the Museum of Modern Art, includes props from “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.”
By KEN JOHNSON
Published: July 26, 2012
Childhood, it is often said, is a recent invention. Children used to be treated as small adults to be put to work as soon as possible. Education meant discipline and punishment. Then came the 20th century and the idea that children are fundamentally different from adults and should be treated accordingly. The ideal child, a creature of terrific potential, became an inspiring symbol of futurity, and the care and education of actual children exercised the minds of great thinkers, including many from the fields of art and design.

“Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900-2000,” a big, wonderful show at the Museum of Modern Art, examines the intersection of Modernist design and modern thinking about children. A rich and thought-provoking study of a great subject, it is loaded with intriguing things to look at — some 500 items, including furniture, toys, games, posters, books and much more.

Juliet Kinchin, a curator in MoMA’s architecture and design department who organized the show along with Aidan O’Connor, a curatorial assistant, observes in her catalog introduction that no period in human history was as invested in concern for children as the 20th century. Yet contradictions abound: “Elastic and powerful,” Ms. Kinchin writes, “the symbolic figure of the child has masked paradoxical aspects of the human predicament in the modern world.” How much freedom to allow and how much control to impose are questions not only about children but also about people everywhere in a time of declining traditional values and expanding possibilities for new ways of being and doing.

What do children need to flourish and become proper members of society? How you answer such questions depends on what you think the essential nature of the child is. Implicitly if not overtly, a different image of the child presides over each of the exhibition’s seven chronologically laid-out sections.

At the start we meet what you might call the rational-creative child, who, given the right materials to play with and a few logical guidelines, will turn into a little architect. Here are kits for creating two- and three-dimensional designs developed by Friedrich Froebel, the founder of the kindergarten movement in the early 19th century. A teaching tool kit full of variously shaped nonrepresentational objects created by Maria Montessori is more colorful and inviting, but it too is based on the understanding that huge, complicated things are usually made from little things following simple rules.

Moving on to the post-World War I era, another vision of childhood comes into view under the heading “Avant-Garde Playtime.” Here one of the most telling objects is a painting called “The Bad Child” (around 1924), a decorative panel for a child’s bedroom by the illustrator and designer Antonio Rubino. In retro-Victorian style it pictures a boy in a comical rage surrounded by a menacing cast of fairy tale characters. The moral may be that the child bedeviled by hobgoblins of small minds becomes a monster himself. Being irrepressibly energetic and playful, children need room to express their impulses and imaginations, which do not always align with adult, bourgeois strictures of behavior.

This version of the child can be seen as a reflection of the avant-garde artist’s own desire to shed burdensome moral and aesthetic conventions. (And to celebrate his own powers; this was a time when the idea of the child as a pure creative genius captivated artists like Klee, Miró and Picasso.)

So it may be not so surprising to learn that the Futurist painter Giacomo Balla designed pieces of children’s furniture like a simple, painted wood wardrobe on view here, held off the floor by a pair of flat, abstracted cutouts of children. Here too are child-size chairs and desks by De Stijl artists, including a delightful diminutive wheelbarrow by Gerrit Rietveld; it is remarkable how little needed to change in scaling down the basic language of simple rectilinear forms and primary colors. It is almost as if these artists had been designing for their idea of the child all along.

An opposite approach to childhood enters the picture in the 1930s as fascist social engineers in Germany and Japan turned to children as raw material to be molded into cogs for industrial and military machinery. A baleful section on these developments, as reflected in photographs, posters and children’s books, is highlighted by startling kimonos for Japanese children patterned with images of warplanes, bombs and cannons.

Consciousness of the needs of children and how best to serve them expanded in all directions after World War II. Health and hygiene became concerns, and designers were called upon to create not only more constructive toys and functional furniture but entire school buildings that would provide the light, air and space that youngsters need to grow sound minds and bodies. The rational-creative child, the playful, unruly child — these were eclipsed by the healthy child, who would be more amenable to a new era of conformity in the 1950s.

Then came consumerism and the advent of the needy child, driven by wants and desires he did not know he had until they were triggered by popular media. From astronaut costumes and ray guns in the ’60s to Nintendo’s Game Boy of 1989, designers and manufacturers catered to juvenile fantasies with predatory resourcefulness.

The contradictions of contemporary childhood come together most resonantly in a display of props designed by the artist Gary Panter for the television program “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” (1986-91) arranged around a video projection of an episode of the show. Surrounded by friendly characters like Globey, an animated world globe, and Chairy, a soft, big-eyed chair, the antic man-child Pee-wee, played by Paul Reubens, resembles a happier version of Rubino’s bad boy. He lives in an artificial world without adult supervision where almost all his fantasies come true. Yet he is constantly buffeted by his own desires and frustrations. He is the infantilized consumer par excellence, and in his archly knowing performance as a children’s show host, he is too a kind of postmodern Pop artist, toying subversively with the semiotics of mass entertainment.

