BLUEPRINT

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October 2009 £4.75

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BLUEPRINT
EDITORIAL
There is an ambiguity about our cover this month, a Plastic
Relic by the Deptford-based design firm Committee, which could
be a building for a tabula-rasa site in the UAE, or an oil-covered
machine part. Perhaps it illustrates the close connection
between 20th-century architecture and design that is well
described by the current Bauhaus show in Berlin (page 124).
Committee, which I write about (page 52), imagined what
might happen if a 27th-century historian found a discarded
plastic part (in this case from a toy), deduced it was a rare and
beautiful object and turned it into the lid of a precious box.
The production of objects, whether architectural icons
or consumer products, has fallen out of favour, and, if there’s
a theme to this year’s London Design Festival (LDF), it’s about
process, rather than product. Even Blueprint will be part of the
focus on how designers work: our editorial office will be a living
installation at the Wapping Project, alongside Tracey Neuls,
Ally Capellino and Van der Meersch and Weston (page 37).
Peter York, who writes for us this month (page 27) gives
short shrift to this trend and thinks it’s just designers turning
inwards. Not surprisingly he’s also critical of Max Fraser’s
‘design tribes’ and his pretence that the only important
distinction between designers is whether they recycle
humorously. Committee gets mad at being labelled a worthy
recycler, when its real aim is to explore mass production.
We agree that now is not the time to turn our backs on
17
NICK MORA
products, and we are therefore very pleased to be media
partner for the UK launch of Naoto Fukasawa’s Plus Minus
Zero housewares collection (page 60). These are products that
make you realise that, however interesting a design process
may be, there must be an end result that improves the world.
The profiles of London-based manufacturing companies
in Produce this month (page 111) show that there are
Londoners who mass-produce things – in the case of Hitch
Mylius, from a factory located within the M25. Our idea was
to interview the unsung heroes of design: the clients whose
critical eye and commercial nous guides it from idea to a
marketable product.
Part two of this issue shifts the focus from London to
Berlin, a city where recession is so ingrained that no one
notices it. Since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, nearly 20
years ago, economic stagnation and vacant sites have created
fertile territory for artists such as Thomas Demand (page 88)
and designers like Studio 7.5 (page 96).
During the LDF, there will be a special offer for new
subscribers: your first three issues of Blueprint for £1. If you
already subscribe, you will have received a free copy of Gian
Luca Amadei’s engaging book on Polish design, which will be
launched at a special event during the festival. Happy reading!
Vicky Richardson, editor
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009

60 00
DAN DUBOWITZ
43 LONDON
As the London Design Festival
begins, the city’s designers are
finding new ways to cope with
economic downturn, page 43;
we unveil the shortlist for the
Blueprint Awards at 100%
Design, page 44; create your
own Claystation Onepiece Chair,
page 49; Vicky Richardson meets
the serious but witty designers of
Committee as they finish
their new cafe in south-east
London, page 52; Lesley Morris
argues design education needs
66 00
00
80
more involvement from industry,
page 58; Ben Hughes explores
the purist ideas of Naoto
Fukasawa ahead of the UK launch
of Plus Minus Zero, page 60;
in a stunning essay, architect,
artist and Paper City contributor
James Wines explains why
drawing is essential to creative
thinking, page 66, and ahead
of the launch of his new book
Discovering Women in Polish
Design, Gian Luca Amadei
reports on exciting times for
Poland’s design scene, page 72
FEATURES
79 BERLIN
With its low property prices,
Berlin has become a desirable
location for artists, designers
and architects, page 79; built
by the Nazis and redeemed by the
Allies’ 1948 airlift, Tempelhof
Airport has totemic significance
in Berlin. Tim Abrahams reports
on the hole its closure has left
in the city, page 80; Anna Krenz
on individual initiatives in Berlin,
page 86; Thomas Demand’s
meticulous paper recreations
of significant scenes have made
19
JAMES WINES/SITE
104
CHRISTIAN AHRENS
him an architects’ favourite
and earned him a retrospective
at Berlin’s Nationalgalerie.
Peter Kelly reports, page 88; Jim
Hudson argues that much can be
learned from IBA in Berlin, page
94; Gwen Webber discovers the
rigorous approach of Studio 7.5,
which has just launched the Setu
chair for Herman Miller, page 96;
Ulla Giesler on new talent and
ideas in the city, page 102, and
Bernd Truempler and Karsten
Huneck set up a new live/work
studio in Berlin, page 104
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009
 REGULARS
20
28
27
CHRISTOPHER RAINBOW
128
IWAN BAAN
22 OPENING SHOT
Dan Dubowitz finds a poignant
example of wasteland behind
a fragment of the Berlin Wall
27 VIEW
Peter York and tribal warfare;
Thomas Heatherwick’s Extrusions;
the lost Dune by Jodorowsky;
Jake Tilson at The Wapping
Project; Achtung! by Erik
Spiekermann; Vitra’s Boisbuchet
workshop; Zvi Hecker’s collection
of Berlin architecture; Sour
Grapes, and the Rainbow cartoon
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009
111 PRODUCE
It is often thought that London
is a city of designers and
creatives: products are actually
made elsewhere. Gian Luca
Amadei finds this is not the case.
He interviews the heads of five
London-based manufacturers.
Uncovering the ideas, processes
and approaches of Izé, Case
Furniture, The Rug Company,
Thorsten van Elten, and Hitch
Mylius, a picture emerges of the
city’s active furniture industry,
focused on mass production
121 REVIEWS
Exhibitions: Telling Tales reviewed
by John Makepeace; Charles
LeDray’s Men’s Suits; Modell
Bauhaus in Berlin, and The Clyde
Books: Artists’ Studios by
architect M J Long; Britain’s
New Towns: Garden Cities
to Sustainable Communities
by Anthony Alexander
Installation: SANAA’s ode
to landscape revives the
Serpentine’s pavilion programme
111
131 GERMAN DESIGN FOCUS
This Autumn, Wilkhahn will
unveil its new office chair, ON.
Nicole Robinson reports on the
unusual research process behind
it. We also bring you the best
of new German furniture design
from its leading manufacturers
152 PRODUCTS
162 PAPER CITY
Pentagram’s Domenic Lippa
builds the best and worst
of a city out of words
22

BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009

 23

OPENING SHOT
DAN DUBOWITZ
This November sees the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. As
part of Blueprint’s mission to explore the city (see page 79), photographer
and artist Dan Dubowitz, who photographs areas of wasteland around the
world, documented the remnants and memorials that mark the Wall’s route.
This shot is taken through a narrow gap in one of the remnants. It replicates
the view that east Berliners would have had of the no man’s land between
the two walls that divided East and West Berlin. On the far side, there is an
observation deck, which gave west Berliners an elevated view during the
Wall’s 28-year life. Dubowitz describes this, one of the Wall’s few remaining
fragments, as one of the most ‘poignant examples of wasteland in the world’.
Dubowitz’s book Fascismo Abbandonato, will be released this Autumn.

BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009

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CHEQ
CHRISTOPHER RAINBOW
Ω VIEW 27
As the UK government looks
to creative industries to be the
engine of growth, Peter York looks
at the fact and fiction that informs
the new Design Tribes taxonomy
in the London Design Guide
Above: Blueprint
cartoonist
There is no pleasing some designers.
About 25 years ago, you couldn’t
Christopher give serious architects away. They
Rainbow’s depiction
of the five design
were unemployable. There was a bit
of gash PoMo here and there in
tribes as featured
in the London London, on the Embankment, but
Design Guide 2010,
edited by Max
out in the real world – in shops and
houses – what really mattered was
Fraser and Revivalism and commercial Formula.
published by
Spotlight Press,
Designers had to skulk and sulk.
September 2009
However, over the last decade,
real architects and designers have
reached a wider audience. They have
become global brands, and have even
worked out how to make money. But
sometimes I think they’d rather be
back there, inside the compound. If
the nation’s looking to the ‘Creative
Industries’ (I can’t begin to describe
in how many ways I hate that term,
although it includes people I love)
to save them, there’s no going back.
All sorts of people, from Gordon
Brown to Department for Culture,
Media and Sport ministers to the
excitable seer Will Hutton, are forever
saying the Creative Industries – whose
contributors are so different from
the uncreative rest of us – will have
to be the national engine of growth
now that the Financial Services have
failed so spectacularly.
This is preposterous, of course: a
huge burden on slender shoulders. But
we have the sensibility in Britain and
the experience across a wide range of
sub-sectors, and some bits of our
Creative Industries actually do work.
Like creating 53 per cent of the
world’s TV formats, for instance.
But there’s something so epically
irritating and insider-like about the
new London Design Guide’s ‘Design
Tribes’ taxonomy of designers that I’m
taken back to when I was constantly
torn between sympathy and
exasperation for my designer friends.
Back then in the 1980s, they
were braving it out – and starting
to sell overseas. They were big in
Tokyo, Paris and SoHo in New York.
Now, there’s a fair bit of honour at
home and, until recently, there was
a market too. But Max Fraser’s tribes
– New Modernists (working quietly in
the great tradition), Escapists
(theatrical sensationalists),
Reactivists (who remake, remodel,
recycle), Digitalists (exploiting
software, sensors and circuit boards),
and Revivalists (‘referencing’
traditional design, often in ‘humorous’
ways) – just describe a narrow range
of fashionable outputs, a sort of
Nathan Barley catalogue. It doesn’t
begin to acknowledge where the
designers are coming from and where
their output is going, nor their
attitudes or the markets.
It assumes that design is only
what’s done by named individuals,
working in endorsed studios – people
who can do the chat and reference
the themes – and has to be mostly
expensive stuff. It disregards lots of
mainstream design practice – the
clever adaptive stuff done at a mass
commercial level, which often
produces the most durable design.
Furthermore, there are whole
swathes of design practice that
this view from Old Street overlooks,
perhaps because it is rooted in
a different aesthetic, and re-works
old archetypes seriously, rather than
IN 21ST-CENTURY
LONDON, THE NEW
MONEY INVASION PUT
FRESH DESIGN INTO
THAT RIDICULOUS
COLLECTING CATEGORY
OF ‘DESIGN ART’
‘referencing them in humorous ways’.
I’m talking decorator taste here, and
the inability of High Design Land to
acknowledge that this sunlit world
may just have something to offer
beyond cushions.
The Style Wars ran through the
20th century in Britain with trad
taste, much of which was terrible,
winning every time. The Futurist
Manifesto, Vital English Art, by
Marinetti and Nevinson (1914),
usefully reproduced at huge scale
in Tate Modern’s Futurism show
(12 June-20 September), fingered the
usual reactionary suspects: Ruskin,
the Pre-Raphaelites, medievalism,
Oscar Wilde and the rest. (It could
have been IKEA, suggesting ‘be not
so English’ and ‘chuck out the chintz’
in their 1990s commercials.)
But from the mid-Nineties
onwards, and at an accelerated
speed during the last decade,
innovative design seemed to be
winning at last. From lottery-funded
public architecture to the Big Brother
house, things were getting built
and fresh interiors were being seen.
Mid Century Modern was redeemed
and widely collected, and then
reproduced, at a mass level.
The original drive of so many
design pioneers, to create prototypes
for mass production and the public
good, which performed well and went
beyond the call of fashion, seemed
almost achievable. But 21st-century
London didn’t turn out like that at all.
Instead, the New Money invasion put
fresh design into that most sublimely
ridiculous collecting category, Design
Art, with its Berkeley Square show
and its saleroom price records. So
I think one useful way of segmenting
designers is in terms of how they
relate to the mass-production ideal –
who they are aiming to sell to, and
at what price points (most shops
in the Guide are way up there).
Another criterion is how they
relate to the past. Do they have
an absolutist vision: did the world
begin in the Weimar Republic in
1919? Or can they see the appeal
of a nice bit of ormolu? The Revivalist
group, the humorous people who
make bombé commodes in distressed
fibreboard, are working in a PoMo
tradition of ‘playful’ design that’s
not much more than 30 years old, one
that displaces real, old things with
vastly more expensive fun ones. These
are designers who can’t overcome
their gag reflex without a theory
and a joke, working for a market
that’s hardly seen the real thing.
Like everything else in 2009,
Design is facing a reality check
and a select committee subpoena,
to prove its value. It can’t be dinky,
it can’t ignore the economics and it
can’t pretend the only key distinction
between designers is whether or not
they recycle humorously.
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009
28 Thomas rough end pieces that stuck in his
mind. For the manufacturer, these
Heatherwick’s were scrap, but these discarded
mistakes now form the basis for
first art show Heatherwick’s first series of limited
editions, Extrusions, that will be
is an experiment launched at London’s Haunch of
Venison in September.
in extruded metal At the time, the Alcan machine

furniture that was not big enough to create the

L-Shaped furniture Heatherwick had

has potential in in mind and endless phone calls to

construction and
design, reports
Vicky Richardson
While still a postgraduate student
at the Royal College of Art in 1993,
Thomas Heatherwick had the idea
of making a piece of furniture from
a single material, all components
extruded in one piece. He began
looking for an aluminium factory
to achieve this end. At the time, a visit
to Alcan in Banbury got him hooked
on the idea: billets of aluminium were
forced into an extruding machine, and
straight sections pulled out at the
other end. But it was the contorted,
other factories came to nothing. But
16 years after the first experiments,
he finally found an extruding machine
large enough. The particular factory is
in Asia and usually makes aluminium
products for the aerospace industry.
Heatherwick is not saying much more
about it than that: he has ambitious
ideas about how the technology can
be used commercially to create mass-
produced furniture, building facades
and structure.
The five prototype benches in the
Extrusions series are made from the
same section incorporating the legs,
back and seat. The gnarled end
sections have been retained, although
the extrusion could have been sliced
to create a pristine section.
Moving into the world of private
galleries has helped Heatherwick fund
ongoing research for the project. The
first steel die alone cost £60,000 to
make, and every time the machine is
used the cost is enormous, as it means
stopping the production of items for
the aerospace industry.
The only limit to the length of
bench is transportation – the factory
itself is 250m long and in theory
a piece of that length could be made.
‘We could seat 700 people on one
piece of metal,’ explains Heatherwick.
In the meantime, though, until the
right project comes along, he has
plans for 2010 to create a sculpture of
100m of the same section that will
tangle into a pile of metal, like a
mound of spaghetti.
However, what fascinates
Heatherwick is not the potential
scale of product, but the idea of
creating useful things, be it furniture
or building structures, out of one
single element. ‘It’s a pure idea thing,’
he says.
Extrusions is at the Haunch of Venison,
W1S, 17 September-8 November

film-maker Alejandro Jodorowsky of etchings, black-and-white

in 1979. Thirty years later, an
exhibition at London’s Drawing
Room, gives us a taste of the initial
production work involved in what
could have been a hugely provocative
and genre-changing film adaptation.
Jodorowsky’s vision was elaborate
in its scope and would have required
a monumental production effort: its
proposed cast included Orson Welles,
Salvador Dali and – in a strange
prefiguring of Sting’s appearance
in Lynch’s version – Mick Jagger.
WWW.CHRISFOSSART.COM
illustrations, and coloured
storyboards, are vivid visualisations
of the film’s the central themes
that have a particularly contemporary
resonance, including resource-war
and environmental degradation.
Five examples of Foss’s work
are shown, creating grand
visualisations of spaceships and
an artificial planet (pictured). The
exhibition includes three designs by
H R Giger showing his vision of the
‘Harkonnen homeworld’: a partially

The exhibition’s curator Tom Morton submerged egg-shaped castle in an

believes that ‘it pointed to a direction apocalyptic industrial wasteland.
for sci-fi that ran counter to the There is also a collection of
prevailing Hollywood winds at the vintage copies of the extraordinary
time, which favoured a more George French sci-fi magazine Métal Hurlant

A new exhibition reveals the ambitious Lucas or Steven Spielberg approach

science-fiction artwork and production
design behind the unrealised film
version of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s
Dune. Claudia White reports
Above: Sci-fi artist David Lynch’s film adaptation of Frank
Chris foss’s vision Herbert’s classic science fiction novel,
for the Emperor’s Dune, has its 25th anniversary this
artificial planet in
year. Yet Lynch’s film, from which
Dune
the director removed his own name,
and that opened to a critical mauling
and low box-office receipts, was only
the final effort in a decade-long series
of attempts to make a screen version
of Herbert’s book.
The most notable of these earlier
attempts was by cult Chilean
to the genre’. To create his sci-fi vision
of the future, Jodorowsky brought
together an astonishing collection of
artistic talent in order to visualise the
film’s aesthetic and production design.
Morton’s exhibition showcases
work by notable French comic book
artist Giraud, most commonly known
as Moebius, the Swiss artist H R Giger,
known later for his design work on the
1979 film Alien, and the British sci-fi
artist Chris Foss. The work of each
reveals what a powerful piece of work
Jodorowsky’s Dune would have been.
Moebius’ output, consisting
on show, for which Jodorowsky and
Moebius were regular contributors.
According to Morton, this magazine
was the one place where the
un-made Dune project saw any kind
of public life. The curator has also
commissioned a series of new
responses to Jodorowsky’s plans,
by artists Steven Claydon, Matthew
Day Jackson and Vidya Galstaldon.
It marks a fitting tribute to a
remarkable film that never was.
Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune is at
the Drawing Room, E2, 17 September-
25 October

BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009

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ACHTUNG!
As London gets Crossrail, Berlin gets the Currywurst
Museum. Yet while the two cities contrast in their
pace, density and cost of living, both encourage
their inhabitants to adopt inventive lifestyles
On 15 August, the German Currywurst
Museum opened in Berlin. In
London, meanwhile, preparatory
construction work has begun on
the Crossrail project. Crossrail is
the largest single addition to the
London transport network for more
than 50 years. By 2017, the first
passengers will be able to travel
from Maidenhead in the West, to
Abbey Wood in the East, travelling
between Heathrow airport, the West
End, the City and Canary Wharf. It
is difficult to find exact figures for
the cost of this gigantic enterprise,
but that is just as well. Everybody
knows that public projects like these
get the go-ahead based on numbers
that have at least doubled by the
time they’re finished.
The Currywurst Museum is
a private initiative. The founder,
Martin Löwer, raised €5m (about
£4m) to celebrate an invention that
has become a German national dish,
consisting of hot pork sausage cut
into slices and seasoned with curry
sauce. The first Currywurst was sold
by Herta Heuwer on a street corner
in Berlin, 4 September 1949.
Currywurst was very much
in evidence on 8 August, when
MELVIN GALAPON
Berliners celebrated the opening
of Europe’s shortest underground
line with the customary street
festival, i.e. lots of people taking
free rides between three stations
and getting into shape for that
strenuous exercise by eating snacks
above ground. The U55 line connects
the Brandenburg Gate with the
new main station, which is a mere
Erik Spiekermann
set up MetaDesign
1,470m away: that’s not even a mile.
and FontShop, and Between these two stations, the
worked in London train also stops at the Bundestag,
from 1973 to 1981. the German parliament building.
A teacher, author By the time an additional 100,000
and designer, passengers will commute into
he is a partner at
central London, in 2017, the new
EdenSpiekermann,
which has offices U-Bahn line in Berlin will have added
in Berlin and another three stations, connecting it
Amsterdam to Alexanderplatz, just another mile
or so east from the Brandenburg Gate.
Berlin, as these examples show,
is busy making small steps into
the future. It is now 20 years since
the two halves of the city were
put back together again. Ten years
ago, construction cranes performed
a ballet above the skyline, which
still maintains the limit of 22m to
the roof-line, with very few high-rise
exceptions. There are large, empty
lots in the very centre of town,
with spontaneous vegetation slowly
growing into small forests. Shops are
for rent everywhere, and apartment
rents start at five euros per square
metre monthly, which means that
you can get a place with 100sq m
(that’s 1,100sq ft) in a solid
building for €500 (£430) per
month. In London, that could well
be described as a three-bedroom flat,
but in Germany, you actually pay
for the area occupied, not for some
estate agent’s lyrical description.
After the gigantic effort
of cleaning up after 40 years
of socialism and rebuilding the
infrastructure, Berliners have settled
in. They’re enjoying a city that has
resigned itself to being poor, but
sexy, as the mayor, Klaus Wowereit,
put it a few years ago. Cheap rents
attract creative people, not bankers
who want to invest their bonuses
in rental properties.
London did not invest in
infrastructure for a long time. The
2012 deadline was the wake-up call.
Now it seems that all of a sudden
politicians and planners have
discovered that people still
want to work in the capital, even
if they have to commute all the
way from Maidenhead.
A city as desirable as this has its
price. When friends from elsewhere
wonder why the pubs are full as soon
as office hours are over, I speculate
that young Londoners who haven’t
yet climbed the first step on the
property ladder simply do not have
much of a place to go back to after
work. So you go to the pub at 6pm,
31
and straight home afterwards, which
tends to be a long journey. Who
wants to spend time at home when
you have to share a bedroom with
one other person and the bathroom
with at least three of them.
In Berlin, after 40 years
of being encircled by a wall with
only a few exits – and those only
in one direction – there is now
more space than property investors
can swing their large cats in.
London, on the other hand,
is getting ready for a population
increase from 7.6m to 8.2m by 2016,
with 30 per cent of the workforce
concentrated in just two per cent
of its geographical area. That
will certainly ensure that London
will remain lively, but at a price.
In London you have to be
inventive because life is expensive.
In Berlin you can be inventive
because living is cheap.
AFTER 40 YEARS OF
BEING ENCIRCLED
BY A WALL, THERE IS
NOW MORE SPACE
THAN PROPERTY
INVESTORS CAN SWING
THEIR LARGE CATS IN
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009
32
Jocelyn Bailey took part in a Vitra
Design Workshop at the idyllic
Domaine de Boisbuchet in France.
During the London Design Festival,
Vitra and Blueprint will run workshops
to capture its spirit of invention
Hidden deep in the rural heart of
south-west France, between Poitiers
and Limoges, is a cult summer
destination for designers, architects
and artists the world over, known
to the initiated simply as Boisbuchet.
A steady stream of creative types
passes through each year to attend
the international summer workshop
programme, jointly run by the Vitra
Design Museum, the Pompidou
Centre, and the Centre International
de Recherche et d'Education Culturelle
et Agricole (CIRECA). The stated
goal of the workshop is ‘not to
produce a “perfect” product but
to offer insights into design process
and the challenges involved to think
rationally, work imaginatively and
display manual dexterity.’
The Domaine de Boisbuchet
consists of about 150ha of
unadulterated French countryside,
lush and buzzing with cicadas,
ONE UNUSUAL ASSET
IS THE EVER-EXPANDING
COLLECTION OF
PAVILIONS AND
ONE-OFF BUILDINGS
KEPT TO INSPIRE
FUTURE GENERATIONS
throughout which is scattered an
eclectic collection of buildings and
pavilions, a placid lake, a working
farm, and a handful of converted
barns whose spaces cater to the varied
needs of the programme. All of this is
presided over by Vitra Design Museum
director, Alexander de Vegesack, for
whom the 15th-century estate has
been a second home for years, and
who more recently decided to relocate
the summer school (which had
previously taken place in Weil am
Rhein, the home of the museum)
to this remote corner of France.
Each week, three or four groups
are mentored by a different set of
renowned designers, engineers and
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009
artists. I visited Boisbuchet in the
first week of the 2009 programme,
during which Italian architect Marco
Zanuso led a lighting course, Sam
Baron of Fabrica tutored porcelain
techniques (Limoges and its porcelain
factories are conveniently nearby)
and provocative Russian performance
artist Andrey Bartenev used his
disciples to stage an opera. Anything
from 30 to 80 students, plus the staff
(most of whom began their affair with
Boisbuchet as participants) made
up a varied and international group,
immersed in living, eating, making
and playing together for a week,
isolated from civilisation and daily
concerns by miles of countryside.
Anna Schwaderer, a German
student completing her Masters
in cultural and communications
management, with an internship
at Boisbuchet, summed up the appeal
of the summer camp: ‘it offers the
possibility of approaching questions
of design, art and architecture in an
individual way, detached from the
well-beaten tracks of everyday life.’
I followed the lighting
programme, although to call
it a programme is to overstate
its formality. Within reason, you
can do as you please, and nothing
is too much trouble for the Boisbuchet
staff. The relaxed atmosphere
allowed participants to oscillate
between working quietly on individual
projects, swimming, helping each
other when an extra pair of hands
was needed, or taking long walks
through the estate.
One of the unusual assets
of the Domaine de Boisbuchet
is its ever-expanding collection
of buildings: the freedom here
has allowed many prototypes and
one-offs to be left standing from
which future generations of designers
can learn or draw inspiration. There
is a reconstructed Japanese minka
guesthouse; a paper pavilion by
Shigeru Ban; a latticework dome by
Jörg Schlaich (who developed the
Olympic stadium in Munich with Frei
Otto); several bamboo buildings
by Colombian architect Simón Vélez;
a pyramid, and a stacked log cabin,
as well as bits of permanent furniture
and installations that have never
been removed.
The ‘Chateau’, now in a state of
half-repair, is oddly the most out-of-
place element – a 19th-century
fantasy concoction resembling the
Walt Disney Castle. But wandering
through its labyrinth of aging rooms –
the walls patched with remnants of
paper from another era, tall windows
rich with green vistas and lizards
disappearing through cracks in the
floor – is a gothic fairytale experience
in itself. And in line with CIRECA’s
mission, this whole architectural
menagerie is now open to the public.
Post-dinner entertainment every
night consisted of a portfolio show-
and-tell from the workshop leaders,
participants and Boisbuchet staff.
Participants are of all ages and
SERGIO MENDOZA
JOCELYN BAILEY
Above: A pyramid experience, but whether still in
pavilion set training or seasoned designers, the
in the grounds standard was impressively high,
of Boisbuchet
diverse, and all hugely inspiring. For
many, a week at Boisbuchet was first
prize in a design competition.
To finish the course, group
presentations – which for the
lighting workshop consisted
of a tour of lighting installations
around the estate – were rewarded
with a celebratory fancy dress
evening in the now-official party
room, a pigshed called Porky’s. The
decor and costumes overseen by
Bartenev, were suitably outrageous.
The absence of neighbours means they
can really let their hair down, and
it was a fantastic end to what was
a remarkable, refreshing, challenging
and inspiring week.
For more information about
Bailey’s lighting project go to
www.blueprintmagazine.co.uk
Vitra and Blueprint present the Audile Interpretation Workshop:
An Exploration into Sound and Environment.
During the London Design Festival, the spirit of the Boisbuchet
workshops will be recreated at Vitra’s base in Clerkenwell. Architect
ODA, in association with sound artist Craig Vear and designer Andrew
Lock, will explore sonic experience with groups of students and
professionals. How much of the world do we experience through
sound? When you close your eyes do you become more aware of the
world behind you? Does the aural environment change more rapidly
than the visual one?
Two one-day workshops will focus on the experience of space through
sound; what kind of shapes enhance or restrict, what kind of textures
absorb or reflect? Participants will create listening devices that
capture, re-interpret and re-imagine the environment, and perhaps
generate their own sound in response.
The workshops will take place 10am-5pm, 24 and 25 September
at Vitra, EC1. Call 020 7608 6200 or email andrew.lock@vitra.com
34
A LETTER FROM
NORWAY
Norwegian wood has hardly been a
feature of Oslo’s recent oil-rich
architecture scene. Yet Herbert Wright
wonders if a new development, based
on bio-waste, could change all that
The Norwegians are big on wood.
You see it in the roof beams defining
the elegant air terminal at Oslo
Gardermoen (designed by Norway’s
Aviaplan), and it makes up perhaps 85
per cent of rural residential structures.
Norwegian architects Brendeland
and Kristofferson have established a
reputation for wooden structures from
the Arctic to Berlin – sadly, I found
none in Oslo. Indeed, there’s almost
no wood in the capital’s streetscapes.
Although it was once a timber town,
little remains apart from some wooden
industrial heritage by the mountain
stream that tumbles down into what
is now an unfeasibly clean downtown.
Oslo is Scandinavia’s fastest
growing conurbation, where more
than a million people nestle between
pine-covered mountainsides and fjord
waters. Architecturally, Oslo’s most
unique landmark was the heavy,
ominous twin-towered Rådhuset
(Town Hall). Designed in 1931, when
totalitarian state structures called
for monumental stone, architects
Arnstein Arneberg and Magnus
Poulsson chose democratic brick but,
ironically, the Nazi occupation meant
that the Rådhuset was not completed
until 1950. Nowadays, it is eclipsed
by Snøhetta’s Opera House, which
is the exact opposite in its angular,
asymmetric form, glinting with
aluminium and glass. Only a few
discreet signs prevent skateboarders
from clattering down its white marble
slopes, all the way from the top to the
water, without a break. The ice-cream
kiosk perched on its roof was probably
wheeled up there.
These days, world-class cultural
buildings are trophies that few, except
for oil sheikhs, can afford. Norway is
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009
Europe’s own petrodollar state. Only
Abu Dhabi has a bigger sovereign
wealth fund, and is constructing
Saadiyat Island, with a Louvre and
a Guggenheim museum. Oslo has
a smaller island in the pipeline,
located beside the Opera House,
that will feature a new Edvard Munch
Museum designed by Madrid’s
Herreros Arquitectos. Across the
six-lane motorway that marks off
this emerging culture district, Oslo
is building its business zone, called
Barcode, because of the profile that
gaps in the strip of office blocks
will create from the water. The first
block is complete, and Snøhetta and
MVDRV are working on others. The
scheme makes a refreshing change to
the uniform formula of big-footprint
megablocks by corporate architects,
favoured by, say, Canary Wharf.
Jumbly and varied cityscapes appeal.
Oslo realised that back in the 1980s,
when the oil revenue started gushing
in and work on the high-density
waterside quarter Aker Brygge began.
Here, every building is different and
the maze of pedestrian spaces is
thronging with life. Why can’t the
Chelsea Barracks’ site be divided up
among different architects?
Oslo’s most recent enhancement
is more modest – a magical spiral
sculpture by Sven Påhlsson at St Olav
Plass – but made in metal, not wood.
No fossil-fuelled public money is
responsible for Oslo’s cool, old brick
quarter of Grünerløkke, where I ended
the day by watching local bohemians
and enjoying a glass of Aass – a local
beer, disappointingly pronounced
Orss. The next day I would be on the
trail of the treated pine.
The Norwegian modified wood
producer Kebony treats sustainable
local timber with waste from sugar
cane production, rather than metals
and artificial chemicals. Under high
pressure and temperature, its secret
formula polymerises in the wood
cells, creating a hard, rot-proof and
extremely durable timber. Kebony
is the only wood with the Nordic
environmental certification of
a Swan. In an unvarnished state, with
industrial strength, it weathers to
grey to appear like concrete patterned
by wooden moulds. (Imagine a new
Brutalism made in wood!)
The first sighting of it occurs
in the Nansen Park, a vast landscaped
leisure resource emerging at the site
of Oslo’s old airport on the Fornebu
Peninsula, closed in 1998. At its
western end stretches a beach along
the fjord. Here, the modest trapezoid
buildings of the bather’s facility,
designed by Thor Olav Solbjør, is
entirely clad in Kebony, inset with
blue light strips. It’s an elegant,
contemporary descendant of the
wooden structures found in remote
Norwegian areas for the outdoor type,
and if the Opera House’s angularity
indicates an emerging vernacular, this
echoes it, but with warm textures.
100km south-west of Oslo lies
Skien and the Kebony factory, housing
vast tanks, where the treatment takes
place. Spying traces of the treatment’s
syrup-like residue, I told them that
I was on an industrial espionage
mission for China. They laughed, but
my host mysteriously disappeared for
a while. Maybe he just went to the loo.
My final stop was the Larvik spa hotel,
a crisp modernist design by Halvorsen
and Reine that cantilevers across
the water with the help of Corbusian
concrete piloti. Here, the varnished
Kebony cladding forms a dynamic
counterpoint to the metal panelling.
The problem with Kebony is the
cost, but like many green features,
capital outlay melts away in lifetime
savings. Kebony lasts longer than
untreated woods and requires
hardly any maintenance. Emerging
architects such as Trondheim’s
Eggen Arkitekter are already using
the timber. In the UK, HRI Architects
have clad two buildings for the
Forestry Commission in Scotland
with the wood. For the first, offices
in Smithton completed in 2007,
they shipped Scottish pine to Norway
for kebonisation. London will have
the chance to see Kebony at 100%
Design, where the 100% Norway
stand, devised by Stokke Austad,
is made of Kebony.
Heading back from Norway to
scruffy London, I speculated whether
Kebony might ultimately spell the end
for Europe’s five billion euros (£4.2m)
import of tropical hardwoods?
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Blueprint will be part of an
installation at the Wapping Project
in September. Emma Gritt visited
37
its latest exhibition, A Net of Eels,
by London-based artist Jake Tilson

