‘An Apparent Simplicity’: this title speaks volumes about the life and work of French designer Pauline Deltour. Brought together at MADD (Musée Des Arts Décoratifs Et Du Design) in Bordeaux, France, her body of work embodies not only her minimal yet playful style, but also her elegance and coherence. One hundred and eighty designs (including prototypes) over ten years. This number speaks to the enthusiasm and vitality that infused her short life (1983-2021).

Her path, through ENSAD (École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs) in Paris, and then Konstantin Grcic’s studio in Munich, hints at her design approach, which balances freedom à la française with German rigour and order.

‘Pauline Deltour: An Apparent Simplicity’ at MADD, Bordeaux

‘Pauline Deltour: An Apparent Simplicity’ (until 21 September 2026) also celebrates the partial reopening of MADD. After three years of restoration and renovation, under the direction of Antoine Dufour Architectes, two buildings classified as ‘Monuments Historiques’ by the Ministry of Culture are united: a late-18th-century townhouse and a late-19th-century municipal prison. The latter houses Deltour’s show.

Here, two former courtyards, where prisoners were allowed to hang out, are transformed into spacious galleries. To contrast with the original limestone walls, the ceilings are covered with metal and glass, letting in sunlight. Around the periphery of the former courtyards sit several small cells.

This is the perfect layout to segment Deltour’s vastly varied body of work: from metal to porcelain, textiles to sweets, tableware to tech, noble materials to natural supplies, and craft to industrial production. The scenography conceived by Konstantin Grcic and Caroline Perret (CPWH) injects energy into the show. All over the exhibition, huge photographs, still-lifes, and portraits of Deltour herself, in dynamic composition, lean against the stone wall.

The first courtyard is occupied by a long, narrow table and functional small objects, as if a vessel with a huge family of Deltour’s designs was setting sail. Although there is no viewing order, visitors might step into the left cell first. The space is dedicated to the ‘A Tempo’ for Alessi, a collection of stainless-wire baskets and a dish drainer, the mass-produced project that launched her career. The products developed from a basket from her ENSAD degree project, inspired by the ocean’s undulation and a coil seen at a factory.

Adjacent is a reconstitution of Pauline Deltour Design Office, an invitation to take a peek behind the scenes of her research and process. Here, a series of sketch-filled notebooks reveals her way of working, while books and personal objects suggest her inspirations. 'We wanted to highlight, above all, her strong, clearly defined style, a method, and a way of approaching projects,' says Etienne Tornier, the museum’s decorative art and design curator.

The invisible, practical details of Pauline Deltour's designs

Moving through the exhibition, visitors can experience the pieces of the ‘Bonhomie’ collection, a tea service created in collaboration with long-established Japanese porcelain maker Arita. The genius of this design is that the base of the teacup is heavy and thick for stability, while the sides remain delicate; Deltour was particular about invisible but practical details.

The next two cells demonstrate Deltour’s capacity to conjure with graphic lines. Tornier analyses her geometric objects for Puiforcat: 'For her, the line sometimes serves as a structuring element,' he says. While straight lines make a three-dimensional stripe for Cire Trudon, curved lines create an innovative system for JEM, the French ethical fine jewellery brand: as part of its ‘Étreintes’ collection, a half ring or a half bracelet of 18ct gold interlocks, becoming a complete piece. This system offers various design options, plain or hybrid: both in the same material, or mixing yellow and white gold, or mother-of-pearl inlay and set diamonds, among other examples.

The second courtyard is dedicated to Deltour's furniture for several brands (including COR, Offecct, and Hem). If she has often been described as 'a shooting star in contemporary design', these pieces of furniture are the perfect metaphor of her constellation.

Visitors are free to try out the seating. Among the designs, the most popular is the garden chair from the ‘Patio’ collection for Tolix, which is also placed outside within the MADD site.

Six cells surrounding this furniture gallery gather designs that include bags for Vitra and Fabernovel, clothing for Sogo & Seibu, a connected bicycle for La Poste, rugs for Hem and even interiors for Moustache and Hôtel Les Touquets. Altogether, they suggest Deltour’s perspective on the body and movement, and her bold sense of colour. 'It is interesting to see how colour influences form and the perception of form,' Tornier adds.

A monograph of the same title as the exhibition has been published for the occasion. More than a catalogue, it is a rich collection of memoirs and photographs, of products but also personal archives. The book is intimate and deeply moving, not only on account of a life cut short, but of the nature of Deltour’s work and personality.

‘Pauline Deltour: An Apparent Simplicity’ is on view through 21 September 2026 at MADD, Bordeaux

For German designer Konstantin Grcic, the technical and poetic sides of lighting design are inextricably intertwined. So when working to recreate the glow of the moon for Nocturne, his latest creation for Flos, he knew exactly how to approach it. ‘The reference to the moon is not a stylistic idea, it’s more about a certain type of light: present but not harsh, both directional and ambient at the same time,’ he explains.

The principles guiding the design were clear to Grcic, and included ‘focused light, diffuse light, and the additional glow of the glass body itself.’ The result is a lighting object featuring an extruded aluminium stem and blown borosilicate glass shade (a cone or a dome) casting both a high-performance focused light and creating an ethereal atmosphere. Although Grcic stresses that the idea of Nocturne didn’t start as a system, it quickly developed into a family of designs that includes a floor lamp defined by a vertical track supporting one or more diffusers, as well as suspension wall-mounted versions.

The new family of lighting designs follows Grcic’s 2019 Noctambule collection, and it’s the latest in a series of pieces created for the designer during his 27-year collaboration with the Italian lighting company.

‘I started working with Flos in 1999 with the Mayday lamp, which is still in production today: It’s a very straightforward object, built around a standard bulb,’ observes Grcic. ‘Since then, the collaboration has evolved quite a lot, mainly because of the shift to LED technology. With Mayday, the light source was given. With more recent projects like OK or Noctambule, we design the light source itself first – the engine – and then develop the lamp around it. So over time, the work has become more integrated and more technical, but the aim is still the same: to make useful, well-resolved lighting.’

A few dozen metres from the Triennale Milano Design Museum, in the centre of the sprawling Sempione Park, high-vis-vested construction workers scurried between a forest of cranes, putting the final touches on what, in a few days, will become the Olympic Fan Zone, where attendees will convene to celebrate and watch the 2026 Winter Olympic Games.

All across the city, similar sites were taking shape – from the Santa Giulia ice-hockey rink in the city’s south-east to the San Siro Stadium, where the Opening Ceremony will be held on 6 February. The Triennale, too, was teeming with technicians and installers this past Tuesday morning (27 January), getting ready to open a slate of new exhibitions in time for the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics. Among them is ‘White Out: The Future of Winter Sports’ (until 15 March 2026), an exhibition curated by the German industrial designer Konstantin Grcic and Triennale’s design director Marco Sammicheli.

‘White Out: The Future of Winter Sports’ at Triennale Milano

'It felt very natural for us to make a contribution during the Olympics,' Grcic told Wallpaper* during the opening of the exhibition. 'We focused specifically on winter-sports-related design projects. And as a designer, the relationship between design and sport is always extremely attractive and interesting. Sports equipment was my first design teacher. Before I even studied design, I was fascinated by it – it’s always tied to performance and function.'

The exhibition is organised into nine different sections: Skins, Dainese, Safety, Infrastructure, Bob Track, Ski, Extremes, Futures, and Material Index. Each section displays a range of innovative objects and ideas that have shaped winter sports over the past several decades.

For instance, the section Skins, which greets visitors at the entrance of the exhibition, presents three glass vitrines containing a trio of kits that once belonged to elite athletes. Among them are alpine skier Federica Brignone’s jumpsuit, helmet, goggles, mittens, boots and back protector – designed to shield her spine in case of high-speed accidents – allowing visitors to imagine the 5ft 4in athlete’s body racing down a mountainside at breakneck speeds. 'The idea was to present the real objects,' said Grcic. 'The actual equipment athletes use.'

Along the circular route of the exhibition, similar high-tech gear is available to see up close. There’s a prototype of the Arc’teryx x Skip Mo/Go, a carbon-fibre exoskeleton resembling a knee brace, which helps propel its wearer uphill while hiking to reduce fatigue. Adjacent is a gleaming metal artificial knee implant by Zimmer Biomet, which stabilises the fragile joint after injury.

For Grcic, the value of staging an exhibition like this lies in the fact that sport often becomes a proving ground for new ideas. 'Sport has always been a pioneering domain for technology and design,' he acknowledges. 'If you think about people’s acceptance of radical design, they are far more open to it when it comes to sports equipment than, say, when they are buying a chair.'

Elsewhere in the exhibition, attention shifts beyond sport to the very real risks involved with inhabiting the mountains. From Recco handheld rescue detectors, which aid search-and-rescue efforts after avalanches, to inflatable vests that protect athletes from traumatic falls. Beyond the equipment on display, however, ‘White Out’ also tackles the larger issues that shape – and even threaten – the existence of winter sports. In the section dedicated to infrastructure, questions of mobility, sustainability and climate change come to the fore.

'This isn’t only about equipment. It’s about infrastructure: how we design ski resorts, how people get there and return, and how we intervene in nature in a way that is acceptable,' explains Grcic. 'What’s interesting is that the biggest environmental problem for winter-sports resorts is not artificial snow, or even the physical impact of lifts on the landscape. It’s car traffic going into and out of resorts. That also implies a relatively simple solution: creating strong public transport links to these resorts could make a significant difference.'

With these concerns in mind, for the final section of the exhibition, the curators commissioned the American media artist Scott Cannon to create an AI-generated animation depicting a speculative future in the year 2100. In it, ski- and snowboard-toting travellers board a Shinkansen-style high-speed train, which deposits them in the centre of a mountain town. From there, they move around futuristic-looking structures embedded in the landscape, imagining a future that reconciles the desires of sports enthusiasts with the fragility of a changing environment.

'The elephant in the room is climate change,' reflects Grcic on the subject, noting the precariousness of a sport and its related industries that rely on an increasingly volatile environment. 'We have to ask ourselves what we are really talking about here. Is winter sport just a pleasant but temporary form of entertainment that will soon disappear, or does it have a future – a positive future – that responds intelligently to these challenges?'

‘White Out: The Future of Winter Sports’ is on view until 15 March 2026

triennale.org

The Musée du Luxembourg on Paris’ Left Bank is best known for hosting exhibitions on historical painting. But to coincide with the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, Chris Dercon – when he was president of GrandPalaisRmn, the cultural institution to which the museum belongs – asked Konstantin Grcic to pitch a curatorial concept around sport and design. The result is ‘Match, Design & Sport – A Story Looking to the Future’, until 11 August 2024.

Konstantin Grcic: ‘Match, Design & Sport – A Story Looking to the Future’

'It would be true to say that sport was my first design teacher,' Grcic says. 'When I was a kid, I was obsessed with looking at sports equipment and studied catalogues about it for days, weeks, months, years. I think it really informed my becoming a designer. I feel that I have learnt so much from this equipment which is always at the forefront of technological development.'

The German designer, who enjoys long-distance running and alpine skiing, has only dabbled in the sports design arena. He was commissioned by Hugo Boss to create the visual branding for British sailor Alex Thomson’s yacht for the 2016/2017 edition of the Vendée Globe, and worked on projects with Adidas 'that never materialised'. 'It’s a very specialised world; I’d probably have to be a specialist designing running shoes, helmets or sports goggles in order to be the right designer,' he continues.

Grcic’s own work does not feature in the exhibition. With no clear brief, he set out to broaden the scope of the sport-and-design relationship far beyond developments in equipment. His aim was to emphasise sport’s inclusivity and the changes impacting the industry, from artificial intelligence to apps, in an open-plan scenography punctuated with Bureau Borsche’s black-and-white typography.

His starting point was to look at antiquity. In collaboration with GrandPalaisRmn’s moulding atelier, his studio made an acrylic-cement reproduction of Myron’s bronze sculpture of a discus thrower, Discobolus (460-450 BC). Elastic therapeutic tape on the copy and a jar of bodybuilding powder refer to how today’s athletes stay in shape. Meanwhile, a photo of Aboriginal runner Cathy Freeman winning a gold medal in Sydney in 2000 and Hirohiko Araki’s poster of Paralympic sporting gods for the Tokyo Paralympic Games 2020 reflect the widening-up of sport to include women, people of colour and athletes with a disability.

Ergonomic and futuristic vision underpin the historical and modern exhibits. Manufrance’s Hirondelle Superbe (1889), a bicycle with an elegant half-moon shaped frame, and Luigi Colani and Flitz Egli’s MDR-1 (1986), a red motorcycle designed a century later that merges the rider with the machine, are both examples of innovative design.

Yet Grcic has eschewed a pedagogical approach, preferring to let the manifold exhibits speak for themselves. The level of precision explored nowadays is conveyed in Leon Paul’s Sub Zer0 (2022) 3D-printed fencing sword handle with an intricate lattice structure and Hermès’ Selle Faubourg (2024), a bespoke show-jumping saddle customised for one horse and its rider.

The exhibition also raises questions, such as how 3D bio-printing could change how injuries are treated. 'I had an accident and have a new knee,' Grcic says. 'With a new implant, do you still qualify as an abled athlete? Do you have an advantage over someone who doesn’t have an artificial one?'

Elsewhere, the potential impact of AI is evoked through the Atlas Humanoid robot (2018) by Boston Dynamics. 'There are only three of these robots in the world and this is the only one which can be lent out for exhibitions; it’s incredible to get hold of it for the length of this show,' Grcic enthuses.