The exhibition ends on a rueful note with a brief section about playgrounds that includes a model for a pastoral playground by the sculptor Isamu Noguchi from 1961. Playground designers in recent years have been stymied by increasingly stringent demands for safety. But how do you give children freedom to explore and test their abilities while minimizing risk and lawsuits? The image of the vulnerable, endangered child haunts today’s consciousness more urgently than ever, as children increasingly do their playing online, in often seamy virtual realities where real-life strangers with bad intentions are easily encountered. And what about the child who is dangerous to others? The issues are only going to get more complicated and the challenges for designers of the 21st century more daunting.

“Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900-2000,” continues through Nov. 5 at the Museum of Modern Art, (212) 708-9400, moma.org.

 

via nytimes.com

 

"Modern Homes: To Doze, To Design in Hong Kong"

By JOANNE LEE-YOUNG

[home_Front 6]Photographs by Philipp Englehorn for The Wall Street Journal

The living area

Hong Kong

After graduating from Cornell University's architecture school, friends Kevin Chin-Kwok Lim and Edward Yujoong Kim moved to Hong Kong, one of the priciest real estate markets on earth. Mr. Lim, 26, who grew up in the city, moved back in with his parents and grandmother. Mr. Kim, 27, stuffed himself and his girlfriend into a 180-square-foot apartment.

Fortunately the duo also hold the keys to a 3,900-square-foot warehouse loft that has evolved into an office, exhibition space and place to stretch out, entertain and relax.

This is not a fancy condo conversion. The loft is on the 19th floor of a working warehouse in an industrial part of Hong Kong. Visitors have to steer around stacked cartons and workers pushing bags of chemical powders into service elevators. It's dank and charmless until an aluminum door slides open to reveal a huge open space with white ceilings, walls and light tiled floors.

Mr. Lim's father, William Lim, 54, a Hong Kong-based architect, artist and art collector, bought the loft in November 2010 for $1 million. He used to rent three separate spaces: an art studio, an apartment for storing his collection and another to show it off. When he saw this place, it was a chance to consolidate. He estimated spending about $142,000 to renovate.

There are few walls. A modern kitchen is at the left; a beige sofa and coffee table made from flatbed trolleys topped with acrylic carves out a living area. A large table, a few chairs and a giant, orange floor lamp in one corner marks the office. A long, glass-enclosed balcony seals out much of the noise from a massive pit below filled with cranes, dump trucks, cement mixers and bulldozers, constructing a new subway station.

Photos: Industrial Living in Hong Kong

On the 19th floor of a working warehouse, a vast loft serves as a multi-purpose hangout.

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Philipp Engelhorn for The Wall Street Journal

After graduating from Cornell University's architecture school, friends Kevin Chin-Kwok Lim and Edward Yujoong Kim moved to Hong Kong, one of the priciest real estate markets on earth.

The loft's centerpiece and main sleeping area is a striking 20-by-13-foot rectangular structure. It's made up of 163 pieces of plywood fit together with tongue-and-groove notches and painted black. The result a grid of cubbyholes filled with art books and collectibles, like a polka dot paperweight by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. The books are laid flat, allowing light to flow through the structure. "The idea was to create a space without using walls," said the younger Mr. Lim, who designed the piece with Mr. Kim and Eddy Man Kim, their third partner who is planning to move to Hong Kong soon.

Within the structure is about 290 square feet of den-like space holding a sofa, small rugs and stacks of DVDs and books. Further into this space, wide, bleached-wood steps lead to a flat platform level that can be topped with cushions and used as beds.

If they are working late into the night, the young architects might toss a tatami mat or thick piece of foam on top of the structure and crash. There is another snoozing spot on the outside edge of the structure, and the men recently placed a thick piece of plywood in a top corner, giving the option of making a loft bed there too.

"When you wake up, it feels like you are on the sea," said Zhang Wei, a Guangzhou-based curator who was an overnight guest on a recent trip. She and her husband piled blankets and pillows onto the structure for a bed. "It's like being on an island because the space around is so huge."

On the far other side of the loft, the space turns into an art gallery. There is a sculpture in the shape of a plate folded in half, by mainland Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei. An angular, metallic satellite-like mobile by Korean artist Lee Bul floats in the air. A portrait by U.K. artist Julian Opie hangs on one wall next to an oversized Chinese lantern. There is a gray concrete bathroom with rough bits of exposed brick. It has a communal sink, a shower unit and three toilet stalls.

[HOME_FRONT2]
Photographs by Philipp Englehorn for The Wall Street Journal

A mobile by Lee Bul and recliner by William Lim

Technically, lofts like this are zoned for commercial use. But real estate agents say more entrepreneurs, including artists, retailers and design companies, are combining work and living spaces into them. There is actually a loophole regulation that permits warehouse spaces to have one or two watch guards who may stay overnight. Nothing forbids them from dozing off, said the elder Mr. Lim.

Recently, the government said it can't regularly inspect all warehouses and will only act to enforce zoning regulations if there are complaints. Currently, a 6,700-square-foot warehouse loft in the same area, which comes renovated and with a rooftop terrace, is listed for $5.1 million.

