sottsass – DesignApplause

design miami 2014. preview.

Nov 17, 2014

above> peter marino: design miami/ 2014 design visionary award winner

above> zaha hadid’s site-specific installation at design.05 miami / recent photo of the moore building

ten years ago, a small fair for collectible design named design.05 miami launched concurrently with art basel miami beach. located in the moore building in the miami design district, it offered a selection of fifteen invited exhibitors, with the stated aim of bringing museum-quality galleries together with the best collectors, connoisseurs, and designers from around the world in one of the premier destinations for art and design.

fast forward 10 years. rodman primack, executive director of design miami/ stated, “the fair grew out of the need for a consolidated marketplace that would act as a platform to showcase the range and strength of what was then a fledgling market.” adding, “since then, the collectible design market has really changed in scale; it’s internationalized and diversified, and this is reflected very clearly in the fair. design miami/ has changed the way galleries engage with their audiences. i am excited to see this ecosystem bringing so many distinct viewpoints and aesthetics together.”

above> a rare photo (designapplause can never get him to pose) of muecke with a model of the pavilion concept

[ pavilion commission ]
minneapolis-based designer jonathan muecke has been commissioned to create the pavilion for the tenth anniversary of design miami/.

the design miami/ pavilion commission has become an important feature of the fair. an ephemeral extension of the fair space itself, the pavilion is at once an exhibit and a piece of functional temporary architecture. while the commission is traditionally given to an early career architect or studio, for its tenth anniversary design miami/ has selected a designer whose practice reflects the multifaceted nature of the fair itself.

alexandra cunningham cameron, creative director at design miami/ commented, “for our tenth anniversary, we wanted to pay homage to the type of young designer that design miami/ wishes to champion – one who experiments with materials, form and scale; who is as much a theorist as a maker; and who challenges us to consider how we relate to the world built around us.”

muecke studied architecture at iowa state, interning at the architectural office of herzog & de meuron in basel, switzerland before studying design at the cranbrook academy of art. muecke has evolved a design practice that resists standard divisions between design, art and architecture, instead focusing on refined forms that investigate notions of positive and negative space that relate to humanscale.

centered around a double-layered circular structure with apertures at both poles, muecke’s design miami pavilion (dmp) is designed on a human scale, rejecting monumentality in favor of lightness and variability.

above> in a not so rare photo of peter marino in leather on metal on leather. a leather vest pricked all over with metal studs, leather wrist guards with metal spikes, a leather hat with a metal skull, a strand of leather hanging from his neck which holds some metal knives, leather belt, metal belt buckle, metal knuckles with skulls, leather pants, leather boots. all the leather is always black.

[ new initiatives ]
design miami/ is launching two new forward-looking initiatives this year: the exhibition strand design curio, and the design visionary award.

conceived as contemporary ‘cabinets of curiosity’, the four independently curated design curio booths scattered throughout the fair will take the widest possible view of design practice. they will go beyond the scope of collectibledesign to embrace diverse fields from science and technology, to handcraft,and from unrealized prototypes to esoteric collections.

[ design visionary ]
the inaugural design visionary award recognizes peter marino. with this award, design miami/ recognizes marino for his achievements as an architect, for his knowledge and status as a collector of design, art and the decorative arts, and for the impact he has had as an advisor on contemporary and twentieth century design to his numerous clients.

commenting on the first edition of this award, primack stated, “this award is about recognizing the figures that have really propelled the world of design in the broader sense. peter is a great talent, and is also an amazing patron of others’ talents. his knowledge of furniture, his ability to create collections in design and his work with leading brands to help them understand the importance of bringing design voices into their world have substantially impacted the market and the language of design”.

marino founded his eponymous architecture, planning and design studio in new york in 1978 having trained with i. m. pei and george nelson. early clients included andy warhol, yves saint laurent and pierre bergé, and gianni and marella agnelli.

[ 2014 exhibitors ]
ammann gallery – cologne
antonella villanova – florence
caroline van hoek – brussels
carpenters workshop gallery – london & paris
carwan gallery – beirut
casati gallery -chicago
cristina grajales gallery – new york
demisch danant – new york
edward cella art + architecture – los angeles
erastudio & apartment-gallery – milan
galerie jacques lacoste – paris
galerie kreo – paris
galerie maria wettergren – paris
galerie pascal cuisinier – paris
galerie patrick seguin – paris
galerie vivid – rotterdam
galleria o. – rome
gallery diet – miami
gallery seomi – seoul & los angeles
hostler burrows – new york
jason jacques inc. – new york johnson trading gallery – new york
jousse entreprise – paris
laffanour – galerie downtown – paris
louisa guinness gallery – london
magen h gallery – new york
moderne gallery – philadelphia
nilufar gallery – milan
ornamentum – hudson
pierre marie giraud – brussels
priveekollektie contemporary art + design – heusden aan de maas
r & company – new york
southern guild – cape town
victor hunt design art dealer – brussels
volume gallery – chicago

[ special exhibitions ]
of the 35 galleries at design miami/ 2014 11 are among those that participated in the first year of the fair in 2005. several of these founding galleries present special exhibitions that celebrate the growth of the collectible design market over the past decade. these include a display dedicated to public commissions in france from the 1960s and 70s from demisch danant; an exhibition on the functional, durable furniture created for universities by charlotte perriand, jean prouvé and le corbusier from galerie patrick seguin; a monograph on rick kauffman’s new york art et industrie gallery and the creative crossover surrounding it from magen h gallery, and newly commissioned works debuting at the fair with cristina grajales gallery, galerie kreo, r & company and nilufar.

