FORM by Mary Manifold

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ISSUE 2

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the cr eat i ve ge ni us

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President & Publisher Michela Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Connor Abrams

Photo Editor Kate Stone

Editor-in-Chief Allison Arieff

Associate Photo Editor Aya Brackett

Creative Director Claudia Bruno

Contributing Photo Editor Deborah Kozloff Hearey

Managing Editor Ann Wilson Spradlin

Senior Production Director Fran Fox

Senior Editors Andrew Wagner, Sam Grawe

Production Specialist Bill Lyons

Editor-at Large Virginia Gardiner

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Editor Amara Holstein

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TABLE OF CONTENTS 1/ FRONT 7 P H O T O P O P ! PHOTO INSPIRATION — Ten ways to know you’re born a New Yorker

9 G E N E R AT O R I D E A S A N D O P I N I O N S — Michael Place, creative director at the Dray Walk Gallery

1 4 E D I T S C R E AT I V E ’s G U I D E T O P R I N T — 14 Creative’s Guide to Print — Larissa Kaspar, 15 Creative Consultancy Franklin Till investigates the movements that are defining contemporary design

ABOUT THE COVER

1 7 F O R M U L AT E S U C C E S S I N T H E C R E AT I V E W O R L D

Starring: Grace Coddington Hair: Julien d’Ys

— Success of people like Oskar Schlemmer and Cindy Sherman

Stylist: Elin Svahn Photographer: Craig McDean

GRACE CODDINGTON

2/ MIDDLE GRACE CODDINGTON

A CREATIVE GENIUS WITH ANOTHER PERSPECTIVE — By Olivia Fleming

D AV I D U R B A N K E

THE YOUNGSTER T H AT M A D E I T, I N W E E K S — By Jenna Flay

HOW TO THINK,

LIKE A GREAT DESIGNER, INSIDE WITH PAULA SCHER — By Charlotte Cotton

A K R A M Z A ATA R I

AGAINST PHOTOGRAPHY CONVERSATION — With Mark Westermoreland

W H AT ' S I N A W O R D ?

DO WE LIVE IN A TIME OF ‘PATHO-POLITICS’? — By Jennifer Allen

IMOGEN6 4

3/ BACK IMOGEN

IN THE BEGINNING — By Bert Rebhandl

HIGHS & LOWS

THE RISE AND FALL OF BIENNIALS IN THE DRC — By Sean O’Toole

DESIGN

MEAUSRING SUCCESS IN COMMUNITY DESIGN PROJECTS — By Charlotte Cotton

UP IN THE AIR

LOOKING AT ART FROM DIFFERENT ANGLES — By Christy Lange

PHOTO POP

PHOTO INSPIRATION from a city of individuals

SBEN KORSCH — CUPCAKE

ROBBY SALSO — SKATER

KATE RACHET — BUBBLE MAN

JUST FOR FUN

10 WAYS TO KNOW YOU’RE BORN A NEW YORKER

PAUL GARLAND — GRAND CENTRAL STATION

Thought Catalog / anonymous blogger

DANNY LYON — HOUSTON ST.

SBEN KORSCH — SUBWAY

DAVID ALBRIGHT — POST NO BILLS

1 — You instinctively check the subway seat for mysterious liquids before sitting down. 2 — You’re an expert at “pre-walking”– the art of walking to the exact spot on the subway platform so the train drops you off right in front of the exit of your choice. 3 — You don’t have a driver’s license until well into your 20’s or 30’s, and when you finally have to get one because you’re taking a job in Connecticut, you go to the DMV and everyone else getting their license is 20/30/40. 4 — You have never been to the Statue of Liberty and frankly you just aren’t that interested. 5 — Growing up your front yard was the sidewalk, the stoop, the middle of the street, or a rooftop. 6 — You know who Dr. Z is. 7 — You know that the guy at your bodega always gives you a straw when you buy a bottled beverage. 8 — Your parents are divorced — or you have a lot of friends with divorced parents. 9 — When you pop into a pizza joint you simply ask for “a slice.” 10 — You think that walking 20 blocks is absolutely faster than waiting on the train after midnight on a weekend.