What’s fascinating is the research that Grcic’s team undertook about technology and big data, from talent-scouting apps to design agency AKQA creating Speedgate, a sport imagined by AI after an algorithm analysed 400 existing sporting activities. 

There’s a lot to grapple with in the small-scale exhibition. The fundamental message behind it is clarified in the words above the grandstand at the end: The practice of a sport is a human right. It’s a quote from Pierre de Coubertin, who revived the Olympic Games at the end of the nineteenth century and made the iconic drawing, The Olympic Rings (1913), of five interlocked circles. 

'It’s a beautiful design of the logo about five continents coming together for the Games and is still completely fresh,' Grcic remarks.

‘Match, Design & Sport – A Story Looking to the Future’ is on view until 11 August 2024

Musée du Luxembourg
19 Rue de Vaugirard
75006 Paris

museeduluxembourg.fr
konstantin-grcic.com

German industrial designer Konstantin Grcic is a master of reinterpreting everyday objects through a conceptual yet utilitarian lens. Take his now-iconic die-cast aluminium ‘Chair One’ (2003), for instance, which elevates the stackable, all-weather monobloc chair to entirely new and sculptural levels. It’s hardly surprising, then, that Grcic would take a similar approach to what is often a hackneyed survey exhibition format. 

Konstantin Grcic: ‘New Normals’

Rather than offer a chronological overview, Grcic’s first institutional exhibition in Berlin, titled ‘New Normals’, reimagines his well-known creations in as-yet-unknown futures. The familiar use of various pieces of furniture – staged in new combinations and cleverly altered – suddenly becomes subject to speculation. What kind of dinner parties would be hosted around the glass-top ‘Champions’ table (2011), now outfitted with motorcycle rear-view mirrors? What new wellness trend would require a home gym made of ‘Brut’ sofas (2016) and a gymnastics ball nestled under a mesh covering? Or, alternatively, how is the tongue-in-cheek version of the ‘Traffic’ chaise longue (2013) presented here, with multiple strategically placed smartphone holders jutting out of its frame, not already the ‘new normal’, as the show’s title suggests?

‘Future and design are inextricably, inherently linked,’ the exhibition’s curators Ludwig Engel and Anna Himmelsbach write in its catalogue, arguing that objects and daily rituals that are self-evident today were unimaginable just a short time ago. Indeed, the challenges of navigating everyday life during a pandemic, inconceivable two years ago, make the curators’ point painfully clear.

Thankfully, the survey offers an almost rhythmic viewing experience straddling grave reality and comic relief. The installation Normal 10 (each of the assemblages in the show is titled an enumerated ‘Normal’) casts three office chairs – the ‘360°’ chair (2009) – and an industrial warning light on the four points of an aluminium cross. Is it a device meant for ensuring socially distanced office work? Or is it a corporate merry-go-round designed to get employees’ creative juices flowing in intense brainstorming sessions? 

‘The majority of what surrounds us today will remain the same for decades to come,’ Grcic argues. Rather than a comprehensive aesthetic à la Star Trek, he says, the future will resemble the present world, gradually altered through constant mending and the occasional paradigm-shifting innovation. It’s a process ‘constantly under construction’, he adds, ‘and barely held together… mainly by duct tape’.

The installation Normal 15 drives this argument home. It consists of six ‘Chap’ stools (2021) forming a circle around a concrete block, to which they are connected with industrial cables. The mysterious assemblage suggests a spiritual ritual carried out in a controlled environment. Corporate team-building measure appropriates sacred medicine retreat? It doesn’t seem so far off. What is ‘inconceivable today’ will one day be taken for granted, Grcic points out. 

INFORMATION

Konstantin Grcic,“New Normals” is on view at Haus am Waldsee, Berlin until 8 May 2022

The Covid-19 crisis seems to have put a kink in history, compacted time, accelerated and re-directed existing trends, prematurely tipped tipping-points. It has made what were already good ideas more vital and urgent. Konstantin Grcic’s designs for a new kind of delivery vehicle – a lightweight, simple, flexible, super-functional trailer pulled by an electric trike – is that kind of idea.

When we first started plotting the launch of Re-Made, Grcic was inevitably among the first names on our wish list of collaborators, and the first to sign up. We knew scalability was vital, that whatever we came up with had to be possible and viable in many multiples. And Berlin-based Grcic is not just a premier league product designer, he is an avowedly industrial designer. Grcic works with big numbers.

Then we needed a maker, a material and a process that Grcic could run with. Hydro, the Norwegian aluminium production giant – like Grcic, a veteran Wallpaper* Handmade collaborator – seemed like a good fit. Hydro has 35,000 employees in 40 countries. Its aluminium can be found in buildings, boats, cars and much more and pretty much everywhere. It has also been investing in and developing recycled and lower-carbon aluminium. Hydro Circal 75R is at least 75 per cent post-consumer scrap. As well as avoiding the environmental impact of extraction, the production of recycled aluminium requires just five per cent of the energy required for primary aluminium. (Aluminium recycling is nothing new, of »course. The material can be infinitely recycled without a loss in quality, and there was a huge aluminium recycling drive in the US during the Second World War. It is estimated that almost 75 per cent of aluminium ever produced is still in use.)

Unfortunately, there aren’t sufficient supplies of recycled aluminium to meet demand. Hydro’s Reduxa primary aluminium at least has a lower carbon footprint than the industry average. Carried out exclusively at Hydro’s Norwegian plants, which are all run on renewable energy, the manufacture of Reduxa creates 4kg CO2-equivalents per kilogram of aluminium, a quarter of the norm.

Suitably matched, Grcic got to thinking about what he could do with Hydro’s more environmentally conscious aluminium. He was intrigued by a production process called friction stir welding (FSW), developed in the UK in the early 1990s and first employed on an industrial scale by Hydro. The technique means that two pieces of aluminium alloy can be fused together by a rotating tool that creates heat through friction.

‘That was the spark of the idea,’ says Grcic. ‘I’m familiar with an aluminium profile casting and all that, but I hadn’t heard of friction stir welding. So I looked into it. Welding aluminium is not easy because of its high conductivity. But friction stir welding manages to keep the heat very local and creates the right doses of heat for what you need. So it’s a very precise, very clean way of bringing aluminium pieces together. And you don’t get those ugly joins that you have to live with or machine away.’

‘Every designer I talk to is fascinated by this technique because it feels like it just melts the material together,’ says Hilde Kallevig, Hydro’s head of group brand and marketing. ‘And, of course, there are cost benefits, because you don’t have to add another material, and a sustainability benefit, because the fewer materials you use, the easier it is to recycle.’

Now Grcic had to come up with a design that made good use of that process. ‘Hydro developed FSW for the shipbuilding industry in order to create large aluminium platforms, made up of welded-together profiles. So we discussed  what we could do with that. We could have taken it to an architectural scale, but, in the end, we are not architects. So I thought, OK, let’s design something that is smaller than a house but bigger than a piece of furniture. And aluminium is strong and lightweight and perfect for vehicle construction. So we decided to look at the typology of cargo bikes.’

Grcic started to develop the idea of a utilitarian electric-powered delivery vehicle, scaled somewhere between the UPS/Amazon or similar delivery van and smaller pedalpowered mobile boxes. His original design – taking inspiration from the Piaggio Ape, a three-wheeled minivan first produced in Italy in 1948 and still in use there and around the world – was for a single-unit threewheeler, made entirely of aluminium profiles, with pedals up front and batteries connected to the rear wheels.

An updated design separated the 1.6m-long trike and a 2.4m by 1.4m articulated trailer, with a large battery pack now housed behind the trike’s saddle stem. This core design was kept as simple and economical as possible, though Grcic imagined that covers for the loading area, a driver’s cabin, a suspension system and even solar panels could be added if required.

‘Other people are developing these e-cargo bike delivery vehicles; DHL and UPS have done them, Deutsche Post, too,’ says Grcic. ‘But they are designing them exactly for their needs. Our idea was to create something much simpler, more adaptable and not so purpose-made; to offer a very basic chassis that people could then play with. And you could deliver furniture with it or turn it into an ice cream van or vegetable stall. It could be anything really.’

We began this project before the Covid-19 crisis. And since then, bicycle sales around the world have boomed: first as people looked for ways to take exercise and enjoy roads emptier of cars and vans than they had been since the 1950s; and then as a way to avoid public transport as they slowly returned to work. And cities, London, New York and Milan included, have looked at ways to make the shift to pedal power more permanent and avoid combustion engines returning to the streets in the same, if not greater, numbers than before the crisis. A switch to electric bikes and light electric vehicles is seen as central to this cleaner restart for urban transport. The Hydro-Truck, as Grcic has provisionally tagged it, suddenly has fresh and serious momentum.

From the beginning of the project, though, it was clear that at some point we would need extra input, expertise and manufacturing muscle, a company at the forefront of research and development of battery power and electric vehicles. We had to develop a drivetrain and work out what kind of battery we would need to pull a fully loaded Hydro-Truck – and Grcic imagined loads of somewhere between 200kg and 500kg – up a hill in San Francisco. We would also need someone who could help us put a working prototype together using Hydro’s parts. But we had what felt like a simple yet compelling idea, now extra-ripe with promise and potential. And we used it to pull in not one but two perfect partners.

Thomas Ingenlath, the former design chief at Volkswagen and Volvo, is now CEO of Polestar, Volvo’s standalone performance electric vehicle brand. He also studied industrial design alongside Grcic at the RCA in London. The pair had lost touch but followed each other’s careers at a distance. Polestar has also  been developing strategic links with Cake, a maker of beautifully designed e bikes and electric motorbikes, founded in 2016 by Stefan Ytterborn and, like Polestar, based in Gothenburg. A serial design entrepreneur, Ytterborn founded the cycle helmet company POC, another Wallpaper* favourite, in 2004. A former Ikea designer, he launched the design agency Ytterborn & Fuentes in 1996. The agency’s clients included Iittala, leading to a collaboration with a certain Konstantin Grcic.

Reintroductions made, it quickly became clear that there was now a team in place who were suitably charged up, connected and qualified to take the idea forward. Talk quickly turned to gaps in the market, Hydro- Truck’s potential appeal everywhere from New York to New Delhi, possible ownership and rental models, whether the truck needed pedals, and the possibility that solar panels could unplug it from the grid.

Ingenlath suggested that a team of engineers who joined Polestar from its sister brand LEVC (the London Electric Vehicle Company, the firm behind the  new electrified black cab) could work with Hydro on the practicalities of manufacturing. LEVC’s TX Electric Taxi has an entirely aluminium frame. Meanwhile, Ytterborn and Grcic could refine the design and work on developing the battery and drivetrain.

Hydro-Truck, everyone agreed, could go places (even if exactly how was stil in the works). ‘There’s a whole casserole full of good ingredients there that we can use to create storytelling around the truck,’ says Kallevig. ‘Now we have to create a prototype that is affordable, manufacturable and more sustainable.’

Ytterborn is positive that can happen, with an eye to Wallpaper’s 2021 exhibition during Salone del Mobile: ‘I’m absolutely convinced that we can get to Milan and show something that makes a difference’. 

INFORMATION

konstantin-grcic.com
hydro.com
ridecake.com
polestar.com

Konstantin Grcic may be the pre-eminent, certainly the most prolific, industrial designer of the era. But what he is not – by his own admission – is a fashion designer. In fact, of all the premier-league designers, Grcic, synonymous with the engineered and re-engineered, might seem the most ill-suited to the swish and swagger and seasonal flimflam of the fashion world. Patricia Urquiola and Marcel Wanders maybe; Grcic, no way.

But when we approached Grcic to be part of this year’s Handmade project – and of course we had to – working with a tailor was one of the first ideas he threw at us. And immediately it started to make sense. Quite the quiet dandy on the side, Grcic, it turns out, has long had an interest in the soft engineering of the bespoke and made-to-measure suit – the complex mechanics of cut and padding, and structure and compensation.

‘I have been fascinated by tailoring for a long time. I had a girlfriend who was a tailor,’ Grcic explains. ‘I appreciate the beauty of working with fabrics, how they become three-dimensional, and also the beauty of cutting into a piece of fabric.’ Grcic knew enough about tailoring, and the skills required, to leave well alone, though. ‘It was one of those things that I thought was fascinating, but didn’t really want to do myself.’

However, when we threw the Handmade challenge at him, he thought it might finally be time to take it on. Initially, his idea was to come to London. ‘When we started talking about the project I thought about Savile Row,’ he says. But we thought it made far more sense to put Grcic together with Brioni, the standard bearer of bespoke Italian tailoring, and see if they could come up with a centerpiece for our Handmade exhibition in Milan.

Grcic was perhaps more familiar with the English tailoring tradition – essentially the evolutionary jump from uniform making and still about creating a sort of civilian armour – than the looser, more fluid and more fashionable swing of the Italian suit. ‘I didn’t really make the connection with Brioni at first,’ he admits. But as soon as we did it for him, it’s fair to say he was as excited by the prospect as one can imagine a designer of his standing and experience could be.

Grcic’s MO has always been to understand the possible first, to look at how things are made, and then see if he can make them better, or at least make them in a different, perhaps better way. And so it was with the Brioni project.

Grcic found his way from Munich, where he is based, to Penne in the Abruzzo area of Italy to meet Angelo Petrucci, Brioni’s master tailor. Brioni was founded in 1945 when Nazareno Fonticoli, a tailor based in Penne, and his partner Gaetano Savini, opened the first Brioni tailor shop on via Barberini in Rome. But it is in Penne where Brioni’s suits are still made, where the company’s heart beats and where a Brioni tailoring school ensures there is always a new supply of master craftsmen to hand-make its suits.

