Plans for a national design center to help alleviate rural poverty will be solidified when 60 designers, corporate leaders, foundation heads, and journalists meet next month for the 2009 Aspen Design Summit. The event, sponsored by the AIGA and Winterhouse Institute, is a strategy session for the social design movement.
The prospective design center will be based in Hale County, Alabama, one of the poorest areas in the country. The county was chosen because it already hosts a number of similar efforts, including Project M,Teach for America and Rural Studio, a group started by the late Samuel Mockbee to help Auburn students design and build structures for poor communities in Western Alabama, including the Harris House shown above.
The center would serve as a collaborative hub and a laboratory for design ideas that could be used in Alabama or elsewhere, according to William Drenttel, a founder of the Winterhouse Institute and editorial director of Design Observer. "If ever there was a place where synergy might occur, this is it," Drenttel said. "For example, Rural Studio is planting a vegetable garden at its headquarters. HERO (Hale Empowerment and Revitalization Organization) is planting a vegetable garden on the backside of main street. It wouldn't take a lot to create a food initiative." The center might also collaborate on infrastructure for health and education, house students working on local projects and direct design tourists to local works.
A dozen or so designers, including John Bielenberg (above), founder of Project M, will detach from the main group next month to develop a concept and business model for the center. "We're trying to create a fleshed out strategic outline with enough initial work that we can actually make something happen in 24 months," Drenttel said.
The Aspen summit, which is backed by the Rockefeller Foundation, will also explore ways in which designers might help a UNICEF project to make classrooms safer and more conducive to learning and how designers might aid sustainable alternatives to the U.S. food industry. Participants include Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, Robert Fabricant, vice president of Frog Design, and Allan Chochinov, editor of Core77.
Four years ago Paola Antonelli curated a collection of emergency shelters, gas masks, and security bollards for a MoMA exhibition called "Safe: Design Takes On Risk." The show demonstrated how thoroughly 9/11 had galvanized the design field. Since then, our collective fear has shifted from terrorism to biology: Our nightmares now center on ebola, swine flu, and pandemic panic. So long Bin Laden. Hello hot zone.
On Tuesday, a diverse group of creative professionals--an illustrator, a sound designer, a set designer, a game designer, and architects, among others--met for the first of eight weekly sessions during which they will each develop a design for quarantine, the safe house of our bio-terror era. The results will be shown in March at Storefront for Art and Architecture, a gallery on Manhattan's Lower East Side.
Quarantine is an ancient practice, according to the project brief, "yet it has re-emerged as an issue of urgent biological, political, and even architectural importance in our era of global trade, bio-engineering, and mass tourism."
The project has an open source aspect, with readers invited to submit their own designs online. To encourage participation, Manaugh and Twilley will post their research as they go, including interviews with a biosafety consultant, the head of the American Public Health Organization, the plant health and quarantine officer at the Royal Botanic Gardens, and Thomas Mullen, author of The Last Town on Earth, an historical novel set in a quarantined village during the 1918 flu outbreak.
The quarantine tanks with the most prominent place in the public imagination are surely the handful of modified airstream trailers used by NASA to isolate astronauts after the Apollo missions. An iconic photo of that era shows President Nixon chatting with the Apollo 11 crew aboard the U.S. Hornet after the first moon landing. Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin cluster around the small trailer window, smiling at Nixon standing somewhat awkwardly outside. What became of those trailers? The one used to quarantine Apollo 12 was recently found at a fish farm in Marion, Alabama. "It's like finding a Rembrandt in a yard sale," said Al Whitaker, a NASA spokesman. "There aren't going to be any more of these."
Maybe Barry Bergdoll should have come to the opening of his museum show dressed as the Grim Reaper. In Home Delivery, MoMA's show last summer, Bergdoll recalled more than 100 years of failed efforts to make prefabricated homes a workable proposition. Bergdoll offered no prediction for the much-hyped modernist prefabs of today, but the show by implication cast doubt on their feasibility.
The dream of shining minimalist prefabs rolling off assembly lines and whisked to their sites on flatbed trucks has soured over the last few years as architects struggled to fulfill the promise of cheap alternatives to conventional housing. By the time installation and finishing work is done, most established prefabs cost $300 to $400 a square foot--no less than a custom home built by a frugal architect and contractor.
The prefab industry received demoralizing news last May when Michelle Kaufmann closed her studio. She had been a darling of design editors, and her prefabs--the Glidehouse, Breezehouse, mkLotus, and mkSolaire--are among the most visible on the market. If she can’t make it, who can?