GF OE NR EM RU AL TAOT RE

IDEAS AND OPINIONS of CREATIVE DIRECTORS / EDITORS / CREATIVES

michael place “We have this thing — It’ll do won’t do. That’s something that I’ve always been big on. Everything is thought about and considered. It takes time to do the kind of work that we do; It’s not always easy. I don’t see it as a visual style, but I think it’s more the way that we approach the work.”

Today there's a real atmosphere of pride and achievement in the Dray Walk Gallery just off Brick Lane, in London. We're here for Blood, Sweat & 11 Years, a retrospective show by Build. Broad shouldered, and with a smile nearly as wide, Michael C Place is giving us a tour of the work - a series or 34 posters covering two walls of this brutalist–looking space. He's got three days' stubble, and a bit or of a hangover thanks to the private view last night, but 'I feel amazing' is written all over his face. "It feels good to document the whole 11 years," he says, as we cross the concrete door to where his earliest posters hang. "We were hoping to do 10 years, but got so busy with work we thought, 'OK, yeah, let's do it for 11 years.' We realised how much work goes into putting on a show, and I think for us it just felt like a good time to do it. As much as a celebration of work, I think it's an achievement to be in business for 11 years in tougher times." The title of the show, he explains, is truly indicative or how hard it's been. If you think about it, nearly half the time Build has been running, the UK economy has been in recession. Maybe the fact that things haven't always been rosy makes it all the more poignant. It's also the first full exhibition Build has ever done, and has the honour of being one of the few graphic design events in the London Design Festival 2012 catalogue. However one or the best things about it is seeing all these printed works physically and up close, rather than in little image boxes on a website. "A lot or people have said, 'It's really nice to see these things for real. You can really appreciate the quality and the work that goes in to these things. I think it's a bit sad really that book design now is all about the thumbnail - the Amazon thumbnail is what you design for, almost," he says The posters are chronologically arranged, and there's at least one for each year. Build was rounded in 2001 after Place and his wife Nicky returned from a year travelling. Prior to that he'd left his job at The Designers Republic in Sheffield, and he admits that his earlier posters have

a pinch or the DR flavour to them. However, each poster seems like a new step in Build's 11-year journey, with Place exploring a field developing his own design voice along the way. Most or the work is self-initiated, or a collaboration, so when the studio, was busier with commercial briers - in 2005, for instance fewer pieces appear. “So, the daily routine is we’re usually in at about 8 or 8:30. The start or the day consists or me walking in, cycling in or driving in - or I can’t be arsed walking or cycling, or if it’s crap weather. I love that – getting your head together before you get in, think and figure out what you’re doing. I find walking around just clears your head,” says Place. There are ups and downs to being in Walthamstow, and he goes through phases or loving or hating the place. Right now, he’s loving it Unlike Clerkenwell, Shoreditch or Hoxton, there’s no Pret A Manger, trendy care or concept bar to hang out in around the corner. However, when possible the Build team shurne across to a local pub for a few drinks on Fridays after work. The only thing he seems to regret is not getting into central London more often to attend exhibitions. Another reason design companies are clustered in London’s central districts is to be nearer to clients. On that front, being in Walthamstow isn’t such a hindrance. It’s only six stops on the train from Liverpool Street, and when clients arrive to visit the Build studios, they’re pleasantly surprised. “It’s runny because we used to think, ‘What are clients going to think about coming up to Walthamstow. It’s not the prettiest of places. But everybody who’s been to this pace has always been like, ‘Oh, wow, blimey, this is nice.’ It’s always been a little bit like, ‘I wasn’t expecting this or Walthamstow,’” he says. “I’m definitely not going to mention The Designers Republic much, but one of the things that we always found really interesting when I worked there was that at the time there weren’t many design studios outside of London. It seemed you needed a London address or postcode to be considered a serious design company. But we used to like it because