‘Meeting Angelo was a crash course in that sort of tailoring,’ explains Grcic. ‘In the afternoon, after seeing all the making and the way they worked, he took my measurements. It is fascinating what information they use. Angelo is always observing, watching how you move, whether you move a lot, whether you make quite small, controlled movements, how much you stand still and what you do with your hands when you stand still.’

The pair, despite coming from very different traditions, developed an instant rapport. ‘We got on very well,’ says Petrucci. ‘Konstantin is an extraordinary person with respect to sensitivity, to being practical and to creativity. I was struck by his way of working – he considered everything just like a real “master tailor” and this is what struck me most. He immediately understood everything regarding the aesthetic level. Naturally, for the technical part, years of training are necessary’.

‘It was a really beautiful experience,’ enthuses Grcic. ‘Of course, your part of the process is making choices, and there are all these options. But someone like Angelo is not just an amazing tailor, he is also an amazing communicator, guiding you to make the right choices.’

But if Grcic was going to take on tailoring, it wasn’t going to be by reinventing the bespoke suit. He has too much respect for the years of training, the skills passed down from generation to generation, and the finely tuned intuition of the master tailor to walk in and try to un-seam it.

Looking through some of the archive material in Angelo’s office, Grcic came across an image of a young man wearing a cape and fell in love with the idea of a suit that reworked that idea and offered the wearer something like a personal environment, a two-piece suit with domestic powers of comfort.

Grcic returned to Munich and set to work on the sewing machine in his studio, mocking up a cape he could take back to Penne and let Petrucci and the team work their magic.

The challenge for Petrucci and Grcic was to produce a suit that from the outside was all about an elegant drape, about fluidity and movement, but that from the inside had the reassuring architecture of a made-to-measure suit, the security of a proper fit. ‘A good tailor really gives you a better body, makes you a better man. I really think there is a psychological aspect to it,’ says Grcic. ‘Tightening all those buttons on a military jacket makes you feel strong, make you feel like a superman.’

For Grcic, though, the appeal of the project was less about creating a new generation of caped superheroes or revolutionising contemporary menswear than getting to grips with a particular model of contemporary craftsmanship, a way of keeping hand-made relevant and practical on a commercial scale.

Brioni employs over 1,000 people at Penne, 400 of them tailors. And demand to enter the company’s tailoring school and join their ranks is intense. But what Brioni has at Penne is a factory. The stages of putting together a made-to-measure suit, and there are hundreds, are broken down and given to different craftsmen. It is, as Grcic describes it, a ‘human chain’. This is craftsmanship on an industrial scale, but also a company culture that is intimately tied to its original location and traditional skills.

And for Grcic, a designer who writes the story of production into each of his designs, this was a very good story. 

As originally featured in the August 2011 issue of Wallpaper* (W*149)

INFORMATION

konstantin-grcic.com; brioni.com

Azzedine Alaïa dedicated his life to designing clothes that transcended trends, super-enhanced the female physique and upheld the classical ideal. His designs had an apparent simplicity, hard-won through fearless experimentation and technical complexity. One of the last projects he worked on before he passed away in November 2017 was a solo show at London’s Design Museum that would tie in with a new Maison Alaïa flagship store on Bond Street.

Alaïa had prepared the exhibition with gallerist Carla Sozzani, curator Mark Wilson, and the co-director of the Design Museum Alice Black. Entitled ‘Azzedine Alaïa: The Couturier’, it will showcase more than 60 outstanding pieces in front of a series of five monumental screens. ‘There has never been an Alaïa show in London. He did not stage big fashion shows and while he was an icon, he was also quite private,’ says Sozzani, founder of Galleria Carla Sozzani and 10 Corso Como in Milan. ‘People don’t necessarily know about his work so it’s wonderful to have this show – the first fashion exhibition at the Design Museum’s Kensington location.’

‘We saw the show as an installation rather than a retrospective,’ says Wilson, who had masterminded two Alaïa shows in 1997 and 2011 at the Netherlands’ Groninger Museum, where he works as chief curator. He came up with the idea for the screens to highlight the sculptural qualities of Alaïa’s clothes: ‘The architectural interventions allow for a 360-degree take on every piece. And it was obvious as to who would make them, as Alaïa had such great relationships with those designers and collected their work.’

Marc Newson, Konstantin Grcic, Kris Ruhs and the Bouroullec brothers were invited to collaborate. To all, Alaïa was a friend, patron and mentor. The brief was to create screens that would complement Alaïa’s work. All battled with the structural complexities of making vast freestanding pieces that could be assembled on site.

In terms of scale, Newson’s is the most ambitious. ‘It was crucial that the pieces remain about Alaïa rather than those intervening to enhance his work,’ says Newson. ‘That’s what we do as designers. I am always working for clients before working for myself. This project was no different, but there is a personal tinge to it because of our friendship,’ adds Newson, who first met Alaïa, through Sozzani, when living in Paris in the early 1990s.

Alaïa collected numerous Newson pieces, including the first aluminium lounger that he made as part of his graduate collection at art school in Sydney. ‘I’ve no idea of how he got hold of it,’ says Newson.

‘There are qualities in Alaïa’s work which shine through: simplicity mixed with technical complexity, rigour, subtlety, sensuality and transparency,’ he continues. ‘There is transparency in many of his garments and that is also the quality of a screen. It’s not a wall, but it has to have some play of light and movement within the absolute structural parameters.’ Newson chose anodised aluminium for his design, adding ‘the metal contrasts and complements the idea that everything around it is a textile’.

The piece, made by aluminium specialist Neal Feay in California, comprises 64 giant tiles, patterned using machine tools and boasting a soft, velvet-like surface. ‘The panels intersect, creating a random yet orderly pattern – almost like a houndstooth,’ says Newson. ‘The anodising process creates these subtle, profound colours – in this case, a flesh pink hue that Alaïa loved. It doesn’t look like hard metal, but sensual and tactile.’

The mission of giving hard surfaces a soft textile-like appearance is a nod to Alaïa’s own material experiments. If he could not find what he liked, he had it developed. He worked in densely-knit tricot for his famous body-sculpting dresses, in fine leather that he made appear as malleable as silk, in semisheer chiffon, sinuous bias-cut silk jersey and laser-cut lace. ‘He would often combine hard architectural elements, such as studs, with fluid materials, creating a tension,’ says Wilson, who has arranged the garments in themes, including volume, African-inspired outfits, black and bandage dresses.

Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec first met Alaïa in 2002 at the opening of their show at Galerie Kreo. Alaïa bought almost the entire collection. ‘It was a sympathetic meeting of shy people with like minds,’ says Ronan. For the Design Museum show, the duo decided on a glass screen. ‘Alaïa had a very precise understanding of silhouette. His clothes are elegant, refined and precise,’ says Ronan. Their textured glass panels (manufactured by Schott AG in Germany) are embedded with a film that creates a wave of gradating grey tones. ‘The quality is neither transparent nor opaque, but translucent,’ says Ronan.

It will be in sharp contrast to the contribution from sculptor Kris Ruhs, who worked with craftsmen in his Marrakech studio for a highly textural, organic piece. ‘It’s like a piece of jewellery, handmade in aluminium,’ says Ruhs. The artist, who created accessories for Alaïa, as well as store interiors, has also worked on a second screen for the show, to display artworks by Alaïa’s partner Christoph von Weyhe.

Konstantin Grcic’s screen is fashioned from polished stainless steel, manufactured by Ronchetti in Italy. ‘Because of the reflective surface, the material becomes somewhat immaterial, like a mirror,’ says Grcic, who constructed the piece from a grid-like pattern of panels. ‘The metal has an undulating surface and one edge is laser cut in a zigzag, like the cut of a tailor’s pinking shears.’ Alaïa owned several Grcic pieces, including a table and a vitrine from his Galerie Kreo shows.

Alaïa’s extensive collection of design and fashion is meticulously archived and housed in the Marais. ‘It’s a subterranean space that has to be as big as a Parisian block,’ says Newson. Works are also on show in his atelier and in stores. The 6,000 sq ft Maison Alaïa store on Bond Street, which is set over three floors, displays designs by Piero Lissoni, Renzo Piano, Naoto Fukasawa, wall sculptures by Ruhs and paintings by von Weyhe, curated by Alaïa and Sozzani, who will now oversee the studio and collections and head up the Azzedine Alaïa Foundation.

Alaïa’s last couture collection was presented in July 2017 and starred his friend Naomi Campbell in a striking velvet bodice and studded pleated gown. Several pieces from this collection will be on show. The giant-scale outfits are juxtaposed with film footage and Richard Wentworth’s almost forensic photographs of the atelier, which he shot over a period of two years. Legions of devotees, including Charlotte Stockdale, Farida Khelfa, Sofia Coppola, Brigitte Macron and Michelle Obama, worship the liberation (the construction is so meticulous that constrictive underwear is unnecessary) and refined eroticism of Alaïa’s clothes. At the time of his death, he was occupied with rescaling all the looks in the show to work with the epic dimensions of the installation.

Just as there is a sense of beautiful complicity between the couturier and the wearer, with Alaïa’s clothes there is also a union of design and culture. ‘All the designers you speak to have such reverence for Alaïa. Through the show we wanted to underline and appreciate that,’ says Black. Adds Newson, ‘Alaïa’s sphere of appreciation was just so broad – he was far more interested in design in general than fashion specifically.’

That like-mindedness was not simply theoretical. It was in Alaïa’s kitchen during his frequent gatherings that bonds were sealed. ‘His circle of friends was vast and from all walks of life. You could be sitting next to Catherine Deneuve, Lauren Bacall, Tadao Ando or Jack Lang – he had a fervid interest in so many things, a big heart and a really mischievous sense of humour,’ reminisces Newson. Says Wilson, ‘The exhibition will be a vision of the epic and the intimate, and a celebration of a generous genius at the epicentre of 20th- and 21st-century design.

Much of Alaïa’s design collection was purchased from Didier and Clémence Krzentowski, founders of Galerie Kreo in Paris. We talk to Clémence about their relationship...

Wallpaper*: How did you first meet Alaïa?
Clémence Krzentowski: Didier and I did a show with Marc [Newson] in 2000, the year after our gallery opened, which is when we met Azzedine. We have a saying in French – ‘On s’est rencontrés et on est tombés amoureux’ – which means we met and fell in love. It was instant connection. Azzedine often referred to Didier as his brother, and Christoph [von Weyhe] said that, in some ways, they even looked alike.

W*: What was your friendship with him like?
CK: We shared all the important moments of our lives with Azzedine. He came to the gallery to see every show, and we often went to events and design fairs together. Most of our encounters were in his kitchen, which was like a second home to us. We talked about fashion and design, but also art, food and nature. He was fascinated by everything. I once asked one of his assistants what he’d learned from Azzedine and he very earnestly replied, ‘I learned life’.

W*: Who did Alaïa admire?
CK: Azzedine loved Marc’s work from the beginning. Marc barely speaks French, and Azzedine didn’t speak English, but they understood each other completely, and Azzedine had a lot of joy in designing the wedding dress for Marc’s wife, Charlotte [Stockdale]. He also had a deep respect and admiration for Konstantin [Grcic], as they were both radical thinkers who enjoyed discovering new things. As for Ronan and Erwan [Bouroullec], he collected their work from the beginning. And since they lived in Paris, they would sometimes come to his kitchen, too.

W*: Do you see similarities in the ways in which Alaïa designed couture and collected furniture?
CK: He was fantastically open-minded about collecting, just as he was about designing. The only criteria he cared about was the content behind each thing. If a piece was interesting, he would want to have it, whether it was a light, a table, a chair, or a work of fashion, art or photography. But he didn’t collect that many names; it would be many pieces from the same people. His relationship with them ran deep.

W*: How was his design collection displayed?
CK: He lived with his pieces, from the Jean Prouvé petrol station that was in his bedroom to pieces by Konstantin and Ronan and Erwan. He had a lot of respect for his things, but he also believed that they should be enjoyed. Since he had too many pieces to have them all at home, the rest was kept at his Paris studio and workshop on rue de la Verrerie. Sometimes we would go and look at all the big boxes containing pieces that hadn’t yet been installed. I do hope they will find their way to his foundation.

As originally featured in the June 2018 issue of Wallpaper* (W*231)

Related: Jony Ive remembers Azzedine Alaïa

INFORMATION

‘Azzedine Alaïa: The Couturier’ is on view until 7 October. For more information, visit the Design Museum website

ADDRESS

Design Museum
224-238 Kensinton High Street
Kensington
London
W8 6AG

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Upstairs at the east London HQ of British furniture brand Established & Sons, Sebastian Wrong crosses his long legs and perches on a Quilt sofa, designed for the brand by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec. Assistants are sent away so we can talk alone. ‘I’m not Kim Jong-un,’ he laughs, although, coincidentally, the sofa is a shade of North Korean red, and the company Wrong co-founded, left and rejoined last spring has had as tumultuous a past as many a wayward state.

During this year’s Salone, in his resumed role as Established & Sons’ design director, Wrong is launching the brand’s first new collection for six years. It’s a big moment for the rock ‘n’ roll furniture manufacturer, which, since its birth 13 years ago, has suffered the departure of its five founders (former chairman Angad Paul committed suicide in 2015), huge debts, loss of direction and near extinction, before being brought back from the brink last year by three new owners.