Now it looks like Kaufmann's designs have a sponsor. Last week, Blu Homes, a start-up homebuilder based outside Boston, bought Kaufman’s designs and will begin manufacturing them next yearat their factory.
Prefab companies normally work one of two ways: they manufacture the largest boxes allowed on a truck or they make walls and ceilings to be assembled on site. Either way, shipping is cumbersome and expensive, and the houses can never be more than, say, 600 miles from the factory.
Blu Homes says it has invented a system that allows for homes of about $150 a square foot delivered anywhere in the country, or even abroad. It already offers a handful of designs developed in collaboration with RISD, including a 1,400-square-foot prefab for $200,000 (shown above). The price includes shipping and foundation work, but not utility hook-ups and permitting costs. Their first home has just been finished (the company has also completed nearly a dozen commercial buildings).
The crux of Blu Homes’ innovation: Instead of loading the bulk of a home onto a truck, the company trucks a series of flat-packed wood and metal sheets, in widths of up to 22 feet, which unfold on site. The folded components reduce shipping costs and assembly time, according to the company. “They basically pop-up,” said Michele Perry, a Blue Homes spokesperson. “The old-fashioned way of doing it was like a gingerbread house. The Blu Homes way is more like an erector set. We think our method is the future of factory built homes.”
The fate of prefab may reside more with finances than with fabrication. “Blu Homes may well have developed a revolutionary system, but technical expertise, although advantageous, has never proven to be a guarantee of commercial success in the prefab business,” said Michael Sylvester, publisher of fabprefab.com, a clearinghouse of information about contemporary prefabs. “The current salvation of prefab will be a return to rational mortgage credit markets.”
The home office used to be a tidy desk tucked in a corner where we paid bills and made a few phone calls. These days it’s more likely a full-fledged command post as we conduct more and more of our work from home. Three years ago 5 million Americans worked from home full-time, according to a Census study. That was before the Great Recession turned us into a nation of home-based entrepreneurs. Who knows what that number might be today?
The problem is that the home office has always been like the crazy cousin who doesn’t fit in with family gatherings. The morphology of the American home has accommodated elaborate TV rooms, dinner parties served in the kitchen and master bedrooms the size of hotel suites. But the home office is still looking for its place. Here are seven ways you might be working a few years from now:
The L.O.F.T. Workstation by Maciek Wojcicki is a new furniture type: in place of the stand-alone desk, the L.O.F.T. is a customizable work area with adjustable desk, shelves, lighting, partitions etc. It’s the kind of work space that flexes to fit any space.
Modernist prefab homes have failed to live up to their hype, in part because they’re rarely cheaper than a custom-designed home. But prefab structures are gaining popularity as backyard offices, like the Office Pod. They’re an expedient way to add a private work space without permits or contractors traipsing through your home.
Offices may reside most comfortably at some distance from the home, even if they’re not prefab. Andrew Berman, a New York architect, designed this copper-clad retreat on Long Island for a writer who wanted to work in a secluded natural setting
With offices growing become more mobile and possibly more energy self-reliant, do they even need to be indoors? Mathias Schnyder designed this free-range workspace with a solar canopy powerful enough to run a laptop.
In small homes, the office may evolve into an electronic kiosk for checking email and printing documents. George Abdoulas designed The Pillar, a concept for a floor-to-ceiling stack of key office components: computer, printer, storage, etc.
Leave it to the Japanese to come up with a stowable office. For telecommuters who may not have the luxury of a dedicated work space, the Trunk Station opens to form a mini-cubicle and folds away at day’s end.
It's increasingly common for people who share a home to also share one long work desk. The double work surface consolidates space and makes their home office more like a dining table--place for sharing thoughts and interaction.
A little more than a year ago the design world was still on its giddy pursuit of over-the-top items of questionable utility. Porcelain Squirrels for $1,100. A limited-edition armoire encased in hand-painted enamel leaves for $700,000. A bench made of hand-molded clay for $6,500.
All that frivolity was unsustainable, and it has recently given way to a new appreciation for the humble virtues of everyday objects. The things you might find in your utility drawer--scissors, pencils sharpeners and allen wrenches--are the unlikely design fashion of the moment.