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it would force people to come out and visit us in Sherfield. I’m not saying we’re overtly doing that now by being in Walthamstow, but I like that independent spirit. We are only five or six stops outside or central London; we’re hardly in the sticks.” Place and his wife, who also takes on some creative work, met when she was a lead artist at the Liverpool developer Psygnosis, which created the Wipeout series ror PlayStation. Place worked on the graphics ror the game while at The Designers Republic, and when Build first launched she stayed at Sony, berore joining the studio six years ago. Designer Joe Luxton joined a couple or years ago on a placement, and Place was impressed enough to take him on full time. The newest member or the team is Sophie James, who is studio assistant, and helps with the running or the place She was a driving rorce behind the exhibition. The integrity or the business is something that’s important to Place – such as dealing honestly with clients and suppliers, paying on time, and sourcing things in the UK. He is also very hands on, and one or the reasons he wanted to start his own studio was so that he could see the entire process in motion, from initial contact to pitching and client meetings, right through to delivering printed work or websites. “My role is creative director, and the way I work is very, very hands on,” says Place, sweeping a palm across the table in front or him. “It’s just what I’ve always known and always genuinely enjoyed. I’m much more just get–onwith–it, and that for me is a big part or the whole thing.I’m much better now, but to start off with I was like, ‘Oh, just let me do it.’ I’m quite impatient, so I kind of just like to get on with things.” Build has grown over the years, and now the work that comes in – like full station branding for Ukrainian TV channel PlusPlus – is too big

an animated film, and in a previous project Build art-directed a crart film about the design team behind the N9 phone at Nokia’s HQ in Finland. “I think one–off projects are great, everybody does them, but there’s something nice about thinking about taking it further,” he says, his hand chopping down on the table, indica ling an incremental process. Alongside projects ror bigger corporations like Sony, Nike and Getty, Build has worked for an array of creative and cultural clients. In many cases, you could almost call the projects collaborations. The studio does ongoing identity work for the New York photographer Timothy Saccenti, which led to commissions from Flying Lotus, a band on Warp Records. Place appeared in the 2007 documentary Helvetica, which celebrated the 50th birthday of the typerace. Beirut, Sagmeister, Brody, Carson - director Gary Hustwit could have asked any or the other top designers who appeared in the film to do the branding, posters and packaging for his subsequent films Objectified and Urbanised, but he went with Build. For Place, clients like this are almost like beneractors, and he thinks it’s important to work for someone who believes in your creativity. In some cases, people who were

once fans or the studio reach positions where they become clients. When Simon Armstrong was running the shop at the Design Museum in London, he contacted Build because he loved their work. The studio has since designed merchandise such as the mugs, badges and the Young Designers Kit, consistint or pencils, erasers, rulers and so forth, for the shop. “Everybody dreams or having that relationship, like Tony Wilson and Peter Saville, being able to build up this real body Of work that’s consistent. Everybody thought Factory’s work was brilliant,” he says. ‘’Vaughan Oliver and 4AD - it’s just an incredible body or work. I think that’s probably a better example. I used to collect all the 4AD releases for the sleeves, and managed to get one signed by him when I was at college. And we do stuff for labels called Aus Records and Simple Records. We do all their stuff I always think they’re our mini little Factory. We manage to do all their releases, so there is that really nice consistency.” Place has loved music-related design going back to his school days in Yorkshire. Back then, he’d cover the fabric nap on his satchel in house paint and then emblazon it with an AC/DC or Iron Maiden logo. Later, as a design student,

"My role is creative director, and the way I work is very, very hands on. It's just what I've always known and always genuinely enjoyed. I just like to get on with things" for one designer even with freelance help. On some projects, Place works alone, and on others he directs Luxton in the traditional sense. He admits that it’s taken him a while to get used to letting go. “We did an interesting project for Nokia recently called Wordplay, so I gave the idea to Joe and he literally ran with it and filled everything out. It was a really good project, one with us two working really well,” he says. “When Nokia rebranded they had a new corporate typeface done by Daltor Maag called Nokia Pure, and they globalised the typeface. Dalton Maag did everything from devanagari tocyrillics. We did a really nice pangram for every alphabet, then we illustrated it using the typefaces. That was perrect for Joe. He’s much more expressive in that sense, whereas I’m a lot more rigid in my approach to design, and certainly type.” It’s the latest or several pieces or work Build has done with Nokia, and Place enjoys working with clients on a continuous basis. The Wordplay project included