The elder Mr. Lim sits on the board of the Asia Art Archive, which documents the history of contemporary art in Asia, and he is co-chair of Para/Site, a non-profit art space in Hong Kong. When he hosts presentations at the loft, attendees gather on wooden bleacher-like seating that spills off one side of the structure. This week, to coincide with the Hong Kong International Art Fair, he will preside over an open house at the loft to exhibit his art collection.

Right now, the young architects are keeping busy with their new design firm, called openUU. They are working on a penthouse, an art gallery and a private school cafeteria in Hong Kong. In Shanghai, they are designing a seafood retail shop. The loft will continue to serve the elder Mr. Lim's art interests, but, for now, it's also a home base for the younger architects to start their careers.

Says Mr. Kim: "The idea is to see how many different activities we can pack in here."

A version of this article appeared May 18, 2012, on page D6 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: To Doze, Design in Hong Kong.

via online.wsj.com

 

"Maria Pergay designs the 'T' for New York Times Summer Design Issue"

Photo: Stephen Lewis
Artwork by Maria Pergay

Infinite Possibilities
May 3, 2012

The Russian-born French designer Maria Pergay created a gleaming ‘‘T’’ out of stainless steel and topped it with a diamond. ‘‘I tried to do it justice,’’ says the 81-year-old artist, who is known for her avant-garde metal furniture. Pergay got her start as a window dresser and says she has a ‘‘big appetite’’ for materials like wood, silver and, especially, stainless steel: ‘‘It is incorruptible, perfectly strong and feminine.’’ In addition to her recent retrospective in Paris, Pergay, who was inducted into the Legion of Honor in February, will celebrate her 55-year career with an exhibition of new and old work at Design Miami/Basel in June.

What was your inspiration for this T?

I was inspired by the Times’s “T” itself, the very old and majestic style of the gothic font and its sense of history.

How long did it take you to create the T?

I sketched for 20 minutes, but it took me 18 full days to execute the project.

How tall is the T? What everyday object is it comparable to, size-wise?

The letter stands more than 50 centimeters tall, about 20 inches.

What made you integrate the infinity sign into this piece?

Logic.

What symbolizes infinite possibility to you?

The universe.

What about the jewel? What inspired you include the diamond?

I’m drawn to diamonds. Diamonds are eternal.

What first drew you to working with stainless steel?

The Flying Carpet Daybed, which I made in 1968, was my first foray into stainless steel. I’ve been working with the material ever since then.

What was the biggest challenge you faced in this project?

How to express myself.

What do you love about your work?

I like its exigence. Happiness comes from paying attention to and obeying artistic urges.

What is unusual about this T?

Your questions.

Fill in the blank: T stands for _______________.

Maria.

Great architecture review for the new stadium..."A Ballpark that may be louder than the fans - Marlins Park in Miami, Baseball’s Newest Stadium" in @nytimes

MIAMI — After 20 years of retro-style ballparks since the opening of Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore, nearly all decked out with brick facades and calculated quirks that came to seem as predictable and interchangeable as the old doughnut-shaped arenas, Major League Baseball has its first unapologetic 21st-century stadium.

 Lumbering and dizzyingly white in the Florida sun, the new Marlins Park is an elliptical concrete, steel and glass boulder looming above the low-rise houses and empty lots of the Little Havana neighborhood. With retail on the outside and a public plaza in front, it’s designed partly to gin up some street life. Economic development is supposed to follow — that was the rationale for the public financing that covered most of the $634 million project ($515 million for the park itself) and contributed to the recall of Miami-Dade County’s mayor. Cities are always building new stadiums with the justification that they’ll catalyze the local economy. They rarely do.

At the same time, the ballpark is unlikely to satisfy aficionados of the latest trends in architecture, but it is nonetheless a modern building, with genuine panache, as opposed to another pastiche. Give the team’s owner, Jeffrey Loria, credit. An art dealer, he cares more than most about aesthetics and took a gamble — part old-school civic improvement plan, part marketing strategy — that Miamians will recognize themselves in the stylishness of the place.

He has festooned concourses and stairwells with art, photographs and sculpture. Most fans will no doubt focus more on the grass field, air-conditioning and retractable roof, which slides over the entry plaza onto slender, palm-shaped pillars, illuminated by pulsing lights. Because of the oppressive heat and rain, the roof isn’t likely to be opened for more than a dozen or so games a year, but even when it is closed, there are sweeping views of the city skyline through 60-foot-tall windows.

The challenge now will be filling the park’s seats. With a capacity of 37,442, this is one of the smallest arenas in the big leagues, but Miamians have notoriously stayed away from Marlins games in droves. Mr. Loria and the city are banking, as so many other owners and cities have, that a new stadium can change a team’s and a neighborhood’s fortunes.

Can it? The Miami Marlins, until this year the Florida Marlins, have labored since their inaugural season in 1993 in a 75,000-seat suburban football arena, where the Dolphins play, which can be as much as an hour’s drive from downtown, with lousy sightlines, crippling summertime humidity and no roof. The Miami Herald’s Marlins beat reporter, Clark Spencer, told me on a recent night that he used to pass the time with colleagues in the press booth counting attendance.

