“The exhibition BLACK2 is a self-initiated project which first came to mind as I was working on the Design Real show for the Serpentine Gallery in late 2009. I got fascinated by the idea of the totally man made object. The phenomenon of the black and square form and its eternal adaptation to such manifold of different types of objects seemed astonishing and at the same time liberatingly simple. A black/square shape or form cannot be found in nature. This is what interested me: creation as a deliberate and conscious act of human intelligence.
As is known, black/square has passed through the millenary history of cultures: from the Egyptian stelae to Moses´ engraved tablets of the ten commandments; from certain Chinese ceramic traditions to the Islamic Kaaba, up to the alchemy and philosopher’s stone which, as tradition would have it, was the shape of a black cube. There is the metaphysical connotation of black/square as employed by Malevich, and later by Kubrick´s Black Monolith. The islamic Kaaba in Mecca is a black rectangle and so is the (protestant) Bible. Black/square can mean the most basic, economical, even cheap form of something. On the other hand, black/square can represent the heightening or ultimate aesthetic climax, even the mystification of an object.”

source: www.konstantin-grcic.com/

www.indie-furniture.org

One of my favourite anonymous, classic-contemporary design: the gently shaped, gres mug FÄRGRIK, from Ikea.
Available worlwide for around 0.50 €.
It is just right.

It is connected and works well with your others web applications as flickr and facebook; It is growing quite fast and the beta version is getting better and better.
I find it is an useful and at the same time playful instruments, both for design professional and hobbyists

Here is the related weblog: www.thinglinkblog.com
good luck to the Social Objects Oy wich is mantaining the site.
Enjoy

This work begins with an in-depth analysis into Danese history and production, made of pedagogy, art, industry and crafts;
the feedback of this phase is a series of infographics about the industrial production of the brand from ’57 until today, wich explain the various typologies, describing their functional and aesthetics features and giving a clear, overall view of Danese’s genetic code.
After that, Marcello has begun to outline a hipothetycal evolutionary path for the brand, and developed a proposal based on a recombination process, wich use waste materials from Danese’s stock with three degrees of reuse.

To verify the potential of this idea, the author involved four designers wich developed a series of projects using a selection of waste materials contained in a Danese Box; Each box contained an instruction booklet designed to orientate users in the project. The results ot this activity, together with the twelve products developed by the author, were defined “Chimere”, easily replicable objects deeply tainted by Danese DNA , innovative for the simplicity of construction and the strong semantics values; It was really interesting to see such an incredible amount of ideas emerging from a single context.

Finally the author proposed three scenarios, suggesting how those projects could find their space in the contemporary Danese production and market:
- through self-production boxes
- through small/limited series
- through workshops aimed to develop new concepts.

this project was very interesting in the meaningful response given to the topic of how high-end goods producers can pragmatically migrate to a sustainable system.

The project has been selected by Abitare magazine among the best winter 2009 thesis from Politecnico di Milano. You can read a review and vote for this work here ( I warmly recommend you to do it!)

I think that while standing in front of one of your projects, the first thing one feels, even before exploring the richness of functional possibilities they offer, is the kindness and cosiness of their presence. I’m sure you know the Supernormal concept developed by designers Naoto Fukasawa and Jasper Morrison: do you think your work fits into this design approach or poetic? Has it ever been a sort of inspiration for your projects? 

Kindness is exactly what I would like my products to convey, after all, at their best products are for people. Sometimes, the angular forms that result from working with basic materials such as metal sheets and tubes can be quite aggressive, even rude – it makes me happy to hear that you don’t consider these pieces aggressive, but somehow friendly. Friendly was the intention. The aspect of Jasper’s work that I like the most is his thinking on atmosphere. It’s rare to find designers today who are concerned with space and not just objects. A lot of criticism has been aimed at Supernormal for its focus on the formal attributes of products, but such criticism overlooks that fact that the visual traits of products effect the environment around them.

On the introduction of his book “Everyware, the dawning age of ubiquitous computing” Adam Greenfield writes: “In everyware all the information we now look to our phones or web browser to provide becomes accessible from just about anywhere, at any time, and is delivered in a manner appropriate to our location and context. In everyware the garment, the room and the street becomes sites of processing and mediation. Households objects from shower stalls to coffee pots are reimagined as places where facts about the world can be gathered, considered, and acted upon. And all the familiar rituals of daily life – things as fundamental as the way we wake up in the morning, get to work, or shop for our groceries – are remade as an intricate dance of information about ourselves, the state of the external world and the options available to us at any given moment.”  Do the awareness of rising of those pervasive technologies influence  your design somehow?