record sleeve design was the one thing he really wanted to do. He gets up tofetch something rrom the bookshelves in the meeting room we’re sitting in Soon we’re nicking through Underground magazine, a late-’80s publication by Rod Clark. With cover-mounted nexi-disks, sometimes even cassettes, Underground was fanatical about music, better than a fanzine, and way off–centre in terms or design. “I think it struck a massive chord with me. It’s really quite gritty, but then almost like Swiss. I think they call it Swiss punk. It’s about not being precious. And now the work that comes in – like full station branding for much as I admire the likes Of 8vo, this is a bastard version or something. In some cases, people who were once fans or the studio reach positions where they become clients. When Simon Armstrong was running the shop at the Design Museum in London, he contacted Build because he loved their work. For Place, who is studio assistant, clients like this are almost like beneractors, and he thinks it’s important to work ror someone who believes in your creativity. It’s that thing Of ugliness or something that’s not quite right. I much prefer putting something that really clashes with something else, so disharmony for me is really harmonious,” he says. “Can you remember them? Gaye Bikers on Acid! Mighty Lemon Drops! Swans! Yes, this was my youth in terms or the kind or music that I really used to like.”

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TALENT

CREATIVE’S GUIDE TO PRINT

BEN WRIGHT & JAMES PAUL STAFFORD GREENFIELD Co-founders / Creative director Wright and Stafford Having worked with started DesignStudio to global brands such blend innovative ideas as Microsoft, MTV, with expert execution... Nike and Getty Images, Both have produced Greenfield moved to award-winning work at DesignStudio from London's leading design Man vs. Machine studios, for clients his role involves including Channel 4, empowering and Nokia and Swisscom engaging brands".

PRINT / EDITORS / TALENT

FORM.com

Perhaps surprisingly, given our obsession with all things digital, the independent print magazine industry currently appears to be enjoying something of a revival. Take a look on the shelves of any independent bookstore today and you'll find a huge number of beautifully printed magazines that are lovingly bought and collected by a faithful, and it seems ever-increasing, new wave of magazine enthusiasts. Events like Printout, held in London every two months, and the newly launched independent magazine conference Mag Is In, held in Turin, Italy this year, are attended by a growing number of publishers and readers alike who are intent on keeping the independent magazine publishing industry alive. And although pinning down figures can be tricky, Steve Watson, founder of independent UK-based magazine subscription service Stack, has seen subscriber numbers more than doubled in the last year. So what's driving this renewed interest? Is it some kind of backlash against the increasing number of digitally published magazines, and the way we view visual inspiration in general online? Or in fact do the two actually complement one another? Jeremy Leslie, editor of MagCulture, believes it’s down to a variety of interlinking factors: ‘There’s always been a healthy number of small independents, but they seem more visible today and the quality is higher. I think there are several reasons for this: firstly, if you’re into making a magazine, chances are that you’ve already established an editorial tone of voice via a blog or other digital channel, he explains. “Secondly, an individual has access to largely the same production hardware and software as a large publisher; all you need is a decent laptop and internet connection and you’re off. Thirdly, that same internet connection helps that person promote, distribute and sell their magazine globally.” Given such fertile ground for producing independent print magazines, one group of publishers is fast emerging as the driving force behind their increasing popularity: graphic designers. It seems that graphic

designers and other creatives are using print magazine publishing as a way to further extend their creative reach and, for some, as a way to move their online projects offline. As Elliot Jay Stocks, founder of the typography focused 8 Faces magazine, explains: “Being a web designer and growing tired of my work disappearing offline, I wanted to make something real that would last and sit on a bookshelf for years to come. The first issue was written and designed entirely by me, but overtime we’ve slowly grown into a much larger team of contributors covering editorial, design and logistics:’ Similarly Justified magazine, which started life as a blog showcasing the work of student and graduate designers. photographers and architects, is now published quarterly by its founder Joshua Ogden. “The web presence we have is great,” he says. “It’s a mass of visual imagery from all over the place - the problem is that as more and more people submit work, the previous work moves further down the endless cyberspace scroll. Seeing this happen is what gave methe idea of trying to capture what the blog has and put it into a printed format that could be kept, owned and even collected, he continues. Off screen magazine, launched earlier this year by Kai Brach, uses the print environment to explore the life and work of people who work solely online creating websites and apps. “As the magazine title suggests, Off screen explores what happens off the screen;’ he explains. “A physical product that can be touched, collected and read anywhere is, we think, a logical way to present this type of information. We encourage you to put your iPad down, grab a cup of coffee and enjoy a high-quality read in the old-fashioned way as well as satisfying their craving to produce a printed, tactile object, for many of the founders of these ‘by creatives, for creatives’ magazines, launching their own publication is often easy.