“Once we counted 80-something people,” he said, “and that included some confused foreign tourists.”

Mr. Loria, who took over in 2002, argued that it was pointless to spend money on top players without a domed stadium. Detractors said he was blackmailing the city into paying for a new park, meanwhile pocketing revenue-sharing millions from other teams that were meant to go toward a beefier payroll.

But then in 2007, Miami officials consented to a new stadium on the site of the former Orange Bowl, a couple of miles from downtown. The city provided the land and $13 million. Miami-Dade County paid nearly $350 million for the bulk of construction, with the Marlins kicking in $161.2 million. The pliant architecture firm Populous, formerly HOK Sport, which designed Yankee Stadium and nearly every retro ballpark during the last two decades, was hired to do the architecture.

Orel Hershiser, the pitcher turned ESPN analyst, got in first dibs as critic on opening night when, apropos the swooping “Star Trek” curves on the outside, he said that the stadium looked “like a cruise ship had a baby with a spaceship.”

Almost endearingly, when we met, Mr. Loria countered with a few wishful comparisons to the Getty Center in Los Angeles and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum. He said the inspiration for the stadium’s electric color scheme, with its fluorescent-green outfield wall, was the palette of the Spanish painter Joan Miró. Public art and native plantings are meant to lend his building’s exterior what might be called an aspirational gravitas.

Inside Mr. Loria has also installed giant reproductions of paintings by blue-chip modernists like Roy Lichtenstein on or near the main concourse, called the Promenade, amid a souk of food stalls hawking $12 mahi-mahi tacos and $14 Cuban sandwiches. Nobody seemed to take much notice of the art the other night, fans clustering instead four-deep before a bobble-head-doll display. But Mr. Loria professed not to care. The goal is a mix of visual distractions.

These include two narrow saltwater aquariums behind home plate, giving off a bright blue glow. The intended spirit is light-hearted. For the same reason that Florida’s hockey team never installed a panther cage in its rink, it’s now clear why no one had put an aquarium in a backstop before. Animal rights activists were traumatized after the team tested the glass with a pitching machine.

The game aside, the main attraction is clearly the kinetic sculpture by the Pop maestro of kitsch, Red Grooms, in left-center field: marlins spin, flamingos flap and water splashes whenever a Marlin hits a homer. Miamians have been competing to come up with a name for it (the Marlinator and the Marlinstrosity are two, so far). This over-the-top gizmo is to the Mets’ homely home-run apple what the video game Call of Duty is to a jack-in-the-box. Considering how few homers have been hit so far, the fences might need to be brought in before too long to make sure it is exercised.

Mr. Hershiser was close to the mark about the architecture. Stadiums these days emulate cruise ships. They’ve got their first-class cabins and exclusive restaurants and nightclubs. (The one at Marlins Park even has a swimming pool.)

The game is no longer necessarily the point for many people who buy a ticket. Baseball used to be a sport of reverie, with the murmur of the crowd, the chatter of announcers on transistor radios and the crack of bats. Now parks are entertainment palaces, telling us when to cheer and selling us overpriced food and merchandise. The longest line I saw on the Promenade was to get into the team’s souvenir store.

Retro stadiums catered to nostalgia for an era before steroids and artificial turf, but even the past gets old. Fans may someday come to long for the doughnut stadiums. I almost miss Shea. Whether the tropical colors and aquariums at Marlins Park will appeal to local Latino fans, on whom Miami is relying to fill most of the seats, or play to outsiders’ clichés of the city, time will tell.

Sightlines are good. Those at the top and behind the outfield fences feel close to the action, and field-level seats benefit from the narrow foul territory. With the roof closed, Marlins Park is chilled to a dry 75 degrees, a family-friendly environment in which to pass a hot summer day or night. Angled walls and cantilevered ramps on the building’s outside create a few elegant geometries, and multicolored tiles provide decorative pizzazz. It’s more than what you find in the grim concrete corridors of Yankee Stadium.

Yes, baseball isn’t what it used to be — the modern game panders to the corporations and rich patrons who buy luxury boxes and seats behind home plate. But stadiums are about as close as many cities come today to creating large-scale public spaces. They attract untold numbers of fans who might never have gone to a game back when baseball was played before cigar-chomping men in jackets and fedoras.

“A lot of us weren’t expecting something this nice,” said Adam Brownstein, a 38-year-old native Miamian, who spoke for what seemed like every resident I met.

Ten clubs have opened new homes since 2001. The Phillies thrive in Citizens Bank Park, where they keep winning. Pittsburgh flounders in PNC Park — which may be the most beautiful of all the parks to be built in recent years — because the Pirates are perennial losers.

Now that Mr. Loria has gotten his new stadium, he is doling out big money for marquee players, talking about World Series games played with the roof open, under the stars. Through seven home games, according to ESPN, the Marlins have sold an average of more than 29,000 tickets.