Absolutely. These technologies have changed how we do just about everything. Our shifts in behavior call for a generation of appropriate furnishings. Coffee tables were designed around TV dinners. Both coffee tables and TV dinners are irrelevant now. Instead we have blogging, media sharing, multichannel communication, and few adequate furnishings. Most furniture designers spend their time re-doing archetypes that are fifty to four thousand years old. I think furnishings today have to be sensitive to our shifting behavior, which makes most of its turns around the pervasive technologies”described by Greenfield.

You once talked to me about your experience at Pratt as a never ending struggle…

Design education in the U.S. is not planned to inform anyone who might want to stand on his own two feet. The education here produces cooky-cutter employees for large consultancies.

I’m really interested in this topic. what you think is the lack of design teaching in contemporary institutions today? How did you approached  your recent teaching experiences in Lausanne and Chicago ?

The one thing that is missing from every design school I have visited is an engagement with literature, greater history, politics, theory, science… basically fragmentation from other fields and over-specialization within the design field means that design students graduate without the slightest clue of who people like Walter Benjamin, Mikhail Bulgakov and E.O. Wilson are. What good are computer renderings and blue-foam models without a basic understanding of Karl Marx? Every year I meet students that don’t know about George Nelson, Enzo Mari or David Kelley – they’re designing in total amnesia.

I’ve given workshops at ÉCAL, SAIC and ENSAD. I take these engagements seriously, as if they were meetings with clients. When you have students looking to your for feedback and direction, it is crucial to be as honest, direct and sharp as possible. I choose to work with the students on themes that are central to my office’s professional practice, and this puts pressure on all of us. 

Could you talk about your working experience at Konstantin Grcic Industrial Design in Munich, and the importance of this training experience for your professional maturity? 

This was an essential experience for me. I really believe that design is a vocational trade that is perhaps best learned from others who are trained in the field. For centuries design was handed down through the master-apprentice chain. 

During your stay in Europe, you also collaborated with Maison Martin Margiela in Paris. What precisely did you do there?

I worked at Margiela one summer in between semesters in college, mostly working on shop interiors. It was wonderful to see how everything, the clothing, accessories, and spaces were done in teamwork. I broke my tote bag one night, and the next day in the leather workshop at the Maison I made some leather handles to place on a plastic supermarché bag that I was using temporarily. Martin saw them, liked them, and put them in the next season’s accessory collection. My office now works the same way, I like to work with interested people, and give them the freedom to think and work within a context – if the ideas are relevant then we implement them.

After the successful exhibitions in Paris, at “la cité de l’architecture”, and in Milan, during Salone del Mobile 2009, Maison Margiela just presented its interior design line, “Line 13 – White objects”. What you think will be the very contribute of this exceptional firm, that re-established the rules of contemporary fashion design?

 It’s difficult to commodify the strength of Margiela’s interior spaces. The boutiques and showrooms are surreal, radical, humorous, and elegant spaces made of collage of recycled elements, all unified in white. This works as a total space, but the overall effect is lost when you take an element from it, a lamp or a chair, and place it in someone’s apartment. At best these can be souvenirs of a Margiela space.

Your first official client as a professional was Danese Milano, one of the leading Italian design firms; you developed such experimental prototypes and products together since the first seat/storage unit, Smith, in 2007. How this marriage started and mostly what you think still keep this collaboration so vivid and fruitful?

My collaboration with Danese started in 2006, after I met Carlotta de Bevilacqua, and Huub Ubbens who at that time was Danese’s design director. The exciting thing about the brief that they gave me was that they had no definable term for what they wanted. This was perfect, because I couldn’t place a typological limit on what I wanted to do either. Again – none of us were looking for new coffee tables, we were and are searching for something more precise. Why base a design on a typology that was based on 1950′s TV dinners or 1920′s leisure activities, when you can start from scratch, and design around contemporary blogging or video chatting? What keeps the collaboration fruitful is Carlotta’s continued interest in contemporary life and willingness to take risks. Territorio for instance was a huge risk. When it came out, designer friends of mine were perplexed – “what is it?” It’s only been this year, two years later, that people are starting to get that it is a place to sit with a coffee and a laptop. I imagine that when coffee tables first came out they also caused some confusion.

Could you talk about your ongoing project for Knoll about the evolution of the office chair? 

For two years I received sponsorship from Knoll to research the structural history of office chairs for a book that I’m writing on that subject. The book will be published in the Summer of 2010. 

After the success of your projects for Danese, you also started working for other prestigious design companies developing high-end products targeted at high-income consumers. In a time where environmental and socio-ethical sustainability  is a priority in design fields, what you think will be the destiny of this luxury market and how do you face this topic as a designer?