Five new pieces, including the handblown ‘Filigrana’ light by Wrong, will be unveiled within the Fiera. Two sofas by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec and Konstantin Grcic are headline acts, there’s a light by young Swiss designer Dimitri Bähler, and a chair by octogenarian Italian Mauro Pasquinelli. They represent a fresh start, says Wrong, and signal a move into ‘more accessible, competitively priced, relevant products’.

Almost the opposite, then, to what E&S became known for when, in 2005, it wowed Milan with a daring debut collection of eight pieces by Britain’s best designers, including Amanda Levete’s ‘Chester’ sofa, the limited-edition ‘Aqua’ table by the late Zaha Hadid, and the ‘Zero-In’ table by Barber & Osgerby. E&S’ original mission – to make everything in the UK with Paul’s steelmaking family firm, Caparo – challenged the traditional (mainly Italian) production landscape.

From left, ‘Barbican’ divan, by Konstantin Grcic, a geometric sofa available in three textile combinations, with memory foam pads; ‘Light’ lights, by Dimitri Bähler, a series of lamps, made from Japanese paper and carbon fibre, that emit a soft, diffused light; ‘Filigrana’ lamps, by Sebastian Wrong, a set of four handblown, acid-etch suspension lights, available in three colourways; ‘Cassette’ sofa, by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, available in distinct metals, this sofa is easy to assemble and take apart.

Jay Osgerby, who worked with E&S from the start, recalls: ‘Established was a phenomenon; it totally unsettled the market. Everyone, from Flos to Vitra, was talking about this ambitious young powerhouse.’ High-octane parties accompanied every launch; in 2005, E&S laid on four double decker buses to collect visitors from all over London and bring them to a bus depot in Hoxton to see the collection. ‘The parties had such glamour and energy,’ says Osgerby.

‘We were fuelled up and firing on all cylinders,’ says Wrong. ‘It was a very free-spirited platform, and we took risks and worked with amazing people.’ Did they ever say no to anything? ‘Occasionally,’ he laughs, ‘but being ambitious and outspoken were our core principles.’

For years, E&S steamed ahead, making high-concept, costly pieces, ignoring the late delivery times and distribution problems that were starting to tarnish its glittering reputation. ‘There were consistent delays,’ recalls Simon Alderson, co-founder of design retailer Twentytwentyone. ‘It had such a diverse range, and a huge supply base, but if you have too many variants, you run into problems.’ In 2007, realising that Caparo’s skills in making pressed car parts were not easily transferrable to the furniture sector, E&S had to abandon its ‘British Made’ tag and produce in Italy. Still, the collection grew and became increasingly random.

Alderson finally gave up on the brand in 2015, but last year, his faith restored by the new regime, he reintroduced pieces from the E&S back catalogue, including the Wrongwoods collection by Wrong and artist Richard Woods, and the ‘Zero-In’ table, which, thanks to a slicker production process, now sells for £950 instead of £1,500. Alderson says, ‘The fact that Sebastian is back has given me confidence. He’s a great figurehead and curator, and understands the brand like no one else.’ Sales, finances and distribution – E&S’ former weak spots – are now overseen by three new owners with promising skill sets: Vincent Frey is the grandson of Pierre Frey, founder of the Parisian fabric house; London-based Patrick Mueller-Hermann is a management consultant; and Swiss investor Ramzi Wakim has a background in hotels.

The new team’s first move was to cull the collection by two-thirds, relegating 102 products to the archive. Taken together, the remaining 42 pieces no longer look like they’re about to break into a fist fight. ‘At times the collection has been confusing,’ Wrong concedes. ‘Our DNA matches the perception of what British design – its edginess – is all about. But we do need to change from being a company that makes objects you look at with curiosity to one that makes things you want to live with.’

Wrong is well placed to oversee this transition. He left E&S in 2012 and a year later joined Danish brand Hay as design director. As well as launching more than 30 products, including the Wrong London lighting range, he injected the mid-market Scandinavian brand with pizazz, hosting glitzy launches in Milan’s La Pelota, where once E&S had partied. His four-year stint at Hay, he says, has given him ‘insight into design development and costs, and what products must do to deliver. Established is not there yet,’ he adds, ‘but it’s early days.’

E&S has always drawn star designers and it was not hard to reel in Grcic and the Bouroullecs. ‘As a designer, Established was brilliant to work for,’ says Osgerby. ‘You want your producer to have ambition and belief and a desire to get the job done.’ And while big names sell and headline acts draw attention, Wrong doesn’t want to abandon E&S’ experimental roots.

Over the years he has put graduation projects by the likes of Shay Alkalay of Raw-Edges and Wouter Scheublin into production and given countless young designers a break. The Pasquinelli project is something of a departure. When Wrong came across a chair by the veteran designer in a factory in Italy, he hunted down an unrealised 1976 design of another chair by Pasquinelli and set about producing it. (It’s the first time that E&S has ‘rebooted’ a living designer; in his heyday, Pasquinelli was well known among the chair experts of Manzano.)

‘Priced at around £550, it’s a working chair and relates to a period I like very much,’ says Wrong. ‘And we need some bread and butter chairs in the collection.’ The other new pieces also ‘fill the gaps’ and cater to a world in which ‘meetings take place on sofas rather than in boardrooms, online retail is on the rise, and battery life is a constant battle.’

Anyone who remembers what a ballsy game-changer E&S was is rooting for them. ‘It helped us create three of the most iconic products we’ve ever made,’ says Osgerby. ‘I hope it can carry on making brilliant pieces.’ Alderson adds, ‘The quality of design is so high, it deserves to succeed. It was such a positive addition. It didn’t follow trends; it invented its own language.’

As originally featured in the May 2018 issue of Wallpaper* (W*230)

See more of Sebastian Wrong’s ‘Filigrana’ lamp. Video: courtesy of Established & Sons

INFORMATION

Established & Sons’ new collection is on view at Pavilion 16 D43 from 17 – 22 April at Salone Del Mobile. For more information, visit the Established & Sons website

ADDRESS

Rho Fiera
Strada Statale Sempion, 28
20017
Milan

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS

In the moment before dawn in a village on the Sardinian coast, a light switches on, a halo of light embraces a room, coffee percolates on the stove. As the day progresses, the tide recedes and the villagers go about their chores. The glow produced inside mimics the natural light as it arcs over the sea, playing a role as profound as the actors.

Fare Luce (Shedding Light), directed by Sardinian photographer Gianluca Vassallo, is the first short film produced by Italian lighting manufacturer Foscarini, part of a resolution to cast its products in a new light.

Earlier in October 2017, the brand launched the ‘Maestri’ cultural project – documenting the making of a paper-thin concrete pendant by Lucidi Pevere, an arched lamp supple as a fishing rod by Marc Sadler – with documentary footage by Vassallo that lifts the curtain on their unique artisanal production methods. Yet the ten-minute Fare Luce took a different tack. Talking to more than 100 viewers at its world premiere during this year's recent Milan Design Film Festival, Foscarini co-founder Carlo Urbinati said, ‘Normally a design object sits on a plinth or a stage, but our job is making people understand our lamps are not just a trophy but part of real life. They change our perspective, enable movement – in real rooms, with coffee on the stove.’

Watch Fare Luce (Shedding Light), produced by Italian lighting manufacturer Foscarini

The MDFF has doubled in scope and audience. Just as new media wreaks havoc on traditional forms of publicity, the festival is providing brands with fresh platforms for engaging with the public – on a deeper, more interactive level than before. ‘With advertising and editorial, you just don’t have the opportunity to tell a story to the same degree,’ says Urbinati. ‘Our starting point for Fare Luce was a beam of light in a dark room – the materialisation of light. We wanted to show our emotional connection to light and its ability to create an atmosphere. And create content which may not be immediately connected to us as a company but is gaining the interest of more people.’

Bigger cities than Milan have held such festivals – New York’s Architecture & Design Film Festival has been running since 2011. Yet if ever there were an audience for such a thing, it would be here, where knowledge about design and craftsmanship is akin to knowing how to change a tyre, and sponsors like Foscarini, De Padova and Cassina are on nearly every corner. ‘People feel the need to know,’ says Mario Frusca of Park Associati architects, whose three-minute short The Light of Construction debuted last week with the cool, symmetrical composition of his style inspiration Stanley Kubrick. ‘This is an opportunity to show a very different vision of architecture. It may not sound sexy, but there’s a community out there for it.’

That community includes your standard design nerds. The audience at Gereon Wetzel’s Design Is Work was spellbound as Konstantin Grcic and his team debated the process of making a die-cast aluminium chair.

Yet the subject matter appeared to have universal impact. Filmmaker Francesco Clerici, met with a rockstar's greeting, filled the seats of two screenings for the debut of In un Biccier d’Acqua (In a Glass of Water). His short documentary featured 107-year-old journalist and philosopher Gillo Dorfles enumerating the heirlooms, textbooks and toiletries in his apartment. ‘Objects are our alter ego,’ says Dorfles. ‘They’re not good, bad, ugly, beautiful… they’re the story.’

Ahead of the world premiere of Kryštof Jankovec’s 30-minute documentary Breakpoint, a profile of Lasvit founder Leon Jakimič, the Lasvit team debated the merits of film as a substitute for straight-up publicity. ‘Every sculpture has a story – the work behind it, the history, cultural connotations, pain. You can’t tell that in one picture or two sentences,’ said marketing director Marcel Náhlovský.

‘Film is the best way to inspire people. And you don’t need to know about design to be impressed or affected by beauty. If the sentiment is authentic, it will be interesting to a wider audience.’

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Milan Design Film Festival website

As part of this year’s  anniversary celebrations, Cassina commissioned photographers Armin Linke and Giulia Bruno to follow the work of its artisans. Here, a master carpenter assembles a ‘’699 Superleggera’’ chair, an iconic model designed by Gio Ponti for Cassina. Made of a natural ashwood frame and India cane seat, the ‘‘super lightweight’’ chair has been in production without interruption since its creation in 1957.

A squat 1940s workshop, set behind a single train track in blue-collar Meda, Lombardy, produced the first industrialised models for the Italian furniture maker Cassina. For a while, the Cassina family lived here too, running a small shop on the premises. While Milan, 20km away, became the pretty face of modern Italian design, here in Meda is where the Cassinas got their fingernails dirty. This year Cassina turns 90, and to mark the occasion, the pioneer of 20th-century Italian design got a manicure, facelift and more besides.

In Meda the Spanish designer Patricia Urquiola – Cassina’s art director for nearly three years – has transformed the old production facility into a post-industrial nirvana. Urquiola has sheathed the front courtyard in theatrical perforated-aluminium curtains,  smoothed the rough stone surfaces, built an ‘tower’ in perforated Cassina-red metal and reached into the back catalogue of Cassina maestri to furnish the cavernous spaces: 1949 side tables by Piero Lissoni as well as low ‘Refolo’ tables by Charlotte Perriand and ‘LC2’ sofas by Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret and Perriand in updated sorbet-green and blue. To create an intimate breakout space she’s installed a replica of the Refuge Tonneau in the ‘refreshment room’. The futuristic mobile shelter was designed by Perriand and Jeanneret in 1938 and produced for the first time by Cassina in 2012.

The renovated central courtyard now features an ‘office tower’ in Cassina-red perforated metal, designed by the brand’s art director Patricia Urquiola. © Armin Linke and Giulia Bruno, 2017. Courtesy of Galleria Vistamare, Pescara

It all encapsulates beautifully Cassina’s philosophy, something managing director Gianluca Armento calls looking back to move forward. It’s counterintuitive, but I believe the truer you are to where you’ve come from, the more innovative you’ll be, he says, after unveiling the space to employees last summer. Inaugurating this new, bolder look for Cassina HQ is the culmination of two years of dusting-off and deconstructing old classics – from Gerrit Rietveld’s 1935 ‘Utrecht’ armchair, upholstered with Bertjan Pot’s triangle-pattern jacquard, to the relaunch of the ‘Pampas’ chair by Le Corbusier, Jeanneret and Perriand. Similarly, Urquiola’s streamlining and ‘challenging of the original architecture at Meda shows the real spirit of Cassina in a more modern way’, says Armento.

‘The soul of Cassina is making advancements on how we create things. What do we want to leave behind? Not just midcentury modern pieces, but an evolution. Keeping it authentic while modifying the angle and story is a science of how to maintain a glorious heritage. And anniversaries are part of that.’ A rather literal expression of that sentiment can be found in the HQ’s new gallery, metres from where co-founder Cesare Cassina first tested the soundness of Gio Ponti’s ‘699 Superleggera’ chair in the 1950s. The inaugural exhibition, by photographers Armin Linke and Giulia Bruno, follows Cassina artisans as they piece together furnishings such as the ‘Cicognino’ table by Franco Albini and the new ‘646 Leggera’, an updated version of the classic ‘Superleggera’.

Linke’s photographs zoom in on the tools of the trade: Bacci CNC routers for fashioning round-edged ash legs and computers equipped with sophisticated 3D programmes. Ultimately, though, the same hands-on method from the 1950s takes over. The process of capturing it, Linke says, was downright anthropological. ‘The “Leggera” chair is shaped by artisans who have been working this way for centuries, but also by the classical industrial process and finally the era of robotics. So you have one piece of furniture from three different eras.’

And so continues the dialogue between modernism and the present day, the intertwining of handcraft – ‘which is now often forgotten, but fascinating,’ says Linke – with the outer limits of digital technology. ‘Every component has a story, and finding that language to fit them together has an elegance, like writing software code or choreography.’