If the Marlins are bottom dwellers in late September, that home-run sculpture may come to seem forlorn, the new team uniforms clownish and the cost of the stadium a renewed scandal.

But that’s then. For now, Miami has reason to cheer.

 

 

via nytimes.com

 

Tom Dixon Makes Things Better in @wsj

By HELEN CHISLETT

[mag0512tom1new]Photograph by Henry Bourne

WORK THIS WAY Designer Tom Dixon outside his studio on Portobello Dock, with some of the pieces he launched at April's Salone del Mobile in Milan.

In a Venn diagram of superstar British designer Tom Dixon, he would occupy the space where design, industry, craft and technology all intersect. That intersection is most apparent at his mini empire at Portobello Dock, a converted Victorian wharf, which he moved into three years ago.

This deceptively peaceful spot, with tall windows overlooking the glittering Grand Union Canal, brings under one roof all that Dixon loves. There's a tea shop, Tart, where we sit on a sunny spring day to chat about his 30-year career over old-fashioned English tea, complete with vintage china teapots, loose-leaf tea and homemade cakes.

The Dock also houses Dixon's design studio and his eponymous shop, where he sells the lighting and furniture he makes next door. Then there is the restaurant, Dock Kitchen, which he co-owns with rising-star chef Stevie Parle, 26, who trained at the River Cafe and Moro. The eclectic menu is also a merging of worlds, drawing on traditional English cuisine, as well as food from Sri Lanka, the Middle East and Japan.

As for Tart, it is his first Dixon & Daughter enterprise, run by his elder daughter, Florence, and her business partner, Aoibheann Callely. I put it to Dixon that with his love of food, texture and music, he is something of a sensualist. "A sensibilist?" he recoils. "Absolutely not!"

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Courtesy of Tom Dixon

The intricately patterned Etch light

You can blame that miscommunication on a mouthful of Tart's delicious meringue, but there is truth to the idea that Dixon prefers tangible pleasures to purely conceptual ones. Successful designers often inhabit a rarefied world, far removed from industry. Dixon, by contrast, is hands on. He may no longer weld the furniture himself—the process that first brought him to the design world's attention—but he visits every factory he uses and familiarizes himself with every stage of production.

There is nothing in his fashion sense—rumpled tweed jacket and jeans—to suggest his significance on the world stage of design, either. His whole demeanor is understated, as though he wished he could remain quietly anonymous. It is something of a wonder that Florence is now part of the Portobello Dock landscape; for years Dixon refused to say a thing about his home life. It goes without saying that he doesn't much enjoy the spotlight of an interview, but he is generous with his time when you do pin him down. The fact is, he is someone who would much prefer to be doing than talking.

Part French, part Latvian, but mainly British, Dixon, 53, was born in Tunisia but has lived in West London since he was a toddler. The home he shares with his wife, Claudia, and two daughters is not far from the Dock.

At 20, Dixon enrolled in an art-foundation course at Chelsea College of Art & Design but hated it. "Art was too conceptual for me," Dixon says. "I liked making things." Six months later a motorbike accident brought his formal education to an abrupt end and also resulted in a gold tooth that glitters when he laughs. When he recovered, Dixon went out to work—first as a technician, later as a junior animator—before embarking on a brief flirtation with the music business as the bass player in an early-'80s lineup called Funkapolitan (one album and three singles).

As strange a detour as it might seem in hindsight, Funkapolitan taught him more than Chelsea ever did. "There is a do-it-yourself attitude in the music business that I love," he says. "You learn that you don't really need any skill. You can teach yourself an instrument, promote yourself through leaflets, do your own production. All you really need is an attitude." In a funny twist of kismet, Portobello Dock is the former headquarters of Virgin Records, and Dixon's shop was once a studio where the Sex Pistols, Spice Girls and Rolling Stones strutted their stuff.

In 1983, Dixon began to express his own attitude by "tooling around" with welded, salvaged furniture. Soon the raw, rusty work began to attract the eye of the then tiny design community in London. "For me it was alchemy," he recalls. "I was amazed that I could take something that was regarded as rubbish and turn it into cash by the end of the day. I wasn't making much money, but there was a satisfaction and a joy to the work."

London gallerist David Gill remembers going to Dixon's first-ever show, "Creative Salvage," held above a hairdressing salon on Kensington Church Street. "To be honest, I thought it would be a waste of time, but it was so fresh I was really impressed," says Gill. "There was all this furniture made out of reusable metal pieces—old pots, pans and cooking utensils—but I remember thinking it reminded me of Roman shields. It had its own language and identity from the very first."

Not only was Gill among the earliest to commission pieces from the edgy, young talent, but he later collaborated with Dixon on a show at the Frankfurt Furniture fair called "Plastic Fantastic." Dixon transformed plastic salad bowls into geodesic domes and in doing so elevated them to high art.

By the late '80s, Dixon was no longer playing punk outsider to the big boys of design, but rather working with the Italian giant Cappellini, for whom he designed the iconic S-Chair in 1991. He founded his own company, Eurolounge, in 1994, and that same year cemented his position as an established designer with a stackable, four-pronged lighting piece called Jack, which he has described as "a sitting, stacking lighting thing."