"It's amazing how much flexibility and creativity you can have within the contstraints of a tight grid system." JAMIE THOMPSON ART DIRECTOR EDWARD HANN JAMIE THOMPSON Senior designer / Art director Hannh has worked at various design agencies Having worked at including Ustwo, DesignStudio for Untitled and Moving just over a year now, Brands, on a mixture, Thompson has worked of digital, branding at Moving Brands, and print projects AKQA, Kin and i-D for global and local Magazine, specialising brands alike. He is in animation, film, now in his second year 3D, interaction and at DesignStudio, environmental design. 7 has the ability to produce the most amazing work as individual teams, yet the exciting thing for us is the way that the teams work together, collaborate and take things to another level. The event itself will be a showcase of this internal collaboration, and a chance to see some ofthe best projects from the last four years as well as witness the premiere of some of our latest work. We were as interested as anyone to see the process of an internal piece of work. Having the deadline ensured that this was a project that we could not sit on; we had a real time constraint and it had to run like a live brief. Timings were short, but we are used to that, and we still needed to maintain the same high level of output and find creative solutions that are engaging as well as realistic.

Design director Hills has developed brand identities for a diverse range of the world's biggest brands includingHP, aSRAM, Royal Mail and Swisscom. He has a pivotal role offering help and support to everyone within the company.

REX MCWHIRTER RICH LYONS Moving image director / Senior designer With a background With experience at including work for BB/Saunders and Swissco! Apple SEA Design, Lyons and london College came from a print of Fashion, moving design background image director McWhirter to further hone his has driven DesignStudio’s skills across art film-based output from direction, digital design short animations all and moving image, the way to large–scale in his four years at productions worldwide.

LAURA HALLY Marketing executive New in the door in Junior designer and 2012, Hally is marketing executive at DesignStudio. With previous industry experience carrying out marketing for advertising research agencies, she is tasked with making DesignStudio famous.

HOLLY CLARK Intern The recent Shillington grad Clark is making a career change from studio admin to creative. She has been working on freelance assignments before joining DesignStudio on placement for the duration of this project.

Franklin Tills a creative consultancy bringing research and insight to life in the form of exhibitions, events and publications. We work with a variety of clients to provide alternative, inspirational ways to develop products and optimize brand experiences. Our expertise in trend forecasting and brand strategy is core to our process. In this second series of trend reports commissioned by Computer Arts Colored on we report on the key aesthetic movements that are currently visible, and draw attention to the key agencies and creatives driving them. We aim to provide a visual essay of the emerging aesthetic directions tying into the theme of the issue We are continuall scouring magazines, blogs, websltes, exhibitions, and contacting designers and agencies, hoping to seek out work that feels not necessarily new, but fresh and relevant. We believe that trend forecasting is essentially mapping correlations and patterns. this is our starting point, to observe and analyse correlation, then we can begin to question why a partlcular pattern is emerging. We also take a look back at the bigger macro trends featured in the first volume of CA Collection, and highlight how we have seen these manifest and evolve across all the design sectors in the past year. In the first issue, we explored the idea of failure, looking at the consumer drive toward uniqueness and the increasing movement against mass manufacture, plus how designers have been revolting against the cookie-cutter nature of production. this sentiment is stronger than ever, as we see designers placing value on more analogue techniques, cherishing the random results from using more basic handmade tools. The idea of simplicity remains a major driving force across many designers' work. As consumers seek out clearer and simpler solutions to their complex lives, graphic designers reconnect this shift with increasingly lean solutions. Information is reduced to its bare minimum without losing value. This section aims to provide an invaluable source of information and insight for anyone working within the fields of graphic design. The trend for digital collage sees a collision of graphic design references, where energetic illustration techniques are spontaneously combined with playful typography. This direction has links to micro trends published in volume one of CA Collection: the intentionally chaotic, confusing retro visual language from parione, and the expressionism and new wave aesthetic of ‘805 pop culture in part three. Designers are experimenting with mixing and reworking a plethora of techniques and references – brush strokes, spray paints, clip art and graffiti are willfully combined, creallng an explosive aesthetic.The more tools used to create the work the better - design studio Department Intern tional deliberately draws on as many design references as possible, celebrating the contrasting, abstract and often chaotic results achieved by doing so. Gradient maps, brush tools and liquify techniques are applied by the designers to create their varied designs Australian studio Toko created a senes of 20 posters for the Plakatausstellung (poster exhiblhon) at the HfG in Ofenbach, Germany, as part of an