 I view high-end companies as a platform for design experimentation that would be impossible within the context of large scale manufacturing. Environmental responsibility within that context is minor because those producers manufacture their products in limited quantities. Moreover high end products, like four thousand dollar bookcases, don’t end up in landfills. 

I’m very interested in moving my office away from rarified products and towards mass manufactured products. The reason is that high-end products are subject to their users choice, while the mass produced products aren’t. The high-end user (or their interior designer) decides if they want the product in their home. The mass-end user, often has no choice. Take public seating, office chairs and airplane seating – in all three cases the user has little choice over what they sit on. Design in this case has less to do with taste than it does with quality of life, and professionally I’m only interested in the latter.

Could you name one contemporary understimate, and one overstimate designer?

I think that Niels Diffrient doesn’t get as much attention in magazines as he should. There’s a man with a philosophy. 90% of the designers in magazines have no philosophy, only baseless computer renderings and bogus shapes.

your favourite book?

The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard

your favourite movie?

Mystery Train by Jim Jarmusch

Your favourite music album? 

 It’s difficult to say, it changes all the time. At the moment I’m listening to Momus’ Forbidden Software.

Thank you Jonathan

How would you describe architecture teaching in western Europe?

Architecture teaching in Italy, France and Spain is mainly subdued to Beaux Arts models, to repetition of types.

The fundamental problem is that is imposed to students an analysis of project  that doesn’t expressly concern the understanding of the project itself.

The native idea of the project is often hampered by the detailed study of geometric forms assumed in an abstract context.

In France the fundamental problem of teaching deals with the inability of teachers to stimulate a critical forma mentis in the pupil.

As I said, knowledge is spread through references in relation with what already exists, in a process that foresees the validation of architectures and projects already tested by history.

We could speak of a teaching system which works through the digestion and regularization of references.

This approach hampers the pupil’s ability to become actor of the design process. students’ imagination, research and vivacity is completely hampered. It seems that students have always to bring some references to validate the goodness of a proper project.

An architecture analysis should probably be a narration analysis.

Architecture could be identifiable as the “narration of an idea, of a history.”

Which could be the “analysis” of a project as spidernethewood, which could be the narration?

What can be considered important in a project as spidernethewood is that it face the matter of disappearance, of volatility, of lightness.

Spidernethewood is a structure that somehow confuses nature with architecture; nature and structure are made “not differentiable” or “indistinct.”

The physicality of an architecture made of immateriality.

It is an architecture shaped by porosity, by empty building structures and no more by the constitution of a density.

Which is the intellectual work proposed in the elaboration of a project like this?

The project introduces an accessibility of thought but at the same time elaborates a defacement protocol: it defaces the common language of the encoded architecture.

We’ll take, for instance, the entrance of a residence.

The thermal barrier normally lays at the entrance of a house. It usually exists an outside, well distinguished from an inside.

It is an important matter in a residence’s planning: we usually expect “to enter” somewhere, with all that the entrance foresees of ceremonial, of formalized.

We frequently find at the entrance a small carpet with on written “bonjour chez vous”, therefore the entrance becomes a ritual, a ceremonial motion, even if is not well suitable, or is poor etc..

In the realized project, we wanted to delete this relationship with the facade.
We wanted to delete the relationship to the way of making architecture that deals with the frontality of the facade, through the frontality of the appearance.

The project has nothing to do with the codification of the entrance, or to the codification of this ceremonial of the individual ownership.

Despite the residence has a private owner, the project is not focused on the determination of ownership in its materiality and appearance; it is a contrary project, it doesn’t have an “ownership” iconography anymore. It doesn’t refers to the idea of an owner that capitalizes a territory; it is released by the idea of possession and occupation of a territory.

Telling the true, something is disposed, obviously it is not a “collectivist” or a “sharing” project but equally we have tried to empty it from that sense of territory ownership and from pretentiousness.

It doesn’t foresee any of the arrogance of an architecture; both that the architecture is beautiful, sophisticated or poor, or pretentious.

The topic is the opposite of all that can be made visible or that has to do with the tangibility, the materiality. This has been the interest: to release the architecture from all the archetypes of the invariability, of the heaviness, of the materiality of an object that conquers a territory.

What are the suggestions given by the forest environment where the residence is planned?

It is a structure that can be “easily” elaborate in a forest.
In the collective 
unconscious, the forest is the place where witches live, where we can easy think at paranormal, at a scary tale, at what it is unknown.
We like to believe in the presence of witches, elves, harpies, and small dangerous animals of whom origin is not known.