The "thing" won him international renown. In 1998 he was appointed head of design at Habitat, then later creative director, staying on as a consultant even after founding his eponymous company in 2002 (he left Habitat in 2008). Ever the multitasker, he was also creative director of the renowned Finnish brand Artek from 2004 to 2009.

Dixon's own brand has yielded quite a few internationally lauded hits, among them the Mirror Ball light (2003), Fresh Fat Chair (2004) and Wingback Chair (2007). He enjoys stripping down forms, emphasizing silhouette or material, as with the voluptuous Plump sofa (2008), a streamlined, space-age version of the classic Chesterfield, or Bulb (2011), an overscaled, energy-efficient lightbulb designed to challenge the aesthetics of most CFL (compact fluorescent lamp) replacements.

His connection to Habitat has often prompted comparisons to Sir Terence Conran, who founded the homeware retailer and is famed for bringing modern design to the masses. And certainly Dixon is a democrat at heart. After all, this is a man who gave away 500 designer polystyrene chairs in Trafalgar Square six years ago. Known as the Great Chair Grab, it was sponsored by Expanded Polystyrene Packaging Group and floated the notion that furniture, like network television, was something you could give away by selling advertising.

He repeated the exercise this April with his metal Stamp Lamp during international design fair Salone del Mobile in Milan. It was there that Dixon orchestrated MOST, an ambitious multidisciplinary festival at the Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia, which he called a "Glastonbury for design."

“I can see the irony of being driven to give away chairs when other people are selling them for a million dollars apiece”

The remarkable thing about this giveaway was that Dixon made all the Stamp pieces on site using radical laser technology, created with German company Trumpf. He is evangelical about the innovation's possibilities. "Stamp is the 2CV [Citroen's famously low-tech car] of design—very basic and crude—but I wanted to show the magic of designing, making and distributing all in one place," explains Dixon.

The Trumpf machinery allows a piece's size, shape and pattern to be changed to order, making mass customization possible. "It is like the rebirth of the medieval high street," explains Dixon. "In the future, people will tailor-make things for you at a local level and it won't cost that much." Indeed, it challenges the current acceptance of furniture being made halfway around the world and then shipped back at huge cost to the environment, and that's important. Though Dixon wears his eco credentials lightly, his crusade to make low-voltage lighting attractive is second to none, as illustrated by Luminosity, a collection of lamps, lights and shades that he also presented last month in Milan.

He is also well aware that we live on a planet full to bursting with consumer goods. "Each designer has to take his or her own stand on that," he says. "Back in the '60s, it was probably OK to design products that were about newness for the sake of it. I like to think my own work is more about durability and permanence, hence my experiment with cut-steel furniture, which came with a thousand-year guarantee. Or for that matter, the accretion-process chairs."

The latter is a reference to the fact that somewhere off a beach in the Bahamas, there is a colony of undersea chairs, not abandoned, but actually growing.

Dixon has harnessed a process known as mineral accretion—a tool of bioengineering—to subject the chairs to low-voltage charges of solar power that encourage the growth of limestone at something close to three times the usual rate. Once they have acquired a beautiful patina, he will fish them out and let us all share in the magic. He adds, "The scientist [Wolf Hilbertz] who developed this method intended to use it to develop bio concrete. You could literally grow cities in this way."

It's highly imaginative thinking for a designer who still feels some level of outsider status after all these years. He has always been half in and half out of the establishment, and is amused at times by how at odds his ideas are within the elitist field of limited-edition design. "I feel good about my own aesthetic, which is quite raw by comparison," he explains. "But I can see the irony of being driven to give away chairs when other people are selling them for a million dollars apiece."

He admits to never having had a master plan, "but things always seem to work out slightly better than I hoped they would." In truth, his optimism is founded. Backed by Swedish investment company Proventus, he has exported his name and designs to more than 60 countries worldwide. Dixon has weathered the recent stagnant economy, and even grown, increasing his retail presence in North America by roughly 50 percent over the past couple of years. And this month, while showing during New York Design week, from May 17 to 22, he will open a pop-up shop at 45 Bleecker Street, with online design hub Fab.com.

Perhaps not having a plan is an ideal strategy in a field that's always in flux. Certainly, Dixon has seen considerable changes during his career. "On the plus side, it is now universally recognized as a valid, even glamorous, thing to do," he says. "On the minus side, it is not used by people in government to make real change. The planet is full of problems, and who better to harness problem-solving brilliance than designers?"

Corrections & Amplifications
An earlier version of this article gave the incorrect address for the pop-up shop at New York Design week.

via online.wsj.com

 

Design Fair of the Year - "At the International Furniture Fair, Social Commentary and Luxury" @NYTimes

Andrea Wyner for The New York Times

Sway lights by CKR for Established & Sons.

By JULIE LASKY
Published: April 25, 2012

SOME of the most thought-provoking ideas at the International Furniture Fair in Milan, which ended on Sunday, issued not from the thousands of exhibition booths and off-site venues or even from the lips of the designers, pundits and producers who bring this stalwart city to life every April. They were written on the walls.