Daniel To and Emma Aiston, a pair of young Australian designers, launched a collection at 100% Design in London last week with a deliberate emphasis on the commonplace: a rubber band ball, a thermometer and a flashlight (above). “There is a certain pleasure in designing a product that hasn’t been over embellished,” they told Yatzer earlier this year.“It is what it is--functional, attractive products that serve a straightforward purpose.”
A set of similarly mundane objects called Anything was also shown at 100% Design last week. Anything, by the British designer Michael Sodeau and a Japanese company called Suikosha, includes those functional but unglamorous items lying around your house: a stapler, tape dispenser, an alarm clock, erasers and scissors (above).
During 100% Design the British designer Jasper Morrison mounted “Jugs, Jars & Pitchers,” an exhibition of vessels found in flea markets and junk shops. The show is up through tomorrow at his London Studio. “My feeling is that design which follows the current ‘entertainment’ model, which attaches more importance to media exposure than to the real-life performance of an object, has run its course, and that it’s time for designers to shape up and design things which have built-in long-term performance,” Morrison said.
Morrison is the godfather of the Everyday Design movement. Three years ago he and Naoto Fukasawa assembled ordinary objects--vegetable peelers, clothespins, plastic ketchup bottles--for a London exhibition they called “Super Normal.” The show was Morrison’s manifesto: Objects designed to gain attention are usually unsatisfactory while designs that make a difference in our lives go unnoticed.
Apart from function, everyday objects are newly appreciated for their purity of form and slightly campy charm. Seen through the eyes of curators and connoisseurs, they assume a kind of unexpected beauty, as if we had beheld the contents of our pantry for the first time. Take, for example, the web site Ancient Industries, which documents vintage objects of common usage, and sells dustpans, hot water bottles, milk pots, a cake stand, among other items.
The Milan Furniture Fair, held every April, is essentially an organ of the Italian furniture industry. Walking the fairgrounds on the city outskirts, one gets the sense that a thousand suits are dealmaking over espresso. At its core, the Milan fair is about business.
September, by contrast, brings a scattering of design fairs around the globe--Amsterdam, Brussels, Copenhagen, Gwangju, Paris, and Lisbon. Because these cities largely lack Italy’s established manufacturing base, they tend to downplay business in favor of ideas and fashion. Of the September shows, the stand-out is 100% Design in London, a trade show held in Earl’s Court, which is accompanied by a week-long festival of gallery events, installations, and student debuts sprinkled across the city. London is a hub of ideas and creativity, and along with Milan it helps to set the design agenda for the year ahead. Here are seven high points from this year’s show:
Nineteenth century residents of Britain’s industrial towns constructed ceremonial arches from their local product whenever royalty or other important figures visited. Wallpaper* magazine commissioned Martino Gamper, an Italian designer living in London, to create a two overlapping arches made of Ercol stacking chairs in the courtyard of the Victoria & Albert Museum.
It Hûske is a trio of workplace hideaways--a rocking horse, a phone booth, and a mobile house--created by Jurjen van Hulzen as a winking reference to the work hours wasted on smoking, gossiping on cell phones, or spacing out at keyboards. They're like the anti-cubicles.
The design world’s taste for over-the-top spectacle has apparently not dissipated. Jamie Hayón, the Spanish master of oversized installations, made a giant chess board from a mosaic of glass tiles in Trafalgar Square. The 32 ceramic chess pieces were hand-painted by Hayón, borrowing details from London architecture. Players direct their moves while seated above the board in a pair of Hayón’s Showtime chairs.
One of the pleasures of design shows is the unexpected appearance of designers from countries not normally represented at these kinds of gatherings. This year it’s Poland’s turn. A group called Young Creative Poland is drawing attention for a collection shown in the Brompton Design District with what the Wallpaper* blog called an “interesting mix of German industrial techniques with a lightness more commonly associated with Scandinavian design. The “chair transformers” shown above are by Studio Beton, a Warsaw firm run by Marta Rowinska and Lech Rowinski.
Remember the nomadic gallery that Shigeru Ban created out of shipping containers for the touring photo exhibit "Ashes and Snow" four years ago? Ban has a history of creating memorable structures from ordinary materials. For 100% Design he was commissioned to build a 72-foot tower out of cardboard tubes with steel connections.
Along with Tom Dixon, Ilse Crawford, the founding editor of Elle Decoration--who now works as a designer--is one of London’s foremost tastemakers. This week she debuted Seating For Eating, a collection of handcrafted walnut benches and stools for De La Spada based on traditional English furniture. The collection can be seen until early November at Leila’s Shop, an organic food store in the Shoreditch neighborhood, where Crawford will give a series of talks about the link between community and growing food.