Work out a project of that kind has been almost simpler because we let the territory to guide us, it is well more reasonable to think about the unknown and mystical in the beauty mean of a forest than in a city.
It is obvious that working on a project of this kind in a city would have been somehow more difficult. The project used the existing forest, not so beautiful but however useful, to develop, inside this, something that is in relationship with alien, unconscious, paranormal.
An architectural project that wants to release from the traditions and that wants to propose something else.

How do materials and geometric forms established by the project, mirror the native’s narration of architecture’s identification with nature and the idea of “not colonization” of a territory?

The outside parts are constituted of nets to protect from the audacity of the nature: these allow to cut the branches of the trees that would otherwise insinuate into the runs. The nets lean on the ground, as they were cobwebs.
The interior project has the same geometric composition of the outside but it changes the material: polyhetylene curtains.

Is it possible to state that inside, the impression is to be in a removable awning; the impression is the same that you can have when you’re in a camping sojourn.
Materials alludes to an object that can be transformed, removed; once more this architecture doesn’t return to the idea of heaviness, of monumentality, of stillness.
Materials also recount an exercise in style: a structure that has nothing predictable but proposes a shock, a new unstable conception among what is inside and what is outside.

What is the “construction detail” in an architectural project that deals with the narration of an idea? Which is, in your opinion, the way to approach an application of analysis of the “constructive detail”?

The “construction detail analysis” is connected to the analysis of intellectual ability.

The “construction detail” should not be analyzed for its mechanical parts but rather as part of the narration.
Teachers push to look at the “construction detail” so that students can reproduce it in their projects in an endless repetition of what has been done.
The true problem is that in Italy, France, Spain, the intellectual ability is almost entirely lost.

Especially in France it seems that we can only see projects which are copies of copies of copies: an imitations of words already said, an endless repetition of projects.
We are incredibly overwhelmed by Beaux Arts system of repetition, a tread of what has been said.

Architecture is not in details, it deals with phenomenology.
The detail is a space percepetion vector, therefore of architecture perception, it’s a vector of transmission through which we can cross a space, the detail makes the space accessible.
The detail acts on the perceptive phenomenology.
But the detail in itself is pure fascination.
An architect drawing can express the articulation and connection of the metallic pieces but the drawing that comes out from there, taken in its singleness, it’s absolutely meaningless.

In those projects too detailed, in which architects become crazy in detailing drawings, it happens that they forget the meaning that the architecture itself wants to express.
You end up forgetting which is the message to transmit, which is the narration, which is the scenery that allows to tell a history.

When I try to produce a detail of a construction detail, I do it in a way that never contradicts the narration that I want to elaborate.
The detail belongs to the narration, not to architecture.
We need to let an engineer or an expert to make the detail the simplest possible, sometimes to trivialize the detail so that the attention could be completely absorbed by the narration.

In spidernethewood’s case, if I had over-detailed the metallic pillars (that certainly had to be graphically made in plans) these would have assumed too importance in comparison to the idea of project.

Nevertheless, this speech doesn’t deny the necessity to have a conscience of the structure.
It is useful to draw some details and to understand the structure but we need to draw imagining not to do it at all. The drawing must be only the papery interpretation of an idea.
The drawing must be interpreted and therefore it will necessarily postpone to ancient or modern constructive technologies. But it is not the point.

The detail that we go to define tells a lot about the history.
Over-detail a constructive detail is absolutely a loss of time, and therefore a loss of money, of economy.
It is, above all, the loss of a conception of the project as a narrative vehicle.
Renzo Piano or Richard Rogers have had full faculty to draw their sophisticated details.
But perhaps it was correct to do it in the context of a well-defined historical period in which the engineeristic theme was extremely important.

The detail is a magic and fantastic mystification of a past known.
Magic, magnificent knowledge, but this kind of knowledge is not straightly necessary for the idea of an architectural narration.
Renzo Piano or Richard Rogers tell the history of the Sixties, years where engineering was thought as a vector of progress. It is the case of the Renzo Piano’s Centre Pompidou.
They thought that the constructive detail could modify the form and the substance of the construction. The building wanted specifically to adapt itself to the functional prerogatives and to the dynamic development.

It arises from a particular fascination of the epoch to the engineer that deals with the possibility of assemblage /disassemblage. Fascination to the technical detail that gives the impression of having the power to play with the structure according to demands. As if architecture was a recreational item, but in the reality it is not assemblable / disassemblable as easily as it sounds.

Therefore today, entering the Beaubourg, we will certainly have a sort of fascination for the technology but, at the same time, we are conscious of the end of the transformation.
As a sclerosis of the engeneering process.
We are definitely conscious of an architectural illusion that proposed the possibility to play with space that has never been given.