EDITS

ANDY HILLS

CREATIVE CONSULTANCY FRANKLIN TILL INVESTIGATES THE MOVEMENTS THAT ARE DEFINING CONTEMPORARY DESIGN ongoing senes of exhibitions called MJ:1. The initial poster idea was to be a collage of recent posters, so when the type–only version was chosen, Toko wanted to achieve a sense of depth, by slightly divertrng from the poster grid, the results deliver a sense of controlled chaos. The same controlled chaos present in the studio’s Adga poster for Annual - spray tools and enlarged pixels seemingly randomly placed on top of type, Absolut continues to bring logo the the trend individualislic creative and mass consumable worlds, The brand is known for keeping up with aesthetic movements and Its latest Absolut Unique bottle project is no exception. In collaboration with Swedish communication agency Family Business, the brand wanted to acknowledge the personal tastes off it’s customers and set out to create one–of–a–kind bottles across a total of four million bottles. In order to create such a vast amount of individual designs Absolut had to re–engineer its entire production line requiring a complex interaction of human and mechanical elements and a generative program that was able to randomly mix 38 colours and 51 pattern types, ensuring that no two bottles would be alike. The Vibrant results are a dash of ‘80s pop culture, graffiti marks, paint strokes, splashes and sprays, creating highly individual artwork on the bottles. Whilst some might think this direction is all in bad taste, it comes at a time when people are seeking increasingly unique productss that reinvent their individual style. By not conforming to set rules, graphic designers are ordering work that appeals to a generation that wants to shake things up.

“We are continually scouring magazines, blogs, websites, exhibitions, and contacting designers and agencies, hoping to seek out work that feels not necessarily new, but fresh and relevant, then we can begin to question why a particular pattern is emerging.” The brand is known for keeping up with aesthetic movements and Its latest Absolut Unique bottle project is no exception. In collaboration with Swedish communication agency family Business, the brand wanted to acknowledge the personal tastes off it’s customers and set out to creale one–of–a–kind bottles across a total of four mIllion bottles. In order to create such a vast amount of individual designs Absolut had to re-engineer its entire produdion line requiring a complex interaction of human and mechanical elements and a generative program that was able to randomly mix 38 colours.

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EDITS

E D IT O R S

Q+A / MICHAEL LUGMA

The posters have an '80s pop look. How easy is it to keep something with such enduring appeal looking fresh? The '80s look has never been the intention in both posters are typographic experiment! free to reference and preferred look. But yes, the colours and the enlarged pixels could span '80s time frame.

FORM.com

How do you feel about breaking traditional design rules with your chaoric graphic style? In general, our work is very structured â&#x20AC;&#x201D; you could even say traditional. These particular pieces demanded a different approach, free of constraints and set rules.

Do you enjoy breaking rules? Experimentation is essential for progress so yes, we do enjoy breaking the rules. That said, what are the rules? Our one: follows concept and not practical rules. Both posters still communicate their message relatively dearly - albeit with a twist. Content and graphic become one and enhance each other.

What's your response to anyone who says they aren't conventionally beautiful? That's alright. We prefer to stay away from the conventional. The use of enlarged pixels is selfconsciously digital.

What does this bring to the composition? The pixel represents the digital aspect of music. The analogue has been absorbed by digital fabrication and carrier.

Q+ A / LARISSA KASPER

on the simplicity of design

Ho w vita l is simp lic ity to yo u in y o u r d e sig n p r a c tic e ? It's an important approach in our work. It comes from a balance between idea and realisation, and refines the message.