[ special commissions ]
design miami/ 2014 features a significant number of special commissions, including works in glass, stone and acrylic. ammann//gallery presents the sakala vase by satyendra pakhalé, his first work in blown murano glass; galerie vivid presents commissioned works by finnish-born designer janne kyttanen, which take the designer’s 3d printed aluminum sedona bench as their point of departure; max lamb creates a granite lamp for johnson trading gallery made over six days using stitch drilling, and jeweler ted noten unveils a table – his first foray into furniture – at ornamentum.

[ a bronze age ]
it may have associations with the earliest days of human craft, but bronze is very much the material of the moment at design miami/. from artist jewelry to monumental decorative works, via furniture and lighting, the cast metal is deployed across multiple formats at this year’s fair. casati gallery introduces the work of chicago-based designer steven haulenbeek with a collection of bronze mirrors, furniture, lights and objects all distinguished by the ‘chaotic texture’ produced by casting in ice. carwan gallery debuts furniture pieces combining bronze, onyx, mother of pearl, resins, fine inlaid wood and silver-plated brass by italian architect vincenzo de cotiis. carpenters workshop gallery shows a new collection of iconoclastic architectural-themed bronzes from studio job; and new furniture pieces and jewelry by claude lalanne are exhibited by louisa guinness gallery.

[ cabinets of curiosity ]
spanning the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, design curio/ presents four immersive environments of objects, textures, artifacts and ideas that truly challenge and contextualize familiar design narratives. this first edition, in celebration of the fair’s 10th anniversary, emphasizes surprising installations of scientific research alongside handcraft and creative production. these include oceanic art and design endeavor coral morphologic’s blue room, offering a coral-eye view of miami’s aquatic waterscapes; beijing’s gallery all presenting naihan li’s latest installation from her i am a monument series, recreating beijing’s cityscape to a scale of 1:100 with billowing smog rising amongst buildings reimagined as furniture pieces. koenig & clinton and joe sheftel gallery partner to present a collection of sottsass objects interacting with works by the memphis group in a jewel-box space; patrick parrish gallery invites visitors to experience the vertiginous grid-based exhibition: surfaces on which your setting and sitting will be uncertain, displaying a group of sculptural furniture objects by ro/lu with matching clothing designs by various projects.

event> design miami/ 2014 @designmiami #designmiami
dates> 3 – 7 december 2014
venue> meridian & 19th street miami beach, usa
december 3-4/ 10am-8pm
december 5/ 11am-8pm
december 6/ 12-8pm
december 7/ 12-6pm

Jane dillon designer. Eye to the future.

Mar 1, 2010

a design history question. when was this chair designed? to what art genre does it belong?
if you would have said early 80s and maybe designed by peter shire that would have been a good answer. but you would be wrong.

above: bel air arm chair designed by peter shire in 1982 while with the memphis group.

the pink chair was designed in 1968, and by someone you may never have heard of, unless you’re an insider in british design circles. her name is jane dillon. below is a picture of jane, sitting in one of her other late 60s chairs.

in the late 60s as a recent graduate of the royal college of art she found her way to the milan studio of ettore sottsass. for the most part she worked on color studies for a line of olivetti office furniture for sottsass . and she also worked out some absolutely amazing chair designs.

dillon gave the victoria & albert museum some of her archival materials, including the pictures included in this blog post. above are one of the earliest development drawings – with a tentative title of ‘T-Time,’ a reference to the idea of including an integral table in the design – and a geometric study showing the plan of the chair as if viewed from above.

below is another motion study, a quick sketch in red pen. the two vignettes at lower left again show the chair in use from above. the idea being shown is that as the sitter shifts her weight from side to side, the seat beneath her (and the other elements of the chair) will move on a swivel joint.

as stylish as the chair looks today dillon’s felt it was mainly an exercise in dynamic ergonomics. the motion study above indicates this, but it’s clearer still in the final preparatory drawing below, which shows how three of the chair’s four parts swivel in coordination according to the user’s shifting posture. she thought of it as a functionalist experiment, more late bauhaus or gerrit rietveld than pop or postmodern.

the chair was put into limited production by a company called planula – sottsass made the connection for her – and was produced in several variations of shape and color, including the green version below. it was received well by the design community and it was reproduced in the magazine domus. in 1972 the chair was nearly included in an important exhibition about italian design at the museum of modern art called ‘the new domestic landscape’. unfortunately the curators decided dillon didn’t count as italian.

dillon has also designed for habitat, herman miller, and cassina. she went back to the royal college of art to teach, and more recently, she has teamed up with designer tom grieves ( studio dillon ) plus to experiment with innovative environmentally sustainable furniture; keeping up to date today seems to be more important to her than having been ahead of the curve in 1968. still, she’s able to marvel at what she came up with back then. “it’s the most amazing kind of object. only when it’s in use does it become a new kind of chair.” she was made an honorary fellow of the royal college of art in 2006.

dillon’s experimentations and her association with sottsass was timely, as 10 years later sottsass assembled the memphis group, composed of italian designers and architects who created a series of products in 1981. they disagreed with the approach of the time and challenged the idea that products had to follow conventional shapes and colors and textures and patterns. the group’s theoretical concepts mixed 20th century styles, colors and materials, positioned itself as a fashion rather than an academic movement, and hoped to erase the international style where postmodernism had failed, preferring an outright revival and continuation of modernism proper rather than a re-reading of it.

[original story]

Resources:
design museum
memphis group
memphis group-architecture
peter shire–la curbed
michael graves
michele de lucchi
matteo thun
nathalie du pasquier
george sowden
andrea branzi
ronan and erwan bouroullec
gerrit rietveld