Eels can be a slippery subject, cycle to its importance in Japanese

but a collaboration between British
artist, writer and cook Jake Tilson
and Japanese photographer Kyochi
Tsuzuki lucidly charts their culinary
importance to both countries, and
serves up a delicious and unexpected
culture. Tsuzuki’s wonderful
photographic depictions of Japan’s
numerous Eel Shrines and Eeland,
an eel-themed resort, fit well with
Tilson’s cabinet of curiosities –
which presents items ranging from

ALL IMAGES: ATLAS INC

feast for the senses. A Net of Eels’
first stop was the Wapping Project,
but the exhibition will next open
in the heart of eel country, Ely
in Cambridgeshire, where taxes were
once paid in the slithering creatures.
The show transports visitors
to hubs of eel activity, including
London’s River Thames and
Billingsgate Fish Market, Ely’s River
Ouse and a fish auction at Tokyo’s
Tsukiji wholesale market, through
audio recordings that perfectly convey
the atmosphere of each place. From
the hustle and bustle of the fish
markets to the gentle riverside noises
of the Ouse, the humble eel’s journey
is tracked.
Visually, the exhibition is just
as enthralling. Tilson’s highly personal
and eclectic approach contrasts
with Tzusuki’s more anthropological
observations to create a fascinating
overview of the eel, from its
extraordinary migratory patterns
and its continually transforming life
canned and stuffed eel, to postage
stamps, action figures, architectural
models and comics.
Much of the focus of the
exhibition rests on ‘eel houses’,
a phenomena discovered by Tilson
on a research trip to Kyoto. Due
to a tax imposed on the width
of a property, merchants’ houses
in the city developed an extremely
long and narrow structure, acquiring
an almost eel-like form, and earning
themselves the unflattering moniker
of unagi no-nedoko or eel beds.
Tilson invented a Kyoto-based
architectural studio called Atelier
Biwa to develop three-dimensional
computer visualisations, scale models
and drawings of eel houses, under
the title of Architectural Fiction –
unagi no-nedoko. This fictional
collective enabled Tilson to explore
ideas concerning the practice, which
had started business renovating old
Kyoto eel houses in the 1980s. The
firm changed its corporate identity
in 2006, and attempted to gain work
in Tokyo, developing a scheme for an
eel restaurant called Kabayaki West on
an eel-house sized plot. The drawings
and models reveal a fantastical
vision and inventive use of space
and imagery. The attention to detail
of this project verges on the obsessive,
and is no more clearly evident than
in the scaled-down historic Japanese
eel posters, used as the backdrop
to the models, sourced by Tsuzuki.
Tsuzuki exhibits nine large-scale
photographic works, exploring Japan’s
relationship with the giant eel,
a symbol of the country. Works include
a giant eel in Lake Ikeda, Kagoshima,
regarded as ‘Japan’s Loch Ness’, and
images of Hikokura Kkuzo Bosatsu,
an Eel Temple in Misato, Saitama.
Tilson’s collection of around
200 images from Britain and Japan Above: Jake Tilson
make up a vibrant pictorial stream designed two
typefaces. One
called Conveyor Belt Sushi. His
pictured here
culinary passion is further revealed is based on the
through his creation of eel-related shape of Atlantic
placemats, which were used eels, the other on
in the Wapping Project’s restaurant, the object of their
alongside a screen-based work capture: spears
showing the facades of traditional
Below left: Tilson’s
eel and pie shops in London and model of an Eel
unagi restaurants in Tokyo and Kyoto. Restaurant, in
Furthermore, two cloth banners Yanaka, Tokyo, 2009
display traditional eel recipes,
using two typefaces designed
by Tilson: one font is derived from
the shape of Atlantic eels, whereas
the other is based on the object
used for their capture – eel spears.
A Net of Eels is at the Babylon
Gallery, Ely, 29 August-4 October

DESIGN IS SIMPLY COMPLEX Prestigious collaborations with the art A series of

at the Wapping Project, E1 and design worlds are most notably Greenhouse Talks
will take place
4-27 September the Tate Modern and Apple Inc.
during the London
Blueprint will be part of a living
Design Festival
installation at the Wapping Project, Tracey Neuls
4-27 September. The magazine’s editorial Tracey Neuls is the London-based designer 7.30pm
and design team will work alongside behind the women’s footwear brands 21-24 September:
three studios while you watch, buy TN_29 and the recently launched Tracey 21 September
and interrogate. Neuls signature collection. Her work has Vicky Richardson,
editor, Blueprint
For Design is Simply Complex, previously featured in Blueprint (265-
22 September
Blueprint will create its November issue April 2008), and her Marylebone shop Paul Priestman,
in public. There will also be a chance hosts displays of furniture. Neuls’ industrial designer
to read archive copies, buy the magazine decision to give priority to the wearer’s 23 September
and peek at an advance issue. individuality and comfort has made Tracey Neuls,
her the creative individual’s preferred shoe designer
24 September
Alongside Blueprint will be Ally Capellino, footwear designer.
Ally Capellino
Tracey Neuls and Van der Meersch
handbag designer
and Weston. Van der Meersch and Weston Tickets cost £5
The Wapping Project has also invited from Lydia.fulton
Ally Capellino Van der Meersch and Weston to set up in @mac.com
Lauded as one of the major designers its former Coal Store. The company sells
of her generation, Capellino was among carefully selected, museum-quality works The Wapping
Project
the first generation of British designers by international architects and designers,
Wapping Hydraulic
to achieve success in Japan, where she whose legacies are still alive in the design Power Station, E1
opened several stores in the 1990s. The world – Charlotte Perriand, Pierre Paulin, For more details:
studio focuses on producing two seasonal Walter Gropius and Serge Mouille – as well 020 7680 2080
bag collections for men and women, and as rare seminal works by Dom Hans van www.thewapping
an ongoing Classics Collection. der Laan, Keith Murray and Friso Kramer. project.com

BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009

38
The architect behind the first Jewish
school in Berlin, Zvi Hecker has built up
an architectural collection in the city
as a mark of respect for his heroes. Here
he explains how it began and grew
In retrospect, my collection of city
apartments in Berlin grew as if by
itself. Until recently, though, I have
neither questioned the origins
of the idea, nor traced the path
of its gradual progress.
My family lives in the apartments
I designed in Israel: Dubiner House
from the early Sixties and Spiral House
from the Eighties. I never considered
these as anything more than the
natural choice of accommodation
for our family. The situation changed
quite radically in 1991 when I won
a competition to design the Jewish
school in Berlin. It became clear
that the scheme stood a better
chance of being built if I was based
in the city, as it had to conform
to German building codes, and there
was also considerable resentment
towards the design. It was then
that I established an office in Berlin,
in addition to my studio in Tel Aviv.
Living and working in Berlin
I became acquainted with the
works of 20th-century architects
for the first time. These included
projects that I had previously
only been familiar with from plans
and photographs, such as the
Stadtsbibliothek by Hans Scharoun.
Such a masterpiece must be
experienced first-hand in order to
see the architect’s unique mastery of
space, animated by his Athenian spirit.
Unlike the public buildings open
daily in Berlin, it is impossible to visit
a housing project by Scharoun, or any
other Berlin architect. The only way
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009
would be to live in one. Recognising
this must have triggered my
interest in what has developed
into an architectural collection.
Berlin’s significance and
uniqueness is well known and quite
evident, but what is particularly
special is the amount and quality
of modern architecture by the most
prominent architects of the 20th
century. Among others, Alvar Aalto,
Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer
were invited to build for the Interbau
Exhibition of Modern Architecture
in Berlin in 1957. In between the
two world wars, residential complexes
and low-cost housing were built
to the designs of Bruno Taut,
Hugo Häring, Walter Gropius, Mies
van der Rohe, Erich Mendelsohn,
Scharoun and many others.
During my student years, some
of these architects were great heroes
of mine, including the likes of
Mendelsohn, who left Nazi Germany
to build in Palestine. My journey
50 years later was in the opposite
direction, from Israel to Berlin
to build the first Jewish school
after the Holocaust.
To acknowledge my debt to the
generations of architects who have
inspired me, I followed the example
of painters who treasured paintings
by artists they admired in their
ateliers. Though you can’t put one
apartment into another, the idea
didn’t seem so erroneous. It is also
a means of respect, long overdue,
for the work of city architects, civil
engineers, and many bureaucrats
who made it possible for so many
good architects to contribute
to the architecture of Berlin.
The first opportunity presented
itself when the decision was made
to transfer the ownership and the
administration of some of Berlin’s
housing condominiums to private
investors. At the beginning of 2000
I found apartments in the Niemeyer
and Aalto buildings; both built
in Tiergarten, the ‘Central Park’
of Berlin, as part of the 1957
Interbau Exhibition.
From 2003 my own work kept
me busy, but in 2007 I purchased
an apartment in a less well-known
housing project in Wedding,
north Berlin, designed by Mies
in 1927, and last year an apartment
in a 1928 block by Mendelsohn
became available. Located in
Cicerostrasse, it is one of the
most elegant apartment buildings
in Berlin, not far from Mendelsohn’s
famous Universum Cinema on
Kurfürstendamm. I am hoping
to buy an additional apartment
in the housing block by Scharoun
on Kaiserdamm.
As I accumulated these
properties, I have been continuously
amazed by the enormous difference
between the high value of the works
of painters and sculptors in contrast
Above: Aalto’s to that of great architects. The art
apartment building market seems to be run by skillful
in Berlin, which manipulators for well-calculated
Hecker considers
profits, while there remains a total
one of the ‘most
beautiful, disinterest in the work of architects,
intelligent and which should have an equivalent
humane’ of its kind commercial value. Collecting
in the world a sample of architects’ work has been
a way of correcting this inequality.
Left: The 1928
In starting this collection,
block by Erich
Mendelsohn, one
my ignorance in matters of finance
of Hecker’s more has been the greatest advantage.
recent acquisitions I was unaware of the fact that strict
rent control in Berlin made profit
on apartment investments unlikely.
Also, many of the tenants that
live in the buildings designed by
Niemeyer have done so for years,
some since the 1950s, enjoying
low rent and the right to stay. The
same is true of the occupancy
of Aalto’s apartment building.
Unfamiliar with commercial matters,
I have been guided by my intuition
and my belief in the importance
of architecture as the best instrument
of culture.
Great architecture has a civilizing
effect on society, and also provides
a solid base for future generations
to learn from and build upon. As
such, architecture must be regarded
as a long-term investment, a kind
of mega-economy. Its success isn’t
measured by monthly payments,
but by the life cycle of generations.
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40 SOUR
GRAPES OLD BAYLEY
In his deliberately antagonistic
new book, Woman as Design,
Observer design critic Stephen
Bayley evaluates the female body
as a ‘designed object’. The result,
though, is an astonishing journey
into the mind of an ageing narcissist.
He begins with ‘design briefs’ for
the various female body parts. To
pick one at random, Bayley outlines
the requirements of ‘the ano-genital
delta’: ‘lubrication to be supplied
in an on-demand basis. The
major orifice must be flexibly
commodious…. The whole to be
meticulously surfaced and carefully
detailed.’ Later on, he brings this
observation: ‘with its shifting role
and meanings, unsurprisingly we feel
a deep ambiguity about the bottom,’
before exhorting: ‘just consider that
the female snail’s vagina is in her head.’
PURPLE PROSE
An insight into the Bayley
household comes early on in the
book: ‘a conversation over dinner
with my wife started me on this
subject…. She said, apropos
of I can’t quite remember what,
did I think a product designer
could have handled the complex
mechanical, hydraulic and aesthetic
problems of the area between
a woman’s legs?’ With a tone that
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009
frequently lurches into deeply
unerotic, glib lyricism, Bayley
picks up where his wife wisely
left off: ‘have any mortal designers
ever achieved such an elegant
and famous junction as that
between the upper thigh and the
gluteal mass?’ he asks. Has any
writer ever achieved such a clumsy
junction between drooling, oily
prose and disturbingly cold,
medical descriptions?
DESIGNS ON HISTORY
In a Youtube video that promotes
his new book, Bayley introduces
himself as being ‘responsible for
building London’s Design Museum,’
rather than, say, as ‘a man who
was given the plum job of museum
director by wealthy Terence Conran,’
which seems a more feasible
description. Strangely, the
Deyan Sudjic-penned mini-history
on the Design Museum’s website
makes no mention of his vital
role, yet Bayley makes it sound
like he spent the Eighties out
on Shad Thames with a brick hod
and a trowel. Could the passing
years be clouding the old codger’s
memory? Interestingly, in 2007,
Bayley wrote an article for The
Observer titled ‘the gentle art
of selling yourself’ in which he
espoused the virtues of self-invention.
ROCKY TIMES AT THE LIGHTHOUSE
Rumours have been flying around
Glasgow that the city’s architecture
centre, The Lighthouse, could face
closure after failing to meet its
commercial income targets. The BBC
reported in mid-July that the centre’s
staff was told of a plan which could
see 44 out of its 57 workers being
made redundant, while its director,
Nick Barley, told Grapes that ‘all
staff (with no exceptions) have been
issued with notes to say that there is
a risk of redundancy.’ There have also
been tales that the director himself
might soon be walking out, which
we put to Barley. He responded: ‘I’m
amused to read that I’ve apparently
announced my departure. It seems
the news has reached you before
it got to me or the Board.’ Does
that sound like a denial to you?
TAKING THE LOW ROAD
Maybe Scotland’s architectural
fortunes will be saved by Jonathan
Meades’ new BBC 4 TV series, which
airs this September. Painfully titled
Off Kilter, the three-part documentary
sees Meades bravely venturing into
‘post-post-industrial Fife, Aberdeen,
Stirling and the Outer Hebrides’,
described by his agent as the ‘unseen
Scotland, the Scotland that is off the
map’. This might come as a surprise
to the Scots who actually live there,
but they will no doubt be placated
by his generous musings on its
‘post-apocalyptic landscape… the
dereliction and deprivation evident
in abandoned stone buildings,
collapsed corrugated iron shacks
and Ford Transits left to rot in peat
bogs’. We hope Jonathan hurried
back quickly to his French pad
with a cool glass of Pastis to recover
from the shock.
CREEPY, GNARLED,
DESTRUCTIVE PEST
No, not Stephen Bayley: insects.
News has reached Grapes of an
architectural component to this
year’s Pestival, an insect-based
arts festival, taking place on
London’s Southbank in September.
For the ‘inter-species’ event, which
celebrates ‘insects in art, and the art
of being an insect’, London-based
architect Softroom has designed
a Termite Pavilion, which draws
on the ‘extraordinary architectural
and engineering skills of one of
Earth’s oldest master buildings’
(i.e. termites). It might seem
frivolous, but architects have to take
whatever commissions come their
way these days. And considering that
there are an estimated 10 quintillion
(10 billion billion) insects on earth
at any given time, maybe Softroom is
just cleverly expanding its client base.
BY CHRISTOPHER RAINBOW
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 //You get to live in one of the centres of the known universe if you are prepared to put up with all of London’s inadequacies: bad air, horrible traffic,
atrocious services and ridiculous prices. If you survive here, nothing will scare you. And having managed to do so is a great boost for anybody’s
self-confidence. The more creative talent you have in one place, the more you attract. As a group, designers aren’t afraid of moving into ‘bad’ areas, we like
to try exotic foods, hang out with interesting people from faraway places, listen to strange sounds, read material that is incomprehensible to outsiders and
generally treat bugs as features. Where could there be a better environment for this species than in London?// Erik Spiekermann, graphic designer

LONDON
This is the first London Design Festival (LDF) to be organised
in the midst of a recession. Yet, as the following pages
demonstrate, the downturn has not reduced the amount of creative
activity in the city. Organisations and individual designers
are finding their own ways to respond to the new economic
climate. Committee, for example, whose Plastic Relic features on
our cover this month, is about to open a new cafe in Deptford.
Bigger plans are also afoot: in April this year, the Meanwhile
Project announced it would temporarily give empty retail spaces
over to artists, and in August the Arts Council announced a grants
scheme for artists to turn vacant units into creative spaces.
Parklife, a 4,200sq-m empty space on the south side of Oxford
Street, is being turned into an opportunity to stage events and
experimental installations. And Icelandic bank Kaupthing is
currently in discussion with developer Stanhope to turn NoHo
Square, another large empty space in London’s west-end, into a site
for public activities or allotments.
Such initiatives bode well for London’s ability to weather the
recession, as does the full programme of events at the 2009 LDF.
To join in with this spirit of self-initiated creativity, Blueprint
will be organising more events at this year’s festival than
ever before.

BLUEPRINT AT THE BLUEPRINT AWARDS VITRA/BLUEPRINT WORKSHOP

LONDON DESIGN FESTIVAL
THE WAPPING PROJECT
The Blueprint team produces
its November issue in the east
London arts venue as part of
an exhibition, Design is Simply
Complex, 4-27 September (page 39)
CLAYSTATION
An interactive event on the Blueprint
stand at 100% Design, offers a
chance to win a chair by Claystation
designer Ben Hughes (page 49)
We will also be running 100%
Design’s annual awards for the best
products and exhibitors (page 46)
YOUNG CREATIVE POLAND
The launch of our product editor
Gian Luca Amadei’s book, Discovering
Women in Polish Design: Interviews
and Conversations (page 74)
TWENTYTWENTYONE
Naoto Fukasawa’s Plus Minus Zero
products, is launched in the UK,
supported by Blueprint (page 60)
The Swiss furniture manufacturer
and Blueprint will be recreating
the annual Boisbuchet workshop in
its Clerkenwell showroom (page 34)
TENT LONDON
Blueprint will be media partner
for the east London design event
PAPER CITY
Our exhibition at the Royal
Academy, Paper City: Urban Utopias,
will continue throughout the
Festival, 31 July-27 October

BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009

44
100% DESIGN LONDON IS GOING
BACK TO ITS ROOTS WITH A
STRONG FOCUS ON EMERGING
TALENT. NOW IN THEIR 14TH
YEAR, THE BLUEPRINT AWARDS,
THIS YEAR IN PARTNERSHIP WITH
THE SUNDAY TIMES STYLE
MAGAZINE, HIGHLIGHT THE BEST
NEW PRODUCTS AND EXHIBITORS.
HERE WE REVEAL RESULTS OF THE
FIRST ROUND OF JUDGING
π
ACOUSTIC FELT
ANNE KYYRÖ QUINN
Finnish born Anne Kyyrö Quinn hand-cuts,
sews and finishes sustainable wool felt
to create undulating three-dimensional wall
coverings. The pieces have excellent sound-
absorbing qualities, making them ideal for use in
public buildings. They will also transform
Quinn’s stand at 100% Design into a cocoon
of muffled noise, where she will show examples
of other materials, such as leather.
www.annekyyroquinn.com
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009
BLUEPRINT
AWARDS
100%
DESIGN
LONDON
This year the format for the Blueprint
Awards changes: instead of exhibitors
entering the awards, leading to a limited
shortlist of six products and exhibitors
in each category, we have awarded an
unlimited number of Blueprint Badges to
the best new products, new talent in 100%
Futures, and the best use of materials.
Blueprint Badge winners – which will
display plaques made by Signbox – have
been selected by Vicky Richardson, editor
of Blueprint, and Gareth Williams, senior
tutor in Design Products at the Royal
College of Art, in early August.
In the final round of judging, at
the show itself, overall winners will
be chosen in four categories: Best New
Product; Best Exhibition Design; Most
Promising Talent at 100% Futures,
and Best Use of Materials.
Judging will take place from 2-4pm on
Thursday 24 September and will
involve a prestigious panel of designers
and critics: Dr Mark Miodownik, head
of materials research at King’s College
and Materials Library; Kim Colin,
Industrial Facility; Ilse Crawford, Studio
Ilse; Ruth Aram, Aram; Philipp Thonet,
Thonet; Kwamina Monney, a director
at Amanda Levete Architects; Kara
O’Reilly, associate editor, The Sunday
Times Style magazine, and Vicky
Richardson, Blueprint editor.
All products and stands will be
eligible, including Blueprint Badge
winners and exhibitors who did not register
in time for the first round of judging.
The four category winners will
be announced at 6.30pm Thursday
24 September at 100% Design.
π BEST NEW PRODUCT
45
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WALK DESK 5TH STOOL
STEUART PADWICK SPANISH INSTITUTE FOR FOREIGN TRADE
Steuart Padwick, who launched Benchmark The 5th stool by Tomás Alonso is designed to be
Furniture with Terence Conran and Sean Sutcliffe perched upon for only for short periods. After
in 2006, has produced a number of new products studying the alternatives, elements of the stool
this year. The best is the Walk Desk, made such as materials, mass and components were
from solid and veneered maple, which makes stripped back as much as possible. What’s left is
reference to the classic school desk. the essence of a stool, something that appears
www.steuartpadwick.co.uk very modest, but strangely beautiful. Alonso
established Okay Design Studio in 2006 with
five colleagues from the Royal College of Art.
PILES OF SUITCASES www.icex.es
BRUSSELS EXPORT

π
Piles of Suitcases is a flexible storage
system, which can be taken apart or added
to, allowing the user to build different luggage
‘landscapes’. Maarten de Ceulaer’s six suitcases
are dimensioned to house particular clothing
items but can be reconfigured according
to the user’s tastes and needs. The material
choice of leather suggests luxury, but there
is a sense of fun behind the bold shades
π
of green and the patchwork of different-sized
squares and rectangles. BISON CHAIR
www.brussels-export.be ALLERMUIR
π Simon Pengelly has designed a characterful
tub chair, with broad shoulders and a narrow
base that looks as if it could be extremely
comfortable. The chair would work well
in an office or leisure environment, and can
be finished in a variety of fabrics. It has
GRAPHITE CHAIR a moulded foam seat with a compact footprint.
SPANISH INSTITUTE FOR FOREIGN TRADE Its sprung seat, and flexible arms and backrest
The intriguing-looking Graphite chair by Diego give it a sense of comfort that’s unusual for
Ramos is the result of experimentation with a contract chair.
materials. The inner structure of the chair www.allermuir.com
is a metallic core mixed with expandable foam
and the exterior surface is latex and resin
treated with Tyvek. This example is complete
with a black ink and UV varnish finish. Ramos,
who runs his own studio in Barcelona, is showing
alongside eight emerging Spanish designers.
π TRELLICK TOWER TEXTILES
DESIGN-NATION
Textile designer Margo Selby and People
Will Always Need Plates have joined forces
www.icex.es to create a range of textiles and products. The
first design is a silk/viscose jacquard inspired
π

by Ernö Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower.

www.designnation.co.uk

π
HEAVY LAMP
DECODE LONDON
The Heavy lamp is based on Benjamin Hubert’s
successful thin-walled concrete pendant lamps
that he launched at 100% Futures (and won
an award for) in 2008. Each shade is hand-cast
and finished allowing slight variation in the
end product each time. The shade can be made
in either white, light grey or dark grey, and
is supported by a laminated plywood neck
in oak or walnut.
www.decodelondon.com

BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009

 46
L MOST PROMISING NEW TALENT AT 100% FUTURES
O
N

π
D
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N LIZ EEUWES
Since graduating with a degree in Product
Design from the Glasgow School of Art,
Canadian-born Liz Eeuwes has set up a studio
developing a collection of textured rugs inspired
by the Scottish countryside. After noticing the
similarity between aerial views of the landscape
and the visual effect of rugs, she began
experimenting with techniques such as pile
heights, hand-knotting, weaving and colouring.
The rugs are handmade from New Zealand wool.
www.lizeeuwes.co.uk
π
STUDIO IL GU CHA
A recent graduate from the RCA, Korean
Il Gu Cha, has shown exceptional talent with
a series of products that include a clock,
Trace of Time, and a radio that is controlled
as if it were a computer mouse. Il Gu Cha
studied as part of Platform 12 under Sam Hecht,
Durrell Bishop and André Klauser. The Korean
π
Institute of Design Promotion has selected
him as a Next Generation Design Leader. EUNYOUNG KIM
www.ilgucha.com LIGHTING
A young designer from Seoul, Eunyoung Kim
is inspired by natural forms such as birds’ nests,
feather and eggs. The web structure of her
lighting is achieved by using a liquid material:
gelcoat resin that sets hard. Kim runs her own
business and makes other interior products
such as wall ornaments and vases.
www.eunyoungkim2009.blogspot.com
π
SEONGYONG LEE
Showing the Balanced Chair, Seongynog Lee
π

ROBIN GRASBY is an accomplished young Korean designer

Having recently graduated in 3D Design from who already has many products to his name.
Northumbria University, Robin Grasby has He showed at Designers Block in 2008, and has
actually been making furniture since the exhibited widely in Seoul.
age of 16 when he began working for a joiner. www.seongyonglee.com
Grasby will show a selection of his products, the
highlight of which is likely to be the Homework
Desk, which took the 100% Design award at
New Designers recently. Grasby was a double
winner, and also took home the Habitat award.
www.robingrasby.com

BEST USE OF MATERIALS

SALMON LEATHER MATERIA

As the name implies, Salmon leather is made by
repurposing salmon skin from the commercial salmon
industry. The company claims that the material is stronger
and more flexible than conventional leather.
www.es-salmonleather.com
BOLIDT BUBBLEBAR FLOOR
The Bubblebar floor is a poured resin that captures
an image. In this case the design was created for the
Water Cube at the Beijing Olympics by the Chinese
architect Jiwei Li.
www.design.bolidt.nl
Dutch company Materia has a free materials database, and
will be exhibiting several intriguing products including
cactus carpet (pictured right), cannabis textiles, soya
cloth, deer-antler wall panels and flooring made from
old wine barrels.
www.materia.nl
MOONLIGHT BY TASHIRO ALLOY
The Japanese company has won prizes for its interior
cladding product made from tin, which is non-combustible
and non-toxic and is made to order.
www.tgmetal.co.jp

BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009

 VOLA International Trade Showroom I 32-36 Great Portland Street I London W1 I Tel: 020 7580 7722 I sales@vola.co.uk I www.vola.com
VOLA UK Ltd. I Unit 12, Ampthill Business Park I Station Road, Ampthill I Bedfordshire MK45 2QW I Tel: 01525 84 11 55 I sales@vola.co.uk I www.vola.com
www.heimtextil-trends.com
 49
L
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BLUEPRINT/
N
BLUEPRINT HAS JOINED FORCES
WITH CLAYSTATION TO CREATE
AN INTERACTIVE EVENT FOR
100% DESIGN LONDON FEATURING
THE NEW ONEPIECE CHAIR. OVER
THE PAGE YOU’LL FIND A MODEL CLAYSTATION
TO DECORATE AND BUILD. BRING
YOUR DESIGN ALONG TO THE
SHOW FOR A CHANCE TO WIN AT 100%
A FULL-SCALE VERSION

Designer Ben Hughes has made
a breakthrough in furniture design,
which you can test for yourself over the
page. It’s a chair made from one piece
of lightweight material, with no glue
or fixings required. The Onepiece
Chair, which will be on show for the
first time at 100% Design, is made from
an innovative Swedish material called
Re-board. The chair is manufactured
in one go, including printing and cutting
of joints and details. It can be specified in
scale and delivered flat-packed at full scale
ready to be folded into three dimensions.
Hughes, who is course director
of the MA in Industrial Design at Central
St Martins, was one of the founding
Below: A Claystation members of Claystation. It was
event at Designers Block set up in 2003 to bring hands-on activities
in 2007 to events where design is generally just
DESIGN
shown in just its final form. The first Visitors to the
Claystation event involved visitors making Blueprint/Claystation
animated clay figures. It evolved into other stand at 100% Design can
areas: giant plasticine cityscapes, chairs, take advantage of a special
cars and even sheds. offer: the first three issues
The Onepiece Chair is a development of a 12-month subscription
from a project Hughes worked on with for just £1
Claystation at the National Museum
of Scotland in 2006 where visitors were
asked to create their own chair designs
in response to the ones being exhibited.
The same idea was repeated with great
success at Designers Block in London
and Milan in 2007. However, at the time,
the technology did not exist to make
full-scale versions of the chairs from
paper. Instead they had to be made from
MDF, which proved to be very heavy.
The development of a new paper
material called Re-board has changed that. Ω

Right: Ben Hughes’

design for the Onepiece
Chair, which will be
available full size
at 100% Design

BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009

 50
L Right: Claystation
O at Designers Block
N
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The brainchild of Swedish entrepreneur

Kurt Aldén, Re-board, which is
manufactured by paper manufacturer
Stora Enso in Sweden, has a sandwich
construction and is as lightweight as
cardboard, but as strong as MDF. The board
has other advantages: it can be printed on,
provides good thermal and sound
insulation, and can be recycled as paper.
The Blueprint/Claystation stand
at this year’s 100% Design will showcase
full-scale versions of the chair, each
decorated by a different designer. We’re
also inviting visitors to decorate and
build their own small-scale version
of the chair and add to our stand.
At the end of the show, judges

.
including Ben Hughes and Matthew Hilton,
will select the best design and the winner
will receive a Onepiece Chair

WHITELINES can be scanned, faxed and copied without

Our template of the Onepiece Chair
is printed on some rather special paper.
The pattern is not just a tasteful grey
background, but is in fact a clever idea
that could have a big impact on the way
designers work.
Most ordinary lined or gridded paper
is grey on white. As the name suggests,
Whitelines reverses this to create a surface
that has no glare and, more importantly,
the lines interfering with the drawing.
Whitelines was invented by Swedish
product designer Olof Hansson in 2006,
when he attempted to copy a drawing
of a product he was working on. ‘I was
irritated because the lines on the copy
made a mess of my sketch. It was then
that the idea of having white lines hit me:
they would not be visible on a photocopy,
but the dark lines that I had written
would,’ says Hansson.
Hansson then patented the idea,
which is now being adopted across
Below left: Olof Hansson’s
sketch shows how dark
lined paper distorts
when photocopied
Sweden as the preferred writing material.
In June, students at the Royal Institute
of Technology in Stockholm used it to
sit exams: the toned paper reduces glare
Below right: Two and assists suffers of dyslexia because
examples of the the background lines do not interfere
Whitelines with text, as with conventional lined
stationary range or squared paper.
Whitelines paper has a zero-carbon
footprint, and is available in variously
sized and shaped notebooks and pads.
www.whitelines.se

BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009

Join us at the Jump the Gap award
ceremony hosted by John Pawson
on 24th September at 6pm

Stand G20
100% Design London
24 - 27 September 2009

www.roca.com
www.jumpthegap.net

rd
The 3 Roca
International
Design
Contest
52

COMMITTEE HAS ACHIEVED

SUCCESS THROUGH ITS
SERIOUS ENGAGEMENT WITH
THE WORLD, AND BY ALWAYS
HAVING A TWINKLE IN ITS
EYE. VICKY RICHARDSON
SPOKE TO THE DESIGNERS,
AS THEY PUT THE FINISHING
TOUCHES TO A NEW CAFE/STUDIO
IN SOUTH-EAST LONDON

COMMITTEE
PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHRISTOFFER RUDQUIST

Committee moved
into a shop on Deptford
High Street in 1998.
Not knowing whether
it would become a
gallery or a shop.
They named it Gallop

BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009


Harry Richardson, one half of Committee,
has just spent several days on his knees,
hand-cutting and mortaring a small area
of tilework on the threshold of a new
cafe on Deptford High Street. A few days
into the job, a passer-by brought him some
knee pads, and countless others stopped
to comment on the work. The experience,
while painful, has reaffirmed Richardson’s
love of the area, in which Committee
has been based for 10 years.
Committee’s work and life is embedded
in Deptford, although it has achieved
worldwide success with its best-known
product, the Kebab Lamp, first seen in April
2004 at the Salone del Mobile in Milan. Self-
taught as designers, Richardson and partner
Clare Page studied fine art at Liverpool
53
L
O
N
D
O
N
School of Art. But it would be wrong to
see them as artists-turned-designers. Their
work takes the form of functional objects,
but it is driven by their interest in what
Page describes as ‘critical practice’.
At times, when talking about design
with Richardson and Page, one can feel
as if the whole exercise is part of an
experiment or investigation – and working
with a magazine to create a front cover
is just part of the process. They say: ‘we’ve
always felt like outsiders in the design
industry, but there’s a definite reason that
we didn’t go into art: that world is isolated,
separate and has its own cathedrals. In
design, there’s more of a crossover and
a dialogue with the ordinary world
of commodities.’ Ω
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009
54
//THE OBSESSION WITH REPURPOSING
DISCARDED OBJECTS STILL GRIPS MANY
DESIGNERS. WITH COMMITTEE, HOWEVER,
IT DERIVES, NOT FROM MORAL REVULSION
WITH CONSUMER CULTURE, BUT A
FASCINATION WITH MASS PRODUCTION,
AND A DESIRE TO EXPLORE THE VALUES
WE PLACE ON ORDINARY ITEMS//
Above: Soft Rocker, an Despite Committee’s admission that
upholstered rocking chair they are naive about the world of design,
launched at the 2008 the success or failure of their products
Milan Salone by SCP
is vital. The pair are reluctant to be part
Left: The Sleep Kebab of what they describe as a ‘show-boating
Lamp, which was sold culture of design’, in which star names
by Philips de Pury, are invited to produce installations on the
New York, in 2005. Each spot. Instead, they are eager to create more
lamp is made by hand by ordinary, mass-produced designs, such
Committee and tells a
as a shampoo bottle or simple furniture.
different story
In 2008, Committee devised its
first conventional piece of furniture for
manufacturer and retailer SCP. This was
a first attempt at moving away from their
used or rescued objects, and references
to them (such as Flytip Wallpaper of 2005).
The Soft Rocker was an ambitious
idea in terms of furniture manufacture:
an upholstered rocking chair, in which
the curved base is covered in fabric.
Their next production design
is likely to be an item of furniture for
Established and Sons at the Milan Salone
in 2010. They have already been asked
by the company to devise a prototype for
Venini glassware, along with a number
of different designers, which the pair
are currently working on.
Page, the more practical and
rational partner, is sometimes frustrated
by the process of working for design
manufacturers, who seem reluctant
to give a specific brief, and simply want
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009
Committee to put their name to a
product. She says: ‘when we ask for more
details and criteria, it’s seen as our
weakness, whereas we just want to be able
to answer the brief’.
Similarly, Page and Richardson
are frustrated when magazines are more
interested in them as personalities than
in their work. But that’s no surprise
really, because the pair are much more
articulate and charming than your average
designers, and their ideas shed light
on many of the dilemmas of our time.
Their latest objects, which will
be on display in their own Deptford
studio, during the London Design
Festival (LDF), are Plastic Relics,
containers produced by Cibone Editions
in Tokyo. One of these appears on
Blueprint’s cover, an object that could
easily be a form of architecture,
a science-fiction vehicle or a piece
of machinery dripping with oil. Plastic
Relics are the result of Committee’s
musings on the future: they projected
themselves into a time when discarded
plastic machine parts might become
collectable curios of a forgotten age. ‘The
leftover plastic items, which
we take for granted today, might well
be a source of archeological interest
or even of great value,’ they explain.
Imagine a scenario in the 27th

century, where a historian finds a
discarded part from a Dyson vacuum
cleaner, and decides to turn it into the
lid for a box. Committee did just that and,
using three-dimensional scanning
techniques, created a wooden container
to match the lid, which was lacquered
in Japan using the traditional process
of building up layers of resin.
The obsession with repurposing
discarded objects still grips many designers
(as seen in the crisp-packet survival shelter
or the car-windscreen glazed facade). With
Committee, however, it derives not from
a moral revulsion with consumer culture,
but a fascination with mass production,
and a desire to explore the values we place
on ordinary items. Says Page: ‘because
of the Kebab Lamp series, we’ve been
cast as the recycling designers, which
makes us mad. These pieces were actually
about saying “look at the way we live,
look at what humans do”. Consumer
products are part of a problem, but they
are fascinating things. Humanity has
a need for beauty, so let’s look at it’. Page
has no time for the idea that designers
have a moral duty to create less: ‘it’s
government legislation and scientists
that will make the difference’.
Committee, one feels, has found
just the right balance between taking
themselves seriously and retaining a sense
55
L
O
N
D
O
N
of humour. The shop unit on Deptford Top row: Plastic Relics,
High Street where they live and work made by the Tokyo-based
is named Gallop, because when they company Cibone. The
boxes evoke a future
first moved in they weren’t sure whether
where the values of
it would be a gallery or shop, hence components are inverted;
the joining up of ‘Gall’ and ‘op’. Later, the cheap plastic part
they found a ceramic tile in a charity becomes more precious
shop on the high street, featuring horses. than hand-worked
This was the first tile they used to lacquer-ware.
decorate the space that they now plan
Above left: An object for
to turn into a cafe where they will
Committee’s Lost Twin
host a ‘Desperate Designer’ event, series for Metropolitan
during the LDF. At the back of the Works, where they
space is Committee’s studio, with wall explored CAD modelling
racks where they store a collection and rapid prototyping
of objects, mostly found or bought cheaply
Right: The Victory Kebab
at Deptford Market or local charity shops.
Lamp of 2006. Committee
In the front of the shop, there is now limits its production
a one-seat cinema booth and a ‘display of Kebab Lamps to eight
space for presenting matters of interest a year, which are sold
of any kind’. The first artist they have through Established
invited to show in the space is Barry and Sons
Sykes, who will ‘make like a designer’.
This follows a previous residency
at Gallop in 2006, where Sykes and
Sean Parfitt created sculptures while
blindfolded in the shop window.
The newly renovated shopfront will
be an interesting addition to Deptford High
Street, which is fast becoming a stop
on the London design and art scene. Page
and Richardson are very much part of the
community here, and the hard work that Ω
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009
56
they’ve put into the new cafe is about
adding something of lasting quality
to the area. A while back, when the
local council put out a call for ideas
to regenerate Deptford, Committee
proposed to devise new public lavatories,
which they felt would improve local
people’s lives in a concrete way.
‘The council has zero compass
on the way to use creative ideas to offer
something for everyone,’ explains Page.
‘We wanted to demonstrate that we might
be far-out creatives, but something of
absolute use and beauty should be the first
port of call.’ Unfortunately for Deptford,
staff changes at the council meant that
their idea was dropped, and consequently
the pair are suspicious of the endless
initiatives, charettes and consultations
(typical of urban regeneration strategies),
which are foisted on the area. Page says:
‘you could literally pave the streets
with marble with all the money that’s
been spent on useless initiatives –
at least that would be interesting’.
The idea of building a cafe was
something that Committee wanted to
do for a while, and the current economic
downturn has fostered an experimental
spirit that has given them the courage
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009
to have a go. ‘It’s crazy to think you’re
going to get work at the moment, and
there’s a freedom that comes with that
recognition – suddenly you’re free to
make your own agenda’, says Richardson.
Seemingly small details, such
as the tiles for the threshold of the
shop, are concerned with creating
a permanent work, whereas many
of the artistic interventions in the area
are of a temporary nature. Along the high
street is the Deptford Project, a railway
carriage converted into a cafe on a site
that is earmarked for development into
apartments by Rogers Stirk Harbour,
and Alison Brooks Architects.
There’s a strong sense in Committee’s
conversion of the shop unit that they
are rebelling against the vogue for such
‘meanwhile’ uses or guerilla shops
and pop-up stores, an idea made
fashionable a few years ago by Commes
des Garçons, but now ubiquitous
as councils are only too eager to let art
students scrawl on the windows to jazz up
dying high streets.
Gallop has taken a different
approach. ‘It’s easy to be a rebel, but
harder to set up a new rule,’ says
Richardson. ‘We’re tiling the floor,

Left: Gallop, the cafe/
studio on Deptford High
Street where Committee
lives and works
Bottom left: The cafe
nears completion in time
for its opening during the
London Design Festival
Right: Harry Richardson
and Clare Page, with
their daughter Dita in the
new cafe
Bottom right: The
threshold’s Victorian-
inspired tiles were laid by
Richardson
Below: Ceramic tiles on
the walls were found in
local charity shops
57
L
O
because tiles are about permanence – N
we want to build something that will D
O
last.’ As passers-by stop to gaze N
at the work, there’s one comment that
Committee finds especially pleasing:
‘it’s so nice to see something being
done carefully.’
It would be easy to characterise Page
and Richardson as young fogies, a couple
mature before their time. In fact, their
approach is quietly critical of an age
that is constantly reacting to what has
gone before. For Committee, developing
an agenda or a goal as designers takes
longer than a post-graduate course.
When asked about their objectives
in an interview with the Design Museum,
they replied: ‘we think it can take
a long time to fully understand one’s
.
objectives, maybe a lifetime, and there
is probably wisdom in trying not to pin
them down’
Gallop, SE8, will host Barry Sykes
during the London Design Festival,
19-27 September and will launch
a programme of events alongside to
accompany the opening of the Gallop
cafe. www.gallop.co.uk
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009
58

COMMENT
‘‘
STUDENTS ARE MISSING OUT
ON FIRST-HAND EXPERIENCE
OF DESIGN, AS ARE TEACHERS.
SO DESIGNERS HAVE TO
PROVIDE IT: THE INDUSTRY’S
FUTURE COULD DEPEND ON IT,
WRITES LESLEY MORRIS
The other day, I saw something really inspiring. School pupils
travelled long distances to London for an event to celebrate their
own and each other’s design work. And on the journey in from
the Black Country, Cornwall and Northumberland, they didn’t
just pass the time flicking through Heat and texting their friends.
They worked on design problems. Can we make rail ticketing
work better? Can we make reserved seats easier to find? Can we
make it easier to see what’s in a sandwich? Real creative thinking
and real enthusiasm. And when they got to their destination –
the V&A’s Sackler Centre – instead of letting a teacher present
their conclusions, each pupil got up and did it with real
confidence. It wasn’t just the enjoyment and the buzz around
the event, but the fact that in the lead-up to it, all the pupils had
worked directly with professional designers. The experience
clearly meant something to them. And it’s one I believe we need
to keep on providing to more and more school children if we’re
going to sustain a strong design industry. It’s not just in schools
that professional designers need to ‘give something back’ but in
people. But working with teachers is just as valuable, maybe
more so. Spending half a day on a design project may inspire
one group of pupils, but giving a teacher the tools to bring design
to life will help many more. Introducing teachers to things like
brainstorming and research techniques could make a critical
difference in helping them teach design as it really is, taking
them closer to good design practice: challenging the brief,
generating and testing ideas, and talking to users to get them
right before producing a concept.
What about higher education? The industry grumbles
about the quality of design graduates: they’re creative,
they’re technically proficient, but they don’t understand the
commercial context they’re working in and they don’t know
enough about running a business, dealing with clients, working
in multidisciplinary teams, or on international projects. They’re
also frequently uncomfortable presenting, or defending, their
ideas. However legitimate those claims may or may not be,
the industry must start reaching out to education and looking
for ways to help. Universities face their own pressures: rising
student numbers; strain on resources, and quality targets
to achieve. Any value a designer can add to these courses
with a masterclass, shadowing for lecturers or structured
mentoring will be gratefully appreciated. They won’t just
be helping to produce more employable designers, but also
to bring other people into the industry, the kind who will help
to carve out an enhanced role for design.
Design agencies are already getting into territory like
helping Iceland out of economic meltdown; exploring new kinds
of agriculture in Africa, and getting the long-term unemployed
into work in the UK. This sort of activity calls for intellectual
problem-solvers, forecasters and strategists, as well as straight
designers. But by the time they choose their courses, people like
that have mostly been put off design careers by parents or careers
advisors who see design purely as a craft discipline. The more
university courses and as mentors to designers just starting out professional designers become embedded in the education
on their careers.
Why the urgency? We have a successful design industry,
despite the recession. You don’t generate £11bn annual revenues
unless you’re doing something right. But we need to build for
a strong future too, not least because countries like China are
system, the more likely we are to banish preconceptions about
what design actually does these days, and make design
consultancy a serious option for a more diverse group of people .
fast building design industries which will soon be capable
of great work at much lower prices than ours. When that day
comes we will need a generation of creative thinkers in place,
people capable of working flexibly with other disciplines
to tackle the really big problems that UK design will increasingly
have to take on to preserve its international standing.
The job of creating those people starts in schools, but Design
and Technology (DT) as a subject is, on the whole, less about
the structured creativity of the design process than making things
to a set of instructions. There are plenty of great DT teachers,
but many don’t have direct experience of design. They may
have gone straight into teaching from an art degree and
a PGCE, or moved into the subject from a completely unrelated
background. Without first-hand contact, it’s like teaching French
without ever having been to France. This is why input from
Lesley Morris
professional designers matters. It connects students and teachers
is head of design
skills at the with the reality of how designers work.
Design Council Not everyone has the skills to work directly with young

BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009

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60

Above: The elegant

logo of Plus Minus Zero,
the company that Naoto
Fukusawa helped launch
in 2003

Left: The Sole Bag is

designed to rest on
the ground and is a
reminder of the type
of plimsolls that are
worn by schoolchildren
throughout Japan.

DESPITE THE JAPANESE

DESIGNER’S AVERSION TO
CELEBRITY AND SIGNATURE
DESIGN, FUKASAWA’S HOUSEWARES
PROFILE
NAOTO
COLLECTION HAS EARNED ITSELF
CULT STATUS. BLUEPRINT IS MEDIA
PARTNER FOR ITS LONG-AWAITED
LAUNCH AT THE LONDON DESIGN
FESTIVAL. BEN HUGHES REPORTS

BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009

FUKASAWA

The UK launch of the much sought-after
Japanese housewares brand Plus Minus
Zero (PMZ) takes place later this month as
part of the London Design Festival.
Available from 22 September at the design
store Twentytwentyone, the PMZ range is
to Muji products what the Conran Shop is
to Habitat: a bit more expensive, a bit
more exclusive, a bit better made and
altogether a bit nicer.
The brand name seems to refer to
the quotation by Joseph Joubert that,
‘a work is perfectly finished only when
nothing can be added to it and nothing
taken away,’ which appears to sum up
the vision of the creative force behind
the range, Naoto Fukasawa. Ownership
of these products has until now been
restricted to those desperate enough
to have made the pilgrimage to the
Left: The card case
with 2.5mm radius
rounded corners, the
dimension that Fukusawa
regards as ideal for an
edge curve
Right: The relief wall
clock won the Coupe
de Coeur award at
Maison et Objet, Paris,
in September 2008
Below left: A heater
for the fourth collection
launched in 2007
company’s flagship store in Tokyo’s Kita-
Aoyama district, and while this is still a
trip worth making, the products
themselves no longer signify a designer
insider, just someone with an eye for
quality (and fairly deep pockets).
Visitors to Twentytwentyone might
be familiar with a proportion of the
range as it featured in Super Normal,
a celebration of utilitarian design curated
by Fukasawa and Jasper Morrison at
the store in 2006. This time, however,
the entire European collection will
be available in the UK for the first time.
While there was much enthusiasm for
Super Normal, both as a design ideology,
and inevitably, as a sort of minimalista
shopping list, there were inherent
problems, particularly with some of
the larger, more complex appliances.
61
‘It’s taken several years to develop the
electronic designs to make them suitable
for the British and European market,
[to comply with] the voltage and EU
Standards,’ says Simon Alderson, director
of Twentytwentyone. ‘We held off officially
launching the collection until these
issues were rationalised, as we feel
it needs to be understood in context
of the electronic designs.’
For an industrial designer who has
made his name in the relative anonymity of
technological products, Fukasawa has been
extremely successful in the transition into
designing furniture, housewares, lighting
and accessories for some of the most
renowned design-led brands. While perhaps
best known for his 1999 wall-mounted
fan-that’s-a-CD-player for Muji, this year
alone he has had products launched from Ω
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009

European companies as diverse as Danese,
Boffi, B+B Italia, Vitra, Magis and Nava.
His work is a particular kind of
rational: it generally conforms to primary
shapes, yet is sometimes sculptural;
his products are generally monochrome,
but he is not afraid to use colour. One
can spot elements of Olivetti and bits of
Brionvega but the general consensus is that
Fukasawa is picking up where Dieter Rams
left off in his pioneering work for Braun.
Alderson describes the products’ appeal
as ‘an acute attention to detail and form.
The designs perform their function in
a progressive, faultless manner, while
being simplified to essential requirements.’
Fukasawa’s designs manifest personality
and soul. ‘It’s an incredibly rare
combination; a range of functional designs,
with timeless, quiet but modern aesthetics,
which are a pleasure to use,’ says Alderson.
Fukasawa doesn’t see this style
as essentially Japanese in character, but a
more universal aesthetic, informed through a
maturing of design thinking. ‘It is a universal
approach, although I can’t ignore the culture
in which I grew up,’ he says. ‘I like the
Japanese mentality: the thought, beauty
and simplicity that this brings to things, and
also the feeling that art can be in the use
of an object. Drinking a bowl of tea may be
simple, but it can express art in the design
of the bowl and the thought in the action.’
Above: The coffee maker In this consideration of use, and
wan a Good Design the lack of ‘authorship,’ or ‘signature’
award in 2007 in design, Fukasawa says he feels closer
to the modern movement in Europe than
Right: The humidifier,
he does the work of the celebrity designer.
which is shaped like a
water droplet, was He has no hesitation in naming Rams as
selected for MoMA New a peer with whom he feels an affinity. ‘In
York’s permanent industrial design, Rams has done great
collection work… He designed tools for people to use,
he didn’t design for himself,’ he says. ‘I feel
that a designer has a role not to express his
personality or thought, but to be in charge
of an object and how it is used. In this way,
design is probably closer to what most
people think of as engineering.’
It is no secret that many of the
pioneers of the Modern Movement were
influenced by the simplicity and clarity
of traditional Japanese design, or that
the relationship between the two was
not just a one-way street. What tends to
evade analysis is quite how a ‘Japauhaus’
approach would prevent a designer from
the natural incorporation of their own
character or why this is desirable.
Fukasawa explains this struggle between
authorship and authenticity using my Muji
polypropylene business-card holder as an
example. ‘I like this case, it’s a good design.
But when I designed a card case, I wanted
to remove the sharp angles at the corner,
which I felt were uncomfortable in the
hand and in your pocket. So I added
63
a radius,’ he says, taking out his own,
PMZ version. ‘But this radius is determined
by the wall thickness, and properties
of the material alone, and by the size
of the contents. If I decided to give it a
bigger radius, then it has a “Fukasawa”
character, and I hate this. My role is to
design for the people who use the product,
not for myself.’
This signature approach, through
which objects become closely associated
with their author, has become more
mainstream in recent years yet it is
something he finds distasteful. ‘I know that
there is an audience for it, but I don’t like
it if someone buys something just because
it is by Naoto Fukasawa. They should buy
something because they like it, not because
of who designed it,’ says Fukasawa.
The inconsistencies here, of course,
are not only that Fukasawa himself has
become such a sought-after name, but
also that his commitment to rationalism
starts to look shaky when some of his
most successful pieces are less shrouded
in logic than one might expect. The
endeavour for a lack of ‘personality’
in his work certainly seems at odds with
something like the LCD TV for PMZ,
which at first glance appears to be styled
after an old-fashioned tube TV set, but
which actually contains a modern LCD
device. This is explained by the designer Ω
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009
64
partly as a joke, but also partly as
a comment on the ‘disappearing’ nature
of technology. ‘As technology for TVs
allows them to become very large and
very thin, it seems as though the designer
is not needed, but I disagree,’ he says. ‘This
portable TV requires a case that allows
the user to set it at the correct angle,
a soft shape that will be comfortable if,
for instance, you’re watching TV in bed.’
Among the European collection is the
brilliant Sole Bag, with its re-appropriated
plimsoll base, and the salt and pepper
maracas, which need to be ‘played’ rather
than used. The density of cultural codes
inherent in these objects suggests that
there is no strict formula being applied,
and that they fail to adhere to a proper
Japauhaus style. Whether the designer
likes it or not, there is plenty of his
personality in this range. Indeed, it’s
only later I realise that while Fukasawa’s
PMZ business-card holder might be
more comfortable, my inferior Muji one
is transparent: arguably more rational,
but far more useful to me either way.
Any attempt to fully comprehend
the subtleties of Japanese aesthetics gets
rapidly bogged down in definitions, context
and history, but it could be argued that
realms of product design act as a bridge.
One analysis comes from Japanese design
critic Masaru Katsumie in the catalogue to
the groundbreaking Japan Style exhibition
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009
at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum
in 1980. While taking issue with
the exhibition title, which suggests
a transitory, or insubstantial aesthetic,
he concludes that a ‘Japan style’ is
identifiable. This is a long way from
the calculated exoticism of souvenir-shop
‘Japonica‘, and is still evolving, but
as Katsumie observes, it could be applied
‘when we conceive a design in an
international context but unconsciously
adopt a Japanese approach.’ This certainly
seems to resonate with the comments
Fukasawa has made of his work.
Signature style or not, as fans of Apple
under Jonathan Ive; Braun under Rams,
or Bang and Olufsen under Jacob Jensen
will concur, if a consumer brand is to
achieve true design approbation it needs
to be the unfettered vision of one person.
The PMZ collection manages
both, and this range is destined for ‘classic’
status like so much of Fukasawa’s other
work. David Tonge, director of design
consultancy The Division, has worked
with Fukasawa at IDEO in California.
‘In the context of Japan he is a superstar,’
he says. ‘The reason for this is that
he is not only a true craftsman with
a sensitivity for the user, but also because
he has a “grand idea”, which encompasses
.
not only individual products, but ranges
like PMZ, and his work with Muji. This
is truly a unique skill in Japan’
Naoto Fukasawa began his design career with Seiko-Epson, later
moving to California to work for design consultancy IDEO. In
1996 he returned to head-up the IDEO office in Tokyo, and
in 2003 established his own eponymous consultancy. The first
Plus Minus Zero (PMZ) collection was launched the same year.
The Tokyo concept store opened in October 2004, and the range
was first introduced to a European market at Maison et Objet,
Paris, in September 2008. The PMZ European range is set to
expand, with a kettle and wristwatch, among other products,
scheduled to launch in early 2010.
Founded in 1996 by Simon Alderson, Twentytwentyone store and
showroom sells 21st-century design products. Its name signifies
an interest in marrying the company’s background in classic
and historical 20th-century pieces with contemporary design.
Blueprint is media partner
for the launch of Plus
Minus Zero (PMZ) in the
UK, and for the exhibition
of Naoto Fukasawa’s
work at Twentytwentyone
PMZ will be launched as
part of the London Design
Festival, 23-27 September
at Twentytwentyone, EC1.
For more information visit
www.twentytwentyone.com
66

JAMES
FOUNDER OF NEW YORK-BASED SITE,
WINES
ON
RENOWNED ENVIRONMENTAL ARTIST
JAMES WINES IS ONE OF THE GREAT
DRAUGHTSMEN OF OUR TIME. A
CONTRIBUTOR TO BLUEPRINT’S PAPER CITY

DRAWING
EXHIBITION AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY, HERE
HE ELABORATES ON THE POWERFUL
CULTURAL, SOCIAL AND HISTORICAL
REASONS FOR DRAWING

It may seem strange to champion hand drawing

in 2009, especially in view of the universal
triumph of digital graphics, when every progressive
architect in the world seems obsessed with
elevating computerised delineation to new heights
of illustrative supremacy. At the same time,
as the software revolution increasingly takes
precedence, there appears to be a fresh incentive
among many architectural students (actually,
a kind of quiet revolution) based on a new-found
desire to hone their manual skills and learn
to draw in the old way.
I have been a long-standing supporter
of dual skills, encouraging young designers
to maintain equal graphic abilities on paper
surfaces and computer desktops. This advocacy
is based on a deeply felt conviction that, by
focusing exclusively on computer-generated
illustration alone, something conceptually
profound is forfeited in the design process.
When electronic response mechanisms replace
the filtration of idea development through tactile
means and guiding fingertips, the fertile territory
of ‘subliminal accident’ is lost. This refers
to marginal calligraphy that dribbles off the
edge of the paper, the inadvertent congestion
of squiggly lines with no apparent meaning, the
unwelcome blobs of ink that drop off a pen tip,
or the inclusion of seemingly irrelevant references
that have nothing to do with initial intentions.

Drawing and Ideas

On innumerable occasions over the years I have
been the creative beneficiary of my own graphic
musings and the chaotic trail of ambiguities left
behind by random charcoal smudges and
watercolour washes. In other words, this pictorial
detritus inscribed on paper, without any
predetermined architectonic mission, has often
become the springboard for new ideas.
Frequently, when watching some seemingly
prepubescent computer whizz use software to whip
out multidimensional views of a complex structure Wines’ 2003 drawing for the
in a matter of minutes, I feel as though I may be Residence Antilia, a private
pushing a hopelessly old fashioned aesthetic ritual, residential tower, which sits
on top of a hillside overlooking
as a consequence of some deep-seated
Mumbai. The building is
psychological resistance to the cybernetic world. I
conceived as a garden in the
recall, a decade ago, when proficiency in computer sky with floating floors
rendering was being applauded as some kind of supporting gardens and
transcendental feat, how impressed I was with the Ω water features

BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009

 67
L
O
//WE SHOULD TALK LESS AND DRAW N
D
MORE. PERSONALLY I WOULD LIKE O
N
TO RENOUNCE SPEECH ALTOGETHER,
AND LIKE ORGANIC NATURE,
COMMUNICATE EVERYTHING I HAVE
TO SAY IN SKETCHES//
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009

68

Wines is perhaps best Wines developed a series

known for his BEST Product
//IT IS OFTEN SAID THAT LEONARDO [DA showrooms, the first
of which SITE designed
VINCI] DREW SO WELL BECAUSE HE in 1971. Spotting that
KNEW ABOUT THINGS; IT IS TRUER TO conventional architecture
ignored the typology of the
SAY THAT HE KNEW ABOUT THINGS out-of-town showroom,
BECAUSE HE DREW SO WELL//
KENNETH CLARK
of imaginative scenarios
depicting the BEST stores
in decay and being taken
over by nature. One example
is the Forest showroom,
below, in Richmond
Virginia, 1979

photo-fidelity of digital drawing. Everything
churned out in those days looked too good to be
true. And it was. As my eyes became accustomed
to sorting out slickness from substance, I gradually
acquired a highly refined aptitude for detecting
mediocrity (or outright crap) lurking under the
pictorial gloss, to a point where I can now spot
digital dazzle camouflaging conceptual vacuity
at a distance of one hundred feet from the
monitor screen.
In addition to the inspirational merits of those
idea-generating graphic accidents credited earlier,
one advantage the computer can never offer is the
kind of calligraphic proficiency needed to draw
really well. As I often try to explain to architectural
students, this elevated status is a combination
of aesthetic instinct and responsive rendition that
goes considerably beyond the conventional ability
to produce photo-like images with great fidelity
– a commonplace talent in architecture, which
is frequently mistaken for genuine drawing.
Mechanical reportage also forms the basis
of computer graphics and it is the primary reason
that digital tools will always be best employed
as an efficient means of confirmation (describing
the big idea after it has been conceived), but never
a deeply resonant art experience in itself. When
teaching drawing to young designers, their most
noticeable deficit is a lack of understanding of
the complex aesthetic challenges in accomplished
draughtsmanship. These include knowledge of the
origins of language, the evolution of calligraphy,
the nature of signification and the abstract
dimension that unites positive and negative visual
elements on the picture plane. In this context,
I am still speaking mainly of drawing in its
subsidiary role as a recorder of thought process
within the larger goal of building design. But,
like the artist’s study for a painting or sculpture,
the calligraphic nature of the sketch is always
a decisive factor in its ultimate qualification as art.
Particularly among design students, the
tradition of illustrative purpose often seems
to hinder their grasp of what might be called
the ‘deep structure’ of drawing, with its multiple
layers of art and content. For this reason, it can
be a revelatory experience – especially in the
computer age – to review the history of graphic
invention and its relationship to the fusion
of signs, symbols and aesthetic choices.
Early Draughtsmen
The discovery of the cave paintings at Altamira in
Spain and Lascaux in France (in 1879 and 1940
respectively), confirmed the fact that Paleolithic
cultures as far back as 30,000 years ago had
mastered the art of drawing and established the
foundations for all subsequent graphic selection in
the formation of written language. Contrary to the
previous view that Cro-Magnon people were
simply meandering hunter-gatherers, these
communities obviously relieved a privileged and
talented minority, perhaps designated religious
shamans, from their food supply obligations. It
is clear, given the consummate artistic quality
of the cave murals, that this level of mastery
was probably the result of centuries of stylistic
refinement. Without going into myriad speculations
on the how and why of Lascaux and Altamira,
it is sufficient to view the reality and conclude
that nothing this aesthetically resolved could
have occurred without a profound investment
in both the urgency of communication and its
translation into culturally endorsed nuances
of line, tone and color. The illustrative factor
was certainly part of the purpose of cave art;
but those Magdalenian painters also knew that
the profundity of visual language resided in its
abstract elements, in essence the connections
linking inscription and philosophy, apart from
any basic reportage intentions.
It is reported that Picasso wept when he
first viewed the Spanish cave paintings, exclaiming
that, ‘after Altamira, all is decadence.’ As one
of history’s greatest draughtsman, he understood
that prophetic Neolithic artists had anticipated not
only the development of Egyptian hieroglyphics

BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009


and Chinese calligraphy thousands of years later,
but also the signifier/signified basis of linguistics
and the role of mind and hand in the evolution
of visual ideas. British historian Andrew Robinson
refers to Magdalenian art as ‘proto-writing’;
seemingly based on the assumption that Ice Age
people did not yet have a legitimate alphabet.
On the other hand, there are enough abstract
symbols punctuating the cave murals to suggest
that these Cro-Magnon painters had already laid
major groundwork for the development of written
language, as well as all subsequent calligraphic
innovation in art and design.
Supporting this argument, there is also
the remarkable stylistic consistency linking
the art of Lascaux and Altamira with innumerable
other cave paintings in Chauvet and La Marche
in France, as well as those found in Africa and
Australia. For example, bison, deer and wild boar
are represented with an extraordinary sensitivity
of rendering techniques, particularly in terms
of linear and tonal choices, which are parallel
to those same skills found in the drawings
of Leonardo Da Vinci. Rembrandt, Van Gogh,
Matisse and Giacometti and, in architecture,
Alberti, Piranesi and Lloyd Wright. In the context
of prehistoric times it was only a small aesthetic
and linguistic leap to associate the gracefully
tapered legs of a bison with all forms of stability
and movement in nature. The next logical step
was to abstract this fragment of anatomy into
a pictographic symbol, refine it into a cuneiform
inscription and, finally, amplify its meaning by
phonetic markings and syllabary alphabets. With
progressive logic, the extended legacy of this
process evolved into the serviceability of email
on one hand and the expressive pathos of Picasso’s
drawings for Guernica on the other.
Observing the bridge from Magdalenian
culture’s deep sense of symbolism and lyrical
representation in the depiction of hunted mammals
to the advent of written language in Asia, pretty
much says it all concerning the value of graphic
invention. By following a similar route four
thousand years ago, China had already developed
calligraphy to a degree where fragments of the
first alphabet still remain a part of contemporary
Chinese writing. This interface between language
development and the aesthetics of drawing
is at the core of graphic expression. It is also
a cyclical and continuously evolutionary form
of communication, thriving on renewal and
re-invention. As described by linguist Noam
Chomsky: ‘language is a process of free creation;
its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner
in which the principles of generation are used is
free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation
and use of words involves a process of free
69
L
O
N
Wines’ ink, wash and charcoal D
drawing of Highrise of Homes O
(1981) is part of the MoMA, N
New York, drawings collection
creation.’ To his ‘use of words’ must be added
the ‘use of line.’
Chinese writing and drawing have remained
synonymous skills in the hands of Asian
calligraphers since the first pictographs emerged,
which, in later dynasties, included ‘ideographs’
to embody fully developed narratives. Like
all languages, Chinese underwent a logical
development from the faithful contour depiction
of such images as man, sun, ox, water, and
so on,towards a more complex system of signs
needed for phonetic/semantic functions. But, the
continuing beauty of Chinese characters is their
metamorphic quality, moving gracefully back
and forth between representational and conceptual
realms of signification. This ‘art of language’
has kept Asian painters and poets continuously
supplied with renewable source material and
perpetuated the performance role of calligraphers.
It is the kind of drawing that becomes a true fusion
of theatre, communication and graphic style. It
is also extremely instructive to anyone seriously
committed to understanding what the successful
coordination of mind and hand can accomplish.
At the core of Chinese calligraphic aesthetic is
the gestural rhythm of the pen or brush stroke and
the manual control demonstrated by the flow of
thick and thin lines. It is the raggedness of edges,
the spontaneous splatters, the inadvertent drips Ω
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009
70
and their collective interaction with negative
spaces, however, reinforcing that all-important
element of ‘subliminal accident’ mentioned before,
which I personally consider essential ingredients
in the multilayered practice of drawing. For the
master Chinese calligrapher, these indeterminate
factors are usually captured in bold gestures;
but the same spontaneity and fragmentation
(and this includes architectural drawings) can
be manifested in the smallest lines on paper.
The Origins of Drawing
I want to summarize a few of these observations on
calligraphic values by discussing the contemporary
efforts of SITE in this direction. From the beginning
of the studio in 1970, our work has been a fusion
of art, architecture and landscape. The philosophy
of the firm is based on a view that communicative
content in the building arts can be developed from
sources outside the traditions of formalist design.
These include the social, psychological and
ecological implications of a post-industrial era.
SITE’s buildings and public spaces are
frequently interpreted as ‘filtering zones’ for
receiving and communicating information about
the environment, rather than designed as hermetic
objects sitting in the environment. For example,
in certain graphic works this proposes a narrative
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009
function of architecture. It suggests that a building’s
wall surfaces, volumes, and adjoining spaces can
be seen as absorptive, sponge-like conveyors of
messages that go considerably beyond conventional
sculptural relationships, suggesting a function
of architecture as the inversion of architecture. It
is a means of converting the familiar ingredients
and processes of construction technology, plus
the public’s subliminal acceptance of certain
kinds of archetypal buildings, into a form of
architectural commentary. By prioritizing these
reflex identifications (rather than compositions
of abstract shapes) my own sketches tend to view
architecture as a ‘subject matter for art,’ rather
than the objective of a conventional design process.
A number of my recent drawings explore
the integration of architecture and landscape. This
approach is often responsive to a situation where
the building is located in a natural site and the
objective is to preserve as many trees as possible.
As a result, architecture appears to be consumed
by its own environment, or, seen more perversely,
as a victim of ‘nature’s revenge.’ In other
examples, the renderings describe the need for
more forested areas, water sources and urban
agriculture in the cityscape. The primary purpose
is to explore the integration of architecture
with context to a degree where it becomes
difficult to discern where a building ends and the
environment begins. Also, in this way, vegetation
can become as much a part of the aesthetic fabric
of a structure as masonry, glass, and steel.
Computer Graphics and Hand Drawing
From the perspective of fusing computer graphics
with hand drawings, SITE has developed an
extremely fluid interface between multi-media and
conceptual development. For example, our studio’s
Residence Antilia for Mumbai, India offers a clear
sequential demonstration of this creative process,
realised through a combination of interactive
hand and digital drawing techniques. It shows the
basic stages of source referencing, search-for-idea
sketches, design clarification and renderings
for pure aesthetic experience. The proposal also
demonstrates the calligraphic underpinnings
as they appear in multiple formats, scales and
comparative qualities of line, tone and colour.
This residential tower, designed in 2003 for
industrialist Mukesh Ambani, is located on a very
restrictive hilltop site, overlooking the entire city
of Mumbai. The concept responds to the client’s
desire to have a multi-tiered, heavily landscaped
structure, similar to the ancient Hanging Gardens
of Babylon. For this reason, the entire building is
conceived as a ‘vertiscape’ garden in the sky,
 71
Opposite page: In 1983 SITE This page: An elevation of the L
designed the Bedford House in Residence Antilia shows levels O
Connecticut, shown in this ink of accommodation supported N
and wash drawing by a stratified structural spine D
O
N

//DRAWING IS PUTTING A LINE

AROUND AN IDEA//
HENRI MATISSE

freeing park spaces from their normal earthbound

confinement. The concept responds to Vastu
principles in Hinduism, wherein the spine is
regarded as the main source of support, leading
upward toward enlightenment.
The seven levels of the residence are supported
by a stratified structural spine, stabilised by the
core and a series of steel cables that support five
‘floating’ floor planes and a variety of interim
garden terraces. The main residence, located on a
crowning 4,000sq m platform, continues the visually
unifying theme of stratification.

Conclusion
My continuing advice to young architects seeking
to draw for reasons of idea development (or pure
pleasure) is to follow Picasso’s obsessive example; ‘I
draw like other people bite their nails.’ In his
enthusiasm for the power of the hand, the great
Spanish artist is also purported to have taken a dim
view of the digital revolution by commenting,
‘computers are useless. They can only give you
answers.’ While overstating the case a bit, and
probably reflective of a certain 1960s naivety
concerning the importance of an emergent
computer age, he correctly prophesised the current
revival of interest in hand drawing and the
widening acknowledgement that there are
conceptual and aesthetic territories that the
software of Form Z, Auto CAD and Sketchup can
neither equate, nor replace.
When I watch masses of architectural
students locked into computer monitors as
prosthetic extensions of their bodies and churning
out facile simulations of buildings, I recall Jean
Baudrillard’s eerie assessments of postmodern
culture. Particularly resonant are his views of
media phenomena: as illusion replacing reality,
where substitution ultimately becomes the reality.
In a world of simulacra I personally find that
signs scratched on paper with a pen or pencil
do have a way of restoring the authenticity
of representation, as well as the nature-centric
validity, socially relevant value and symbolic
content in the object or place being described.
As Baudrillard astutely observed, the illusions
created by media tend to remove people from
the organic and tactile world around them.
Retaining this connection between mind and hand
seems just as valid now as it was for the cave
artists who immortalised the hunt in Lascaux
and Altamira. The quest for calligraphic quality
is no less relevant as well. It is an objective
perfectly described by an anonymous quote I found
recently on the Internet; ‘we all have at least
100,000 bad drawings inside of us. The sooner
we get them out and onto paper, the sooner
we’ll get to the good ones buried deep within’ .
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009
72
POLISH
POLISH DESIGN IS UNDERGOING
A DRAMATIC SEA CHANGE.
GIAN LUCA AMADEI
REPORTS ON HOW DESIGN IS
DESIGN
EXPERIENCING A RENNAISSANCE
THROUGH EDUCATION,
DRAWING FROM ITS TRADITIONS
AND CRAFT HERITAGE
Modern Polish design is as dense and
fragmented as the country’s socio-political
history. The Communist regime that lasted
from 1945 to 1989, left a void in the
discipline that has resulted in an apparent
lack of identity.
During this time, however, design
research, experimentation and prototyping
of furniture and products was prolific. This
was primarily down to the Institute of
Industrial Design in Warsaw, a state-run
facility initiated in 1950, and headed up
by Polish graphic artist and designer
Wanda Telakowska, who collected work
and provided a home for the artefacts. This
fertile period left behind an incredible
heritage of thousands of prototypes,
which form part of the National Museum’s
collection in Warsaw.
In the process of growing and rebuilding
itself, the post-Communist Polish design
community has been experiencing an
exciting and critical period of change.
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009
Since Poland entered the European Union in
2004, many of the country’s designers
moved to other European capitals and the
United States to study and work. It has only
been in the past year that many designers
have returned to Poland. This has
effectively catalysed the growth of its design
community, which has been gradually
establishing itself and simultaneously
re-evaluating its identity.
Design education too is at a crucial
point in Poland, whereby new ideas and
experimentation have been infiltrating and
challenging the established academia. In
October 2008, the Academy of Fine Arts
in Warsaw invited a guest tutor, RCA
graduate and Polish native, Tomek Rygalik,
to launch an alternative design studio in
the industrial design department. The idea
of an experimental unit was an instant
success with new students.
The unit’s name PG13, derives from
‘pracownia goscinna’, or ‘guest studio’, Ω
 73

Genotype, the lighting

installation designed by
Tomek Rygalik for Corian.
It was unveiled in May at
Arena Design, furniture
trade fair in Poznan

BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009

74

Left: Termo seating while ‘13’ refers to the number of students

system by Tomek Rygalik in the unit. The name has remained, even
though after the first class, the unit expanded
Below left: Seating
to 19 students and is due to grow further.
system made from
oriented strand board, After graduating with an MA in
designed as part of the industrial design from the RCA in 2005,
Resourceful Workshops at Rygalik set up his own studio in London
the Young Poland event and Łódz, counting Italian furniture
in Jaffa, Israel, in June company, Moroso, among his clients. As
well as holding a post as a research associate
Bottom left: Net chair
at the RCA Helen Hamlyn Centre for three
for Moroso by Rygalik
years, Rygalik has also taught on the design
Below right: Light made management course at the Academy
using insulation material of Fine Arts in Warsaw.
by Marcin Ebert from ‘PG13’s ambition is to question what
alternative design already exists in design,’ explains Rygalik. ‘It
unit, PG13
is not just opposing for the sake of it, but
aims to break the status quo. This is
extremely important for the new generation
of Polish designers.’
This experimental approach is less
concerned with the constraints of mass
production, and more focused on creating

BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009


projects that are open to investigation
and new possibilities. Rygalik is reluctant
to define the identity of Polish design or
predict where the industry is heading.
Similar to his teaching approach at the
Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Rygalik
and PG13 have been testing the boundaries
of design education to incorporate research
and innovation.
These days there are many
opportunities for designers in Poland. While
it has been 20 years since Communism
collapsed and Poland became a free market,
it has taken time to adjust and react
to this transition. Now, though, there is a
spirit of optimism and pride about the
country’s design scene.
Next year a new design department will
open in Poznan’s Higher School of
Humanistic Arts and Jounalism, under the
guidance and patronage of the former
director of the Eindhoven Design Academy,
Li Edelkoort. This department will focus on
Below: The opening
exhibition of PG13’s work
in Warsaw earlier this year
traditional craft and will incorporate a new
design centre for the town, which is
scheduled to be completed in 2011.
These schemes were all launched as part
of a three-day workshop in June, where
designers, students including PG13, and
academics, as well as international guests
such as Patricia Urquiola, presented another
facet to the development of Polish design. In
contrast to Rygalik’s approach, led by
research, this focused on traditions, and
aimed to transfer the knowledge and skills
of representatives of crafts, such as wood
carving or ceramics, to young designers. As a
result, works inspired by folklore were
created and neglected Polish crafts were
revived.
Poland is a country that is widely
acknowledged for its manufacturing
and heavy industry, but less for its design
and traditional crafts. Interest
in rediscovering this aspect of the country’s
heritage, though, was instigated at a
75
commercial level in 2004 when Polish
rug company Moho Design launched
the Dia rug featuring a traditional Polish
decorative pattern. The rug is made from
felt, a material traditionally used
for clothing by an indigenous population
in the Silesia region (south of Poland).
Dia has since become a beacon for
contemporary Polish design.
‘Now that the project for the new
design school in Poznan has been officially
launched it is like a dream,’ says designer
Zuzanna Skalska, who is a key figure in the
development of educational projects. ‘The
aim is that these schemes will promote
Polish design through education, exhibitions
and cooperation with businesses.’
Skalska studied at the Eindhoven
Design Academy, she has worked at Philips
Design in Eindhoven, and is now working
at VanBerlo Strategy and Design, where
she is responsible for ongoing trend research
in a large number of industry branches, Ω
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009
76

including identifying future scenarios engaging with industrial production.

in design.
For Skalska the emphasis on traditional
craft is interesting as it gives Polish design
a stronger emotional rather than
commercial edge. While Rygalik believes
the connection to traditions and local
folklore is important, he is keen that it is
understood objectively without becoming
a purely decorative exercise, risking the
categorisation of Polish design.
Whether ephemeral, artistic or craft-
based, huge changes are underway in Polish
design education. This is also having
an effect on the Polish design community
and opportunities for sharing views and
projects, such as the Łódz Design Festival, a
fast growing annual event. Rygalik, one of
the curators of the festival this year will
show the work of PG13 alongside a similar
initiative run by Spanish design collective
Surtido, which is also interested in
During the London Design Festival,
the best crop of Polish designers including
Rygalik, will be showing their work in
the exhibition Young Creative Poland,
in the Brompton Design District. Featuring
work from furniture and graphic design,
to fashion and engineering, the show
will represent the up-and-coming Polish
design scene.
The education system and design
community in Poland is quickly
transforming, and the next natural step
would be to foster collaboration between
designers and manufacturers. Despite
positive change, industry in Poland has long
been biased towards producing for foreign
companies.
Increasingly, however, initiatives such
as the new design department and design
.
centre in Poznan are creating a new synergy
between the education system, designers

ALL IMAGES: PRO DESIGN

exploring design without necessarily and manufacturers

Anticlockwise from top

left: Traditional Polish
paper decorations;
Li Edelkoort, patron of
the new design school
opening next year in
Poznan; workshops and
exhibitions, New Folk
Design, were organised
to launch the new
design school

DISCOVERING WOMEN IN
POLISH DESIGN: INTERVIEWS
AND CONVERSATIONS
A new book by Gian Luca
Amadei that gives an insight
into a fast-evolving design
industry that until now
has remained little known
beyond Poland.
The design industry in Poland has been
largely dominated by women who have
been pushing and championing design
against all the odds through the war
years, Communism, social reform and
now the expanding industrialisation
brought by the free market economy
since 1989. Through interviews
and conversations with designers,
as well as leading women from the
design industry, the book seeks to
explore why this is, and to examine how
things have slowly started to change.
The book launch will take place
at the Young Creative Poland exhibition
in the Brompton Design District on
23 September. It will be accompanied by
a panel discussion, Discovering Polish
Design, chaired by Vicky Richardson,
editor of Blueprint, and including
contributions from three inspirational
women featured in the book.
23 September, 10.30am
5 Cromwell Place, London SW7 2JE
10.30 Coffee and Polish cakes
11.00 Panel discussion, Discovering Polish
Design
Chair: Vicky Richardson
Gian Luca Amadei, author and product
editor of Blueprint
Ewa Gołebiowska, Director of the Silesian
Castle of Art and Enterprise, Cieszyn
Zuzanna Skalska, Senior consultant
on design trends and insights
Maja Ganszyniec, product designer
Discovering Women in Polish Design:
Interviews and Conversations was initiated
by Gian Luca Amadei and Anna Pietrzyk-
Simone and is published by the Adam
Mickiewicz Insitute.
The book is free to Blueprint
subscribers with the October issue and will
be on sale at the exhibition at the special
price of £15.
www.womenindesign.pl

BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009

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SOLID CARVED BATHTUBS STAIRCASES BOOKMATCHED MARBLE RECLAIMED ANTIQUE STONE SEMI PRECIOUS
 //It took time for me to recognise the singular character of Berlin. The city’s unusual scale comfortably accommodates large buildings along wide streets,
lined with spacious sidewalks and endless rows of trees. Berlin’s population does not exceed four million, though it could easily accommodate another two. Well-
served by public transport, the city’s traffic moves smoothly. Berlin enjoys a rather moderate continental climate and is not torn apart by conflicting beliefs or
interests as its social hierarchy is not yet quite settled. Berlin’s voting pattern is more liberal than that of Germany as a whole and its mixed population is
relatively young, with a large proportion involved in arts and media. The city traditionally subsidises cultural activity to make it available to all. Berlin provides
luxury that money can’t buy// Zvi Hecker, architect

BERLIN
A city where memorials loom large, Berlin still bears the scars and
reaps the benefits of successive political ideologies and creative
movements. The 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall
and the subsequent reunification of Germany will be widely
commemorated in November. This year also sees the 90th
anniversary of the Bauhaus school, which is currently being
renowned as one of the best places for artists, architects and
designers to settle. In contrast to London, the city has been
economically downcast for so long that the recent recession has
had little effect: De Spiegel described Berlin as ‘too poor to afford
a crisis.’ With this in mind, Blueprint writers Tim Abrahams, Peter
Kelly and Gwen Webber spent an intensive week in the city, as a
celebrated with the largest ever exhibition on its work in Berlin guest of British architect Robert Slinger, of Kapok Architects, who
(see page 123). Today, despite an economy that has suffered has made the city his home. They uncovered some of the city’s most
prolonged decline and minimal population growth, Berlin is still significant stories and met its most inspiring creative inhabitants.

82 TEMPELHOF AIRPORT 90 ANNA KRENZ 98 STUDIO 7.5

A vast, symbolic and possibly Polish gallerist and architect Anna The Berlin-based industrial
unfillable hole has been left Krenz explains the unique appeal design practice on the process
in the centre of Berlin by the of her adopted home city and the behind Setu, its new office chair
closure of this 1930s airport initiatives to accommodate artists for Herman Miller

88 ULLA GIESLER 92 THOMAS DEMAND 104 LIVE/WORK STUDIO

Curator of the oldest architecture Artist Thomas Demand on the Office for Subversive Architecture
gallery in Europe, Aedes, Ulla Giesler eve of his major retrospective members, Bernd Truempler and
talks about its 30th anniversary at Berlin’s Nationalgalerie Karsten Huneck, set up in Berlin

BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009

 TEMPELHOF
80
THE DERELICT NAZI-ERA AIRPORT
HAS BEEN THE RECENT FOCUS
OF CONTROVERSY IN BERLIN.
ARCHITECTURAL COMPETITIONS
HAVE PROPOSED AMBITIOUS IDEAS

AIRPORT
ON HOW TO USE THE VAST SPACE,
AND DEMONSTRATIONS HAVE CALLED
FOR IT TO BE OPENED TO THE
PUBLIC. TIM ABRAHAMS REPORTS
PHOTOGRAPHY BY DAN DUBOWITZ

The main hall at Tempelhof

airport. According to the
German Finance Ministry,
it will cost one million euros
per month to maintain
the empty building

BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009


On 20 June this year, 5,000 Berliners
attempted to gain access to their city’s
famous airport, which had been closed
in October 2008. Marching under the
slogan ‘Squat Tempelhof’, the stated aim
of the demonstrators was to turn the
Nazi-built airport over to public use.
Their attempts appeared to be a failure.
The Squat Tempelhof protestors had
handed the initiative to the police when
they announced their decision to invade the
400ha site in a press conference a month
earlier. In addition, the police and Berlin’s
mayor, Klaus Wowereit, had been subjected
to criticism for allowing Labour Day
demonstrations on 1 May to get out of hand.
They weren’t going to let that happen again.
On the surface, the inabilitity of
Berlin’s famous anarchist/leftist squatter
community to invade the vast Tempelhof
symbolises the dissipation of their power.
In the 1970s, it was a powerful group,
particularly in the neighbouring Kreuzberg
district. When the Wall came down in
1989, thousands of young people poured
into the city from the rest of Germany and
into abandoned properties in the former
East. Tempelhof was the next step: a
building with huge political signficance
as well as massive potential as a public
facility. The unsuccessful campaign to
squat the airport was only the most recent
in a series of democratic attempts to keep it
open. A city-wide referendum narrowly
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failed to reach the necessary quorum B
when Wowereit declared that, as the vote
E
R
wasn’t constitutionally binding, he was L
going to ignore it anyway. I
N
From the Mayor’s perspective the
building is something of a millstone. The
terminal is said to be the third largest
building in the world, after the Pentagon
and the Palace of the Parliament in
Bucharest. Yet the field itself, hemmed
in by the city, is too small for international
jets. In its final years, Tempelhof operated
at an annual loss of up to €15m (about
£13m). The city has stated that this money
is needed for construction of the planned
Berlin-Brandenburg International Airport:
an expansion of Schönefeld Airport built Ω
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Left: Tempelhof’s 85 years Below: The integrated
of service as an airport hangar and terminal
ended in October 2008. building at Tempelhof
Its closure creates an is 1.2km long. It is
unused space three times supposed to be the
the size of London’s third largest building
Regents Park in the centre in the world
in the former East. Protestors point out
that the listed Tempelhof building will
still cost one million euros (£680,000)
per month to maintain when mothballed:
the more likely reason is, they say, that
private partners funding the extended
Schönefeld have stipulated there shouldn’t
be any competition to the new airport.
Today, Tempelhof is empty, and
is likely to remain so. The main building
alone is 1.2km long, wrapping halfway
around the airfield. It is astonishing that
the building, even when empty, is free of
the oppressive feeling of fascism. In many
ways, it is the ultimate Nazi building that
formed part of Hitler’s plans for Germania,
a capital of the Third Reich to be built
on top of Berlin. The capital was to be
built on two axes. The first axis would
have run south from a new Great Meeting
Hall which would have been built next
to the Reichstag and been 10 times larger
than St Paul’s in Rome. A boulevard would
have connected to a huge railway station,
and been punctuated by a massive victory
arch marking the junction with an east-
west axis. This boulevard would have
led to Tempelhof.
As it is, Tempelhof was the only
part of the plan that was built, its hangars
and gates arranged in a huge span that
forms the wings of the building. In plan,
the building is a very Nazi-looking eagle.
Flight has only been part of Tempelhof’s
purpose. Throughout the 18th and 19th
centuries, the site was used for military
exercises by the Prussian and German
armies, and as a parade ground for infantry
and cavalry units. Its aeronautical use
came at the beginning of the 20th century.
Later, Hitler combined the two roles. The
building’s roof is effectively a tribune
from which aeronautical displays and great
spectacles of marching could be viewed.
It should be a ‘crushing’ experience,
as Hitler intended. But it isn’t. This may
partly be due to the speed with which
it was built, under the direction of Ernst
Sagebiel. Ground was broken in 1936
and 18 months later the roofing ceremony
was celebrated. When it was finished, the
complex included 49 separate buildings,
seven hangars and 9,000 offices.
Its lines are simple and relatively
unadorned. The narrow windows in the
facade are reminiscent of the collonades
of Albert Speer’s Zeppelintribune in
Nuremberg, but this isn’t architecture
as backdrop. It’s pragmatic. Light cascades
into the deep plan of the building,
and warms the limestone. From inside,
one is not aware of its Nazi origins, as the
most dramatic aspect is from the first-floor
departures lounge, where one could see
the aircrafts arriving and departing from
the hangars beneath. It is, as Sir Norman
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Foster has said, ‘the mother of all airports.’
Berliners think of Tempelhof as
somehow salvaged from its origins. At
the entrance, near the eagle statues, which
have had their swastikas removed, stands
a memorial to the Luftbrücke, or Airbridge,
which looks like the beginning of a
concrete rainbow. From 1948 to 1949,
the airport was the means by which the
Allies lifted a Soviet seige on the encircled
West Berlin. Taking off from Frankfurt
and landing at Tempelhof, predominantly
US Air Force planes kept the enclave
well fed. The locals called these planes
‘Rosinenbomber’ (Candy Bombers),
because along with vital goods, they
also brought sweets.
Tempelhof was a US base until
the 1980s and whole parts of it are
still discernible as former US military
accommodation. The Airbridge effectively
rescued Tempelhof from its Nazi past.
Berliners also love the fact that it’s located
in the centre of the city and that, despite
the grandeur of the building, one could
cycle there to catch a flight on a small
plane either to the rest of Germany
or Austria.
Wowereit has been Berlin’s mayor
since 2001. He will be remembered for his
short, immediately qualified statements. In
2001, addressing a convention of the Social
Democratic Party (SPD), for which he was Ω
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009
84
candidate for the mayoral elections, he
announced: ‘ich bin schwul, und das ist
auch gut so.’ (‘I am gay, and that’s a good
thing.’) Two years later in an interview
with the press, he declared ‘Berlin ist
arm, aber sexy.’ Berlin is poor but sexy.
In some central Berlin districts,
unemployment is at 20 per cent. Plus,
much of the tax revenue the city does
generate goes towards serving its €60bn
(about £5.2bn) debt. In an article Der
Spiegel published this year titled Can’t
Even Afford A Crisis, Michael Burda,
an economist at the city’s Humboldt
University stated: ‘Because Berlin has
done relatively so poorly for the last 40
years, it can’t do much worse.’
So, even if the building and the airfield
are loved by Berliners, that doesn’t
neccesarily make them valuable
commodities. Despite cries of conspiracy
by the Squat Tempelhof protestors, the
airport and airfield are unlikely to undergo
major development soon, and not solely
because the city is broke. The book Urban
Pioneers, published by the Berlin Senate’s
Department for Urban Development and
edited by a six-person team, which includes
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009
the landscape architect, Klaus Overmeyer,
the following statistics appear. In 1989,
about 500ha of industrial buildings were
vacated. In addition, another 270ha of
technical infrastructure including military
facilities, were abandoned. Altogether
an area almost five times that of Regent’s
Park in a metropolitan region that has
half the population of London’s. Tempelhof
provides another area more than three
times the size of Regent’s Park. This
is a headache as much as anything.
And yet Mayor Wowereit seemed
inclined to pursue a unique strategy, which
has evolved out of Berlin’s unique situation.
Berliners’ squats have provided a unique
economy. Ingeborg Junge-Reyer of the
Senate’s Urban Development Department
refers to the art galleries, open-air cinemas,
ski schools, and the children’s gardens
that have emerged across the city as
‘a laboratory for the business of tempoary
use’. The Senate’s support for these
entrepreneurial squatters is pragmatic.
According to Overmeyer, ‘there’s a strong
policy from the urban development bodies
to try to foster parks and promenades
and so on, but they always run out of
//SO, EVEN IF THE BUILDING AND THE AIRFIELD
ARE LOVED BY BERLINERS, THAT DOESN’T
NECESSARILY MAKE THEM VALUABLE
COMMODITIES. DESPITE CRIES OF CONSPIRACY
BY THE SQUAT TEMPELHOF PROTESTORS,
THE AIRPORT AND AIRFIELD ARE UNLIKELY
TO UNDERGO MAJOR DEVELOPMENT SOON,
AND NOT SOLELY BECAUSE THE CITY IS BROKE//
Above left: The Hall money and they suddenly depend on
of the Heroes. According these users as partners in development
to a security guard, this and maintaining space. They found that
room full of Nazi statuary
you can create intensive public domains
was stripped bare by US
troops in 1945 without designing public space. These
domains are essential for the public
Above right: An aerial image of the city but also for the social
photograph of the stabilisation of certain neighbourhoods.’
airport stands in the Hall For two and a half years, Overmeyer,
of the Heroes. In plan,
together with fellow ex-squatters from the
Tempelhof is shaped
architecture and art practice Raumlabor,
like an eagle
and the more conservative architecture
practice Michael Braum, developed
a proposal of encouraging ‘actors’,
individuals from adjacent areas into the
space to determine what Tempelhof should
be. The combined approach was to think
of architecture not as a fetishised object,
but as an object with a relationship to its
surroundings and to social space. The idea
was to think of strategies which worked
from the bottom-up and, according to
Matthias Rick from Raumlabor, to perform
actions ‘where we create a narrative
or a fiction which is also a strategy for
activating space. What we try to do is find
the connection in this tension between
urban planning and these action events.’