Do yo u th in k e la b o r a te o r n a me nta ti o n c a n d istr a c t fr o m th e c o r e me ss a g e ? No - with certain projects it can or course support it. But abstraction and simplification help to transmit the message in a very direct yet open way. The context complements the elements that abstraction and content keep open. It results in a controlled exchange between content, realisation and context.

Ho w d o yo u g o a b o u t r e d u c in g a s y mb o l to its p u r e st g r a p h ic fo r m? We observe what happens if we continue to abstract something until we reach a limit. The statement is emphasised as we get closer to these limits. The challenge is not to cross them.

Do yo u th in k a p ie c e o f d e sig n ca n b e str ip p e d r ig h t b a c k to its b a sic s , wh i l e s ti l l b e in g p la yfu l a n d fu ll o f p e r so n al i ty ? A project's personality is primarily characterised by its content. The realisation, or in this case the reduction, is how we show it. We often work with a strong grid, but break it slightly by introducing a playful setting.

Ho w imp o r ta n t is u se o f c o lo u r in th i s style o f wo r k - d o d e sig n s fu n c ti o n mo r e e ffe c tive ly with a ve r y sta r k p a le tte ? The use or colour is dependent on the particular project. With certain projects, a limited printing budget influences our decisions from the start. The choice or colour is more important than the reduction or the palette, as every colour transmits a certain emotion, which in turn has an effect on the message.

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GRACE

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n a summer night in New York one of the gays in a huddle outside Rawhide on Eighth Avenue calls out, “We love you, Grace!” as she walks home. In Paris, at the autumn ready-to-wear shows, a giggling Japanese girl asks if she can be snapped next to her. Grace Coddington, the creative director of American Vogue, who turns 70 in April, has been a quietly revolutionary presence in the fashion world—first as a model, then as an editor—for half a century. But only since the release of the film “The September Issue” in 2009 has she been recognised in public—greeted by strangers who witnessed some of her creative battles and now see her as a reassuringly human face of fashion. When architecture enters the realm of museum display, it generally arrives small, smooth, and flat. Drawings, photographs, computer images, video, and scale models are the usual media; however well they communicate information (and however beautiful they are), they can only approximate such phenomena as materiality, sound, and inhabitable space. For people not trained in the codes of architectural representation– most of the museum-going public–comprehension, too, tends to be approximate. In the last 15 years or so, installation architecture has come to offer an alternative: the construction within a gallery of temporary, full-scale architecture that creates spaces, programs, and experiences. The best of this work not only occupies but also affects its surroundings, exposing something of the conventions of museum and gallery display and revealing latent possibilities of the space it inhabits. “Fabrications,” an ambitious, three-venue exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, aims to use installation to draw a diverse audience into a serious, immediate encounter with contemporary architecture. Organized by the three museums’ curators of architecture–Aaron Betsky, Mark Robbins, and Terence Riley, respectively–the show presents 12 installations (four at each venue) that, according to its press materials, “offer an immediate experience of architecture while revealing and addressing ideas about current architectural production, new materials, and making space.” Many of the pieces provide opportunities for direct physical contact; among the 12 projects you’re invited to sit, climb, hide, lay down, pull, and gently drop (while bemused museum guards do their best to remain impassive). Most also strive

a creative genius with a diferent perspective by Olivia Fleming

for immediacy by exposing or exaggerating their tectonic gestures, acting as a kind of large-print version for those not accustomed to reading architecture closely. But if the installations get the “immediate” experience right, they’re not all as successful at dealing with the capacity of architecture to mediate: fewer than half of the projects present themselves as devices for reinterpreting and rearranging architectural space. It’s hard to know why this is; maybe it’s because most of the architects in the show are more used to building big than thinking about museum installation. But why fabricate an interesting architectural object for a show without also making an interesting claim about its setting, about the institutional and spatial conditions of its display? Across the three venues–the sculpture garden at the museum and the galleries of the Wexner–three basic strategies are used to make the installations “immediate”; they might be called mimetic, interactive, and interventionist approaches, and the projects divide up neatly into four per category. The mimetic works present small if nonetheless full-scale buildings or building parts that take a fairly uncritical stance to the constraints of museum display. Patkau Architects’ Petite Maison de Weekend, revisited, at the beautifully installed Wexner site, is a complete wooden cottage for two. Well crafted, if didactic in its demonstration of “sustainable” construction, it presents such features as a deep storage wall, photovoltaic roof, composting toilet, and rain-collection system; after the exhibition, it is meant to be relocated and to serve as a prototype for other such houses. Mockbee/Coker Architects followed a similar strategy, also at the Wexner: the firm built a passageway-cum-porch of different woods, cables, window screen, cast concrete, tree stumps, blue glass bottles, and other materials drawn from the vernacular architecture of the rural South; it will be attached to a home in Alabama after the exhibition ends. Given these architects’ interest in reusing their objects elsewhere, it’s not surprising that the installations remain aloof from the museum.