The New York design shop Kiosk has a earned a following for selling small-scale design items the owners collect on biannual trips around the world--Finnish hair clips, Japanese paintbrushes, Mexican wastebaskets. This week Kiosk is operating from a pop-up store created by the British designer Michael Marriott, made out of plastic storage crates and sheets of plywood.
In a talk last Friday at the Conflux Festival in New York, Kennedy described the trip, an art and design project known as the Swimming Cities of Serenissima, as “making and riding beautiful junk from Koper to Venice with many dirty people, putting on a show, and then taking it all apart again.”
Fortunately for Kennedy, she’d already had some experience converting squat house culture into a functioning fleet. Last year she worked in the production crew for an experimental film, The Flood, based on the artist Swoon’s trip down the Hudson River with artists and performers on seven intricately crafted rafts made from garbage and other scavenged material. The group staged performances in towns along the way. The film used the crafts as a backdrop for a story about an escape from economic and ecological collapse.
A dumpster-diving, freegan crew needs a strong organization to make the 130-mile trip to Venice. And it started when Kennedy (above) and the Swimming Cities Team began pulling wood out of construction site dumpsters on the streets of New York in December 2008. What they couldn’t scavenge they bought from Build It Green, a salvage lumber outlet in Astoria, Queens. They then shipped two 40-foot containers to the Slovenian town of Koper where she assembled the parts into three 20-foot-tall sculptures floating on pontoons. The group crew of 30--plus a few stowaways--navigated across the Adriatic to Venice in time to stage a series of performances at the Biennale. Along the way Kennedy bluffed her way through international maritime law, negotiated Italian insurance forms and argued endlessly with the Italian Coast Guard. When she tried to get a safety certificate from a German engineer, he said, “Oh no. It’s you. I saw you on the news.”
Swimming Cities was an anarchic crew with more than its share of conflict and mishap. One member broke his neck jumping off a building, and Kennedy found herself contending with storms, arrests and bickering. “The only thing that was sacred was the motors,” Kennedy said. “Nobody could fuck with the motors."
The crew had almost no money, and they subsisted on bread, prosecco and beer. “I was miserable for a good 70 percent of the time,” Kennedy said, until they floated victoriously into Venice for two weeks of puppet theater, silent movies and music alongside the Venice gardini in June. "Kids asked me ‘Where’s Peter Pan,” she said. “I felt like Santa Claus.”
Over the past week New York
marked the 400th anniversary of the Dutch arrival with a design
festival on Governor's Island and the
unveiling of a pavilion
by Dutch architect Ben Van Berkel, among
other commemorations.
The events were sprinkled with references to Mannahatta, or "island of many hills" as the 500 or so Lenape inhabitants called it. If the anniversary has a central image, it's the computer rendering of the unspoiled Manhattan landscape of 1609, with its rolling hills and salt marshes.
The image was drawn from the Mannahatta Project, a decade-long effort by Landscape
ecologist Eric Sanderson
to map the ecology of Manhattan in the hours before Henry Hudson arrived. An exhibition based on Sanderson's work and designed by Abbott Miller, Mannahatta/Manhattan: A Natural History of New York City, is on exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York until October 12 and Sanderson's informed imaginings of wild Manhattan is on the cover story of this
month's National Geographic.
An early hint of Mannahatta
nostalgia came last year at the Whitney Museum's Bienniale,
where Fritz Haeg, an architect by training and artist by temperament,
filled the museum courtyard with habitations for the bald eagle, bobcat, beaver
and nine other creatures that Sanderson says would lived on the museum's
Madison Avenue site 400 years ago.
The Lenape revival includes a
garden Haeg created on the lawn of a public housing development in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York
using only plants that the Lenape employed for food or medicine, a list that includes hazelnut, persimmon, milkweed and elderberry.
The planting is part of a four-year project called Edible
Estates in
which Haeg persuades homeowners to rip up their front lawn and create an edible
garden. You might think of it as a home makeover show with a radical activist
bent.
Last night Haeg threw a party
for the publication of his bookThe Sundown Salon Unfolding Archive, a scrapbook of performances, stunts and happenings
held at his geodesic dome in Los Angeles. For six years, the Sundown Salons
were a gathering spot for the city's avant-garde, and Haeg has documented them
on one 140-foot long accordion-fold paper with text on one side and photos on
the other.