To expound further on the theme, this month Cassina releases its 90th-anniversary monograph – no mere coffee-table retrospective, but rather a treatise on the industry moving forward. Edited by Pin-Up magazine founder Felix Burrichter, This Will Be the Place taps contemporary experts including designer Konstantin Grcic, architectural historian Beatriz Colomina and architect Zhao Yang, and asks them to arrive at a vision of the future home based on their appreciation of the past.

The significance of history ‘as a point of reference of excellence’ is something Barbara Lehmann, director of Cassina’s archives, sets up in her introduction. ‘There can be no future without a knowledge of the past,’ she writes. Armento insists the brand has always looked forward a generation for creative input. ‘Some of the furniture we produce was designed over 100 years ago, but remember, the designers were in their twenties, thirties and forties, creating change, creating progress,’ he says. ‘That is still our responsibility, and that is what I want to pay tribute to.’

As originally featured in the October 2017 issue of Wallpaper* (W*223)

A replica of Charlotte Perriand and Pierre Jeanneret’s 1938 Refuge Tonneau takes centre stage in the communal area of Cassina’s Meda HQ.

Models from the Cassina archive, including ‘Superleggera’ and ‘Leggera’ chairs, photographed by Linke and Bruno for the inaugural exhibition of the HQ’s new gallery space.

Cassina’s 90th-anniversary monograph This Will Be the Place (Rizzoli, €80).

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Cassina website

It’s a rare sort of company that appears more youthful as it grows older. Swiss bathroom specialist Laufen – which celebrates its 125th anniversary this year – is one such forward-thinking brand.

Established in 1982 in Switzerland, Laufen has celebrated several milestones along the way: the invention of both the first wall-hung toilet and one piece floor-standing washbasin, and most recently, the launch of its groundbreaking SaphirKeramik. But it’s Laufen’s creative collaborations that have really captured our imagination.

So to Design Miami/ Basel, where Laufen has brought together luminaries from the spheres of art, architecture and design for the project, with Atelier Oï, Konstantin Grcic, Alfredo Häberli, Ludovica and Roberto Palomba, and Patricia Urquiola among them. Curated by Beda Achermann, the objects are playful explorations of Laufen’s materials.

Toan Nguyen created a vase in glazed and sintered SaphirKeramik, reimagining a drop of water in an abstract way, while Atelier Oï envisioned the cross-section of a sapphire crystal using 3D printing. Peter Wirz’s contribution – a fine fireclay recreation of a Toblerone chocolate bar – was a humorous tribute to the proudly Swiss bathroom brand.

The exhibition made its debut in March at the German Architecture Museum (DAM), before travelling to Milan for Salone del Mobile, and Copenhagen for 3 Days of Design. Further stops on the tour include the London Design Festival, and Vienna Design Week, culminating with Design Miami in December.

INFORMATION
For more information, visit the Laufen website

A neglected parking lot on the outskirts of Rome sounds like an unlikely stage for the launch of the latest furniture collection by esteemed industrial designer Konstantin Grcic. However, this small, unassuming building is not what it seems.

The padiglione is in fact a little-known masterpiece of engineering that was designed by the late Roman architect Pier Luigi Nervi. Built in 1945 as a warehouse for his firm, Nervi e Bartoli, the structure is the only surviving building from its larger Magliana campus.

The undulating pavilion was Nervi’s first building in ferro-cemento, a technique for free forming reinforced concrete, which later became the distinctive signature of his work. Despite its historical value, the pavilion’s significance is little known, even among locals.

Installed within the space for one day only, Konstantin’s new collection of modular tables with integrated seating and suspension lighting is executed entirely in concrete using the most innovative techniques – an homage to Nervi’s building principles.

Commissioned by Giustini / Stagetti  Galleria O Roma (where the collection is also on view until 31 July) and curated by Emanuela Nobile Mino, the showcase, titled the ‘Magliana Project’, is the latest in a wider series of exhibitions initiated by the gallery called ‘Privato Romano Interno’.

Begun in 2011, the series invites international designers to produce limited-edition furniture collections that are inspired by the city of Rome, and celebrate traditional Italian craftsmanship. Each collection is then presented in an architecturally striking space within the city. Grcic’s debut follows on from the Campana Brothers’ ‘Brazilian Baroque’ collection of 2011, and Formafantasma’s Roman pottery-inspired ‘Delta’ collection from 2016.

‘Konstantin’s project was very challenging,’ says curator Nobile Mino. ‘Each piece needed to pass by different processes of prototyping in order to achieve Konstantin’s high standard of perfection. So today we are all very happy and proud of the results obtained after such a long – and yet exciting – period of research.’

Grcic was first introduced to Nervi’s experimental pavilion at an exhibition dedicated to the architect at the MAXXI museum in 2011. He later visited the site with Nobile Mino at the beginning of the project, where he imagined a dining area that would functions an ‘ideal compensation to its vacant interior’. Arranged down the central long axis of the space, a long Last Supper-style arrangement of cement tables integrates seating and lighting fixtures.

‘By associating a decidedly pragmatic inclination with a pointedly philanthropic sentiment,’ Nobile Mino says. ‘The Magliana Project presents itself as a successful attempt to reorganise everyday reality in the domestic sphere by introducing a new order of behavioural and aesthetic values: principally celebrating the convivial experience, while preserving the harmony of intimacy.’

INFORMATION

‘Magliana Project’ is on view until 31 July at Giustini / Stagetti Galleria O Roma. For more information, visit the website

ADDRESS

Giustini / Stagetti Galleria O Roma
Via dell’Arancio, 46/49
00186 Rome

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The growing desire to reimagine industrial fabrics as precious ones signals a promising period of invention in fine-watch design. And as the name that pioneered this approach three decades ago, it’s a good time for Swiss brand Rado to underline that it was ahead of the game.

An early advocate of its scratch-resistant, ultra-light, hypo-allergenic qualities, Rado has been designing in ceramic since the 1980s and has continually researched and developed its potential in watch design. As such, Rado has created successful design responses to ceramic’s inherent manufacturing difficulties, including developing new colours.

This year, the Swiss marque has collaborated with Konstantin Grcic, tasking him with reimagining the Rado Ceramica. Launched in 1990, the unisex Ceramica, made entirely of ceramic and sapphire crystal, chimed with 1990s notions of futurism in fashion and design. Its uniform link ‘bangle’ bracelet was integrated into the dial, while its high-gloss black ceramic looks added glamour and a jewel-like feel.

‘The original watch design was radical, so redeeming that means being respectful of the legacy,’ says Grcic. He made subtle changes, including opting for matt-black ceramic – not a choice 30 years ago. The bracelet also dictated design details. ‘It’s the key characteristic so it was something we knew we would keep. The original bracelet and case is one geometry so, even though it was not my first intention, we made a distinction between them.’ Grcic decided to pare down the material so that the bracelet is now tapered. ‘It’s more elegant; the case almost becomes the first link.’

He also focused on the dial graphics and hands. The new Ceramica is launched in four variations, with differing levels of dial detail. Grcic’s design is set apart by a graphic simplicity that announces the industrial designer’s distinctive touch. Details such as the long white tips on the hands, the typeface, and the decision to replace the 12 o’clock position with a white triangle give the new Ceramica ‘an instrument quality; a Ramslike character,’ says Grcic.

However, even Grcic was confounded by the ‘mindblowing difference in scale’ demanded by watch design. Though his studio worked to magnified computer images much of the time, they regularly had to come out of computer reality and create models. Hence, there was a lot of ‘Sellotaping paper around your wrist’.

Whether this will be Grcic’s only watch design remains to be seen. But his now-honed eye suggests future promise for an horological career.

As originally featured in the January 2017 issue of Wallpaper* (W*214)

'Good design,' said Dieter Rams, 'is as little design as possible.' A good point well made, but one that perhaps belies the current state of affairs. Successful design is not simply about form and function; there are patents and trademarks, copyrights and rights proceedings to take into account.

In an unprecedented move, over 100 design luminaries – including Rams himself, Louis Vuitton artistic director Nicolas Ghesquière, Sir Terence Conran, Lord Norman Foster, Jasper Morrison and Sir Paul Smith – have come together to pledge their support to design and its protection.

Catalysed by the long-fought patent battle between Apple and Samsung, the document – or amici curiae, to be technical – was compiled by Charles Mauro, president and founder of MauroNewMedia and presented by legal firm Orrick. Those who have signed the 62-page document are in no way party to the litigations at hand, wherein the US Supreme Court has been asked to reject Samsung’s appeal in the Apple v. Samsung case. This document is only meant to advise proceedings. 

The crux of the argument is that, as industrial design has segued from a purely utilitarian to an aesthetic industry, form has become as important as function. And this, in the eyes of design's game changers, is what needs protecting.

To that end, the document includes a brief history of the ethics and aesthetics of industrial design, including a look back at Raymond Loewy, who would become the father of American industrial design. Loewy's lasting legacy was his ability to take existing products and redesign them with a fresh, appealing aesthetic. Sigmund Gestetner's 'duplicating machine' was the first to receive the Loewy treatment, a slick redesign which resulted in soaring sales. The Roebuck & Co 'Coldspot' refrigerator followed suit, as did many other appliances and objects not mentioned in the amicus.

The now iconic Coca-Cola bottle comes into consideration as an example of how a product's visual design becomes the product itself in the minds of consumers. So too do American automobiles, including Henry Ford's Model T and General Motors' bold and bright Chevrolet. 'History,' summarises Mauro, 'teaches that visual design is the way to package, market and sell technological innovation, manufacturing knowhow, product reliability and performance expectations. Appearance becomes identified with the underlying functional features and with a particular level of product quality and safety.'
 
Intellectual property and protecting design patent rights against infringement are increasingly important subjects. It is not without reason that 111 renown and respected names in the design world – including Konstantin Grcic, Calvin Klein and Alber Elbaz, as well as Sir John Sorrell, Microsoft's executive creative director Raymond Riley and Bentley's director of design Stefan Sielaff – have given their support to this cause.
 
Form might not always follow function, but it will always be the gateway to user experience. It's all very well shrugging our collective shoulders and hoping that the dark arts of branding and marketing will ultimately prevail. But for the legions of skilled designers – whatever their field – the need for greater protection against shameless aping, lazy copying and outright theft has never been more apparent.

There’s good news for fans of the dark side this spring: the German furniture maker ClassiCon and designer Konstantin Grcic are celebrating 25 years of working together with a new furniture collection in deepest, darkest black. With the exception of a brand-new oak daybed called, rather appropriately, ‘Ulisse’, the Black Edition represents a journey through the greatest hits of Grcic’s work for ClassiCon over the years. The folded metal ‘Pallas’ table (2003) is there, so too the ‘Mars’ (2003), ‘Venus’ (2006) and ‘Chaos’ (2001) chairs, the ‘Odin’ sofa (2005), the ‘Orcus’ desk (1993) and ‘Diana’ side tables (2002). It is a wonderful mix of his work; at once so familiar to the design fan, and so very radical in form.

When he first crossed paths with ClassiCon in 1991, Grcic had just left London, where he had graduated from the Royal College of Art and worked for Jasper Morrison, and had returned to his home town of Munich to found his own studio, KGID. Also a new company, devoted initially to a classic modernist line of furniture manufacture, ClassiCon was looking for young talent to create new formal dialogues with design history’s big names, in particular the late Eileen Gray, whose work it had the licence to produce. It decided to take a risk with the rather far-out designs of the young Grcic and it rapidly became clear that they were an effective foil to the Gray pieces, but also had a formal daring all of their own. It was a great call by ClassiCon – now everybody wants a piece of Grcic. One or two retired masters aside, he is, without doubt, Germany’s greatest living designer. He has curated exhibitions; produced pieces for the likes of Authentics, Cappellini, Driade, Magis and Flos; has works in the permanent collection of MoMA; and is a winner of Italy’s Compasso d’Oro – perhaps the design industry’s greatest honour.

So why celebrate this highly successful partnership with such a sombre-coloured collection? In 2010, Grcic curated an exhibition for the Istituto Svizzero di Roma called ‘Black2’, in which he selected 51 black rectilinear consumer objects, and housed them in a glass cabinet of his own design. It was a collection of everyday curiosities and included a black American Express card, Zanusso’s 1969 'Black 201' TV set, a Braun calculator and a Leica camera. The show was a sort of homage to Kazimir Malevich’s 1915 Black Square painting but also to the black monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the black quadrilateral becomes a representation of a certain kind of liberation and enlightenment, but also the abandonment of the rule book and rebelliousness – the apple in the Eden of the arts, ‘giving shape’, in Malevich’s words, ‘to pure feeling’.

The Black Edition is far from monotonous monochrome; the chromatic nuances of black in the individual objects reflect a very conscious decision on the part of the designer. Each piece has a new surface coating or upholstery that ranges from an almost rubbery matt black for the ‘Pallas’ table to high gloss for the ‘Orcus’ desk and a sumptuous black velvet by Raf Simons for Kvadrat for the ‘Odin’ sofa. To emphasise the sensuality of the new edition, ClassiCon invited the Iranian artist Shirana Shahbazi to photograph the whole ensemble against a vibrant geometric colour background, which ties Grcic’s designs firmly back to their modernist roots.

One of the things that fascinates about Grcic’s work is the evidence of the journey he takes through function and form to reach the final design. The freedom of his pieces, the absolutely radical forms – that are nevertheless strangely timeless once you have got over the shock of the new – is rooted in the most rigorous workings out, incorporating not only technical solutions but also context, both historical and practical. And all of it reduced to the max at the end.