Two months before the airport was
closed, however, the Mayor closed down
the research group and mothballed their
work. Overmeyer believes this is due
to poor communication between the
Senate and the Mayor. Benjamin Foerster-
Baldenius of Raumlabor thinks it was
deliberate disregard on the part of the
Mayor. Bizarrely, Wowereit then launched
an ideas competition for the site, with
three prizes, one of which was won
by a team including London-based Chora
architects and Gross Max from Scotland.
Their project seems to be heavily
influenced by the work of the preceding
research. ‘At the core of our proposal
is a participatory instrument enabling
inhabitants and other stakeholders
to creatively negotiate a process-based
development,’ explains the text on their
entry. A familiar concept to anyone
who has read Urban Pioneers.
Not much hope is being derived from
this latest call for ideas, however. The
authorities in Berlin know how to kill
ideas with competitions. When the
Munich-based practice Hilmer and Sattler
won a competiton for the master plan
for Potsdamerplatz in 1991, it was
subsequently diluted when an alternative,
developed for the investors by Richard
Rogers, was put before the Senate. Renzo
Piano then won a further competition
set up by Daimler Benz, which led to the
horror show that was eventually built.
So Chora’s prize should be taken with
a pinch of salt. It is only the first stage
in a three-stage competition. And ideas
are not what is lacking. An illustration
by Raumlabor shows Tempelhof covered
with all the ideas for the space that people
gave them during their research. There
is room enough for all of them.
Wowereit has his own idea, however.
He has kicked out the last remaining
businesses who were renting commercial
space there and handed Tempelhof over
to a public-private partnership (PPP) who
want to make the old airport a venue
for fairs and festivals. The anchor tenant
is Bread and Butter – a German fashion
fair, which prides itself on its use of
historically significant spaces for its catwalk
shows and displays. In the past the fair has
been held at a cable plant in Berlin, and the
halls built for the Expo of 1929 – the Fira
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Above: The building is Barcelona. The last fair was held on 1 July
much loved by Berliners. and was clearly the real prompt to the
On the wall at the Squat Tempelhof protestors. The fair will
bottom of these stairs to
return in January 2010. The Mayor seems
the main hall is a mural
dedicated to the US-led determined to build on Berlin’s reputation
Airbridge campaign as a playground. It is ironic that he is
of 1948-1949 closing airports given how vital he clearly
thinks weekend trips are to Berlin’s future.
It is hard not to visit Tempelhof and think
what a great airport it would make.
This vision of Berlin as Europe’s
playground will not sustain Tempelhof,
let alone the whole city for very long. The
squatters may yet have their victory, albeit
in a manner which they will not
immediately recognise. The sheer scale of
Tempelhof, amid the profusion of free and
cheap space for development in the city,
and combined with the city’s poverty
means that sooner or later they will have to
open it up to some form of community
activity. The high rents paid by organisations
like Bread and Butter, will only go some
way to offsetting the maintenance costs.
When it is eventually opened up, Berlin’s
increasingly sophisticated economy of
public appropriation and temporary use
will begin to work on it for better or worse .
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009
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In Berlin, there are more than 6,000
Part of a wave of artists, almost 3,000 architects,
artists and architects 500 photographers and more than
1,200 designers. Despite the poor
who are setting up financial situation of the city, it
remains a living cultural centre. This
intiatives to create a is partly the result of a ‘top-down’
approach – projects initiated by the
new subculture in city and private investors – but the
Berlin, Anna Krenz vitality of the city is mainly due to
individual initiative. Well-educated,
shares her experience young people, who do not have a
permanent job, including artists and
of founding a vibrant, architects, are working without major
international gallery funding to implement their own
projects. In Berlin, these people form
in Kreuzberg a subculture, which attracts
immigrants from all over the globe.
The gallery run by myself and
my partner, Jacek Slaski, is a good
example. It is located in an area that
DOMINIC DUPONT
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009
has become established for its
artistic output, thanks in particular
to the efforts of Carmen Reiz. In
2003, while running an agency
called Spielfeld, she established an
urban project known as Wrangelei
(the name came from Wrangel Street,
the ‘centre’ of our district of
Kreuzberg), which looked for empty
shops to fill with creative people,
to bring life to the streets.
The initiative received financial
support from the EU and the local
authorities, and anyone could apply
to join the programme, so long as
they were young and enthusiastic.
The only criterion was that their
project had to be non-commercial
and open to the public. There were
seven spaces in total, and not all
of them were galleries: there were
lawyers, designers and architects
offices, and a cycle shop/café. Our
gallery has an international
approach: it is partly given over to
Polish artists and those who have
settled in Berlin, but also exhibits
works by artists from around the
world. We show art that is hard to
sell, but is political and provocative.
The entire area is populated by clubs
and galleries, and Reiz herself runs a Anna Krenz, a
big artists’ house, Josetti Höfe, in
Polish-born architect,
artist and journalist,
which she rents studios to creatives.
The vibrancy of Kreuzberg is a
has lived in Berlin
since 2003. She is the
result of an attitude in the city.
Berlin constantly varies in terms of
co-founder and
director of Galerie
architectural style. There are no Zero in Kreuzberg,
Berlin. She wears a
skyscrapers and no single centre. The
tiara because she
city will never be complete, nor will thinks of herself as a
its development be dominated by a ‘Polish princess living
top-down approach to planning. in exile’
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88

INTERVIEW
THOMAS
DEMAND

BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009

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THE BERLIN-BASED ARTIST,
RENOWNED FOR HIS METICULOUS
RECONSTRUCTIONS OF SIGNIFICANT
SCENES IN PAPER AND CARDBOARD,
IS ABOUT TO BE HONOURED WITH
A MAJOR RETROSPECTIVE AT
GERMANY’S NATIONAL GALLERY.
PETER KELLY REPORTS
PORTRAITS BY DOMINIC DUPONT

In July Thomas Demand’s studio – set in a

vast warehouse in the Mitte district of
Berlin – was home to a 3m-tall replica
of a church organ made from coloured paper.
When I visited, the finishing touches were
being made by the artist and his team of
assistants, perfecting the thousands of pipes,
pedals and meticulously recreated keys;
a camera stand was positioned directly
opposite, ready to capture the end result.
Its construction had taken three months.
Within the next week, however, this
intricate model would be photographed,
dismantled, destroyed and stuffed into a
recycling bin. This is the brief lifespan of
each of the German artist’s sculptures,
which are created only to serve his final,
large-scale photographs. ‘You have to
destroy them straight away, otherwise you
grow to like them,’ he says.
This new work will form part of
Demand’s forthcoming exhibition at
Germany’s national gallery in Berlin, which
opens on 18 September. It is the 45-year-old
artist’s most significant retrospective to date
and, in a characteristic mix of grandiosity
and understatement, he has named it after
the institution itself, Nationalgalerie. Each
artwork selected for the show – including
32 works from the last 20 years together
with six new pieces – addresses an event
Ω or subject matter that has shaped German
history over the last century. Demand
likens the curatorial procedure to a Google
search through his works: ‘you type
in ‘German’ and ‘national’ and ‘gallery’
and you get a whole load of results: some
completely outside of what you’d expect’.
In conversation, Demand talks softly,
quickly and precisely. Like his artworks,
an acute awareness of absurdity underlies
almost every statement, but the wit is
resolutely deadpan. The grandeur of having
a retrospective at the Nationalgalerie,
a building designed by Mies van der Rohe,
is something that Demand appears to treat
with amused detachment. ‘If you have a
theme like that, it’s impossible to fulfil the
expectations,’ he says. ‘But the way that you
fail is interesting. It’s such a pompous brief
and obviously my work can’t fulfil that.’
For someone who, in his own words,
has ‘never been much concerned with
where I came from’ the show is a surprising Ω
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009

ALL IMAGES: THOMAS DEMAND, VG BILD-KUNST, BONN 2009. COURTESY NEUE NATIONALGALERIE
exploration of German identity, through
Demand’s heavily mediated work. Although
the selection process relied greatly upon
serendipity, it has still resulted in the
inclusion of many key works that cemented
Demand’s reputation as a distinctive artist.
This includes Office, from 1995, which
depicts the Stasi Central office in Berlin
after it was ransacked by East Berliners
seeking their personal records, and Room,
from the same year, which shows the
military conference room that was blown up
in Count von Stauffenberg’s attempt
to assassinate Hitler in 1944.
A centrepiece, though, will be the
photograph of Demand’s replica church
organ. Like all the other new works in the
show, it was a project that the artist had
planned before but had not yet realised:
the theme of nationhood provided
a perfect opportunity. It was inspired by
a free-standing, open-air church organ –
the largest of its kind in the world – built
by First World War veterans and situated
in the small valley town of Kuftsein, on the
Austrian-German border. At 12pm, every
day since 1931, the same tune has been
played on the organ – The Song of the Old
Comrade – as a tribute to lost soldiers. The
melody reverberated around the valley and
could, apparently, be heard up to 10km away.
The tradition continued uninterrupted until
Top left: New work by last November when, according to Demand,
Demand, Parliament, the organ was taken down to be rebuilt with
which depicts a digital workings.
part of Germany’s
In a city such as Berlin, where
old parliament
building in Bonn memorials to the past are ubiquitous – from
Peter Eisenman’s Holocaust monument
Above: Office,1995, to small plaques marking the spot where
depicts the Stasi individuals were killed attempting to cross
Central Office after the Wall – Demand describes the war
it had been ransacked
veterans’ organ as ‘a beautiful, simple
by east Berliners
straightforward idea of making a memorial,
rather than having a field of stones or
a symbolic figure.’ Demand’s own version
of the organ is therefore a memorial
to a memorial that is losing much
of its resonance due to the requirements
of tourism. Yet Demand is aware that
his work also falls almost comically short
of the original: ‘if you make a picture of the
instrument you completely miss its point,
because the instrument is about the sound.’
Demand is not a Berliner, though his
presence in the city is testament to what
a comfortable environment Berlin has
become for artists in the last 20 years; he
used to share his workspace with Olafur
Eliasson and Tacita Dean, who now have
studios in other parts of Berlin. Demand
himself was born in Munich, and gained
his artistic education at Dusseldorf’s
Kunstakademie, the Cité des Arts in Paris
and, most importantly, Goldsmiths College
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MARINA BOLLA
Above: Room, 1994,
is Demand’s simulation
of the bunker where the
last failed attempt was
made on Hitler's life
Left: From Demand’s
Klause series, 2006,
which depicts the
scene of a crime in
a German village
JAMES MORRIS
in London. It was there that Demand hit
upon the technique of photographing precise
paper reconstructions of scenes and objects.
Frequently working from photographs
in the popular media, the scenes tend
to have a narrative or significance beyond
his deliberately imperfect replicas: previous
works have depicted the kitchen area
of Saddam Hussein’s hideout in Iraq,
and the studio of an artist who was assaulted
by Baader-Meinhof members. Detail is lost
in the translation, and Demand’s paper
constructions bring a sheen and lightness
that is only subtly unreal. It is a technique
that simultaneously draws the viewer in, and
distances them from the underlying story.
Much has been written about the
complex layers of meaning in Demand’s
art, but the humour is often missed, perhaps
because he is often attracted to sinister
subjects – one famous piece depicted
the hallway leading to serial killer Jeffrey
Dahmer's apartment – but also because
jokes are not usually expected from a
German artist whose work seems to imply
an obsessive eye for detail. Yet it is, Demand
says, ‘an underrated quality in the work’,
which is almost always present. A new piece
for the Nationalgalerie exhibition recreates
a bus shelter where German pop group
Tokio Hotel, according to Demand, used to
sit as ten-year-olds, ‘dreaming of becoming Ω
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the world’s biggest band’. Last year they won
an MTV award for best newcomer and,
meanwhile, their old bus shelter hang-out
has been dismantled into tiny fragments and
sold on Ebay. ‘It’s now a pixelated structure,
but with the pixels spread out across the
world,’ says Demand with some wonderment,
before adding: ‘they’re really a terrible band.’
Another new work is a reconstruction of one
of Demand’s children’s bedrooms, which
displays the light-hearted side even more
obviously. ‘There’s a toy in there, and every
time I see it, I laugh because it’s just such
a very funny object to make,’ he says.
Architecture is one of the artist’s
abiding concerns, and architects have
been among his most consistent fans.
Rem Koolhaas will be taking part
in the series of talks that accompany
the forthcoming retrospective and,
at the end of last year, an architecture unit
from Kingston University, led by new
head of faculty Daniel Rosbottom, staged
an exhibition entitled Demanding Attention,
which emulated the German artist’s work.
‘I think it is very difficult, for young
architects in particular, to think about
the character of place, and this is something
my work addresses,’ says Demand.
One of his long-term collaborators
//ARCHITECTURE IS ONE OF THE
ARTIST’S ABIDING CONCERNS,
AND ARCHITECTS HAVE BEEN
AMONG HIS MOST CONSISTENT
FANS.... ‘I THINK IT IS VERY
DIFFICULT, FOR YOUNG ARCHITECTS
IN PARTICULAR, TO THINK
ABOUT THE CHARACTER OF PLACE,
AND THIS IS SOMETHING MY WORK
ADDRESSES,’ SAYS DEMAND//
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009
is British architect Caruso St John, who
designed his 2004 exhibition at the
Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria, and has
also contributed to the design of the new
Nationalgalerie show. ‘Thomas is incredibly
engaged in architecture,’ says Adam Caruso,
who finds that his own practice’s work is
influenced by Demand’s artistic methods.
The exhibition design itself grew out of
Demand’s typically meticulous background
research, compiling information on almost
all of the past shows that had been held
at the Nationalgalerie, and was also
particularly influenced by Mies van der
Rohe’s Velvet and Silk Cafe exhibition
design from 1927, using heavy curtains to
divide the space, block out light and,
says Demand, ‘to avoid any pretension
of permanence.’
A hint that Caruso St John shares
Demand’s taste for combining social
commentary with dry humour can be found
in their joint, competition-winning proposal
for the Escher-Wyss Platz in Zurich: it was
said that the design of the scheme’s central
building was simultaneously inspired by
the famously defiant Nail House in
Chongqing, China, and the house beneath
a Coney Island rollercoaster that featured
in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. Demand’s
Above: Studio,
1997, derives from
a photograph of the
1970's television set
for the German version
of What's My Line?
Below: Thomas Demand
outside his studio in the
Mitte district of Berlin. He
used to share the space
with Olafur Eliasson and
Tacita Dean
fascination with the meaning and
representation of architecture is also evident
in a new work for the Nationalgalerie
retrospective, entitled Parliament. It depicts
a small section of the debating chamber
of Germany’s old centre of national
governance in Bonn, with its imposing,
dark black-and-gold interior colour
scheme. Implicit in Demand’s replication
is a critique of Norman Foster’s Reichstag
building: ‘it’s so transparent you can
photograph it from anywhere, so you don’t
have this iconic view anymore… there’s
nothing specific about that space,’ he says.
Though, as in all of his work, Demand
is bringing layers of doubt and irony to
this retrospective, this will inevitably be a
more personal show than he has embarked
on before. Each of the talks, which
accompany the show throughout its run,
will feature a ‘double-act’ of commentators
from outside the art world, and will be
mediated by the gallery’s director and
Demand himself. He says: ‘we will be
standing there, quite vulnerably, discussing
whatever we want to discuss.’ It is an
unusually brave way for an artist to engage
.
with their audience. Although one suspects
that Demand will be equally satisfied even if
they aren’t a total success
Lighting design, illuminated sculptures and chandeliers.
Long Knoll Barns, Cokers Lane, Kilmington,
Wiltshire, BA12 7HU. T: 01985 845 228
www.brucemunro.co.uk
brucemunro
the art of light
94

COMMENT
‘‘
AN AMBITIOUS REPARATION
PROGRAMME IN 1987 HAS LEFT
BERLIN WITH AN IMPRESSIVE
ARCHITECTURAL HERITAGE. IT
IS PROOF THAT LARGE-SCALE
URBAN REGENERATION CAN
WORK AND ALSO BE INSPIRING,
SAYS WRITER JIM HUDSON
By the 1980s, Britain was in the process of withdrawal from
state-funded housing, atomizing the design of domestic
architecture and leaving no real models, good or bad, for housing
design on a large scale. But while we were busy disposing
of our public housing stock, over in West Berlin they’d gone
back to the drawing board. The city had had its fair share
of grim sub-Corbusian housing projects, particularly in the then
backwater of Kreuzberg – a poor district, but also the heart of the
city’s alternative and squatter scenes. Luckily, when funding
and public patience ran out on these projects, the situation
coincided with the planning of an international housing
exhibition – the Internationale Bauausstellung (IBA) 1987, which
morphed at an early stage from the planned International Expo
approach (put some new buildings in a park, photograph them,
forget them) into something more ambitious. The IBA became an
attempt to repair an entire failing city quarter.
From the beginning of the 1980s up to the point when
as postmodernists at the time, but have more recently been
rebranded as ‘new traditionalists’. Both are strongly linked
to the New Urbanism movement, whose concerns about
the urban environment often appear sound, but are let down
by an insistence on taking historicism to an extreme or overly
literal level.
IBA buildings present a curious medley of postmodernism
and other emerging styles such as deconstructivism (the Hadid
block being one of the more recognizable). Some buildings feature
wholly unremarkable, almost bland, street facades. But take
a wander through the entrances to some of these blocks and
you find yourself in communal gardens or overgrown Italianate
courtyards, some with cafes, playgrounds and schools. There
are genuine elements of sustainability, from before a time when
the pointless strapping of wind turbines and photovoltaics on to
buildings became fashionable; in one large courtyard space you
find yourself on a series of bridges over fields of reed beds because
the surrounding blocks recycle all their waste water.
Although a majority of the housing is public, there’s
a complex mix of tenure, with the IBA stretching from the
wealthy embassy district around Tiergarten, eastwards toward
the poorer areas of predominantly social housing, including
Kreuzberg. Most of the housing seems to be genuinely liked
by its residents, who are sometimes bemused by visiting
architecture students and critics questioning them on matters
of theory or style. It helps that on the whole the buildings seem
to have weathered well, despite Berlin’s tradition of graffiti
on every surface (Siza’s pristine white walls were the most
notable early casualty).
The wall that divided Berlin for more than 28 years was
gone by the time the final IBA projects were being completed.
Much has been written about how many of the key players
in the IBA took the policies forward into what became known
as the ‘Critical Reconstruction’ of the scarred city. Yet, looking
the Berlin Wall fell, the exhibition was responsible for more back it appears that the reconstruction of the 1990s fell mainly
than 5,000 new residential units, largely integrated into Berlin’s into the traps of either bland corporate towers (Potzdamerplatz)
19th century urban form of five-storey high-density buildings or obsessive historicist restrictions (Pariserplatz). Lessons from
around a network of internal courtyards and communal spaces. Berlin’s IBA have been learnt elsewhere in Germany (a new
A high proportion of the designs were procured through IBA is underway in Hamburg), but the real legacy is perhaps
international competitions, resulting in work by Alvaro Siza, proof that urban regeneration can be achieved on this scale, with
Mario Botta, Peter Cook, John Hejduk, Aldo Rossi, Frei Otto,
Arata Isozaki, James Stirling and many others. Zaha Hadid
did her first building here, while blocks by Rem Koolhaas and
Peter Eisenman face each other across a street. The use of so
many apparently disparate architects leads to some interesting
.
architecture in a leading role. It is ironic that back in Kreuzberg
itself, the work of rescuing failed neighbourhoods by the IBA laid
the foundations for their increasing gentrification

contrasts not found elsewhere on this scale, and not at all

in the monolithic planning which preceded it. The Altbau
(old building) element of the exhibition became a case study
in sensitive urban renewal, rescuing and refurbishing about
7,000 apartments as well as providing schools, community
Jim Hudson
has a blog on centres and extensive landscaping, with projects often
buildings and resident-led.
urban planning
www.architecturein It is curious then that the IBA is so rarely studied, or heard
berlin.wordpress. of, at least in the UK. Perhaps it’s an issue of style; many
com. In 2007, of the designs are just too postmodern – that unacceptable
he left his job
at a London-based face of the Eighties – for contemporary tastes. The IBA includes
architecture master plans and several buildings by Rob Krier, brother
practice to live of Poundbury designer Léon Krier, both of whom were known
and work in Berlin

BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009

waldo/45
bring it forward and cherish it

ZZZMDPHVEXUOHLJKFRXNLQIR#MDPHVEXUOHLJKFRXNW>@
96

UNUSUALLY FOR A SMALL

AND SELF-CONTAINED DESIGN
PRACTICE IN DE-INDUSTRIALISED
BERLIN, STUDIO 7.5 ACTUALLY
MAKES ITS INCOME THROUGH WHAT
IT DOES BEST: DEVISING
BEAUTIFULLY CRAFTED FURNITURE.
GWEN WEBBER REPORTS

STUDIO
PORTRAIT BY DOMINIC DUPONT

7.5

BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009

 97
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One major outcome of Berlin’s reunification

in 1990 was the de-industrialisation of
the region. At the time, Berliners had
hoped the city would regain its role as
an industrial hub and gateway to central
Europe. Instead, two-thirds of the city’s
manufacturing jobs were lost, and the
service industry has instead become the
city’s economic mainstay. As a result,
designers in the city tend to develop ideas
rather than products, and find alternative
ways to supplement their incomes.
Unusually, Studio 7.5 has been commercially
successful purely by creating furniture
for mass production.
The studio has collaborated consistently
with German furniture manufacturers,
including Wilkhahn, Rosenthal and
Pohlschroeder, but none are based in Berlin,
and its most lucrative and high-profile
projects have been for overseas companies.
One of the studio’s first major commissions
was to design the Mirra chair for Herman
Miller in the United States in 2003. This
year, it has launched Setu, an office chair
for the same firm that has been six years
in the making, and is the result of a new
process, sustained by huge investment
from the US manufacturer.
For such a small, and defiantly self-
contained company – the name 7.5 refers
to the weight of a lorry from which the
designers had intended to work – their ability Ω

Left: The Setu chair,

launched in Milan
this year

BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009


to collaborate with large companies on
major commercial projects is exceptional.
Studio 7.5 is run by its three founding
members, Claudia Pilkat, Burkhard Schmitz
and Carola Zwick, and her brother, Roland,
(who was brought on board to help prototype
Mirra and was made a partner when they
won the bid for the design). The entire
7.5 teams consists only of its four partners,
plus a graphic designer and, normally,
two interns. The studio in which they work
sits behind a quiet residential street in the
Charlottenburg district. A cobbled courtyard
signals the entrance. This is a typical
arrangement in the city; artists and designers
commandeer old workshops that reveal
themselves in a sequence of courtyards
behind incongruous facades. Their building
was originally a blacksmith’s, but now
the four-storey block provides for a self-
contained workshop. On the ground floor,
there is a full-scale CNC cutting-machine
and a lathe. ‘One of the beauties of working
today is that these sorts of sophisticated
tools are affordable and are an investment
that can empower you,’ says Carola Zwick.
Beside this is a long, wooden table, dividing
the workshop from the kitchen area,
and the studio also has an in-house chef.
When I visited, Roland Zwick was
wearing an apron printed with his essential
daily equipment: a knife and fork, a hammer,
a screwdriver, a saw and a mouse for his
computer. ‘Universal tools,’ says Pilkat.
It speaks of a dedication to the fundamentals
Top right: The Mood
furniture range, 2006, of design that underpins every Studio 7.5
has been produced project. The practice does its own research
by tubular steel
and testing on site: an in-house graphic
manufacturers, L&C
designer develops the products’ identities
Stendal. Studio 7.5
has also designed the and, unusually, an engineer supports the
company’s branding team: ‘It’s vital to have an engineer who is
creative,’ says Carola Zwick. At Studio 7.5,
Above left: The award- prototyping occurs in-house: along the
winning Mirra chair for wall by the stairs to the mezzanine level is a
Herman Miller, 2003,
gallery-style presentation of components of
launched Studio 7.5
on to the international their fresh-off-the-production-line Setu chair.
furniture design scene This chair is the result of a long
collaboration with Herman Miller. ‘It
Above right: Puzzle was one of the first clients to ring up our
workstation, 1996, office after we set up in 1993,’ says Carola
for Herman Miller pre-
Zwick. Prompted by the success of Schmitz’s
dated pop-up offices,
Picto chair for Wilkhahn, Herman Miller
but was never put into
mass production invited the fledgling studio to pitch
an idea for a project. Although they didn’t
win that commission, three years later
it asked the studio to design a workstation
that could be flat-packed and FedExed.
The Puzzle model pre-dated the notion
of pop-up workstations but, at the time,
Herman Miller did not have the systems
to make a product so far outside its remit.
As a result, it was launched as a limited-
edition piece, with only 100 ever made.
But the association remained strong, and
the production values of Herman Miller
and Studio 7.5 matched well. When 7.5
pitched a design for the Setu 18 months
after it had launched the award-winning
Mirra chair, the chairman of Herman
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Miller jokingly told Schmitz to ‘get a life’.
The rigorous approach to mass-produced
design comes from the education of Studio
7.5’s founding partners. Self-proclaimed
design purists, all three studied at the Berlin
University of Arts (UdK) under professor
Hans Roericht – a tutor from the avant-garde
Ulm School of Design, which was founded in
1953 by Bauhaus designers Max Bill, Inge
Aicher-Scholl and Otl Aicher. Schmitz
was part of Roericht’s office, whereas Pilkat
and Zwick spent summers working there,
until they formed their own studio. ‘Roericht
instilled in us the idea that a designer should
identify the problem and then find the
solution,’ says Carola Zwick. ‘So observation
is the starting point.’ Zwick says that the
studio also feels a strong connection with
the principles and entrepreneurial values
held by Charles and Ray Eames, who never
waited to be commissioned for work.
The studio has built up a high degree
of respect from major companies, who
were formerly suspicious of their position
in the city. ‘Even after the Wall came down,
communication was difficult, and Berlin
was considered too remote for some firms,
even those based in Stuttgart,’ explains
Carola Zwick. Now, geography doesn’t
hinder their progress and their principles of
honesty and loyalty are widely recognised, as
proven by their continuing relationship with
Herman Miller. ‘Although we don’t share
the religious ideals on which the company Ω
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009
 New space

H E L E N YA R D L E Y
w w w . h e l e n y a r d l e y. c o m

A/Z Studios
3-5 Hardwidge Street
London
SE1 3SY

Open Mon - Fri 11:00 - 16:00

or by appointment

T 020 7403 7114

F 020 7403 8906
E info@helenyardley.com

//WHEREAS THE BACK OF THE
EMBODY HAS A WEB OF PADS TO
TRANSFER THE WEIGHT LOAD,
THE SETU HAS OF A SINGLE PIECE
OF POLYPROPYLENE: A ‘SPINE’ THAT
FORMS THE STRUCTURE AND THE
TILT MECHANISM. THE CHAIR IS
REFINED TO THE POINT OF BEING
SKELETAL, THUS RESEMBLING
THE SHAPE OF A SEAHORSE//
is founded, its values go beyond design: they
are universal concerns,’ says Carola Zwick.
In 2003 Herman Miller invited the
Studio 7.5 team to promote Mirra in the US.
During their six-week trip, they presented
the concept to architects and developers,
including Skidmore Owings and Merrill,
HOK and Gensler. Over the next 12 months,
the studio took similar trips to offices in
Europe and Asia. This enabled the designers
to do market research for their next project.
They subsequently spent 18 months on
developing 35 prototypes in the studio in
Berlin. Only then did the team approach
Herman Miller with their concept for Setu.
The new chair has arrived just one year
after the launch of Herman Miller’s Embody,
designed by Jeff Weber, and responds to the
same challenge: to create an ergonomic chair
with an integrated structure that enables the
user to have freedom of movement. However,
the result is dramatically different. Whereas
the back of the Embody has a web of
interconnected pads to transfer the weight
load, Setu has a single polypropylene
‘spine’ that forms the structure and the
tilt mechanism. The chair has no visible
adjustment components and is refined
to the point of being skeletal, recalling
the shape of a seahorse.
The chair is a testament to Studio 7.5’s
‘closed circle’ work ethic. They not only take
full responsibility for designing the product,
but also for devising systems of manufacture.
‘We don’t do hand drawings, because it’s
easier to convince people with 3D computer
designs and photographs of prototypes,’ says
Carola Zwick who, like all of 7.5’s partners
is highly savvy and business-minded.
Despite the tough economic climate
of Berlin, Studio 7.5 has stuck to its practice,
learned from Roericht, of always challenging
the client’s brief. Carola Zwick and Schmitz
may have the security of teaching jobs to fall
back on, at UdK and the smaller Weissensee
Kunsthochschule in Berlin, respectively,
but it nevertheless takes a bold approach to
commerce. Every item of furniture in 7.5’s
portfolio, from the Furos range of wooden
furniture for German manufacturer Wasa
in 1994, to a range of casino hospitality
and catering products for Rosenthal from
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1997, displays the same rigourous approach.
Despite this good example, it comes
as no surprise to learn that many of Zwick
and Schmitz’s students leave the country
to work as designers elsewhere after
graduation. ‘We don’t push them towards
anything specific,’ says Carola Zwick.
‘Some Germany-based companies recognize
the importance of design in business,
but mostly students leave and return
with more experience to set up their own
practice, where it’s affordable in Berlin.’
The studio is currently involved in
a smaller venture with a steel manufacturing
company 160km away in the former GDR.
L&C Stendal originally produced tubular
steel furniture for the Bauhaus school
in nearby Dessau. Along with designing
furniture for the company – including a
stackable conference chair, and a ‘cinematic’
lounge chair titled Mood – the studio
has also worked on rebranding. Creating
everything from its website and brochures,
to exhibition stands, this project is close
.
to the studio’s heart. With its obsession for
understanding mechanisms and compulsion
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009
 102
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As architecture Aedes was founded in West Berlin in
1980, by Kristin Feireiss, who had
gallery Aedes the idea to promote contemporary
architecture, not as art but as a
prepares to celebrate cultural product. At the time,
its 30th anniversary she established the gallery with
then-unknown people, such as
next year, project Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas, and it
is still the practice’s ethos to foster
director Ulla Geisler new talent. We find it easier to
secure sponsorship by focusing on
offers an insight into young architects, in comparison to
the experimental so-called stars. Next year, we will
celebrate our 30th anniversary.
ethos that drives the We are totally private, so have
to look for sponsorship for each
gallery’s fostering of exhibition. Zumtobel is the biggest
new talent sponsor and provides a yearly
budget. So, we have a basic amount
of funding, but we have to find extra
money for every show. It’s a bit hard,
because often more than 50 per cent
DOMINIC DUPONT
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009
of our work is concentrated on
fundraising but, on the other hand,
that allows us to do what we chose.
Also, we don’t like talking about our
own scene. That’s boring, and why
we established the gallery in the first
place. It is also why we set up the
Aedes Campus (a summer school for
colleges from around the world to
work in an adjacent building).
However, some issues in the
city are interesting, such as the
Stadtschloss. The castle used to be a
grand building on the site of the
Palast der Republik in the former
East, but following reunification it
was hard for the government to leave
the old stuff alone. The West had to
demolish everything. They are
positive that it will be reconstructed,
but we aren’t so sure. They want to
replace it with a castle in the old
style. What sense does that make?
They also want it to be a museum.
Why do we need museums in a
shrinking city with no money for
content? We only need the space
that we have. The idea is to bring the
content from all the beautiful 1970s
museums in the former Western part,
to the centre, where the tourists are.
But we think you just need a concept
on how to move the people, because
it’s perfect where they are. In Paris,
you have everything in one place,
but this is not the culture of Berlin.
The reason that people come Ulla Gielser joined the
here is because of the different architecture gallery
outlook. You can work the way we do Aedes in 1996.
Although trained as
at Aedes. Just try a project. See if it
works. If it’s not working, then try
a cultural scientist,
she specializes in
something else. This may not be a curating exhibitions
German attitude, but it’s helping to in China and other
change Germany in a way. parts of Asia
 Contract Furniture Specialists

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 104

LIVE
WORK
THE CREATIVE DUO BEHIND OFFICE
FOR SUBVERSIVE ARCHITECTURE,
KARSTEN HUNECK AND BERND
STUDIO
TRUEMPLER, HAS SET UP A SPACE
IN BERLIN. GIVEN THEIR
UNCONVENTIONAL AND ARTISTIC
APPROACH, SAYS TIM ABRAHAMS,
IT’S A NATURAL MOVE.
PORTRAIT BY DOMINIC DUPONT

To the generation who grew up in

West Germany, Berlin is an anomaly,
a playground. Bernd Truempler, a member
of the Office of Subversive Architecture
(OSA), who has just set up an office in
the city with his cohort Karsten Huneck,
remembers it as a place of fun and
relationships. He first came here, like
many of his contemporaries, on a school
trip in the early 1980s. Pupils were told the
history of Berlin, taken to the East and then
dropped off for a couple of hours. ‘We could
do whatever we wanted. We were sitting in
the café having a coffee, and I remember
there was one guy who came up to us,
asking if we could be penpals,’ he says. Ω
JOHANNES MARBURG

BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009

 105
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KHBT’s live work studio is

located in a courtyard
building in
Grunbergerstrasse in the
former East Berlin

BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009

Total living.