Andrea Wyner for The New York Times

The Dutch designer Frederick Roijé with his Dish of Desire bird feeder.

“Thanks Starck,” read one such message, scrawled in the neighborhood of Ventura Lambrate, where for the third consecutive year emerging designers have shown work and staged Oedipal battles with the masters. The words accompanied a drawing of Philippe Starck’s Juicy Salif lemon squeezer from 1990, an aluminum teardrop on spidery legs with a knob intended for mauling citrus — but the artist had substituted a toilet paper roll for the lemon.

Such an irreverent treatment of a classic object suggests that Mr. Starck may have lost his mojo in today’s design world, but he shows no sign of receding from the scene. On the contrary, his notoriously paradoxical nature defined this year’s fair, which was marked by the contradictory pursuits of social consciousness and unrestrained luxury.

Mr. Starck may be best known for a whimsical $100 sculpture that does nothing more than extract juice. But he also is — or claims to be — as idealistic as any young designer.

He alternately caters to lovers of luxury and slaps them on the wrist. This year, he collaborated with Lenny Kravitz on upholstered versions of his Mademoiselle chair for the high-end Italian company Kartell, but he also touted his Broom chair for the American company Emeco, made of 90 percent recycled post-industrial factory waste and 10 percent glass. “With this new chair, I start to feel happy,” he said in a promotional film for the product, “because it is made of nothing.”

A decade ago, socially conscious design was a sideshow at the fair, but now it’s in the center ring. A number of companies boasted of earth-friendly materials and showed off efficient packing methods that reduced their carbon footprints. The Swedish company Offecct went so far as to display Luca Nichetto’s Robo chair from 2010 along with its box to show how compactly it can be taken apart and shipped.

Food was a popular medium for commentary. In Lambrate, Rui Pereira and Ryosuke Fukusada baked tiny cakes shaped like chairs, lamps and vases to protest the hyperabundance of new furniture and the inability of consumers to “digest” it. And in the Tortona district, Marleen Jansen presented her Seesaw Table, which requires two diners to sit down to meals and depart from the table at precisely the same time — or else risk sending one of the pair flying.

“It’s a courtesy table,” Ms. Jansen said. “I want to manipulate behavior, and it’s rude to leave the table while eating.”

On the frontiers of experimentation, the “Open Design Archipelago” exhibition organized by Domus magazine and Audi demonstrated methods for harnessing the desert sun to melt sand and produce glass objects; for manufacturing inexpensive chairs with a robotic arm (no human hands needed); and for training crows to pick up bottle caps littering the landscape.

And yet, while there were plenty of designers trying to redirect human habits and prepare for a world with scarce resources, many conventional products seemed to have gotten bigger and softer, assuming a standard of padded comfort one might even call American.

Furniture came with names like Soft Box, the Swiss designer Alfred Häberli’s cushy sofa for Moroso. And the body-cradling Bunny armchair by Iskos-Berlin, for the Danish company Normann Copenhagen, was all but infantilizing.

But nothing conveyed the sensuality of textiles (or their facsimile) this year so much as the flowing tablecloth carved into the wood of Ferruccio Laviani’s Twaya table for Emmemobili. A representative of the Italian company Emmemobili noted that, by the end of the fair, the number of hands rubbing the table’s surface had left “the left side smoother than the right.”...

 

Full article: nytimes.com

 

"Suddenly Simple Authentic, organic and local isn't just about your food—American minimalist furnishings with clean shapes and forthright finishes are all the rage" in @wsj

By DAVID SOKOL

The New American Minimalism

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IT'S A PHENOMENON AS OLD as America itself—our taste in furniture, as in fashion, is fickle. In the early 19th century, the winged pedestals of English Regency were brushed aside for the sleeker lines of Grecian Plain. Our suburban forefathers moved Danish modern into the attic and trucked in lumbering Spanish revival. And today we're putting our playful blob lamps on eBay and returning to simple, locally made pieces.

Call it the New American Minimalism. It usurps our 2000s-era romance with confections perhaps best represented by the Dutch brand Moooi, which conjured up crocheted side tables and Louis-style chairs burned to a slight crisp. It also bears little resemblance to older minimalist vocabularies, like the colorful Memphis style that was parodied in the 1988 movie "Beetlejuice." Instead, honesty is now the policy: reserved shapes, natural materials, apparent construction and hand finishing.

Consider the Maxhedron chandelier by Bec Brittain, a prism of one-way mirrors mounted into a steel armature. Or maybe the Wave Bench by Seattle's Henrybuilt Furniture, with gentle curves and the occasional game board routed into a wood slab that also boasts visible mortise-and-tenon joinery. Such thoughtfully detailed forms "encourage the consumer to care for the people making it for them," said designer Lindsey Adelman, who is based in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Ms. Adelman (who employed Ms. Brittain until last year) is known for chandeliers with handblown glass volumes projecting from spare, branchlike arms, as well as her You Make It series of DIY light fixtures built from off-the-shelf parts. "I'm constantly searching for an economy of means, which is probably how most industrial designers think," she said. "And because the form itself is minimal, the edges have to be perfect."