Grcic’s creative brilliance thrives on restrictions. ‘I have learned a lot from him,’ says ClassiCon CEO Oliver Holy. ‘About making prototypes, about never neglecting details and always to see through the development personally. He never lets up: he’s a true master.’ I interviewed him a few years back on the subject of one of his forerunners – the great German designer Dieter Rams. Grcic said that when he was younger he really disliked Rams’ work and everything it stood for because it belonged to the past and was so dogmatic. It was only later that he discovered, while talking to Rams, the incredible poetry and emotion embedded within his ostensibly functional work. ‘It all became so human... so beautiful,’ he said. 

One of the great similarities between Rams’ and Grcic’s work is that the former finds it almost impossible to articulate this sense of poetry, and Grcic, too, clothes this intangible, yet powerful element of his own creative expression with words such as ‘discipline’ and ‘routine’. Grcic says, for example, of the new ClassiCon Black Edition, that he intentionally chose black ‘because it is a colour that represents classic modernism and its existential objectivity. But black is also a clear, modern statement: pure, topical and radical.’ All of which are compelling reasons, but it is what he didn’t say – that the rich chromatic blacks and extraordinary surfaces of this edition make it unbelievably sensual, sexy, decadent even – that is perhaps, in the final analysis, the most interesting. 

As originally featured in the May 2016 issue of Wallpaper* (W*206)

INFORMATION

’25 Years of Grcic for ClassiCon’ is on view from 12–17 April. For more information, visit Konstantin Grcic’s website or ClassiCon’s website

ADDRESS

Spotti
viale Piave 27
Milan

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Germany's Kunsthalle Bielefeld is now hosting 'Abbildungen', the latest exhibition of work by Konstantin Grcic, a notable Wallpaper* affiliate and one of Europe’s most influential industrial designers. Herein, Grcic is presenting a selection of his 'design-oeuvre' via both simple and complex bases, pedestals, shelves and display cases, especially designed and fabricated for the occasion.

In 1991, Grcic conceived a robust wooden plinth for the exquisite sculpture Bird, by Constantin Brancusi, after a request by its private owner. Fifteen years later, upon an invitation by the adventurous director of the Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Friedrich Meschede, the designer presents Rodin's La douleur on a sockel redolent of an industrial palette.

'The Brancusi plinth is my earliest work in this exhibition,' explains Grcic, 'the plinth for Rodin my latest. So, both pedestals form a frame for the exhibited works. The sockel is an absolutely classical form of presentation. That is what I’m interested in. A sockel is creating space for figures and greatly challenges us to look at things in a new way.’ Outgoing Tate Modern director Chris Dercon rightly stated during his opening speech that, 'for Konstantin Grcic, furniture is always a plinth'.

Yet Grcic was also inspired by Philip Johnson’s architecture for the Kunsthalle Bielefeld, privately commissioned by the local industrialist Rudolph August Oetker in 1968. Indeed, aficionados of architecture are aware that Johnson conceived his Kunsthalle literally as a plinth for art. Grcic’s displays carefully follow Johnson’s proportions of the rooms, his curved walls and the views of nature through the windows.

This month also, Galerie Kreo in Paris will be presenting Grcic’s new 'Hieronymus' furniture series, including a combined table and bench, inspired by Antonello da Messina's crucifixion painting of 1475, housed in the collection of the National Gallery in London.

'The five fixtures,' explains art historian Donatien Grau, 'are all like small plinths, almost a stage, seemingly separating us from the world.’

Plinths are an essential artworld consideration and design focus, at least according to Dercon and Meschede. Museum curators, it seems, should learn from Grcic, Jasper Morrison and other designers in how to display art in ways simultaneously stimulating and precise.

INFORMATION

'Abbildungen' is on view until 3 July. For more information, visit the Kunsthalle Bielefeld's website

ADDRESS

Kunsthalle Bielefeld
Artur charging Beck-Straße 5
D-33602 Bielefeld

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To understand how Konstantin Grcic arrived at his latest series, 'Hieronymus', you must refer to the painting by Antonello da Messina of Saint Jerome in his study. In it, the theologian and Doctor of the Church, most recognised for translating the Bible into Latin, is situated on a podium rendered with architectural elements like a proscenium-cum-office.

Flash forward roughly 500 years when Grcic was training as a cabinetmaker in Dorset where he first saw a photo of the work, exhibited in the National Gallery, and marveled at this unusual depiction of furniture. His five pieces currently presented at the Galerie Kreo adopt this workstation concept circa 1475 while radically rethinking the design for today.

Within the Paris gallery, the varyingly geometric works give the impression of sculptures, whether cube-like in Carrara marble, tube-like in gold matte-finish aluminum, ovoid in 3D-printed sand, or irregularly pentagonal in fibre-cement. But the German designer – also currently showing a selection of plinth designs at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld – says he never considered the pieces as unoccupied. ‘Even in our early visualisations and illustrations, there was always a person inside,’ he tells Wallpaper*, demonstrating how each invites a slightly different posture.

More than just striking forms, the units serve as self-contained spaces for reading, writing or else the oft-neglected art of contemplation. Grcic points out how occupying one offers a reminder that furniture engages multiple points of contact: how we sit, where we place our feet, whether we can easily rest our elbows. ‘You can argue, “Is it comfortable or is it uncomfortable?” I think it’s both; it depends very much on your frame of mind and what you want to do,’ he says, before adding they are not intended as ‘9-to-5 desks.’

Grcic notes, too, how these ‘proposals’ present different typologies to the standard chair and table within a small footprint. The uprightness of the aluminum design, for instance, has the effect of a minimalist throne, while the larger 3D design could accommodate several people like space-age, tête-à-tête
-style seating.

Unlike some of his industrial designs, Grcic says conceiving a series for Galerie Kreo allows him to test the limits of form and function. ‘The gallery is the kind of oratory or playground for trying things out. When you find things that work, they could end up being used in a commercial project. But I think you have to go extreme in order to learn a lot,’ he says.

Still to be determined is whether the pieces themselves might enable different ways of thinking—that leaning on the bench within the fibre-cement structure could stimulate ideas that wouldn’t materialise from sitting in the back of a taxi. To this, Grcic replies, ‘I think this is most significant; any chair has an effect on mind and how you work. Some people can concentrate anywhere, like in an airport. But here, I think the physical interaction puts you into a space which is also a mental space.’

Without doubt, it’s also a contemporary space, which he believes relates it back to the da Messina tableau ('Hieronymus' is Jerome in Latin). 'I think it’s something very much of today, just as much as the painting depicted how someone would think about Jerome in his study at that time,’ Grcic explains. ‘I couldn’t have done these five years ago and maybe I wouldn’t do them in five years’ time.’

INFORMATION

’Hieronymus’ is on view until 16 July. For more information visit the Galerie Kreo website

ADDRESS

31 rue Dauphine, 75006, Paris

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Konstantin Grcic and Patricia Urquiola need little in the way of introduction. Their always exceptional design work has earned them multiple and regular appearances in the pages of this magazine. Friends and first team talent for the same design companies, and joint winners of last year’s Wallpaper* Designer of the Year gong, the pair joined forces on this year’s judging panel. 

Meeting at Fondazione Prada in Milan – with Urquiola’s husband, and Grcic’s partner and baby daughter patiently in tow – the duo discussed who got top marks and why, across 11 different categories.

They admit they came to the task reluctantly – no designer is comfortable sitting in judgement on the work of peers, friends and colleagues. Luckily, many of the Judges’ Awards categories don’t require this kind of discomfort. And in others, the result was so clear cut there was little need for tortured debate. The Fondazione Prada, winner of Best New Public Building, was a case in point.

‘There were no compromises made,’ observes Grcic of the sprawling complex. It was designed by Rem Koolhaas’ OMA, which transformed seven early-20th-century buildings and designed three new structures, all of which pop up and play harmoniously in the vast campus. ‘The choice of architect, and the time span of developing such a project in all of its detail, make the building stand for the kind of quality that we see so rarely today.’ 

Urquiola agrees. ‘This kind of attitude, to think but then to also act, is so important,’ she says of Prada’s CEO Patrizio Bertelli and his wife and creative director Miuccia Prada, who spent over a decade planning the project. ‘As someone who lives in Milan, they have really given us something special,’ she adds.  

Urquiola was spellbound by the foamy, air-pierced aluminium that wraps around many of the foundation’s walls and inspired the pair’s on-site illustration of the space, created for this month’s limited-edition subscriber cover. ‘I’ve often seen this material but it’s never been well proposed,’ Urquiola says. ‘The way it’s been used here is fantastic.’ 

The designers were also in accord when it came to the Designer of the Year award. 

‘All of the contenders were great,’ Grcic says. ‘But the Bouroullec brothers have done such fantastic work over such a long period of time, they deserve it just a little bit more than the others. They’ve been going at it for 15 years, always at the top level. It’s incredible.’

‘It was very easy for me,’ Urquiola agrees. ‘They did a fantastic job this year.’ 

Other categories mulled over by our duo were Best New Hotel, which went to the Aman Tokyo (‘I’ve been there,’ says Urquiola. ‘The entrance is an incredible piece of architecture’); Best City, which went to Copenhagen (‘They seem to be creating a city for today for a citizen for today,’ remarks Grcic. ‘It’s very open minded’); and the twin fashion awards with Best Men’s Fashion Collection A/W 2015 going to Stefano Pilati at Ermenegildo Zegna Couture and the womenswear award for the same season handed to Phoebe Philo at Céline.

‘I feel very inspired by good fashion designers and what they’re able to do,’ Grcic says. ‘We keep designing tables, chairs and storage. They have to redesign the jacket, shirt and trousers. The choice of materials, fabrics and the construction of something three-dimensional is very interesting.

As originally featured in the February 2016 issue of Wallpaper* (W*203)

See the Design Awards 2016 in full – including our extra-special Judges' Awards - here

INFORMATION

Photography: Gianluca Fontana

Last year, Italian company Driade enlisted architect David Chipperfield to curate the brand’s artistic direction. The first steps included introducing new designers to the collection and redesigning the Milanese showroom, now an all-white sculptural space.

As well as contributing product design for the brand, Chipperfield also introduced Driade’s inaugural Image Book, a photographic volume which presents the new pieces as well as furniture from the permanent collection through the art direction of John Morgan. To emphasise the continuity between past, present and future, the latest crop of Konstantin Grcic’s shelves were presented alongside archive pieces by the likes of Nanda Vigo and Marco Zanuso, while the book also includes Driade staples such as Fredrikson Stallard’s 'Basalt' collection and new pieces by design giant Enzo Mari.

Eschewing a standard catalogue style, the pieces, all with a strong sense of modernity and creative flair, were photographed by Berlin-based photographer Simon Menges against the suggestive backdrop of a stone quarry outside Verona.

‘Since its beginnings in 1968, Driade has, through its selection of designers and through the development of objects and furniture, represented a particular attitude, encouraging innovation and individuality, and enjoying a spirit of design diversity,’ says Chipperfield, who since taking the helm of the company has been quietly directing it while celebrating its roots. ‘Going forward, it is the intention of Driade to maintain its contribution to this culture and to continue to develop the generous balance between the individuality of the designer and the lose coherence and perspective so brilliantly determined by [founders] Adelaide Acerbi, Antonia Astori, and Enrico Astori.'

4416367709001

Konstantin Grcic at the bow of the Hugo Boss IMOCA 60 yacht, for which he  has designed the branding and interiors. The unusual black hull relies on specialist paint by BASF that includes a reflective layer to avoid overheating.

Watch a 'behind-the-build' and interview with Grcic and Alex Thomson above

In nautical evolutionary terms, the modern racing yacht is the fittest and fastest. Competition creates a ruthless efficiency in boatbuilding, and the world’s oceans become testing grounds for advanced materials and new design. Most importantly, the sea is the toughest arena on the planet, and technology has to work seamlessly in what is the ultimate test of endurance.

Hugo Boss has supported ocean racing since 2003, when the German fashion brand became the sponsor of Alex Thomson Racing. British sailor Thomson, having won his first round-the-world race in 1999 (at 25, he was the youngest skipper ever to win such a competition), currently holds a clutch of distance records. He has competed in the gruelling Vendée Globe solo round-the-world race since 2004, coming in third in the 2012 event. The next Vendée Globe sets sail on 6 November 2016 and the 41-year-old skipper’s ambitions now rest on a remarkable new yacht that’s been hand-built on the south coast of the UK.

Informed and shaped by Thomson’s own extensive experience, and styled, inside and out, by long-standing Hugo Boss collaborator Konstantin Grcic, the yacht was built at Green Marine in Hythe, Hampshire, to specifications set out by IMOCA, in a process overseen at every stage by Thomson.

The Vendée Globe was founded in 1989 as the only non-stop, round-the-world race for the solo sailor. Typically, competitors spend between three and four months at sea, entirely alone and unable to set foot on dry land (otherwise they’re disqualified). The technical and physical challenge is immense.

While Grcic is creating the identity and branding that’ll announce Hugo Boss to the world, he’s also playing a critical product design role inside the hollow superstructure, where ballast, stores and equipment are squeezed in with Thomson’s ultra-compact living space. Making this space work well could essentially decide the outcome of the race.

Thomson has worked closely with Grcic to make this space as efficient as possible, building a wooden mock-up to explore every option. ‘Konstantin comes from a different area [of expertise] and has a different perspective,’ says Thomson, ‘but the boat has to be light. There’s no sink, no toilet, no conventional bunk. You have to prioritise what’s important,’ he says, likening the tiny cabin to like being inside a bass bin, with constant, ear-shattering noise and movement.

‘There’s no room for experimentation,’ says Grcic. ‘If something fails he has to be able to repair it while he’s racing.’