Organising Secretariat
T +39 051 864310
F +39 051 864313
estero@acropoli.com

Entrance strictly limited to professionals. The general public is admitted on Sunday only. Entrance is forbidden to minors under the age of 10. www.abitareiltempo.com

CHRISTIAN AHRENS
Later, in the decade before the Berlin Wall
fell, he visited friends who had decamped
to the city to avoid military service.
Even before the pair decided to set up
a base in the city under the name KHBT, it
was a playground to them. In 2000, they
worked there as assistants for Ottmar Hörl,
the artist
recently investigated by the Nuremberg
public prosecutor’s office, when one of his
pieces (a garden gnome giving the Nazi
salute) went on show in a city gallery.
In those days, Hörl asked Huneck and
Truempler to work on a more benign
symbol – Berlin’s bear. They helped him
cover the Unter den Linden, from the
Brandenburg Gate to Friedrichstrasse, with
10,000 multicoloured, 400mm-tall plastic
models of the animal. ‘We were more or
less the project managers for his bigger
projects,’ says Truempler. The duo devised
a 2.1m-high timber structure, which
created ‘a big wave of bears sitting in the
air’ at the Brandenburg Gate.
However, for the last five years, the
pair have been working on their day jobs,
but also operating projects as the British
wing of the OSA. They have built
temporary art installations at the Leeds
Top: OSA’s contribution International Pool and the Liverpool
to the Liverpool Biennale Biennial. They have co-created with
2006 was a structure to Blueprint the first unofficial viewing
house talks and events
platform for the Olympics site, around the
on top of a warehouse
Lea Valley of London, and contributed
belonging to the A
Foundation alongside Rachel Whiteread to the group
show, In Space of Elsewhere, at Kingston
Above left: An OSA University’s Stanley Picker Gallery. The
project in Cologne, from pair see themselves as very much part
2006, bringing art to a of a collective, which formed at the
local residents’ car park
Darmstadt University of Technology
Above right: An in 1994. Today, OSA is an ever-moving
installation that will be network that stretches all over Europe,
erected at Contemporary with a focus on German-speaking areas.
Art Norwich in 2010 Soon after Truempler and Huneck first
met in Darmstadt, they started initiating
real projects, even when the brief given by
their tutors was theoretical. They decided
upon their name, the Office for Subversive
Architecture, to reflect their determination
to tackle projects in unusual ways, by
taking an artistic approach to interpreting
briefs. The name was also a conscious nod
towards Rem Koolhaas’s Office for
Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), which
was fashionable when the pair were
studying in the 1990s. The architect was
highly regarded by the young
undergraduates, and Huneck still respects
107
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JOHANNES MARBURG
Koolhaas’s work, although he says: ‘OMA
went very global, concentrating on big
cities. We do smaller bits and pieces here
and there to transform spaces.’
In addition, OSA have always been a
loosely affiliated group. Their collective CV
displays an astonishing range: fanciful
theatre pieces in industrial buildings sit
next to hard-nosed discussions. Last year,
around the towns of Feldbach and
Studenzen in Austria, OSA members
Anke Strittmatter and Oliver Langbein,
created an off-kilter Hollywood catastrophe
performance piece. Claiming that they
were using a powerful X-ray, the OSA-led
group projected a film on to the side of the
silo, ‘revealing’ a pig that had become stuck
inside. Yet they also remain committed to
influencing the worldwide discussion on
public spaces. Members of the network
have contributed to workshops on new
public spaces in New York, Montreal and
Mexico City, and they teach as well.
Truempler and Huneck have recently been
working under the guidance of Odile Decq
at the Paris École Spéciale d’Architecture.
The fact that they opened up an office
in Berlin could be seen as the latest stage in
the architectural drift between Berlin and Ω
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009
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DOMINIC DUPONT
London. In the early Nineties, British
architects moved to help reconstruct the
city after reunification. When this illusory
historical moment ended, German architects
followed the British back to London. It is
too early, though, to talk of another drift
back to Berlin. OSA depends on the art
market, as much as the property
development market: when the Goethe
Institute invited Huneck and Truempler to
New York, they asked the practice whether
they had a Berlin office. ‘When we were
invited to Moscow by the British council
they said to us, “it’s incredible that you are
not in Berlin,”’ says Truempler. The
practice already had strong connections
with the city through Aedes, and continue
to support the pioneering architecture
gallery, notably by contributing to its
summer school at the Aedes Campus.
Primarily, the purchase of the unit, in
a beautiful courtyard off Grünbergerstrasse,
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009
in former East Berlin, was an economic
consideration: ‘We bought this place,
because we wanted to invest in something,
and Berlin is still affordable. London is not
now. Not in our profession,’ says
Truempler. The renovated early 20th-
century workshop space had been empty
for a year. ‘We paid a good price. In London,
you would get a one-bedroom flat for what
we paid.’ To date, the pair have been
working day jobs: Truempler as a producer
for the German version of Changing Rooms
(Zuhause im Glück), and Huneck as an
architect with the practice, A Studio.
However, they don’t see the studio
as an immediate means of establishing
a conventional architecture practice. They
have no desire to give up their art-focused
practice or their residence in the UK, and
are currently working on an installation
for Contemporary Art Norwich in 2010.
The pair’s studio is not a conventional
//KHBT’S STUDIO IS NOT
A CONVENTIONAL OFFICE SPACE.
THEY HAVE INSERTED A KIND
OF FLOATING CABINET, INTO AN
OPEN AND BRIGHT DUAL-ASPECT
GROUND-FLOOR STUDIO SPACE. IT
IS A DELIBERATELY INCONGRUOUS
WRAP-AROUND SCULPTURE IN
WHICH THERE ARE SMALL ROOMS
THEY CAN SLEEP IN//
Left: Karsten Huneck
(left) and Bernd
Truempler in their new
live work studio in Berlin
office. They have inserted a kind
of floating cabinet into a open and bright
dual-aspect ground-floor studio space. It
is a deliberately incongruous wrap-around
sculpture in which there are small rooms
they can sleep in. According to Huneck,
they will use it ‘to develop projects
together as KHBT, as well as working on
OSA schemes’.
They have chosen a fascinating part of
the city in which to work. Nearby is the
Raw-tempel cultural complex, a 10ha site
in a former railyard, which hosts a music
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The role of manufacturers in the
development of design is often
underestimated. In the following
pages Gian Luca Amadei talks to five
London-based design companies
to find out how their ethos and
business model forms a synergy
with designers to shape the process
Portraits by Tom Russell
PRODUCE 111
At this year’s London Design Festival
there will be a strong focus on the
process behind design products,
with live studio installations,
including the one Blueprint is
involved with at the Wapping
Project, and events such as 100%
Materials. Inevitably the recession
has had impact on the number of new
products being made, but there is also
a growing fascination with the way
that designers work, and the materials
and techniques they employ.
The emphasis on designers,
though, can overshadow the key role
and influence that the manufacturer
or client has on the process. We
therefore decided to interview a
range of different company directors
about how they work with designers.
Each has a unique business model,
and is challenging design and related
technologies by collaborating with
home-grown, and international
designers and architects.
We chose the five companies –
Case Furniture, Hitch Mylius, Izé,
Thorsten van Elten, and The Rug
Company – because they are working
at a range of different scales and
on very different sorts of design
products. The overall picture that
emerges is of an active furniture
Above: Detail of the
Lap shelving system
manufacturing scene in London.
The global economic crisis that has
by Case Furniture
forced the industry and consumers
to lower their expenditure and
investments, has not stopped
these companies’ intensive search
for new and interesting projects.
On the following pages, the
cross section of companies gives an
insight into different ways of thinking
and approaches to production. For
furniture manufacturer Case, for
example, its first step to producing
a new piece is to commission and
brief a designer. With others, such
as Thorsten van Elten and Izé, the
starting point is more organic and
informal. The relationship between
manufacturer and designer requires
a synergy, in which business is
combined and merged with creativity.
What also emerges is that
rational business planning, driven
by costs and budget issues, is often
Ω
widely influenced by entrepreneurial
intuition. This demonstrates how
the emotional element is as integral
to the business side of manufacturing
as it is to design.
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009
112Ω
Above left: The Lap CASE FURNITURE
shelving system, PAUL NEWMAN
which is available MANAGING DIRECTOR
in two sizes
COMPANY ESTABLISHED IN 1995
Above right: Director BY PAUL NEWMAN AND
Paul Newman at SHERIDAN COAKLEY
work in his west
London studio What is your company’s ethos?
Case was set up to make well-
designed, functional furniture, the
key point of difference being that its
aim was to collaborate with only one
large retail customer in each country.
When is the right moment for
a new product?
The decision to set a brief and
develop a particular product
is not about the moment as we
are not attempting to create
products that are fashionable.
I normally have a general list
of products that I’m considering.
This can be a result of many
different inputs such as seeing
a historical product, identifying
a need in my own home, or a request
from a customer, or designer. This
list of products then gets detailed
and prioritised having discussed
it with the chosen designer. For
example, with our latest product
the Lap shelving system, I wanted
to work with Marina Bautier,
as I admired her work for Idée
in Japan especially for the
elegant combination of solid timber
and sheet steel. I had a wooden
framed storage system on “my list”
so a brief was developed for Bautier
for what became Lap.
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009
Which designers do you work with?
Matthew Hilton, Robin Day,
Nazanin Kamali, Marina Bautier
and Bethan Gray.
How do you decide which designer
to commission?
I think they must primarily
be interested in function and
have a clarity and purpose that
is their own, not borrowed.
What is the first step in
commissioning a new product?
The brief.
How does the briefing process
work?
I try to make it very specific
including details such as product
type, materials, and retail price.
Usually a brief will be aimed
at a specific designer and often
a specific producer. In relation
to Lap, we were specific about size,
functional requirement, price point,
and, following an initial meeting
with Bautier, we also specified
frame material and thickness.
What are the most important
external factors that influence
a design?
I think technology is an important
factor both in terms of advancing
materials and manufacturing
techniques, but also in the way
it changes how we live. Ecological
issues are always at the forefront
of current marketing campaigns but
I think one has to filter the irrelevant
issues. For me, the key ecological
goal is to make products that have
longevity, both in terms of quality of
design and constructional durability.
To have a product in daily use for
50 years that can be passed down
to another generation is a justifiable
use of material. Another is only using
sustainable timber sources and being
extremely wary of the certification
of many exotic hardwoods.
How does the business model
for your company influence
the design?
It’s of primary importance, as is
working with designers that have
the experience and skill to design
costs out of a product while
maintaining its ethos.
How important are models and
drawings in the process of
developing a new product?
I think drawing is a fundamental
and irreplaceable skill and models
are an extension of that. I can’t
deny that computer visuals are
a massive aid in product development
but the danger is that they allow
you to “polish a turd”.
How involved do you get in the
design development?
I think it’s imperative that
for a product to be successful
its development from concept
to creation is a homogenous and
inclusive process involving all aspects
from aesthetics to business and
I think good designers understand
and appreciate this. In relation
to the Lap shelving I visited
Bautier several times in her Brussels
studio during the development
and we worked together in reaching
technical and aesthetic decisions.
Where are your products
manufactured?
Our products are almost entirely
manufactured in Europe in factories
which I visit every week. I guess
through one product development
cycle we would make approximately
five factory visits.
What are you currently working on?
The Lap shelving by Bautier, which
was launched at Milan this year.
We are very proud of all the recent
products and the Lap particularly
embodies the Case philosophy.
While it is functional, its simplicity
and elegance mask a thorough and
intelligent design process, married
to an economically sensible approach
to manufacture and packaging.
Your plans for the London Design
Festival?
We are launching Case in John Lewis
on an exclusive basis in September
and will be exhibiting in their Oxford
Street Store and also in Portobello
Dock. John Lewis has always shown
an understanding and commitment
to contemporary design (for example,
working with Robin and Lucienne
Day) and we are flattered that they
have asked us to work with them
on an exclusive basis.

HITCH MYLIUS
TRISTRAM MYLIUS
MANAGING DIRECTOR
COMPANY ESTABLISHED IN 1971
BY TRISTRAM AND HAZEL MYLIUS
What is your company’s ethos?
We aim to provide products that
stand out from the crowd through
design, quality and craftsmanship,
while offering genuine value and
reliable, attentive service.
When is the right moment for
a new product?
I don’t think there’s ever a wrong
moment to launch a new product.
For Hitch Mylius, product
development is a constant and
never-ending process involving
assessment of potential new designs
and the review of our existing
ranges. Often our product launches
have coincided with trade shows,
though a launch at any other time
is an important and useful sales tool.
Which designers do you work with?
Our current product range includes
work by a variety of designers
and architects including David
Chipperfield, Simon Pengelly,
Nigel Coates, Mueller Kneer, and
Azumi. We are currently working
on new products by Matthias
Demacker, Kazuko Okamoto
and Fabiaan van Severen.
How do you decide which designer
to commission?
On occasion, we might commission
a designer because we love his
or her work. More often, designers
approach us with a wide variety
of ideas and, once in a while,
if the chemistry is just right,
a new product will be born.
What are the most important
external factors that influence
a design?
The critical factor in all this
is the compatibility of the design
with the Hitch Mylius dna: while
our product range is quite varied,
there are consistent qualities
of proportion, detailing and
a sparseness of design that run
right across the range to define
the Hitch Mylius collection.
How does the business model for
your company influence the
design?
I was really pleased when, just over
a year ago, Demacker called me to
suggest a collaboration. Though we
had not had any previous contact,
I had seen his work with a number
of other manufacturers, either in the
press or at the Milan fair. Equally, he
was aware of our work and must have
felt there was a potential synergy. He
made an initial presentation of a
number of designs, which we finally
narrowed down to two that fired the
enthusiasm of my team and that we
felt had a sound commercial future.
How important are models and
drawings in the process of
developing a new product?
It goes without saying that models
and drawings are absolutely essential
steps on the path from concept
to production. One of the designers
we work with invariably provides us
with CAD and 3D models, and a full
set of working drawings, every detail
and component being meticulously
specified. At the other extreme,
a high-profile architect once gave
me a little squidge of orange
plasticine with four matchstick legs
as the starting point for a range
of chairs and sofas. Either way,
there is always plenty of scope for
input from the manufacturer, and
I suppose it is my job to be able
to pick up the development from
this early stage and steer it towards
final production. In Demacker’s
case, his initial design changed
considerably between concept
drawings and final product, and
while certain changes were required
for commercial reasons, it was so
important not to lose this quality.
How involved do you get in the
design development?
I love the ‘designing and making’
side of my business. I’m in the
very fortunate position, heading
a small manufacturing company,
where I can make sure that I’m
intimately involved with product
development. The designer, my
production manager and I generally
work together to fine-tune the
design through the development
and prototyping phase. I see my
input as an essential ingredient
113
in the design process, and I’m afraid Above left: Tristram
I never hold back from suggesting Mylius assessing
(or insisting on) design changes. prototypes of the
latest chair by
With the factory as my base,
Matthias Demacker
a fair proportion of my time is spent
in the prototype department. Above right: Cake,
a concept modular
Where are your products seating system
manufactured? designed by
Kazuko Okamoto
Hitch Mylius’ production, and
reputation, is centred around our
workforce of highly-skilled cutters,
sewing machinists and upholsterers
at our north-London factory
so, while many of our components
are outsourced or subcontracted to
outside suppliers, all our upholstery
work and finishing is done in-house.
What are you currently working
on?
We are working with Munich-based
designer Demacker on an extensive
seating range of which the first
pieces were launched at Design
Prima in June. These are simple,
comfortable, refined yet quietly
understated chairs: qualities
that could describe any of our
product family.
Your plans for the London Design
Festival?
Further models from Demacker’s
range will be launched during
the Autumn. This design very neatly
Ω
fills a gap in our product range:
a beautiful, comfortable, affordable,
stackable conference or dining
chair, and that’s just the start
of the collection.
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009
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Ω 115
Above left: Edwin IZE
Heathcote testing EDWIN HEATHCOTE
the working DIRECTOR
prototype of a COMPANY ESTABLISHED IN 2001
door knob by BY EDWIN HEATHCOTE AND
Terence Woodgate
DAVE BRADSHAW
Above right: Z Lever
by Eric Parry What is your company’s ethos?
Architects for Izé To reconcile the realms of
architecture, design, art and
manufacture and to create products
which shed light on and provoke
thought about the rituals of the
everyday, about material, use
and history.
When is the right moment for
a new product?
The product and the moment find us.
Which designers do you work with?
Kenneth Grange, Sergison Bates,
David Adjaye, Eric Parry, 6a,
Colin St John Wilson, Keith Williams,
Candy and Candy. More recently
with: Terence Woodgate, Zaha
Hadid, Stanton Williams, and
Martin Brudnizki.
What is the first step in
commissioning a new product?
We may approach a designer or
they might approach us, but the
first step is always an informal
conversation. In the case of
Sergison Bates, for instance,
we approached them and spent
a couple of years defining an entire
range of ironmongery. In the case
of Woodgate, who has long been
a friend, he approached us with
a fully formed idea and prototypes.
How does the briefing process
work?
It is minimal and tends to emerge
through dialogue rather than written
form. The parameters in designing
a handle are generally just common
sense, although there are a few
basic things about how the product
will function, how it is fixed and
in particular the materials and
finishes and so on. Beyond that
we’re open to ideas.
What are the most important
external factors that influence
a design?
We don’t try to impose a particular
direction on the designs, although
they are products we hope will
add something new or interesting
to what is available elsewhere. Often
they are designed for a specific
building or place and therefore
directly influenced by the ideas
inherent in the architecture.
However, that doesn’t mean they
can’t exist outside the context
that informed them.
How does the business model
for your company influence
the design?
We are in a curious position
in which the designer is often
also the specifier or customer
so perhaps we’re a little freer
than other companies. Product
designers such as Woodgate and
Grange tend to be good at subtly
tweaking norms to create something
strikingly different. Architects
on the other hand tend to design
for themselves, products they
personally would like to specify.
As an architect myself I’m happy
to accommodate either approach.
How important are models and
drawings in the process of
developing a new product?
Invaluable. The sketch is almost
always the first step, followed by
dimensioned drawings and then
a model which may be handmade
or rapid prototyped. This last stage
is critical in determining the scale
and feel of the product, but it is
the final stage. We like to work
with hand-made models, shaped
from resin but in certain instances,
such as the Hadid design, the form
is so complex and sculptural that
it is only possible to model digitally
to achieve the accuracy required.
How involved do you get in the
design development?
We remain intimately involved
in the whole design process, we
hope, as facilitators encouraging
the best possible evolution of the
design. In a handle we developed
with Candy and Candy for the One
Hyde Park apartments we were
asked to have no fixings visible
at all and a solid single-piece
backplate. That meant we needed
to engineer a complex fitting
mechanism with a pivoting centre
plate which covers over fixing holes.
Where are your products
manufactured?
In the UK and in India. We visit
the factories regularly as there
are always products in development
and production issues to discuss.
The two processes we principally
use require very different approaches.
Fabrication, which we do at our
Midlands works, does not involve
much tooling so we are able
to effectively produce a prototype
almost immediately using the final
materials, usually stainless steel.
Casting, on the other hand,
needs a model (which may be
hand made or a rapid prototype)
and then a tool made from that
model and then the final castings
via either an investment casting
or forging process.
What are you currently working
on?
We are extremely enthusiastic
about a new design by Woodgate.
It is a door knob which acts
a little like a lever but looks
like a knob. It is an extremely
simple idea and design and, because
of the deeply ingrained traditions
and expectations of the field,
it feels like a very radical object,
which surprises and delights as
you operate it. We will be launching
the product early next year.
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009
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Ω 117
Above left: The THORSTEN VAN ELTEN
Spun Stool first DIRECTOR
launched at New
COMPANY ESTABLISHED IN 2002
Designers 2008,
BY THORSTEN VAN ELTEN
and is now going
into production
What is your company’s ethos?
Above right: Products with personality.
Thorsten van
Elten in his east When is the right moment
London studio
for a new product?
If the product is right, the
moment is right.
Which designers do you
work with?
Among others: Ed Carpenter,
Alexander Taylor, Barnaby Barford,
Sam Johnson, Gitta Gschwendtner
and Richard Shed. Right now
we are working on new products
by Edward Robinson, Shunsuke
Kawaguchi and Jon Harrison.
How do you decide which
designer to commission?
It’s more of an intuition, either
it feels right or it doesn’t.
What is the first step in
commissioning a product?
I don’t really commission
products as such. Someone
shows me a product and it’s
usually an instant yes or no.
How does the briefing
process work?
To be honest, we don’t usually
set briefs, although it’s always
got to be low on development
and tooling costs. We try to
get it right the first time and
that’s what all of the products
have in common.
What are the most important
external factors that influence
a design?
Money, or, more specifically,
the lack of money is the only
thing that influences me
because I can’t develop as
many products as I want to.
How does the business model
for your company influence
the design?
It’s an automatic thing and
comes naturally because when
I pick the products I already
have an approximate retail
price in mind. Once you have
that, you can work backwards
to a cost price and decide
if it’s going to be achievable.
How important are models and
drawings in the process of
developing a new product?
I think models are possibly
more important than drawings
and they don’t have to be
elaborate models. A bit or
cardboard can go a long way
to understanding if a product
will work. Technical drawings
are obviously essential for
the manufacturing process.
How involved do you get in the
design development?
That varies greatly. At times
the product is perfect when I’ve
seen it the first time, others have
a lot of collaboration involved.
It often helps the designer to
get a completely different point
of view. One of the products
I’m currently working on, the Spun
Stool, this was almost ready for
production when I saw it at New
Designers this year. The designer,
Edward Robinson already had
quotes for tooling, and production
in a variety of finishes so all
I had to do is take over where
he left it with the supplier. All we
had to decide was on a range of
colours that would fit the product,
but also my collection. Another
product we are working on is
a tea-light holder which was more
of an idea when we saw it but
with very little thought on the
actual production process. So
we met a few times and worked
on this. Since he too is a recent
graduate it’s very important
for his development as a designer.
Where are your products
manufactured?
We try to produce whenever
possible in the UK. Factory
visits aren’t always necessary.
With regards to the Spun Stool,
the designer had already visited
the factory and had done all
the groundwork. I think
it’s important to have a good
working relationship with
factories, once they understand
the concept behind the products
or the company they are more
likely to give us the results
we require.
What are you currently
working on?
I feel like I’m in the middle of a
change in direction, a more grown
up direction. I question my reasons
for producing more products that
the world doesn’t really need. But
in a throwaway society I still want
to bring products to the market
that have longevity and bring
people pleasure for a long time.
One of which is the Sunset Over
the Horizon Tea Light Holder
by Shunsuke Kawaguchi and the
Spun Stool by Robinson, which
we hope to launch later on this
year. I thought the Spun Stool had
a great character and longevity. It
is using a very old and traditional
production process to create
a new and current product,
whichis where I would like
to go.We are not and will never
be a high-tech company.
What are your plans
for this year’s London
Design Festival?
Sea-Change: The Dock, W10,
21-27 September.
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009
118 Ω
THE RUG COMPANY
Above left: THE RUG COMPANY
Christopher Sharp CHRISTOPHER SHARP
during a trip to
CEO
Nepal, following
the rug production
COMPANY ESTABLISHED IN 1997 BY
CHRISTOPHER AND SUZANNE SHARP
Above right: One
of the four designs What is your company’s ethos?
by Tom Dixon To make the most beautiful, original
to be presented and ethical handmade rugs.
at the London
Design Festival
When is the right moment for a new
product?
It’s a very intuitive process. If you
are true to your instincts you have
a better chance of making the right
choices. We know when something is
interesting, challenging and original
and when we are being tempted to
launch products for the wrong reasons
or at the wrong time. It’s essential
to balance financial and artistic value.
Which designers do you work with?
We have worked with more than
40 different designers. We are
currently doing new collections with
Paul Smith, Alexander McQueen, Tom
Dixon, Jaime Hayon, and Giles Deacon.
How do you decide which designer
to commission?
Suzanne and I need to believe
that they will bring something that
is innovative and original to our
existing collections; unless they
can, irrespective of who they are,
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009
we’re not interested. Handmade
rugs are incredibly durable, so I like
to remind them that their rugs will
be part of their enduring legacy so
they need to be extraordinarily good.
What is the first step in
commissioning a new product?
Discussion. We know a bit about
making rugs so we start by explaining
the process and available materials.
We want to talk about possibilities
rather than limitations; we want
the designer to feel unrestricted
by the medium. The more we engage,
the more imaginative the ideas will
be. It’s a journey. Often, the longer
the journey, the better the story.
How does the briefing process
work?
Rather than giving a formulated brief
we like to visit the designers’ studios
and get them to spend time with
us, we want them to understand
both the company and us. We really
want them to engage with the
process and understand the medium.
What are the most important
external factors that influence
a design?
Different designers have different
factors. The best fashion designers are
both commercial and artistic. They
understand print and colour and are
brilliantly decisive. Product designers
are often more concerned with
functionality. They want to explore
the materials and the manufacturing
process, they have a real sense that
each piece is part of their own legacy.
How does the business model for
your company influence the design?
It’s important they understand
our customers. It’s unlikely that
a designer would have become
successful without an ability to excite
their own customers: we often already
share the same customers but in a
different medium. We don’t want the
price point to be an influence
on their designing process. The two
main factors that affect price are knot
count and the material used. If the
rug requires very fine detail the knot
count will be high, the time taken to
weave it longer and the price higher.
How important are models and
drawings in the process of
developing a new product?
Our designers will usually submit their
work as a drawing, either computer
generated or hand drawn.
How involved do you get in the
design development?
Generally, designers are not used to
working with a product that is really
affected by the craft of its production.
It is this that makes handmade
rugs so beautiful, the weaver plays
a huge part in the result; it’s a true
collaboration between the craftsman
and designer. For our collaboration
with Dixon we experimented with
various ideas and it took a year
to get to the point where we felt we
had something special. He’s patient.
Where are your products
manufactured?
The majority of our rugs are made
in Nepal. Someone from the company
will visit every couple of months.
We have developed a close friendship
and understanding with our weavers
and there is a constant stream
of emails and phone calls all day.
Before embarking on making
a finished rug there will be a period
of sampling, and as a result of this
process, for example, Dixon changed
his designs completely.
What are you currently working on?
We are just about to launch
a collection with Dixon. He is
a pleasure to work with, he says what
he thinks, and is an intelligent man.
Your plans for the London Design
Festival?
We are launching the new four-
piece collection with Tom Dixon
at The Dock, W10.
Design: www.fuwagardner.com Image: The Neighbourhood / John Maclean Photography

Create your environment

24–27 September 2009
Earls Court London
Save £20 – register free
before 18th September at
www.100percentdesign.co.uk

>>EXHIBITION
TELLING TALES:
FANTASY AND FEAR IN
CONTEMPORARY DESIGN
14 July-18 October
V&A, SW7
Review by John Makepeace
John Makepeace To earnest British designers, Telling
has run his own Tales is counter-intuitive. Nothing
furniture studio
could be further from the minimalist
since 1961. With
the Furniture thinking that took so long to gain
Makers Company, acceptance in Britain. This new wave
he has initiated the has largely come from the Design
V&A’s forthcoming Academy in Eindhoven, but has
Furniture Futures found a receptive audience in
symposium, on
London, which is an international
18 September
hub for designers, as well as auction
Above: Fig Leaf houses and DesignArt galleries.
wardrobe by The V&A’s curator, Gareth
Tord Boontje, 2008 Williams, has assembled a powerful
reminder of the emotions that can
Below: Part of be conveyed by furniture; and the
Nissen Adams’
splendidly theatrical presentation by
exhibition design in
the Heaven and London-based architecture practice
Hell section, Nissen Adams, in collaboration with
showing Kelly stage lighting specialist Zerlina
McCallum’s Do You Hughes, helps to give coherence to
Hear What I Hear, the curatorial themes distilled from
and Wieki Somers’
this group of designers.
china skull High
Tea Pot
Just as the advertising industry
has explored the concept of
wrapping consumer products in
stories, it seems the gene has
escaped to give designers – and
curators – a fresh approach.
Although this raises questions about
the validity of the ‘narrative’ for the
exhibition, it certainly contributes
to the interpretation of the objects.
Here storytelling supplements
drawing as a means of discovering
and revealing fresh insights.
DAVID LAMBERT
121
The exhibition is arranged into
three scenarios: The Forest Glade,
a space of childhood myths and
REVIEW
fairytales; The Enchanted Castle,
a satirical take on status symbols;
and Heaven and Hell, a look at
mortality through the embrace of
psychoanalysis and exploration of
dreams, memories and the
unconscious. In the past, the works
shown here have tended to be
displayed in white-walled galleries
and treated as individual pieces of
artistic inspiration rather than being
evaluated and compared. For me,
though, there are some familiar and
outstanding highlights in this show
that have never been displayed so
dramatically before. These will, I
believe, become ‘landmarks’ in the
history of furniture, objects of
imagination, invention and
uncompromising quality.
The first section, The Forest
Glade, features work by designers
such as Julia Lohman, Maarten Baas
and Tomáš Gabzdil Libertiny. Among
these, the Fig Leaf wardrobe by
Tord Boontje really does speak of
fantasy, and could well have been a
catalyst for at least this section of
the exhibition. Part of the
idiosyncratic Meta collection by
Malletts, the piece exudes a
commanding presence. Boontje’s One of the standout works in the Their expressionistic symbolism
desire to express romance, nature second stage of the exhibition is often alludes to their Dutch heritage.
and dreams through design comes Jeroen Verhoeven’s Cinderella table, The third and final component of
across, as does his fascination with which was first seen in 2005, and the exhibition, Heaven and Hell, is
the decorative potential of craft has now appeared in Carrara marble. as disturbing as it is disjointed: the
processes: the wardrobe is covered in It has a similar fairytale aesthetic to curators describe it as containing
616 hand-painted enamelled copper Boontje’s work, although, instead of work ‘by designers concerned with
leaves, which surround a lost cast an essay in hand-crafting, this table themes of mortality and the
patinated bronze tree. is an astonishing evocation of how afterlife,’ yet the dark tone seems to
digital techniques for conceiving and relate far more closely to Hell than
realising ideas can transform what Heaven. One exemplar is The Lovers
is possible. With two contemporaries rug by Fredrikson Stallard, which
at Eindhoven, Verhoeven formed comprises a pair of conjoined pools
Demakersvan (which translates of poured red urethane, symbolising
as ‘the makers of...’ ). ‘We are plain the average quantity of blood in
but love the impossible. We respect two people. The fear of death,
the old but want the new. We judgement and Hell, while no longer
believe in fusing talented writers, a life-long burden, have been
filmmakers, artists and scientists replaced, it seems, by more earthly
to create a super storyteller,’ he says. horrors and a living narrative. Fear,
The work demonstrates how infusing whether an irrational creation of our
an item of furniture with a narrative imagination, or a response to real
is a way that new technology and events, can haunt us all.
artists from various disciplines can Certainly, the exhibition stirs
be brought together. strong feelings, a response to be
This section also contains the expected, given the steady march of
work of husband and wife duo Job bland design through the last
Smeets and Nynke Tynagel of Studio century. It is hugely relevant to
Job, who are represented by several those who are passionate about the
items of furniture and ceramics. future of furniture design and
The Robber Baron collection of a making. Word has it that visitors
cast-bronze table, lamp, jewel safe, from the other side of the world are
clock and cabinet illustrates their coming to London for that purpose
use of extravagant materials in a alone. As the overall impact of
parody of status, industrial wealth, Telling Tales, can be overwhelming,
warfare and the corruption of power. it’s worth a second visit too.
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009
 123
>>BOOK intimately overlap as great efforts
are made to dedicate space for the
ARTISTS’ STUDIOS
production of art.
By M J Long
Camden Town artist Frank
Black Dog Publishing, £24.95 Auerbach said of Long’s conversion
Review by Adrian Friend of his studio, a 4.8m cube, in 1990:
‘it was really tact and imagination
Adrian Friend M J Long’s book is a wonderful insight that turned a very limited space into
is director of Friend into the repackaging of everyday the biggest possible clear area to work
and Company households into spaces that are and a proper sleeping area, bathroom
architects in
compact, but large enough for an and kitchen. It’s a sort of miracle.’
London. He also
runs the second
artist’s studio. The book, which is Entry into many of the spaces
year design studio appropriately bound in uncoated, is celebrated with a stepped access,

ESTATE OF GORDON HOUSE

at Nottingham grey millboard, features 13 studios
University’s school that Long has designed for artists –
of architecture who were mostly friends of her and her
late husband Colin St John Wilson –
between 1975 and the present.
Right: Exterior of a
studio designed by In an eloquent, though poignantly
M J Long for artist brief, introduction, Wilson (who died
Gordon House in 2007) writes that the design
of each studio is ‘akin to a portrait of
the artist built upon close observation
and friendship’.
The common feature of many
of the designs is their inventiveness
and economy. Stairs become spaces
to sleep under or snooze within,
in preparation for a nocturnal burst
of activity. Kitchens and bathrooms
deliberately allowing a view over the
art in different stages of production,
before stepping down into the studio,
as demonstrated in the library
mezzanine added to the Inshaw Studio
in 2005. In the Kitaj studio, 1975,
the ceiling of an enclosed staircase,
which leads down to the basement
studio, forms a stepped bookcase on
the ground floor. This bookcase rises
like a stair to some imaginary portal
in the corner of the living room.
Indeed, one realises that in every
project, Long was celebrating the act
of making art with the details: the
overlapping kitchen and paint-palette
counter in the Blake Chapel Studio,
1990; the built-in guest room bed
in the Inshaw Studio; the sentinel-like
mezzanine structure in Huxley/Allen
Studio. These are all examples of
a clever micro-architecture that seems
immensely satisfying and something
the next generation can learn from.
Success for many of the studios
seems to lie in their unobtrusiveness,
as Auerbach explained in a summing
up of his studio world: ‘some people
were worried about getting rid of all
the paint on the floor, but it was
picturesque for other people. For me,
it was just a condition of life.’ It is
this architect-controlled ordinariness
that is most fascinating about the
book and most apparent in the last
of the studio projects, the Porthmeor
Studios in St Ives, begun in 1997:
a humble and rich interplay of light
and shade, art and architecture.

>>EXHIBITION cobwebs, normally seen teased by air

CHARLES LEDRAY:
MENS SUITS
11 July-20 September
The Fire Station, W1
Review by Elice Catmull
Right and below: For three years, American artist Charles
LeDray’s Mens Suits, LeDray has been meticulously crafting
which is set in a Mens Suits, his first exhibition in the
disused fire station UK, commissioned by Artangel. Sitting
in Marylebone
in a disused fire station, three ‘scenes’
suggest the interiors of charity shops.
Without walls and with their own
miniature floor tiles, the little replicas
sit directly on the floor. Each has
a ceiling, suspended below shoulder
height. By crouching down to peer
into the scenes, you can get a sense
of the level of detail: polystyrene
ceiling tiles come complete with
conditioning units in office buildings.
Within this floor-and-ceiling
sandwich, the self-taught artist has
hand sewn garments, each of which
is smaller than reality, but too large
to be dolls’ clothes. They are hung and
placed on carefully crafted furniture,
which, apart from the scale, are exact
copies of common shop furnishings.
The attention to detail is astounding:
LeDray has even arranged dust above
the ceilings, to represent the spaces
the cleaner couldn’t reach.
The first scene resembles a sorting
room or basement of a thrift store.
Garments are piled on small-scale
ironing boards and a dirty sock is
slung over a crate. The second is an
interior in which two circular racks
support suit jackets on hangers and a
central table has a layer of neatly
folded tops. The final scene is of a
more organised interior, with a table
of assorted ties and a mannequin in
a suit that looks fit for a used-car
salesman.
It is this stereotyping and
familiarity that connects one to the
exhibition. I often found myself
picturing the people who once owned
the clothes: a hanging suit jacket
reminded me of the businessman
with a grey-speckled beard I had seen
on the train that morning. The clothes
also begin to embody issues such
as rich and poor, and old and young,
and serves to show the effect clothing
has on our judgement of others.
Rather than being displayed on
podiums and raised to eye-level, there
was something very surreal about
the way the scenes lay on the floor,
forcing visitors stoop to see them.
In the dark and cold room, the three
scenes created pools of yellowy light,
like marooned dreams. I raised a smile
at the subtlety of the little sets that
are so modest they could be mistaken
for being the standard decor of any
fire station. Peering down at them
was like spying on another world
or witnessing a scene from a story.
It is hard to ignore the absence
of people. There are clues to their
presence, however: black rubber
marks where carts had stocked the
shop; clothes strewn in the sorting
area, and a vest unfolded in the shop,
where someone must have looked
at it, but then decided against buying.
Is the shop closed for the night with
everyone returning to their families?
Or is it something worse? Perhaps
a post-apocalyptic scene, where
no one is alive and the clothes are
left as traces of identity?
Whatever one’s interpretation,
LeDray seems to invite it. The
incredible detail is proof of the careful
choices the artist has made, arranging
clues and allowing the visitor
to play detective. This is more than
a collection of ‘cute’ garments. Mens
Suits can take on many different
meanings, depending on the stories
we choose to give them.

BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009

124

>>EXHIBITION
MODELL BAUHAUS
22 July-4 October
Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin
Review by Jim Hudson

Right: Chezweitz Given the importance of the Bauhaus

and Roseapple’s as a founding institution for 20th-
almost faultless century modernism, it’s surprising
exhibition design,
that so few retrospectives have
here featuring
Johannes Itten’s
been held, and certainly nothing
Tower of Fire approaching the scale and ambition

ALL IMAGES: ARGE MODELL BAUHAUS; PHOTOGRAPHER: JIRKA JANSCH

sculpture of Modell Bauhaus. The exhibition
sets its sights high: a reappraisal
Below: László of the Bauhaus legacy that both
Moholy-Nagy's acknowledges and critiques the brand
Light-Space
it has become. It brings together more
Modulator
than 1,000 objects from New York’s
Museum of Modern Art and the three
major German Bauhaus collections:
the Bauhaus Archive Berlin, the
Bauhaus Foundation Dessau and
the Weimar Classical Foundation.
The timing is apposite: 2009 is
the 90th anniversary of the founding
of the Bauhaus, and also the 20th
anniversary of the fall of the Berlin
Wall, a division which kept much of
this collection apart in the post-war
period. Coincidentally, 2009 is also
the 80th birthday of the New York
MoMA, which became a home for many
members of the Bauhaus after they
fled the Third Reich, holding the first
Bauhaus retrospective there in 1938.
With so much material, Modell
Bauhaus could easily have been
overwhelming, viewed only as an
endless display of objects removed
from their context. To counter this,
the curators have been keen to
emphasize that the Bauhaus was
not a static design office turning
out branded products, but rather
a continually evolving and changing
project. Its brief, 14-year life saw
THE TERM ‘MODELL’
SIGNIFIES THE
BAUHAUS’ INTENTION TO
CREATE MODEL DESIGNS,
BUT ALSO TO ESTABLISH
ITSELF AS A MODEL FOR
OTHER INSTITUTIONS
three directors (Walter Gropius,
Hannes Meyer and Mies van der Rohe),
and three consecutive homes (Weimar,
Dessau and finally Berlin), due
in part to constant attack from
the reactionary right. It was also
not always harmonious. Gropius
began early on to turn away from the
Bauhaus' founding idea – a modern
equivalent of a group of medieval
craftsmen – towards an alliance
of art with technology, disappointing
many of its co-founders. The ever-
apolitical Mies utterly rejected
Meyer’s communist leanings.
The 18 rooms are arranged
chronologically, with each room
focusing on a different aspect of the
Bauhaus' design output and its
changing nature. The rooms also follow
a gradually changing colour scheme
representing each year with a different
hue, the order based on Bauhaus tutor
Johannes Itten's Colour Sphere.
The design, by Berlin-based
Chezweitz and Roseapple, is almost
faultless, apart from the slightly
cluttered and strangely 1970s feel
of the final room, which features
various examples of Mies’ tubular steel
furniture, confusingly set against too
many mirrors and dark, wooden
panelling. Occasionally, you can’t help
feeling that you’re in a branch of
Habitat, with tableware and lamps
displayed in minimalist surroundings,
although this says more about the
long-term influence of the Bauhaus’
designs than any failure in the
exhibition’s approach.
There was always a tension
between mass production and elitism
at the Bauhaus; its slogan under
Meyer was ‘the needs of the people,
not the dictates of luxury’, and it is
ironic that a strictly limited-edition
Mart Stam S43 chair is being produced
as an exhibition tie-in. This paradox
is acknowledged as part of the show
with Christine Hill’s tongue-in-cheek
contemporary installation, DIY
Bauhaus, where visitors are given
advice on how to bring Bauhaus
style into their homes.
The exhibition really comes alive,
though, when it focuses less on the
domestic design objects and more
on the Bauhaus’s overlapping work
in advertising, sculpture, theatre
and architecture, reminding you
what an incredible scope of activities
the Bauhaus encompassed in striving
for total art.
László Moholy-Nagy's Light-Space
Modulator is placed in a translucent
cube in a darkened room, with
coloured lighting playing fantastical
shadows over the cube’s surface from
within. Nearby, video screens play
re-stagings of Bauhaus theatre and
dance pieces, one of which features
a robotic figure performing an early
but unmistakable moonwalk. A new
model of Mies' famously unbuilt (and
equally unbuildable) glass skyscraper
for Berlin's Friedrichstrasse is a stark
contrast to the lacklustre new building
going up on the same site today.
The term ‘Modell’ in the title
is translated as ‘conceptual model’,
signifying both the Bauhaus’ intention
to create model designs, but also
to establish itself as a model for
other institutions. With such ambition
to present a new perspective on the
Bauhaus, it’s disappointing that the
explanatory text is so limited.
Generally, each room has a single
board of text with individual objects
labelled only with name and designer.
Despite the curators’ efforts to the
contrary, there’s also a risk that Modell
Bauhaus could imply an unrealistic
neatness and continuity. But despite
this the show is not to be missed.
Given that the last major Bauhaus
retrospective was in Stuttgart in 1968,
and that the forthcoming New York
version will be in much reduced form,
the sheer scale and completeness
of Modell Bauhaus is unlikely to be
repeated for many years. ‘More is
more’, as Mies wouldn’t have said.

BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009

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 127
>>BOOK with modern movement ideals: the
reaction to industrialisation as well
BRITAIN’S NEW TOWNS: as the embrace of technology, of
GARDEN CITIES artisan ideals and industrial processes,
TO SUSTAINABLE and of suburban neighbourhoods
COMMUNITIES and megastructures.
By Anthony Alexander Town planner Patrick Abercrombie,
Routledge, £29.99 an elitist central figure in the
Review by Alastair Donald new town movement, combined
the traditionalist Council for the
Alastair Donald When Ebenezer Howard – clerk, Preservation of Rural England’s (CPRE)
is a writer, urban utopian thinker, inventor and reaction to the democratisation
designer, researcher, spiritualist – attended a séance of the countryside, with a modernist
and co-founder of
in 1926, he apparently received emphasis on urbanity. The modernising
ManTowNHuman
a message from his first wife: ‘you sensibilities evident in some civic
Right: View of have accomplished more than you architecture jarred with poor-quality
central Milton know’. It’s unclear what the former
Keynes, which Mrs Howard would think of the New WHEN ARCHITECTS TALK
features in
Alexander’s book
Town descendents of the garden city
movement, which Howard initiated.
OF ‘FALLEN UTOPIAS’
When architects and planners IT’S NOT DIFFICULT
talk of ‘fallen utopias’, however, TO DETECT THEIR
it’s not difficult to detect their
disappointment. This narrative DISAPPOINTMENT
of the New Towns programme aims
to learn the lessons. housing, materials, and public services. short. Even in Milton Keynes, which civic, civilised, civilisation’. Civic
Using a wide range of sources, Even as newspapers highlighted bold experimented with urban designs that ambition is something more than
the book nicely brings out the myriad experiments and dream towns, William reflected the transport of the age, the instrumental aims of today’s
tensions that characterised the New Beveridge, chairman of Newton the experiments didn’t go far enough. community architects. The humanising
Towns programme. Post-war optimism, Aycliffe New Town Development Ultimately, the central tension in aspirations that motivated Gibberd
exemplified by bright, cartoonish warned Aycliffe’s first occupants that the text reflects Alexander’s belief that to filter the landscape through urban
public service films like Charley his offer was a life with ‘no gardens, ‘sustainable communities’ inherit the Harlow are a world away from the
in New Town and the pioneering few roads, no shops and surrounded new town’s tradition. Yet management- sustainable demands for green
spirit of the new towners, co-existed by a sea of mud’. speak about targets for Sustainable infrastructure: effectively to protect
with continued rationing, and Yet the new towners refused Communities as ‘diverse… inclusive, nature from human communities.
a paternalistic state that was driving to be trapped in the mud. A spirited well planned, built and run’, compare The new town experiments might
through extensive new controls independence and the opportunities poorly with the ambition expressed not have always worked, or been taken
over development. of automobility increasingly by Lord Reith, chair of the New Towns far enough. But the sense of ambition
All are writ large in the undermined planners’ desire for the Committee from 1945, of conducting that the book captures, and which
architectural and urban design self-containment of neighbourhood ‘an essay in civilisation’, and later motivated valuable experiments with
experiments of the day. Alexander and town. Here we glimpse where by architect and landscape designer urban arrangements and architectural
captures the fusion of garden cities the new towns experiments really fell Frederick Gibberd: ‘citizenship, civil, forms, is worth recovering.

>>EXHIBITION tenement flats for the tradesmen,

terraces for the foremen and
THE CLYDE: FILMS OF detached villas for the managers.
THE RIVER 1912-1971 Each played a role in what seems
20 June-20 September to have been a finely regulated
The Lighthouse, Glasgow system, and yet the good times
Review by Ellie Herring were not to last.
Once famously known as the
‘Second City of the Empire’, Glasgow
Right: Scene Given that the Lighthouse is currently had always been precariously
from Seaward, facing a crisis – namely, the threat of dependent on its river; indeed
The Great Ships, closure over financial mismanagement the two identities were so interwoven
an Oscar-winning
– it seems somewhat ironic that that it seems, in hindsight,
COURTESY OF SCOTTISH SCREEN ARCHIVE, NLS

film from 1960

the subject of one of its current inevitable that when bad times hit
exhibitions is the equally tragic the Clyde,the shockwaves would
decline of Glasgow’s river, the Clyde. reverberate throughout the city.
Yet in contrast to the Lighthouse, By the late 1950s, the city’s ship
whose fate remains to be sealed, construction was in serious decline,
the industrial productivity of the due in part to a fall in demand for
Clyde already belongs to the past, transatlantic liners and inefficient
as this show reveals. work practices. The yards had been
A partnership exhibition between warned: rationalise or go out of
the Lighthouse and the Scottish of transatlantic liners being launched by tramlines, the primary purpose business. Yet despite modernisation
Screen Archive, The Clyde: Films and jolly daytrips ‘doon the watter’. of which was to transport the city’s and investment, one yard after
of the River 1912-1971 features Although on the surface, these workers down to the shipyards. another closed, and Glasgow
a selection of professional and subjects may appear out of place in a They show virtually unrecognisable was forced to give up her proud
amateur films documenting the rare design centre, this modest exhibition sections of the Clyde in the city shipbuilding industries. It’s difficult
and everyday events that punctuated reveals the direct – and indirect – centre, swollen with ships, their to imagine that the tragedy of the
life in Glasgow during this period. impact of the river on the surrounding sheer bulk dwarfing passers-by. Clyde could have been prevented,
Scenes of men riveting steel follow urban architecture. The films throw Even its housing reflects the particularly as so many other cities
on from clips of royal visits, footage light on a landscape criss-crossed hierarchy of the workforce – across Britain suffered a similar fate.

BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009

128
>>INSTALLATION
SERPENTINE GALLERY
PAVILION
12 July-18 October
Kensington Gardens, W2
Review by Robin Wilson
Robin Wilson The merits of individual pavilions
is a writer and aside, the Serpentine Gallery
a member of two
pavilion programme has, over the last
art practices
Photolanguage and decade, presented a level of diversity
Experimental Group. in architectural style and philosophy
He teaches at the that stands in stark contrast to the
Bartlett School UK’s architectural scene itself. In
of Architecture, commissioning the Japanese architect
and at Nottingham
SANAA (Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue
and Bristol schools
Nishizawa) for this year’s pavilion,
of architecture
the Serpentine’s curators have
Above right and successfully reasserted a core
below: SANAA’s principle of the programme, namely,
Serpentine Pavilion, to introduce us to the unfamiliar.
which reasserts Lesser known to the UK audience
the gallery’s core
than the likes of Zaha Hadid,
programme and
establishes Daniel Libeskind and Frank Gehry,
a strong link with SANAA’s work represents design that
the landscape has genuinely evolved in response
to different social and environmental
contexts. SANAA has achieved
international commissions in recent
years, with major projects in New
York, Spain and Germany. The
pavilion, however, has some of its
closest precedents in earlier projects
in the provincial landscapes of Japan,
such as the remarkable Park Cafe
in Ibaraki Prefecture, 1998.
SANAA’s project responds to its
parkland context more than any of the
previous pavilions. The use of minimal
component dimensions (40mm and
60mm columns support a 25mm roof
plane) in the creation of a largely
open structure achieves continuity
with the wider landscape rather than
the creation of a distinct form within
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009
it. It resists identification as
a landmark or a singular destination,
and is more akin to an architectural
continuation of movement through
the park. SANAA makes the most of
the topographic change on the site.
The pavilion’s screed floor follows
the gentle slope of lawn away from
the gallery, while the aluminium-clad
roof has its own 3D topography, lifting
and compressing the internal space.
Images of the pavilion tend to
overstate the impact of the curvilinear
form of the canopy. On site, while
one has a strong sense of the whole
space and the field of activity that
takes place within it, the building
does not impose itself as a complete
figure. The architects have previously
spoken of their wish for their buildings
to present new impressions with
each visit, and that knowledge
of a building should equate to
a ‘gathering of experiences’. They
have also remarked on how perception
within a building is beyond their
control, subject to too many variables.
The pavilion’s structural and material
precision is not directed toward the
achievement of given, experiential
effects and a definitive image, but
the opening up of perceptual play.
Looking back at earlier SANAA
projects it is clear that in its work
for the Serpentine, it has taken the
opportunity for experimentation
associated with the history of pavilion
construction. In the Ibaraki Park
Cafe 60.5mm columns generate
an internal space with similar levels
of transparency to the new pavilion.
In contrast, however, this earlier
project rigorously adheres to the
rectilinear grid characteristic of the
modernist pavilion. In the cafe,
columns and vertical mirror partitions
organise the Ibaraki landscape
views into a distinctly more formal, if
ALL IMAGES: IWAN BAAN
complex, regime of framing. Moreover,
SANAA’s commentary on the work
of that period expressed considerable
caution in the use of the curve within
architecture, as an element that
demands extreme care in execution.
At the Serpentine, in shifting
away from the grid in favour of
different ‘pools’ of transparent space,
SANAA has produced an innovative
response to the complexity of the
pavilion brief itself. They have
subtly spread the different functions
of the building apart beneath the
canopy rather than create a single,
multi-use space characteristic
of many of its predecessors. Boundaries
and thresholds of varying weight
introduce these adjacent zones,
from the edge of the screed floor
to free-standing acrylic walls.
The ubiquity of the pavilion’s
curve would also seem to derive
from the impulse to collapse the
separation of landscape and building.
The different elements of its
programme – cafe, lecture space,
casual seating and circulation –
are placed within different zones
of a meandering route. The material
language of the older Park Cafe
is reconfigured in the pavilion into
a more dynamic topography and one
that more thoroughly internalises
the experience of landscape within
its layers. One might gaze through the
depth of the building and across layers
of programme to view the parkland.
In an essay in last year’s
catalogue reflecting on the modern
history of pavilion building,
Beatriz Colomina suggested that
experimentation through the pavilion
ultimately ‘becomes collective’,
with architects successively learning
from one another. The subtlety of the
SANAA pavilion’s experimentation
is only fully revealed on site. A key
lesson of the pavilion concerns the
need to bear witness to architectural
space and not to rely on the culture
of the media image that we so readily
mistake for architecture.
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Ω
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SPECIAL
FOCUS

GERMAN
DESIGN
2009
A selection of the best products
and furniture from Germany
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 INTRODUCTION
CONTENTS These days, it’s difficult to characterise
the design output of an individual, let alone
a whole country. So it would be a grave error
for me to attempt to sum up German furniture

ON CHAIR: IDEA TO PRODUCT 134 and product design in this short introduction.
As if to prove the futility of such a task,
it’s interesting to note that the only company
in the world still making products by Germany’s
KARCHER DESIGN 136 greatest living designer Dieter Rams is
Vitsoe, which has its head office in London’s
Camden Town.

WILKHAHN 138 Rams’ work will be honoured by an exhibition

at the London Design Museum
this autumn. His approach and philosophy
(‘less, but better’) has become a guiding principle
ASSMANN BÜROMÖBEL 140 for sustainable design all around the world.
The connection between Rams’ designs for Braun
and Jonathan Ive’s work for Apple is

DAUPHIN HUMAN DESIGN 142 well documented, and in this issue of Blueprint
we feature the UK launch of a new collection
of housewares, Plus Minus Zero, by Japanese
designer Naoto Fukasawa, who is also hugely
GAGGENAU 144 indebted to Rams.
Another example of the global importance
of German design is the Bauhaus, and with
KFF 146 a major new retrospective at Berlin’s Martin-
Gropius-Bau, it’s a good time to acknowledge
its huge influence. More than 100 of the exhibits
in the show are held by MoMA, New York, the
PRONORM 148 city where many Bauhaus émigrés made their
home shortly before the Second World War.
This special focus on German furniture
SIEMATIC 150 and products is particularly opportune, as recent
reports show a recovery in the German economy.
Over the page you’ll find lots more positive
news from the heart of the Eurozone, beginning
with the remarkable ON chair by Wilkhahn.

Vicky Richardson, editor, Blueprint

BLUEPRINT
134
ON
CHAIR
IDEA
TO
PRODUCT
THE INFLUENTIAL
GERMAN OFFICE FURNITURE
COMPANY, WILKHAHN, IS ABOUT
TO LAUNCH A NEW SWIVEL CHAIR.
NICOLE ROBINSON DISCOVERS
THAT THE FIVE YEARS OF
RESEARCH THAT WENT INTO
IT HAS RESULTED IN A
REMARKABLE DESIGN
BLUEPRINT SPECIAL FOCUS ON GERMAN DESIGN 2009
This Autumn, Wilkhahn is set to reveal
its new office chair, ON. The chair is said
to mimic natural mobility with three-
dimensional movements. Put simply,
it moves in any direction you do. Instead
of differentiating between correct and
incorrect sitting positions, its ergonomic
approach introduces unrestricted
movement as the ideal principle for long-
term seating furniture. The kinematics
behind ON are based on the interaction
between the mechanics, elasticity of
materials and the geometry of the seat
shell. Developers divided the mechanism
into two halves, which created two
independently mobile swivel arms.
Wilkhahn wanted to create a milestone
in office swivel seating, to change the way
people think about a good sitting position
and to refine ergonomics. To accomplish
this, a team of designers, engineers and
other product development specialists
spent more than five years doing extensive
preliminary studies: dismantling chairs
and exploring the science of kinematics.
This intensive research and design
process was set in place to develop
an end-product that was simple. But
systemic change doesn’t happen overnight
and the company needed to reorganise
itself around the process. ‘We’ve started
organising and structuring ourselves
in such a way that more weight is given
to the pre-development phase and we
can take a project-oriented approach,’
says Jochen Hahne, Wilkhahn’s
managing director.
First, a thorough analysis of the
market was undertaken, including the
limits of technical feasibility and the needs
of the individual users. Reviewing products
already available, especially those claiming
special ergonomic features, the team
dismantled a series of well-known chairs,
analysed their movement, investigated
their ergonomics and assessed the
complexity of each chair’s assembly.
‘By trying and testing the widest
possible variety of approaches, the team
gradually progressed towards the best
solution,’ says Lars Quadejacob of Design
Report, a branch of the German Design
Council that has produced a report
on the process.
All of this happened in one very
secure and confidential project room,
to which Hahne admits, even he doesn’t
have a key. The insight from the existing
chairs was converted into charts, polarity
profiles and mood boards. These gradually
filled the walls of the project room,
along with lists of statistics, sketches,
press clippings, material samples,
design models and occasional curios
like a toothbrush with flexible handle,
or a pair of flippers. The team hunted
for the simplest technical solutions
for highly complex requirements.
Inevitably, spending five years
developing a new product yields better
results than spending less time. But, in
addition, the lengthy process and extra
energy has helped identify concepts that
may not have made the cut for ON, but
Wilkhahn intends to put to use in the future.
‘The process of finding solutions
 135

Far left: The first for the kinematics, the development

prototype simulated the of the other chair components and the
seat depth with lengths design all meshed with one another
of metal measuring tape
instead of following on each other’s
Left: The ON chair moves heels as is usually the case,’ says
in three dimensions and Armin Scharf of Design Report. The
has independently integrated process actually shortened
moveable armrests the development time, improved the
quality and saved cost-intensive
Above: The chair is finely
amendments, he says.
detailed after a five-year
In 2006 the team presented three
development process
concepts and evaluated them with the
management and marketing division,
narrowing it down to a seat that moves
in three dimensions and a synchronously
reacting backrest, plus the independently
movable swivel armrests. At this time,
Wiege, Wilkhahn’s design subsidiary,
stepped in.
‘The special nature of the chair’s
mobility had to be transported via the
swivel arms,’ explains Michael Englisch,
head of the design team. Supports
along the sides of the chair connect
the mechanics with the backrest, and
integrate the armrests. It was an idea
born at an early stage that saved material
and tooling costs. It took months to
refine the initial, hurriedly sketched idea.
‘At some point the classic
methods just weren’t getting us any
further, so we decided to switch to
clay models,’ says Englisch. ‘Once we
had the possibility of creating freeform
models, things started moving rapidly.’

ON will be launched in the UK

this September

SPECIAL FOCUS ON GERMAN DESIGN 2009 BLUEPRINT

 (*.

SPECIAL FOCUS ON GERMAN DESIGN 2009 BLUEPRINT

 (*/

Innovation Architecture by social behaviour and largely by

WILKHAHN At heart, we are a manufacturing
Wilkhahn Forum London company and there is no attempt
Morelands to conceal our desire to excel in
5-23E Old Street everything we do. We achieve this
London through innovation, constantly pushing
EC1V 9HL the envelope in terms of materials
t: +44 (0)20 7324 2900 technology and by challenging accepted
e: info@wilkhahn.co.uk conventions. In 1980 a new global
w: www.wilkhahn.com benchmark for dynamic sitting was
drawn; the FS Line was not only a
milestone in the company’s history,
it also underscored a commitment to
‘Good Industrial Design’ that continues
to this day. The FS Line was the most
flexible, versatile and supportive
seating device that was possible at the
time. The introduction of ON now
thirty years later permits Wilkhahn to
positively influence the fate of all office
based sedentary workers.
Sustainability
At Wilkhhan we strive to develop
lasting products, increase their utility
value and reduce waste. “Less is
more” or “reduce to the max” are
the guiding principles that Wilkhahn
translates into future contexts every
time anew. Ecologically oriented
design principles are a natural, integral
part of product development. As long
ago as 1992 Wilkhahn introduced its
first ecological design concept, the
Picto series. Comprising only eight
materials, none of which were non-
recyclable composites, Picto ensured
the company’s goal of environmental
responsibility had a highly visible
beacon.
Architecture is a dominant theme in face-to-face communication. For
Wilkhahn’s everyday activities; we organisations of any size the integration
rely upon the profession to endorse of communication-relevant places within
and express our product design spatial structures is one of the key tasks
proposals, and our own location needs involved in future-oriented architectural
to be protected by compatible and planning. Wilkhahn documents the
sympathietic structures. Production multitude of successful possiblilites
halls by acclaimed architects such as within this deeply researched book,
Frei Otto and Thomas Herzog make the available to order online at
Wilkhahn site a worthwhile visit for www.wilkhahn.com.
specifiers and customers alike.
On the move
Reducing emissions There are many areas that the general
With an annual anticipated running time public can interface with Wilkhahn, and
of 7,500 hours with an output of 3,000,000 in transit we are there to help reduce
kilowatt hours, the new combined heat the pain, frustration and anxiety of
and power unit produces approximately indeterminate periods in the airport
the annual electricity requirements of transit lounge. Whether arriving or
Wilkhahn and at the same time, the departing, the durable qualities of
resulting waste heat is directly used as Wilkhahn Tubis will not compete with
heating energy. The power unit thus has the architecture or the scenery available
a constantly monitored and displayed helping to maintain a good and lasting
efficiency level approximating to 82%. impression of any journey.
However, the best part is that vegetable oil
is used as fuel instead of oil or gas: during
the combustion process not more CO2 is
released than was previously absorbed by
the plants.
Sharing ideas - the Planning Guide
for Conference and Communication
Environments
Wilkhahn always aims to contribute to
the furtherance of essential processes, the
most vital of which is the development
and sharing of knowledge and ideas.
Communication environments evolve
out of architectural spaces; they do
not exist by accident but are generated

In 1996 Wilkhahn won the Federal

German Prize for Ecology.

In its business activities, Wilkhahn is

committed to the goals of sustainable
development and, its policy of
responsible management (Corporate
Responsibility Policy) is binding for all
corporate areas. The self-commitment
statement, signed by both Management
and the owners of the company, is
rooted in Wilkhahn values and have
been guiding business policy for many
decades. The name of Wilkhahn should
stand for truthfulness in product design,
for fair and responsible dealings with
employees, customers and business
partners and for the highest degree of
ecological responsibility for products
and production. In 2000, the first
sustainability report was published
entitled ‘Wilkhahn Added Values’. And
the current Environmental Statement
has also been extended to include
the topics of quality management,
promotion of health and staff focus.

SPECIAL FOCUS ON GERMAN DESIGN 2009 BLUEPRINT

 (*0

SPECIAL FOCUS ON GERMAN DESIGN 2009 BLUEPRINT

 (+'

Right: TriASS conference

table/benching

Above: TriASS frame

detail

Below: Antaro
management desk
with adjustable height
meeting table

Left: Antaro semi-circular

meeting tables

SPECIAL FOCUS ON GERMAN DESIGN 2009 BLUEPRINT


ASSMANN BÜROMÖBEL
114 Clerkenwell Road
London
EC1M 5SA
t: +44 (0)20 7251 6836
f: +44 (0)20 7253 2976
e: london@assmann.de
w: www.assmann.de/en
HEAD OFFICE
ASSMANN BÜROMÖBEL GMBH + CO. KG
Heinrich-Assmann Strasse 11
D-49324 Melle
Germany
Design that has been reduced to the bare
essentials is the distinguishing feature of all
ASSMANN furniture products, with their clear
shapes, optimum functionality and the best
quality materials.
The high-quality furnishing concept TriASS is
a desk system with straight lines and design-
orientated complementary furniture, as well as
a modular benching system. With individual
elements in the programme designed to
complement each other, TriASS always retains
its unmistakeable appearance, whatever the
frame variant, material and colour. Design
features include no visible fixings and a general
asymmetrical look to the range as a whole,
particularly the pedestals and credenzas. Key to
the benching system is the simple but ingenious
construction principle with its specially
developed connector to allow the benching to
be reconfigured as needs change, or to revert to
individual desks.
(+(
Antaro, with its distinctive ‘floating’ desk top
and polished aluminium legs, is the top range of
three newly launched products designed for the
price conscious market. It is complemented by
the slender C-leg Canvaro range and the purely
functional Rondana range. All three ranges offer
a choice of desk top shapes and accessories,
conference extensions, connection elements/
links and meeting and conference tables.
The Antaro range has steel frames with round or
square legs, and ‘tube-in-tube’ height adjustment
for desks. It is attractive, functional and cost-
effective, with a choice of materials and finishes.
The simple, classic design makes it suitable for
a wide range of furnishing applications from
administrative to executive. Canvaro comes
as standard workstations with manual height
adjustment as well as ergonomic sit/stand desks
with electronic adjustment, both complying with
the new draft EU standard DIN pr EN 527/1. The
simple but functional entry-level Rondana range
fulfils a wide range of furnishing options.
SPECIAL FOCUS ON GERMAN DESIGN 2009 BLUEPRINT
 (+)
DAUPHIN HUMAN DESIGN
The Bridge
12 – 16 Clerkenwell Road
London EC1M 5PQ
T: 0207 324 6210
E. info@dauphinuk.com
W. www.dauphinuk.com
Dauphin HumanDesign UK Ltd offer the
broadest range of ergonomic office and
industrial seating currently available.
The product portfolio covers economic,
mid-range and hand-crafted top quality
seating experiences in fully supporting
task, visitor and reception ranges. With
designs by ergonomic experts such as,
Martin Ballendat, Manfred Elzenbeck,
Klaus Haar Roland Zünd of Züco and
the Dauphin-Designteam and with full
ISO9001 certification Dauphin ensures
well designed, strong products and
company performance.
Dauphin have been researching the
principles of ‘New Ergonomics’ for
years. Dauphin’s Seating Research
Department study ‘Homo Sedens’ – the
seated human – and special technologies
for physiologically controlled seated
positions are tested and developed.
Dauphin Human Design Group use
their expertise in ergonomics to focus
on enabling people to feel good and not
be aggravated by backaches.
Lordo, an office swivel chair designed by
Martin Ballendat automatically prevents
incorrect physical postures when seated.
Dauphin’s patented “Syncro-Dynamic”
ergonomic feature with automatic
weight compensation and seat-tilt
adjustment as standard allows Lordo
users to sit correctly and dynamically
SPECIAL FOCUS ON GERMAN DESIGN 2009 BLUEPRINT
Right: dat-o range designed by
Martin Ballendat
Bottom right: Lordo - office swivel
chair designed by Martin Ballendat.
Bottom: Sento Bench
Bottom left: Matchpoint
Left: dat-o range designed by
Martin Ballendat
with the body in a balanced posture. The
seat and backrest simultaneously follow
the movements of the person sitting and
always remain at the correct angle.
dat-o chairs, designed by Martin
Ballendat, feature transparent mesh
fabric backrests giving a distinctive,
airy character and providing excellent
posture opportunities
The Matchpoint range of chairs from
Dauphin is equipped with numerous
ergonomic extras as standard. Users
can conveniently adjust the height of
the backrest while sitting by grasping
the two telescopic adjusters which are
built into the backrest shell on the left
and right-hand sides. A light pressure
on either of the buttons is all that is
needed to take advantage of the 10
cm adjustment range for the backrest,
armrests and sliding seat
The Sento bench is suitable for all
open-plan environments and waiting
areas. The system combines cultivated
design with great practicality and
performance. The highly practical
Sento bench seating has now been
further enhanced by adding comfortable
armrests. They have been cleverly
incorporated into the overall design of
the high-quality event chair which is
also available with wooden seats and
backrests.
 (+*

SPECIAL FOCUS ON GERMAN DESIGN 2009 BLUEPRINT

 (++

GAGGENAU
Gaggenau Showroom
40 Wigmore Street
London W1U 2RX
t: 0844 892 9026
w: www.gaggenau.co.uk

‘Less is more’ is the mantra of Gaggenau’s

Chief Designer, Reinhard Segers when
approaching the design of Gaggenau appliances.
The beauty of the Gaggenau portfolio of
specialist built-in appliances is derived
from the desire to create timeless form that
translates into superb functionality.

The Gaggenau design team takes its inspiration

from professional kitchens to create restaurant-
quality appliances for the modern kitchen.
The entire range is characterised by flawless
functionality and ease of operation, combined
with the multiple benefits of innovative
technology and beautiful, timeless design.