As she has become more successful, Ms. Adelman has delved deeper into the minimal-artisanal approach. At the Salone del Mobile furniture fair in Milan this week, she introduced 25 candlesticks designed with flakes of cast brass sparingly affixed to sleek, barely tapered cylinders lathe-turned from walnut wood.

Scott Fellows and Craig Bassam, owners of New Canaan, Conn.–based furniture studio BassamFellows, also are faces of the movement. After two years in business in Switzerland, the partners moved back to the United States and brought their manufacturing with them for convenience. The company ultimately settled on carpentry and upholstery workshops in Lancaster County, Pa., which happened to be located near reserves of hardwood. All that proximity meant less travel for the designers. The local origins also helped convince retailer Design Within Reach to begin selling the duo's sophisticated yet highly tactile ash and walnut Tractor Stools a year and a half ago.

Independent studios and big companies alike are dialing up their made-in-America credentials. Since the mid-2000s, Minneapolis-based Room & Board has sourced approximately 90% of its inventory domestically. As of this year, all its wood collections are made in the U.S. A series of wood-banded pieces called Moro, previously imported from China, is now made in Vermont by longtime company supplier Lyndon Woodworking.

One reason behind the American manufacturing boom is improved production conditions domestically—or at least more difficulty elsewhere. Tyler Hays is the founder of the upscale brand BDDW, whose Philadelphia woodworkers and metalsmiths pair muscular wood elements with wabi-sabi bronze pedestals and casework. He said that falling wages in post-recession America have become competitive with increasingly pricey Chinese labor, and that "you can spend $4 in fossil fuel for shipping a $10 item overseas."

“The basic yet refined lines allow more whimsical furniture pieces to stand out.”

Rich Brilliant Willing sells home furnishings it designs to match the capabilities of local fabricators. Its Delta lighting collection, for instance, is produced by a lamp-shade facility in New Jersey. The New York–based company, whose work has an improvised quality, also licenses its designs to manufacturers with overseas operations, but co-founder Charles Brill described this as a series of missed opportunities. Refinements get lost in translation, more quality controls are required, and time zones and transport schedules delay prototyping and production.

Overall, domestic costs have come down enough for BDDW's Mr. Hays to create more affordable furniture and home accessories, such as collapsible bookshelves and wood cutting boards for the wholesale company Lostine. "We're making a bigger profit on pieces made in America than stuff made in China, and there's huge, huge interest at the Anthropologie price point," he said. The flash-sale website Fab.com also demonstrates the booming demand in this market segment. As of deadline, the online retailer was running sales of garden tools created by a Montana blacksmith and forged-steel lighting made in Illinois that the site described as having an "unpretentious, minimalist sensibility with a rough-hewn edge."

David McFadden, chief curator of the Museum of Art and Design in New York, thinks such simplicity and sturdiness is "a lingering response to the economics of the past few years." Los Angeles–based interior designer Ruth Storc, who writes the blog Design Patriot with her graphic-designer husband, Michael, agreed that the New American Minimalism captures a moment when conspicuous consumption is largely out of fashion. But she said these designs also embody the desire to support local economies.

"People are interested in all things artisanal, because they want to know where the things they live with are being made and by whom," she said. "Perhaps there is a bit of a backlash against globalization and technology."

Fab.com co-founder and chief creative officer Bradford Shane Shellhammer, a direct beneficiary of that modern technology, predicts the movement will last: "It's hard to check responsible consumption at the door and go back to mass-produced things that have no stories to be told."

Responsibility simply looks good, too. Kimberly Ayres, the San Francisco designer whose sunshiny interiors might seem at odds with the pared lines and visible mechanics of the new minimalism, embraces these furnishings precisely for their counterpoint quality. "The basic yet refined lines allow more whimsical furniture pieces to stand out" while, she said, "the handmade quality is grounding."

The versatility of minimal artisanship is what drove the recent partnership between Chicago carpet-tile company FLOR and Atlas Industries. The small Brooklyn manufacturer is perhaps best known for a modular wall-mounted storage system that, according to Atlas co-founder Thomas Wright, resists the economies of mass production. Atlas is furnishing a new chain of retail stores for the DIY flooring firm. Wright's partner, Joseph Fratesi, said that the functionality and character of their work gives customers "a different experience of the built world."

Jerry Helling, president of Lenoir, N.C.-based contract furnishings giant Bernhardt Design—which is hosting a temporary gallery show entitled "America Made Me" during the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York next month—concurs that American furniture design lately has embraced simplicity, craft and sustainability. He also notes that a planned-obsolescence attitude still pervades the American furniture industry, so we may soon see more ornate furniture again. Mr. Hays, of BDDW and Lostine, argues that American-made furniture is here to stay, no matter what stripe or style. "It's green and good for the economy," he said. "Local fits everybody's agenda."