The boat’s livery is dominated by a big, bold Hugo Boss logo, as one might expect. ‘It’s strong and simple and fits well on a raceboat,’ says Grcic. The hull itself is black, an unconventional decision only realised with the use of a specialist dual-layer paint, originally intended for automotive applications, with an embedded reflective layer beneath a black surface to keep temperatures down.

This will be Thompson’s fourth attempt at the Vendée Globe. ‘As a sailor you want to go south, the Roaring Forties and Furious Fifties, where the waves are big and well spaced. It’s exhilarating and scary,’ says Thomson. ‘The Indian and Pacific Oceans are tough. You’re really isolated, thousands of miles from help. Your fierce competitor is also your best rescue squad. So there’s a strange bond you don’t see in other sports.’

Thomson is a breed apart, and he knows it. Fewer than 100 people have ever completed a solo round-the-world race. For Hugo Boss, the boat, the team and the race are a major marketing expense that is not without risk. ‘I’ve been allowed to build an extreme machine that’s just for me – it’s very ostentatious really. Its 20,000 individual pieces have all been handcrafted,’ Thomson says. ‘It’s an amalgamation of all the good things I’ve seen on boats in the last 12 years.’

Grcic’s livery will ensure the Hugo Boss IMOCA 60 cuts an impressive figure as it slices its way around the world; its low hull, 30m mast and 650 sq m of sails all create an impressive sight at speed. Few pieces of industrial design are so singularly focused as the racing yacht, and the stakes could not be higher. If all goes well though, Thomson, Grcic and Green Marine will have come together to create a boat that rules the waves.

For the unabridged version turn to page 122 of the September 2015 edition of Wallpaper* (W*198)

Ever restless, Wallpaper* Handmade upped its perfectly proportioned sticks again this year, installing itself (well, we helped) in a semi-retired stretch of Milanese store fronts to create the Wallpaper* Arcade. We were determined that this year's Handmade event be the biggest, best and most bountiful yet. And so it was; not least our opening bash, now well established as Salone's swingingest party.

This year we were joined by Tom Dixon, Patricia Urquiola, Konstantin Grcic, Philippe Malouin, Maurizio Cattelan and many other luminaries who enjoyed the more interactive elements of this year's exhibition: including the Wallpaper* nail bar; live hair styling by the legendary Jimo Salako; and the remarkable 'Rotunda Seronita' snack bar, dispensing not only savoury treats but their own handmade cherry wood trays.

Of course, such scale and ambition does not come easy and we again have to thank the many friends, old and new, who provided invaluable assistance and supplies. The champagne flowed freely thanks to Veuve Clicquot, whose Re-creation Awards installation of re-imagined mail boxes proved a particular favourite, while Royal Salute served wonderful whisky at their remarkable 'Neolithic' bar, designed by Studio Mackereth and crafted by Jack Badger. The highest-grade grappa came courtesy of Nonino (try saying that after a few glasses) whilst beer was supplied by San Miguel (summer in a bottle as far we're concerned).

Given this year's culinary theme, the catering had to impress and we served up a monumental stretch of Italian favourites, including generous dollops of organic panettone gelato from local favourites, Grom. We also flew in St John sous chef Arnold Hoeksma who cooked up bone marrow pizza at the Emeco space while the young craftsmen Josh Fisher bent, beat and shaped metal into unique editions of Jasper Morrison's 'Alfi' chair.

The Wallpaper* Arcade – a collaborative effort in the best tradition of Handmade – was brightened by Kvadrat's spectacular multi-colour colonnade as well as the multidisciplinary delights of d3 Dubai Design District; the contemporary crafted carpets of AfghanMade; and Gufram's prickly pop-up lounge.

Finally, a huge thank you to the event sponsors, Veuve Clicquot, Hästens and Monoqi Business, and, of course, Leclettico's Claudio Loria, whose ambition and drive matches our own.

Like its fashion siblings, Milan's design retail scene is dominated by Italian behemoths running their own single brand stores. Multi-brand shops specialising in a quality edit of contemporary design can be hard to find, which is why Spotti is one of the city's best-kept secrets.

Opened in 1986 by brothers Claudio and Mauro Spotti, the shop hangs quietly on the fringes of Milan's central shopping district and features a considered selection of new furniture, lighting and carpet designs jumbled seamlessly with iconic re-issues.

Inside, the shop's good mood and fresh scene are owed to its twice-yearly installations curated by Arianna Lelli Mami and Chiara di Pinto of local design firm Studiopepe. The latest incarnation, entitled 'Summer Tales', features a colourful mix of Kettal's outdoor 'Bitta' sofa (in a new rope version), 'Modernica Bubble' lamps and chairs by George Nelson, exclusive ceramic sculptures by Livia Polidoro and Adobe terracotta desktop accessories, all set against a canvas of tropical wallpaper by Cole & Son.

See all of Spotti’s past in-store collaborations with Studiopepe

The store first enlisted Studiopepe in 2009 because of their unconventionally Milanese approach to interiors. 'We knew that they could make a difference,' says Claudio Spotti, 'especially in a city where design is everywhere but it's often presented in a stiff way.' Lelli Mami's and di Pinto's first project involved transforming the store's interiors completely in white and since then has grown in scope to also include research of young designers and specially commissioned pieces.

For each seasonal store takeover, the studio is now given total creative control of Spotti's showroom design, window and product installations, reigned in only if there are new launches to include such as the Kvadrat and Raf Simons collaboration from this year's Salone del Mobile or Lina Bo Bardi's 'Bowl' Chair for Arper.

Spotti also offers interior design services for homes and offices, kitchens produced by Valcucine, and custom-made furniture under its eponymous label, including pieces designed by Studiopepe. The presentation of 'Summer Tales', which will run in-store throughout October, is the shop's tenth exhibit with Lelli Mami and di Pinto.

ADDRESS

Spotti Milano
Viale Piave, 27
20129 Milano
Italy

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When Jean-François de Bastide wrote La Petite Maison, a novella based on a libertine who seduces an upright woman by impressing her with his pleasure pad, he could never have imagined it looking like the installation being unveiled at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac's Pantin location today.

‘Home (very) Sweet Home’ rethinks de Bastide's narrative, circa 1785, by integrating art and design elements in a space roughly configured to resemble a seven-room residence (including a ‘garden’ that consists of an Alex Katz rose painting and Elger Esser’s moody depiction of Giverny).

In exploring the notion of ‘sensuous architecture’, curators Matthieu Lelièvre and Alexandra Midal also looked back to Condillac's Treatise on the Sensations (1754) and Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières' The Genius of Architecture or The Analogy of that Art with our Sensations (1780). But Galerie Ropac exists in the present, not the past. And as such, the spaces present a series of contemporary vignettes that transform viewer into voyeur and blur lines between furniture and objet d'art.

The rooms express not only a variety of aesthetics but ways of engagement. To view the salon - with its modular set of low tables in burned wood from Normal Studio and Wiener Sitzmöbel seating - you need to look through a series of distorted peepholes. In the boudoir, Konstantin Grcic’s polyurethane loveseat anchors the interactive wallpaper by HEAD.

You can walk around the Floris Schoonderbeek’s orange bathtub, with its barbecue-like heating apparatus. But you can only gaze at the bedroom mise-en-scène that includes a trompe l’oeil marble-printed wingback chair by Maurizio Galante and Tal Lancman and Sylvie Fleury’s bronze casts of Alaïa pumps. Benjamin Graindorge’s amorphous lighting of the striking red El Ultimo Grito table in the dining room are very clearly functional, but could as easily be deemed sculptures. There’s a compact Tony Cragg piece in the space that functions as a wunderkammer. It can only be glimpsed from afar, making it all the more covetable.

Enter the kitchen and all you'll find is Martha Rosler's ‘Semiotics of the Kitchen’ (from 1975), a performance art piece in which the artist acts out aggressively with quotidian kitchen utensils. It is the one work in the show that is outside the Ropac collection.

Lelièvre, who works in-house at Galerie Ropac, explains that their interpretation is less literally sexual, more subtly unsettling. It was Midal who encouraged this darker reading that belies the show's name; knives are a recurring theme and Warhol's ‘Flash – November 22, 1963’ (the feature image) underscores the voyeuristic aspect.

In an early walk-through of the exhibition, Thaddaeus Ropac (one of Wallpaper’s 2014 Design Awards judges) noted how the Pantin gallery – a cluster of buildings located just beyond the Paris' ring road – provides the additional space to introduce unconventional programming. ‘We want to stay as an art gallery representing artists and their careers. But we like to explore other ways of showing art,’ he said. ‘We are showing art in a context of an environment where design also plays a role.’

Lelièvre says the project forced him to apply decorator touches such as the crown moldings to establish a bourgeois backdrop. But that really, he never saw the environment as an actual home. The unusually angled walls, he says, make this clear. ‘There's a feeling of bringing a view to what is architecture and design,’ he adds. ‘We are not decorators – it is not a question. But we are crossing towards it.’

Indeed, had we been crossing the threshold into an actual home, there would have been a doormat.

The concept for the exhibition was inspired by Jean-François de Bastide's La Petite Maison, a novella based on a libertine who seduces an upright woman by impressing her with his pleasure pad. The bedroom mise-en-scène features the 'Watermelon with Knife' painting by Robert Mapplethorpe, 1985, trompe l’oeil marble-printed wingback chair by Maurizio Galante & Tal Lancman, 2011, and 'Augenkreuz' eye artworks by Stephan Balkenhol, 2012.

As the title suggests, 'Konstantin Grcic: Panorama', opening today at The Vitra Design Museum, is a sweeping overview of Grcic's career: a career that has established him as the reigning champ of a new poetic rationalism.

The Hugo Boss-sponsored exhibition, a collaboration between Vitra and Grcic and years in the making, doesn't attack this career in a straight ahead chronological way, but rather at conceptual angles. It picks up on key themes and asks the same questions that Grcic has asked and tried to answer in his work… the questions he keeps asking.

'Life Space', the first section of the show, asks what it really means to live 'somewhere' now; and if we are all increasingly mobile, can we simply take that space with us? Furthermore, how do you create a space that allows for networking, communication and contact - through all the mediums that now offer that - as well as peace, solitude and solace?

'Work Space' tries to get at Grcic's creative process, taking us inside a studio, or hi-tech science lab that contains seemingly random inspirational objects. The space also asks, what does the rationalist modernist do when the job of trying to make people's lives work better has to accommodate competing demands? When the idea of a benevolent design god offering one solution for the common good is dead?

'Public Space' meanwhile, spins around a 30 metre long, 4.5 metre high, digital image produced by artist Neil Campbell Ross. Here are multiple images of what's out there, for better or worse, the old and the new, nature and the city, utopia and dystopia, the unholy mess of the common land. What, it asks, is the designer to do with it, what is a useful intervention?

'Object Space', on the other hand, is biography through object - Grcic's own designs that have inspired him. It is CV and wunderkammer and suggests where Grcic might head next.

ADDRESS

Vitra Design Museum
Charles-Eames-Straße 2
79576 Weil am Rhein, Germany

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Art and design often play with thereness and not thereness, with absences, voids and implied absences. Art can also do anxiety inducing; design, almost by definition, not so much. Konstantin Grcic's new furniture collection for Galerie Kreo, Man Machine, taking its name from a 1978 Kraftwerk album, does both.

The nine-piece collection includes a chaise, tables, chests and a book-shelf, all made out of industrial float glass by a glass workshop established in Frankfurt in 1829. As Grcic says, industrial-spec glass is not an obvious material to make furniture out of - 'it's cold, hard, fragile and really heavy.'

It's also not there in the way that most materials are, presenting particular design challenges, especially if it is pretty much the only material you are working with. You don't know how visible it is going to be and in what ways. Grcic says he produced computer drawings and models for the pieces but, given the workshop's industrial capabilities, he could also produce several versions of his designs before arriving at the one that worked. There were failures and discoveries along the way he admits. 'There is a considerable amount of engineering involved,' he says. 'It's not rocket science but the pieces have to be functional, and work properly.'

What makes pieces in the collection more than Larry Bell-alike novelties is the addition of hinges, cranks and black silicon gas-filled pistons. The pieces are dynamic; you can move and adjust them. In fact, because these mechanics are so visible, the pieces become as much about them as the effects of glass-on-glass, stark angles and geometry in the air. 'They are almost a celebration of the pistons,' Grcic says.

They are also a counter to the anxiety effect of the glass furniture. 'They humanise the designs,' he says, hence the Man Machine title. 'And there is poetry in their slow, precise movement. It is unexpected. They also make a great noise.'

ADDRESS

Galerie Kreo
31, rue Dauphine
Paris

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It may be tough to teach old dogs new tricks, but perhaps they can learn to live in new houses. Japanese graphic designer and curator Kenya Hara has made it his mission to find out.

In our last Handmade issue (W*161), we were thinking along similar lines when we commissioned Jarmund/Vigsnæs Arkitekter to design a dog retreat for us, and Hara's new venture, Architecture for Dogs, takes the idea further.

Debuting at Design Miami in early December, in collaboration with a star-studded cast of designers and architects from America, Europe and Japan, this online venture supplies free blueprints for 13 different DIY doghouses, each one earmarked for a particular breed. Hara hopes that pet enthusiasts everywhere will build them and that their photos will go viral and kickstart an online architectural discourse about the designs when the website launches this month.

Hara has been mulling over the idea of designer doghouses for around 15 years, and the project finally caught the attention of American investors at Imprint Venture Lab. Hara knew the pet-related theme would be popular, he said, 'I have the impression that the whole world is interested in babies and dogs.'