With the NFL season less than a week old, the new $1.15 billion stadium for the Dallas Cowboys may be the most talked about piece of architecture in the country.
Designed by HKS, the go-to architecture firm for splashy sports arenas, Cowboy Stadium has gained notice this week mostly for a flaw: its $40 million high-def Mitsubishi scoreboard that bafflingly hangs 90 feet above the field--low enough for A.J. Trapasso, a Tennessee Titans kicker, to bang a punt off it during a preseason game.
The low-hanging scoreboard notwithstanding, the stadium is notable for its whopping dimensions--it seats 100,000 and the "world's largest operable glass doors" open up behind each end zone--at a time when conventional thinking favors modesty and moderation. On the other hand, who would expect a stadium in Big D to be anything but a hollering XXX-Large.
Big projects are like runaway trains--you can't stop them just because the economy sours. As a cultural counterpoint to the stadium, a performing arts center opens in Dallas next month with ambitions of becoming the Lincoln Center of the South. It certainly has the architectural credentials: the $354 million complex includes an opera house and outdoor stage by Norman Foster. An accompanying 600-seat theater (above) by Joshua Prince-Ramus and Rem Koolhaas dispenses with the traditional layout of a performance space. By moving the foyer, box office and other support areas above and below the auditorium Koolhaas opens the performance space to the outside. When the blinds are closed it's a darkened box; when they're open downtown Dallas joins the backdrop.
Of course it's not all that surprising that Dallas should build a grand-scale arts center. The city has a history of lavishing oil money on cultural facilities, including the Meyerson Symphony (above) designed by I.M. Pei in 1989. Still, it's jarring to see large complexes continue to open a year after Lehmann Bros folded. It takes so long to build big architectural projects--the performing arts center has been underway for almost a decade--that they can seem stangely out-of-keeping with the moment.
When the Chrysler building opened with steel ornaments and spires months after the 1929 crash it reflected the shiny optimism of a past era. The same may be true of Dallas, Las Vegas and Los Angeles as projects initiated in a time of gangbusting prosperity open their doors to a chastened world. The issue won't be whether it's good architecture, but whether it's good architecture for this moment.
While Americans checked out for the Labor Day interlude, the European design season got underway with Maison et Objet, one of the home furnishings fairs that set the agenda for the design year ahead.
Maison is generally regarded as an early indicator of fresh design ideas--colors, textures, forms--for textiles, furniture and tabletop design. If anything, it took on an element of intrigue this year as editors and cool hunters watched to see how the design field would respond to the uncertainty and anxiety of the past year. Here are six examples of design directions glimpsed in Paris.
Design reduced to its essence.Arik Levy, the Paris-based industrial designer, introduced a collection for Eno in which vases and other tabletop items appear in the most basic sculptural forms. "No ornaments," Levy said. "No decoration, no fat, no special effects, no crazy materials. Just the essentials."
Structure is emphasized.The Muuto table by Mattias Ståhlborn is one of a scattering of new furniture pieces with structural sleeves and other fasteners set off with their own color, as if to make the basic structure preempt the styling.
Flexible furniture is ascendant. Furniture that folds, stows or otherwise fits together is in favor as consumers gravitate to space-saving pieces. The example shown here is the Petalo nesting tables designed by the late French designer Charlotte Perriand and manufactured for the first time by Cassina.
Design is sold by weight, like a commodity.Paola Navone dangled hundreds of his brightly patterned cups, jugs, saucers and pitchers from a skylight at Merci, a Paris design shop. The ceramic tableware was also sold by the kilo, as if to suggest that design exists on the same plane as coffee, meat, grain and other staples of everyday life.
Agriculture is the imagery of the moment. Not surprisingly, designers are in the thrall of the local food movement and the back-to-basics pleasures of homegrown staples. As a result, the halls of Maison et Objet contained a conspicuous number of designs with an agricultural bent, including a movable plant container (above) made from a recyclable fabric by Bacsac.
Slats are migrating from architecture to furniture. Slatted exterior walls have become common to the point of cliche in new residential design over the past few years. Their popularity is due in part to a backlash again the clean hard lines of modernism. Slats are a warmed-up alternative with a touch of craft. Now they're showing up in furniture, as evidenced by the Titikaka bench created by Naoto Fukasawa with teak lathes billowing over an aluminum frame.
Modernist prefab homes have failed to live up to their hype, in part because they’re rarely cheaper than a custom-designed home. But prefab structures are gaining popularity as backyard offices, like the 