On the international stage, Gaggenau is

a regular recipient of major design prizes.
That’s because Gaggenau’s highly innovative
collections of cooking, cooling, ventilation and
dishwashing appliances are crafted by hand
using only the very best quality materials
available, such as tempered glass, polished
stainless steel and solid aluminium.

For cooking, Gaggenau’s tantalising selection

of restaurant-grade ovens is a feast of visual
and culinary coordination. Favoured by top
chefs, Gaggenau’s distinctive built-in ovens
boast generous internal capacities, a plethora of
different heating methods to cope with cooking
and entertaining on a large scale, plus electronic
temperature control for professional precision.

For cooling, Gaggenau’s Vario cooling range

of modular refrigeration appliances sets
new technical standards with stainless steel
interiors and superb energy efficiency ratings
and the new Classics 400 range of fridges,
freezers and wine cabinets offers exceptional
cooling appliances designed specifically to
coordinate with the eye-catching controls of
the built in cooking collection.

Design wise, Gaggenau sets the industry

standard for functional and aesthetic prowess,
creating products with sleek surfaces and linear
rule to reflect its subtle, understated design Top: Vario 400 series cooktops
ethic. The company’s philosophy ensures that
Right: Vario cooling 400 series
attention to detail is a top priority by including
thoughtful elements, such as matte finishes Above: Double oven BX 280
and fingerprint resistant surfaces.
Left middle: Oven BO271
Gaggenau’s London showroom is at 40 Wigmore combined with combination
steam oven BS 254 and
Street where trade and consumer visitors alike
warming drawer WS 261 in
are welcome to browse at their leisure or make anthracite
an appointment with expert staff. Call 0844
892 9026 for more information and a list of Bottom left: AT400 table
Gaggenau partners or visit www.gaggenau.co.uk ventilation system

SPECIAL FOCUS ON GERMAN DESIGN 2009 BLUEPRINT

 (+,

SPECIAL FOCUS ON GERMAN DESIGN 2009 BLUEPRINT

 (+-

SPECIAL FOCUS ON GERMAN DESIGN 2009 BLUEPRINT


Top left: TEXAS at Hamburg Airport
Top centre: GLOOH: at Arminia Bielefeld Stadium
Top right: GATE modular Bench system
Centre: UNIT at Atlantic City Hotel
Botton right: JUST Swivel chair & SNOW extension table
Left: MOOD chairs-new 2009
(+.
KFF
Bahnhofstrasse 27
32657 Lemgo
Germany
T: 0049 5261 98590
e: l.lemmen@kff.de
w: www.kff.de
25 years ago Karl Friedrich Förster
started out as a one man company to
make modern furniture out of love
for good design and raw materials.
These materials could be natural or
industrial, they could be wood, steel,
glass or stone. Karl Friedrich Förster
(KFF) would shape them into his own
creations.
Now, in 2009, KFF has come a
long way and has specialized in
manufacturing chairs and tables,
serving the themes ‘dining’ and
‘lounging’. Both themes are found in
the residential and contract markets,
so KFF also operates in both of them.
KFF chairs are to be found all over the
world from The USA to Japan. The
German home market is the most
important and KFF still takes great
pride in the fact that it still produces
its entire collection within Germany.
KFF shows its collections every year at
IMM Cologne, Orgatec and Salone del
Mobile. More and more professionals
find KFF products on the internet, via
our website.
Ever since the year 2000, KFF has
given more room to other designers
which has resulted in some award
winning designs, such as the GLOOH
( H.Helweg 2006 Red Dot Design
Award) and The GATE (Formmodul
2007 ID award).
Most recently KFF won a prestigious
contract job to supply 1000 chairs for
the United Nations in NewYork City
(HLW architects).
SPECIAL FOCUS ON GERMAN DESIGN 2009 BLUEPRINT
 (+/

PRONORM
e: jason.grinton@pronormde.co.uk
w: www.pronorm.de

Sales contacts:
South - Don Ward:07801 862 690
Midlands – Richard Turner:0781 844 7678
North - Jason Grinton:07801 862 691

Pronorm is a trend-aware kitchen furniture company

that prides itself on satisfying customer desires for
contemporary design with the confidence of a German-
manufactured product. Pronorm is part of the Nobia
Group and sister brand to Poggenpohl, assuring customers
of a high calibre product backed by superb service.

Pronorm ranks among the leading German brands and

has a state of the art manufacturing facility in Germany,
with all kitchens being precision manufactured and
supplied rigid built to dedicated lead times. Using the
finest quality materials, Pronorm draws on its technical
and design expertise to produce outstanding kitchens
boasting the very latest colour trends, texture innovations
and performance. The company is noted for its Primeline
handle-less kitchen range which offers wide design
flexibility thanks to its extensive choice of door and drawer
sizes. The Proline 128 range excels in ergonomics, allowing
the working heights of the kitchen to be tailored to the
needs of the user. New additions to the portfolio include
Sterling Grey, a calming neutral tone that combines the
very essence of style and sophistication.

The portfolio distinguishes itself with an extensive choice

of kitchen styles offering real creative freedom for the
designer with lasting value. Pronorm’s kitchens are an
exercise in elegance and ergonomics where designers
and customers can experience the beauty of high quality
materials and appreciate the aesthetics of intelligent
design. Pronorm kitchens can be found at 80 retailers
nationwide

SPECIAL FOCUS ON GERMAN DESIGN 2009 BLUEPRINT

 (+0

Top left: Sterling Grey from the

Proline 128 range

Top right: Iceland Birch from the

Proline 128 range

Bottom left: Nut Tobacco from the

Classicline range

Bottom centre: Gloss Grey from the

Classicline range

Bottom right: Gloss Vanilla &

Aluminium from the Classicline
range

SPECIAL FOCUS ON GERMAN DESIGN 2009 BLUEPRINT

 (,'

SPECIAL FOCUS ON GERMAN DESIGN 2009 BLUEPRINT


Top Left: SieMatic’s MultiMatic, increasing internal
capacity by up to 34%
Top Right: The Reddot and Microsoft award winning
SieMatic S1
Left: BeauxArts, a modern classic. Shown here in
Magnolia White
Right: The S1’s ‘Smartboard’ which incorporates
an Ipod docking system and a TV built into the
splashback
Below: SieMatic’s latest creation ‘CompactDesgin’
which offers the quality without the price tag.
Shown here in Greige and Titan Walnut
(,(
SIEMATIC UK LTD
SieMatic UK
PO Box 2161
Rayleigh
SS6 0AL
T: 0844 3356595
E: sales@siematic.co.uk
w: www.siematic.co.uk
SieMatic - the brand you can trust
The award winning SieMatic has been making kitchens for
eighty years and is sold in fifty eight countries across the
world. In the UK, SieMatic is represented by many long
standing and professional partners who understand the
complexities of not only designing and selling kitchens,
but crucially, of total project management.
As the first tentative signs that things are improving
come to light, the imperative of brand and not just price is
already resurgent.
UK Managing Director for SieMatic, Bernard Otulakowski
says, “In the ‘fat’ years when business was flooding
through the doors and hundreds of new builds were
being constructed daily, the developer could standardise
specification by selecting basic boxes for the kitchen. In
these leaner times, no one can take business for granted
and now more than ever it is specification and brand that
will sell the property. Location, specification and brand are
key in all building projects. SieMatic cannot control the
location but we can help to increase the market value of a
property by offering an award winning brand”.
Belinda Sewell of Stuart Frazer Contracts has been
specifying SieMatic kitchens for 8 years and is one of the
most experienced kitchen suppliers in the country. Belinda
says, “Although never easy, ‘selling’ kitchens is the easy
bit. Getting them delivered on time, thus avoid penalty
clauses, with the correct cabinetry and components
correctly supplied first time is imperative. Whilst that
sounds obvious, it’s a process fraught with potential
failures. Suppliers need to know that there’s a safe storage
facility on site for instance and an awareness of the health
and safety criteria”.
SieMatic is respected for quality and performance. The
brand offers architects and designers the widest possible
choice of style and design solutions, from the stunning
BeauxArts kitchen which is fast becoming a contemporary
classic, through to the Microsoft Award winning S1, with
touch controls, integrated audio visual system and an
exclusive electronic drawer opening system. It truly is the
kitchen of tomorrow, but available today. SieMatic doesn’t
only design groundbreaking kitchens; also available is
CompactDesign, a range of cabinets offered at an affordable
price and an option that is a serious contender in the
contract market.
SieMatic is a World wide recognisable brand and is the
choice of the professional.
SPECIAL FOCUS ON GERMAN DESIGN 2009 BLUEPRINT
152
PRODUCTS To place products contact: Rowena Peck T +44 (0)20 7336 5224 F +44 (0)20 7336 5201 E rpeck@progressivemediagroup.com W blueprintmagazine.co.uk
Polyrey
Victoria House
49 Clarendon Road
Watford
WD17 1HP
01923 202 700
www.polyrey.com
<< ATAG
With over 60 years’ developing
and perfecting the gas hob
burner, ATAG markets probably the
most technically advanced and
efficient gas burners available in
Europe today. The new range of
gas hobs are designed and
engineered to suit modern
lifestyles; cooking fast, cleanly,
safely and most importantly
efficiently, giving gas an eco-
friendly edge. Beautifully crafted
and hand finished from stainless
steel in the company’s premium
MAGNA finish, ATAG’s HG9711MT
is a five-zone gas hob has a soft
leading edge, rolling out to a very
flat and flush design to
complement the trends in the
market place today.
<< LZF
Farolillo is a range of wood veneer lamps
designed by Bang Design for
Spanish lighting manufacturer LZF.
Farolillo is available as a suspension or a
table lamp. There are two sizes for
the suspension lamp: 35cm width x 60cm
height, or 45cm width x 55cm
height. The table lamp is 45cm width x
55cm height. Farolillo is made of natural
wood veneer and is available in a variety
of finishes and colours, including
American white wood, cherry wood,
beech, yellow, orange, red, green and
grey. LZF specializes in wood veneer
lighting.
Lzf Lamps
Avenida Reino de Valencia 14
46370 Chiva
Valencia, Spain
+34 96 252 47 80
www.lzf-lamps.com
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009
<< POLYREY
Recognising the popularity of pearlescent
finishes with designers, Polyrey has brought
out a new specification for ten of its most
specified pearlescent laminates. Previously
suitable for vertical use only, the ten
chosen laminates now feature a high gloss
overlay that gives them higher levels of Häfele UK Ltd
wear and scratch resistance so they can be Brownsover Road
specified with confidence on horizontal Swift Valley Industrial Estate
applications too. The new spec pearlescent Rugby
laminates give designers much wider Warwickshire CV21 1RD
flexibility to luxe up an interior project, 01788 542 020
while being confident of their high www.hafele.co.uk
performance characteristics when used
HÄFELE
<<
either vertically or horizontally. Metallic and
pearlescent laminates are always a popular Soft closing doors are no longer limited to cabinets and wardrobes thanks to the new
finish because they work well in the Smuso softclose 80 system from Häfele UK for full sized sliding doors. Hidden away in
material mix design ethic with woodgrain the top track the Smuso 80 softclose mechanism means sliding doors are smoothly and
finishes and glass. The ten pearlescent silently brought to a stop when they are closed and gently pulled into the end position,
laminates are Glam Ambre, Glam where they are securely held. Reducing the chance of any damage to the users fingers or
Champagne, Acier Oyde, Cuivre Oxyde, Inox the door. The Smuso 80 softclose system is designed to be used with Häfele UK’s most
Brossé, Pearl Argent, Pearl Graphite, Pearl popular sliding door gear range, Hawa Junior 80, allowing door weights up to 80kgs
Blanc, Piqué Vif Argent and Piqué Cuivre. made of wood, glass or a combination of the two.
Sunfold Systems
Sunfold House
Chestnut Drive
Wymondham Business Park
Wymondham
Norfolk
NR18 9SB
01953 423 423
www.sunfold.com
SUNFOLD SYSTEMS
<<
Sunfold Systems are the original specialists for aluminium and timber folding sliding
doors. Offering thermally broken, marine treated and extreme weather frames of the
Atag highest quality. Including high security locking, thermally broken tracks and heads,
0208 247 3993 flush floor finishes, non-finger trapping seals and magnetic catches. Also offering
g.gleave@atag.co.uk sliding systems, complete internal doors sets, roofs, windows, and bespoke glazing.
www.atag.co.uk Sunfold have a high quality product solution for any opening.
Hacel Lighting
Projects Dept
Hacel Lighting
The Silverlink
Wallsend
Tyne and Wear NE28 9ND
0191 280 9915
www.hacel.co.uk
HACEL
<<
Hacel's Pure and Desire catalogues feature an extensive range of innovative and
exciting products designed and manufactured in the UK. The sleek and stylish Celeste is
an extensive range of recessed and suspended luminaires. A choice of head
configurations, energy efficient light sources and wattages are available with compact
styling, clean fascias, enclosed precision die-cast lamp housings and branded electronic
control gear featuring throughout the range. The Celeste will enhance and illuminate
many Retail, Commercial and Architectural environments.
 | www.fowlerco.co.uk | 01273 423111 | ben@brighton.co.uk |

Fowler & Co. designed and made this striking staircase for an
elegant Edwardian mansion apartment.
The stair strings are laser cut from 12mm thick steel to support
solid Native Oaks treads. A lighting channel runs up the edges of
the stairs to light the lobby below. The staircase hangs sweetly in
the space, with it's glass balustrade.
154
PRODUCTS To place products contact: Rowena Peck T +44 (0)20 7336 5224 F +44 (0)20 7336 5201 E rpeck@progressivemediagroup.com W blueprintmagazine.co.uk

<< C2 FURNITURE
A range of stunning Danish-
designed office memo and notice
boards will be unveiled to the
architectural and interior design
community at the 100% Design
show in London. Called Chat-
Board®, it is a collection of glass Junckers
magnetic wall-mounted boards Unit 1
that can add an entirely new Wheaton Road
dimension to enhance any Witham
commercial interior by doing away Essex CM8 3UJ
with the drab and visually 01376 534 700
intrusive felt, cork or plastic www.junckers.com
memo boards that disfigure so
JUNCKERS

many contemporary office, hotel,
hospitality, restaurant and
education interiors. Chat-Boards
are manufactured in Denmark and
C2 Furniture Contracts Limited are available in the UK from
48 Evelyn Drive London-based C2 Furniture
Pinner Contracts, which will be displaying
Middlesex HA5 4RS a selection of Chat-Board size and
07003 973306 colour options on stand B20 at
www.c2-contracts.co.uk 100% Design.
<<
Architects Lee Boyd of Edinburgh specified Junckers Oak Variation for the complete
restoration of Garrison House on the Isle of Cumbrae, a Grade B listed building. Almost
destroyed by a fire in 2001, the building was awarded considerable public funding to
enable Lee Boyd to completely transform it into a unique space that unites a
contemporary look with the heritage of the building. Junckers solid Oak Variation
provided the perfect back drop for the interior, its rustic look adding natural warmth
and beauty. Junckers’ pre-finished floors provide ultimate durability for this public
facility, which includes a museum, library, surgery and café. The flooring contractors
were McKay Flooring, part of Junckers Approved Contractors network.

<< BISQUE
The Orbit towel radiator is an eye-catching,
asymmetrical shape in three sizes, suitable for
any style of bathroom or kitchen. Made from
superior-quality, polished stainless steel, this
model can be used on both central heating and IDS
hot water systems and an electric-only version is Unit 9, Euroway
also available. With the attention to detail Blagrove
expected from Bisque, the coiled tubing is Swindon SN5 8YW
cleverly slanted forward, providing easy access to 08457 298 298
towels with minimal effort. Hidden air vents www.idsurfaces.co.uk
complete the look. Available in three sizes:
INTERNATIONAL DECORATIVE SURFACES
<<

600mm, 900mm and 1200mm high. Material:

Mirror finish stainless steel. Making its début at 100% Design, Hanex is the go-to solid surface brand for designers to
check out. With a twenty year track record in the Far East and America, Hanex solid
surfacing offers a premium product spec that stacks up against more established brands,
while being more affordable. Design-wise there are 100 colours to choose from including
Bisque the classic favourites, terrazzo effects and brand new sophisticated neutral colours
23 Queen Square featuring pearlescent particles. Hanex is an 100% acrylic product which gives it
Bath BA1 2HX fabrication advantages and allows it to be thermoformed into 3D shapes. It boasts the
01225 478 500 highest FR classification of any solid surfacing material on the market giving it unlimited
www.bisque.co.uk freedom for use in domestic, commercial, leisure, transport and public sector projects.

<< CORIAN®
Corian’s® rise in popularity has been
meteoric since being introduced into the UK
exactly 30 years ago by entrepreneur,
Geoffrey Baker of CD UK Ltd. With a keen
ConnectionTM
eye for the next big design material Baker
Dogley Mills, Penistone Road
also introduced Parapan to the UK 10 years
Fenay Bridge
ago and will launch Veritas a Resinart®
Huddersfield HD8 0NQ
panel at 100% Design. Invented and
01484 600 100
produced by DuPont, Corian® is a solid
www.connection.uk.com
surface offering superior design possibilities
and excellent long-term performance. Used
CONNECTION
<<

in the home for everything from worktops &

DIVINE is about the evolution of a line, the shape rising from the ground and
getting larger is symbolic to its visual presence. A combination of ‘hard meets soft’, Corian®
‘sharp meets smooth’, with a very delicate fluid shape that runs along its frontal Thistle House, Thistle Way
horizon. The result is a well balance product suited to a multitude of tastes and Gildersome Spur, Wakefield Road
environments. Leeds LS27 7JZ
0113 201 2240
www.cdukltd.co.uk
basins through trays & bowls to lights,
furniture and most recently a radiator, it is
also specified in many different commercial
environments, from hotels to healthcare,
retail to marine.

BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009

 Stockists of:
Alessi
BestLite
Cassina
Driade
Established & Sons
Foscarini
Kartell
Moooi
Santa & Cole
Tom Dixon
Vitra
Zanotta
and many more...

Tel:
0114 —
Tel: 01785 811555 2666900
www.

www.decolight.co.uk

Rimadesio systems facilitate space management in homes and offices.

Areas can be sub-divided, clothes storage areas defined and accompanied
by complementary storage systems. Casement doors to match the
sliding panels in standard or custom sizes.
Wall storage systems designed to suit your requirements.

Tel 01403 784846 Fax 01403 784849

mail@domainfurniture.info www.domainfurniture.info
156
PRODUCTS To place products contact: Rowena Peck T +44 (0)20 7336 5224 F +44 (0)20 7336 5201 E rpeck@progressivemediagroup.com W blueprintmagazine.co.uk
Veritas
Thistle House, Thistle Way
Gildersome Spur
Wakefield Road
Leeds LS27 7JZ
0113 201 2240
www.veritas-uk.net
<< ROCA
At this year’s 100% Design, Roca will present
the 11 finalist projects for its 3rd International
Design Contest, Jump the Gap, on its stand
designed by Héctor Serrano. The final shortlist
includes the winner whose name will be
revealed by John Pawson, architect and
president of the jury, on the Roca stand (G20)
on 24th September. Roca’s 3rd Jump the Gap
competition was launched at 100% Design last
year and encouraged young designers to put
forward innovative solutions for the future;
"jumping the gap" between the present and
the future, inviting us to move into tomorrow's
world with new products, new spaces or new
uses and functions.
<< MAINE
MAINE have launched a new range of
innovative storage to create more
streamlined offices. Their new
Mainepure range is made to the same
exacting high standards of excellence
as their successful Maineseries31 range.
It can also fit alongside their existing
ranges to the same wide range of
heights and widths. The Mainepure
range has a clean, elegant facade and
a flush, discreet label holder, which
also acts as the drawer pull. Everything
is engineered for a beautiful result.
Maine
Home Park
Kings Langley
Hertfordshire
WD4 8LZ
01923 260 411
www.maine.co.uk
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009
<< VERITAS
Veritas, the highly versatile,
decorative resin panel previously
only available in the US is being
launched in the UK at 100%
Design, Stand B40. In addition to
displays showing how Veritas can
be used successfully for curves,
backlit panels and canopies there
will also be an interactive station
where visitors can create their
own unique sample. The appeal of
Veritas is the total creative
freedom it offers designers and
architects to customise this
unique material to suit any
environment, style or colour
scheme. More durable than acrylic,
the possibilities for use are
limitless ranging from commercial
projects such as retail units,
restaurants, offices and hotels, to
domestic projects.
Roca Limited
Samson Road
Hermitage Industrial Estate
Coalville
Leics. LE67 3FP
01530 830080
www.roca-uk.com
<< LUJAN Y SICILIA
Rut is a new lamp designed by Ola
Wihlborg for Spanish lighting
manufacturer Lujan & Sicilia Rut is
available as a floor, table or suspension
lamp. There are various sizes available,
including the large floor lamp, shown
below, in 160cm high x 88cm diameter.
Rut is made of laser-cut powder-coated
steel and is available in white, black or
gold.
LUJAN Y SICILIA
C/ Orellana, 12
28004 Madrid - Spain
+34 913 081 173
www.lujan-sicilia.com
<< PARAPAN®
Parapan® has been taking the place of
more conventional materials to conjure
up a wide variety of applications for
many rooms in the house. The high
gloss, high tech acrylic has almost
mirror like qualities reflecting light and
gives this home bar in black Parapan®
designed by Davenports, a real ‘wow’
factor. Cut from solid sheets Parapan®
can be easily thermoformed into curves
to make islands, cupboard doors and
drawer fronts. Curves can be outward,
inward and even s-shape in varying
Parapan® radii to create interesting & unusual
Thistle House, Thistle Way shapes to make a style statement.
Gildersome Spur, Wakefield The 21 colours available are solid and
Road run right the way through and as they
Leeds LS27 7JZ are UV stable they will never fade.
0113 201 2240 Practical and hard wearing it is easy to
www.parapan.co.uk clean and maintain.
BURMATEX
<<
Recognising the need for products that deliver on both style Burmatex Ltd
and performance, within the boundaries of increasingly strict Victoria Mills
budgets, innovative carpet tile company Burmatex has The Green
bolstered its mid-range portfolio by refreshing staple loop Ossett
products Balance and Infinity 24, making them more West Yorkshire WF5 0AN
accessible and useable. Balance and Infinity 24 sit alongside 01924 262 525
recently launched Sector, in the Burmatex portfolio. www.burmatex.co.uk
mslInteriors reception desks | desks | executive | boardroom | seating
storage | screens | bespoke

London
The Design Works
93-99 Goswell Road
Clerkenwell
London
EC1V 7EY

HARDWARE FROM THE OCEAN

The subtle beauty of shell has been used for centuries on many SEE US AT 100% DESIGN
applications Including jewellery and musical instruments.
STAND NUMBER C1
MSL Interiors are the UK Turnstyle Designs have introduced a range of Shell Inlaid Door
Sole Distributors for: Levers and Cabinet Handles that are bound to cause a stir.
www.maro.com.pl Mother of Pearl and Paua are currently in stock with new TURNSTYLE DESIGNS
www.JOFFICE.be shell inlays being Introduced soon, all inlays come from
www.bejot.com.pl
sustainable sources in keeping with Turnstyles strict 01271 325 325
environmental policies.
www.profim.pl www.turnstyledesigns.com
Available in the Ski and Recess ranges, in a full choice of
metal plated Backgrounds, the new range offers a rich and sales@turnstyledesigns.com
MSL INTERIORS: T 0845 520 1100 F 01772 712020 WWW.MSL-INTERIORS.CO.UK luxurious alternative.

new release | pebble blends

black & tan mix

java grey

birds egg

sanur mix

Poppy Seed Pebble Blend poppy seed

It’s true. There’s no beauty like that of nature. Our new release
Pebble Blends let you enjoy a ravishing, stylish interplay
of natural colours, shapes and textures.

www.islandstone.co.uk
Island Stone Natural Advantage Ltd
Phone +44 0800 083 9351 • Fax +44 0800 083 9352 • sales@islandstone.co.uk
158
PRODUCTS To place products contact: Rowena Peck T +44 (0)20 7336 5224 F +44 (0)20 7336 5201 E rpeck@progressivemediagroup.com W blueprintmagazine.co.uk
LG Hausys Europe
26 Kings Hill Avenue
West Malling
Kent ME19 4AE
01732 424 240
www.himacs.eu
<<THE INTERIORS
GROUP
The Interiors Group have been
appointed by OpenTV, who
provide convergent media
solutions, to build their new
office interiors at Ralph Erskine’s
iconic Ark office building. The
Interiors Group will build the new
office interior for media company
Open TV in eight weeks. The
Galinsky.com guide describes The
Ark as ‘an office concept so
enlightened that it is struggling
in the real world.’ Along with
CBRE Building Consultancy, The
Interiors Group will take the
concept and with further
innovation, provide OpenTV a new
landmark facility .
<< HAVELLS SYLVANIA
Concord Stadium is an innovative low
energy spotlight range, which takes
display lighting into a new dimension.
Utilising 16 x 1W LED’s, generating up to
1200 fixture lumens this cutting-edge
spotlight introduces a new highly flexible
accent lighting tool. The Concord vision
was to design and develop the optimum
LED spotlight. The Stadium range
incorporates all the features and benefits
of the new LED technology designed
around a super slim housing, allowing the
spotlight to provide lighting solutions for
a myriad of lighting applications, includ-
ing museums, galleries and retail spaces.
The Stadium portfolio introduces two ver-
sions, Stadium EVO and Stadium PRO,
both with excellent colour rendering, low
running temperatures, very long lamp life
resulting in reduced maintenance costs
and energy saving efficient light source.
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009
<< HI-MACS®
For Touch By, design is a modern
language to raise emotions and surprise
people. These were the foundations that
Jean-Jacques Martin, on the consultation
of Bernard Fric, used to set up this
collective of young designers, showing for
the first time at 100% Design, stand G54,
from 24th to 27th September. Six young
creators will give a sneak peak of their
work: around ten pieces of furniture
which are each more sparkling and
creative than the other. What makes them
special? They are all made out of HI-
MACS®. Chosen for its functional features,
its aesthetics and its design properties,
this material has got these young artists'
pulses racing. Having seen the quality of
the pieces in the exhibition, Francesco
<<
Lucchese, a Milanese architect known for
creating out of the ordinary multi-sensory
spaces, volunteered his services to
support this promising group on the
100% Design stand.
<<
The Interiors Group
Mount Manor House
16 The Mount
Guildford
Surrey GU2 4HS
01932 779 999
www.interiorsgroup.co.uk
<<
Havells Sylvania
Otley Road
Shipley
West Yorkshire BD17 7SN
01274 532 552
www.havells-sylvania.com
Miele Company Ltd
Fairacres
Marcham Road
Abingdon OX14 1TW
01235 554 455
www.Miele.co.uk
MIELE
Miele – Forever Better. Outstanding design and construction
since 1899. As a project partner, developer, designer or
architect you strive for new innovations and forward thinking
partners. So does Miele.
Beacons Business Interiors
Unit 18/19
Ffrwdgrech Ind Est
Brecon
Powys LD3 8LA
01874 623 089
www.bbi-uk.com
BEACONS BUSINESS INTERIORS
Facilities support firm Beacons Business Interiors has won £3 million worth of new
contracts in the last six weeks giving another indication that the economy is showing
some signs of recovery. The contracts include wins from high profile organisations
including the Welsh Rugby Union, Lloyds Banking Group, disaster recovery firm
SunGard and Balfour Beatty Workplace. These wins see Bbi buck the trend for facilities
support organisations, many of which have been badly hit by the downturn, and the
company still has ambitious expansion plans despite the state of the economy.
Armstrong World
Industries Ltd
Building Products Division
Armstrong House
38 Market Square
Uxbridge UB8 1NG
0800 371849
www.armstrong-ceilings.co.uk
ARMSTRONG CEILINGS
The refurbishment and refit of commercial offices at 236 Grays Inn Road for Telereal
Trilium was a major project, with the ceiling area measuring 2,300m2. The client,
architect and contractor were tasked with meeting aesthetic, acoustic & environmental
challenges on this jobsite. Armstrong Ceilings were finally selected as the preferred
supplier due to their dedication to recycling and their established market leadership for
both aesthetics and performance in suspended ceilings systems. Armstrong’s unique ‘End
of Life’ recycling programme includes most types of Armstrong mineral fibre tiles produced
after January 2000, and these can be 100% recycled using a highly efficient process.
1

Head Office
United Kingdom
t +44 (0)1276 681000
e info@stretchceilings.co.uk

w w w. s t r e t c h c e i l i n g s . c o . u k
Bolidtop synthetic floors offer the ultimate in technology and
aesthetics. Marketed, supplied and installed by Stratum Resin
Flooring, the UK partner of Bolidt based in The Netherlands.
For further information on our stunning range of Bolidtop BESPOKE SOLID ROSEWOOD TABLES
poured resin flooring systems, please contact Stratum Resin
Flooring Ltd on 0870 770 4316, or e-mail 13 Stratford Road, Kensington, London W8 6RF
info@stratum.uk.com www.stratum.uk.com. Tel: 07771 861939
pære dansk www.paeredansk.com

No. 1 Choice for Upholstery Leather

Automotive !
Domestic !
Commercial !
Marine !
Outdoor !

www.jmtleather.com

JMT Leather ! No. 1 Inca Business Park, Acton, Sudbury, Suffolk CO10 0BB, England.
Tel: +44 (0)1787 882552 ! e-mail: salesuk@jmtleather.com
To advertise contact: Howard Hassan T +44 (0)20 7336 5239 E hhassen@progressivemediagroup.com
SHOWS TO BE SEEN 161
1 2 3

4 5
1 MURASPEC
100% design – stand number C23 T: 08705 117 118

2 AEON SCULPTURAL HEATING

100% Design – stand number K14 T: 01525 379505

3 HADDONSTONE
Decorex – stand number A4 T: 01604 770711

4 ARMOURCOAT
100% design – stand number A40 T: 01732 460668

5 CHRISTY CARPETS
100% Design – stand number J30 T: 01908 308777

6 HAMILTON LITESTAT
Decorex – stand number J317 T: 01747 860088

7 PHILIP WATTS DESIGN

100% design – stand number H41 T: 0115 926 9756

8 FORMICA LIMITED
100% design – stand number A86 T: 0191 259 3100

6 7 8

BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009

 162

PACE
NEIGHBOURHOODS
TOLERANCE
SEXUALITYFASHION

INDIVIDUALITY
FRIENDSHIPS
EXCITEMENTLOVE

BARS
ARTPASSION
HEAT
CONNECTIVITY COMMUNITIES

LIFE
CLUBS

POLITICS
DIVERSITY
OPINIONS
HEART
KNOWLEDGE

DEBATE
SOUL

INTEGRATION
PARKS
WORDS
CULTURE

PAPER CITY
ARCHITECTURE
SOUNDS

DOMENIC LIPPA
A partner at Pentagram, Domenic Lippa has created the London Design Festival’s
identity for the past three years and is curating an exhibition of posters about
London at the Victoria and Albert Museum, 19-27 September. Lippa has devised
a Paper City that expresses his passion for living in the city, although he recognises

INTOLERANCE
that most have a murky underbelly. ‘Cities are vibrant and exciting places to live,

DISCORD
and they’re full of life. But you need all the negatives to make the positives

AGGRESSION

DIRT
enticing,’ he says. ‘I love the opening of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, when the
camera pans across the perfect white fence and delves into the earth, where
all the pain is.’ Lippa’s image will be part of Blueprint’s exhibition Paper City:
Urban Utopias at the Royal Academy of Arts, 31 July-27 October.

CONGESTION

SMELLS ANGERSOULLESS
TRANSPORT
BLUEPRINT OCTOBER 2009
VERMIN
LONELINESS
 NEW - EDC Studio now open

EDC T 020 7323 3233

The Studio E contract@edcplc.co.uk
77 Margaret Street W www.edcplc.co.uk
London

studio
W1W 8SY

Pure Cabinet System by Pastoe

Naòs.
Pierluigi Cerri

Photo Mario Carrieri

Ergonom Ltd
Whittington House
19-30 Alfred Place
LondonWC1E 7EA
tel. + 44 (0) 20 7323 2325
fax + 44 (0) 20 7323 2032
e-mail: enquiry@ergonom.com
www.ergonom.com