Building on the 'man's best friend' bond, he started by matching designers to dogs, choosing only small breeds that like to live inside. Some are random pairings, such as the Dachshund with architects Atelier Bow-Wow and the Toy Poodle with product designer Konstantin Grcic, but others are special requests, like architect Toyo Ito who wanted to build for his own Shiba, and Kengo Kuma who was keen to make a new home for a client's Pug.

Because conversation with their canine clients could be a bit one-sided, Hara provided each designer with a dossier of information covering the physical characteristics, temperament and health concerns of their breed. Human needs were considered in the brief, too, which stipulated that the doghouses should be easy for anyone to assemble with ordinary household tools and materials.

Leading the pack, Hara launched the project by designing two doghouses of his own: a hard, paper cone suspended from the ceiling for a Japanese Terrier and a plywood contraption for a Teacup Poodle.

Intended to improve contact between pooch and person, the poodle's structure consists of a 70cm-high, wedge-shaped, wooden tunnel enclosing a puppy-sized run of stairs. They lead up to a platform at chair height where the dog can recline while gazing adoringly at their owner. 'Putting a dog on the table is not so good,' says Hara. 'Yet the floor is a little too far away.' Located between these two extremes, Hara's proposal may have conceptual merit. But it took lots of Liver Snaps to coax a live Poodle up the stairs.

This reaction is not much of a surprise since the actual dogs did not participate much during the design phase. And when they did, many were more challenging than human clients. Architect Sou Fujimoto's subject, a Boston Terrier rented at a Tokyo dog park, refused to even go inside the prototype. Scrapping that sphere-shaped model, Fujimoto devised an open-frame structure instead, reminiscent of his House NA.

Most designers started by presenting a conceptual sketch to Hara and his staff who then investigated ways to realise the projects. 'Architects are very busy so we tried to provide ideas for materials and construction methods,' explains Hara.

Like a fast-paced game of fetch, ideas moved back and forth between the designers and team Hara. Sometimes it took four or five months to develop a realistic solution - more time than required for many full-fledged buildings. And even then certain proposals, such as Toyo Ito's inflatable, vinyl roof worn on the dog's back, still proved unbuildable.

Others, however, like architect Kazuyo Sejima's home for a Bichon Frise, met with more success. The Pritzker-prize winner had little time to spare, but knew that she wanted to create something fluffy for her assistant's fuzzy white pup. Running with her idea, Hara's group began exploring soft materials and ways to support them.

In due course, all agreed on a curved wooden frame enrobed by a hand-knitted cover. Though it bears little resemblance to the minimalist, glass buildings that have made Sejima famous, her doghouse got a warm reception from its canine resident who crawled inside and took an immediate liking to the soft, protective shell.

The Tokyo architecture firm Torafu also sincerely considered the needs of its Jack Russell Terrier, creating an easy-to-build, simple structure that recycles old clothes. Resembling a hammock, it consists of a wooden frame that supports an old T-shirt, preferably one well worn by the dog's owner. 'The smell of the owner is very, very important for a dog,' says Hara. 'It makes the dog feel safe and want to be here.'

But a pooch's response is only one measure of success. 'Architecture for Dogs is not a pet's project,' explains Hara. 'It is a project for architects.' For that reason, he engaged Yugo Nakamura, one of Japan's leading web designers, to create the interactive, trilingual website where participants can download drawings and view instructional videos, as well as upload photos of their newly built pet palaces, showcasing customisations and material substitutions.

'One idea can create lots of architecture around the world,' says Hara. And potentially turn Architecture for Dogs into a catalyst for architectural invention.

He may be legendary for his industrial design projects for the likes of Vitra and Magis but Munich-based Konstantin Grcic is keeping us all on our toes this year, first by venturing into fashion territory for Wallpaper* Handmade (more of this to come in our August issue) and now by producing a collection of limited edition tables for Galerie Kreo, emblazoned with a graphic language inspired by the sports industry.

'What I particularly like is how the graphics on sports equipment refers to performance,' he says. 'They create the illusion that the object with them is faster or more powerful than the one without.' The graphics on the tables, however, are entirely made up. 'I am interested in the psychology of graphics in relation to products and more specifically how the semantics of certain colours, words and symbols can change our perception of them,' he explains.

There's also something distinctly Memphis-like about their eye-popping colours and so-bad-it's-good aesthetic, albeit with a more hard-edged, masculine feel. With names like 'Apache' and 'Jetdog', the Champions collection consists of four large tables and four small ones, each produced in editions of six.

To create the graphics, Grcic eschewed conventional transfer foils used in the sports industry, in favour of expert lacquering skills of Walter Maurer, who worked with Andy Warhol and Frank Stella on their art cars for BMW in the mid-1970s. Maurer painstakingly builds up the graphics by using many layers of paint, which, when finished, almost look like they have been inlaid. 'The lacquerer technique is old school,' Grcic explains. 'I wanted to achieve the same level of quality found in an old lacquered Chinese box.'

By incorporating this level of craftsmanship, and by putting his designs in a gallery context, he pits them against the anonymous designs of the sports industry, questioning the relationship between high and low in the product industry. And, to reinforce the point, the tables are laid out in the space 'like they are Formula 1 cars lined up on the starting grid of a race track,' as the designer specified.

ADDRESS

Galerie Kreo
31, rue Dauphine
75006 Paris
France work tel

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I wanted to make a gag about a press breakfast of Duchampians but I couldn’t quite make it work. It would have been a good gag. And relevant. Almost a century on and we’re still loitering around Duchamp’s urinal, still dealing with its backsplash. A new exhibition at London’s Serpentine Gallery, Design Real, plays the Duchampian provocation with a straight bat or with a double-bluff. Hard to say. Wasn’t it a lovely urinal the show suggests. Wasn’t it form and function just the way they should be.

Of course there are no urinals in this exhibition (there easily could have been, as long as they were smart new urinals that managed their task in smart new ways. The only provocation would have been if they were badly designed urinals). The show’s curator, the German industrial designer Konstantin Grcic, has brought mass-ish produced (at some point over the last ten years) design into the small white spaces of the Serpentine – for its first design show - with no apology and little in the way of explanation. Or not where you expect it anyway. The objects have been hung and ennobled on plinths but not described to death. And so the obvious Duchampian come on.

When art galleries and museums do design they usually feel the need to explain exactly what the piece does, how it does it and why it does it better than the thing that did it before. But Grcic’s 42 objects (and, as with the Tin Man, a space where an artificial heart should have been) – including a Volvo tail light, a Lamborghini spoiler, a municipal broom, an easy-pack earthquake helmet, the enormous electric battery for a Tesla car, a Sebastian Wrong mirror and on - are given the sparest of introductions.

In line with the opening of the exhibition Grcic spoke to Alice Rawsthorn about the development of Design Real and its vision of industrial design. Watch the talk here

Some of the designs are clearly authored – an occasional flash of the flamboyant id amongst all the subdued super-egotism – while others look undesigned and accidental. Some – the water-container wheel – are wonderful lo-fi logic for the developing world, others hi-tech luxury goodies. There are though no editions or prototypes or one-offs. No ‘design art’. Nor is there any hierarchy, narrative, thematic construct. Just stuff, not art, stuff. Grcic wants us to take the pieces as we find them, as found objects in the vacuumed space of a contemporary gallery.

In an essay in the exhibition’s excellent catalogue, the US designer Jonathan Olivares makes the point that design is so inchoate and undisciplined a discipline – such a difficult adolescent - that it might take an artist to put it into some kind of larger perspective. An Andreas Gursky factory shot perhaps. Or Ed Ruscha’s graphics (Grcic’s simple tags to identify each design, calling a broom a broom, a table a table and nothing more, are very Ruscha). And so showing design in an art gallery might help us see design more clearly.

The tagging system also brings in Barthes. The ‘Office Chair’ of the exhibition, the Aeron, is the one many of us sit on most of the time. And the chair is given no extra charge by being put in this space. It just looks like someone forgot to take an office chair away. It’s typology but it makes us think harder about how other exhibits challenge and play against those simple typological tags. The sign and signifier soup gets more tasty and complex.

Grcic does not want us to leave it at the tags of course. There is a fantastic but distinct research space in the gallery; a circle of sand bags, TV screens and hacked Kindles that offer all the background info you could want (most of it from the website that has been launched to back-up the show).

And Grcic uses this background info to ask us to think about the complexities of industrial production, the chains of supplier and sub-suppliers, the testing and trials, the mammoth effort it takes to get this stuff out there. It also looks at the key dilemmas and debates of contemporary design: that the modernist dream of perfectly-formed plastic for everyone is an environmental nightmare.

But ultimately Grcic is, as Emily King points out in the exhibition catalogue, a techno-optimist. And he wants us to feel how clever and complex and beautiful the modern world of design and manufacturing is. That design has solved problems in the past and it will go on solving them.

Konstantin Grcic has also curated Wallspace* for us, filling his virtual wall with the things he’s inspired by

Design Real, curated by Konstantin Grcic. Installation view. Featuring from left to right - LD3 AKE Unit Loading Device, by PalNet GmbH; KR 5 arc robot, by Mario Selic, for KUKA Automation + Robotics; onehundred&ten; suitcase, by Ross Lovegrove for Globe-Trotter; FK-160-BK knife, by Kyocera Corporation;Q Drum water container, by Q Drum Ltd; North Tiles, by Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec for Kvadrat A/S. 

Design Real, curated by Konstantin Grcic. Installation view. Featuring clockwise form bottom left - battery, by Klaus Adolph, for Tesla; LifeStraw water purifier, by Vestergaard Frandsen; Frolexus Sentina bed, by Froli; Yang lamp, by Carlotta de Bevilacqua, for Artemide.

Design Real, curated by Konstantin Grcic. Installation view. Featuring from left to right - Volvo XC60 tail light, by Volvo Car Corporation; Aeron Chair, by Don Chadwick & Bill Stumpf, for Herman Miller; Carafe Eau de Paris, by Pierre Charpin, for Eau de Paris; AbiCor heart, by Abiomed; Heaven step ladder, by Thomas Bernstrand, for Swedese Mobler AB; LIKEaBIKE Racer, by Kokua Holzspielzeug GmbH; CE 491 102 ceramic hob, by Gaggenau.

ADDRESS

Serpentine Gallery
Kensington Gardens
London
W2 3XA

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Camper is fast building a heritage of collaborators that reads like a list of Wallpaper* leading lights. Over in Tokyo, Konstantin Grcic has taken his first foray into retail interiors, injecting a dose of industrial luxe to the Daikanyama district store. He has peppered the store with his concrete-based Chair One, constructed a ’Camper Brick’ display on which to show the shoes and direct the flow of traffic in the store and, the most intriguing element, posted a giant map of the area on the far wall. The map is interactive, pinpointing customers’ current location and allowing them to post their own local highlights and recommendations.

Meanwhile over in London, Tokujin Yoshioka, Furniture Designer of the Year in our 2007 Wallpaper* Design Awards, has applied his ethereal vision across the new Camper store on London’s Regent Street. Taking an altogether more natural approach, he’s decked out the store in his now trademark material petals, finishing the theme off with his Bouqet chairs for Moroso. We grabbed some time with the Japanese maverick to find out a bit more about his latest project.

See more of Yoshioka and Grcic’s new Camper stores

How did the collaboration with Camper come about?

In July, 2008, I was commissioned to design both a store and a pair of shoes for the ’Camper toðer’ collaboration project, designed by Camper with various creators around the world.

Why did you decide to use your Bouquet chair for Moroso as a starting point?

The idea incorporating principles of nature was in fact derived from the installation presented in New York in 2007, where approximately 30,000 sheets of tissues covered the entire space creating a scene reminiscent of snowscape. The store shares the similar world-view of the Bouquet Chair and brings elation to the viewers.

You’ve been using the same folding technique for a couple of years now – what is it about the effect that you like so much?

In recent years, I have been presenting designs, which incorporate the law of nature or a phenomenon. With Camper, I tried to express the elements existing in nature such as plants and flowers. Gathering each flower petal of different appearances has created the ever-changing expression in scenery of the store.

Does it take on a specific significance when applied to the Camper brand?

Folding technique may not take on a specific significance for Camper. But the colour used in the material signifies the corporate colour of Camper and also the images of the brand, which is positive and energetic.

Camper has a heritage of working with the world’s leading creatives in their store designs – is it important to make your own stamp and create an interior that people instantly recognise as yours?

I think the principle of this project is to bring a new value to Camper through each creator’s design method. Therefore, I pondered on a new design, which embraces Camper’s brand identity and my originality. However, I don’t think all the customers recognize that I designed the store. The most important thing is whether the customers enjoy being in the space and the design helps with that.

Since you won a Wallpaper* design award as best furniture designer in 2008, the design world has changed quite radically. Have events in the past year and a half changed your approach to design?

The Wallpaper* award gave me an opportunity to communicate with more and more people through my works. More generally, in these years, I’ve wondered how people understand my work in relation to the things that are happening in the world. This is how I’ve come to notice that my work is close to the principles of nature and natural beauty. However, my attitude to design has never changed. The reason I continue to design is to make people happy.

What else are you working on at the moment?

I will be designing a Teijin stand for the Japan industry pavilion for the Shanghai EXPO, which will be held in China from 1 May, 2010. I’m also currently working on some very ambitious and interesting projects, which I have dreamed of for a long time but are still confidential.

ADDRESS

Camper Tokyo
Za house building
1-34-17-b1 ebisu nishi
Daikanyama district
Tokyo

Camper London
207-209 Regent Street
London

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