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The Somatic Body, Kennedy & Violich Architecture’s installation at the museum (where each of the show’s architects worked on each of its pieces at a different stage; the architect or firm that produced final working drawings for a piece is identified here as its author), presents a wall in the process of delamination and eruption, a tumbling swell of gypsum board, plywood, lath, and wire. Positioned near the entry, it has an interesting annunciatory presence but misses the chance to reorganize passage into the gallery; worse, the pseudo-sculptural stacks of drywall end up offering a banal display of common building materials. Munkenbeck and Marshall Architects built a structure that recalls Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona pavilion above the garden’s reflecting pool. In a setting so infused with the spirit of Mies (the garden was designed, after the master, by Philip Johnson), this little hut intelligently and ironically captures his

aesthetic in condensed form, and brings an intimate architectural scale into the garden, but otherwise doesn’t do much apart from showcasing two gorgeous hanging panels of woven steel. The four interactive installations focus on the demonstration of physical forces. With Dancing Bleachers, Eric Owen Moss draped wishbone-like pieces of steel over the Wexner Center’s beams; these gigantic, limp-looking forms were originally meant to be climbed so people could reach viewing platforms some 20 feet above the gallery, but institutional anxieties prevailed, and the hands-on elements (treads and rails) are vestigial. Still, the piece has an undeniably exciting presence and carries muscle enough to confront the idiosyncratic spaces and ornamental structure of Peter Eisenman’s architecture. Two museum installations practically insist on physical interaction, but don’t go far enough in uncovering what Betsky, in his curatorial statement,

rightly calls the museum’s “protective skin”–the ways it relies on its apparent physical “neutrality” (white walls, silence, concealed building and security systems, and so on) to veil its own interpretive practices and modes of spatial control. The Body in Action, by Hodgetts + Fung Design Associates, gathers air from the museum’s ventilation system into an enormous sailcloth “lung” that feeds into a bowed wooden mouthpiece; handles invite visitors to open the mouth and feel the rush of air. The Body in Equipoise, by Rob Wellington Quigley, is a kind of gangplank made of wood, cables, pink stretch wrap, bungee cord, steel tubes, and other materials; as people walk along its surface, they reach a point where their weight causes the floor to slightly drop. Both pieces subvert our expectations of architectural surfaces, but fail to get at the political dimension that Betsky suggests.

jan / feb

Grace has that space where she let’s her creativity run wild – she needs this place for her brain to rest – to create these

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wonderful ideas.”

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At museum, Ten Arquitectos with Guy Nordenson removed a portion of the venerable garden’s marble paving and inserted a wooden ramp/seat assembly in the rubble facing Auguste Rodin’s Monument to Balzac. Visitors descend through the ground plane, sit in the chair, and look up to a lean, cantilevered glass canopy inscribed with an unidentified fragment of art historical writing. The reference is so obscure, and its presentation so indirect, that you can’t tell if it has been invoked ironically, respectfully, or gratuitously; meanwhile, the power and immediacy of the excavation gets undermined. It is the four interventionist installations that pose genuinely interesting arguments about conditions of architectural exhibition and museum display along with more “immediate” aspects of construction and experience. At museum, Office directed a stair-like structure of perforated, folded sheet steel that leaps, from stiletto feet, beyond the garden’s northern wall, suggesting the interpenetration of museum garden and urban fabric. Despite the fact that–among the Judds and Giacomettis–it risks misreading as a nonetoo-handsome sculpture, it nonetheless makes a strong urban gesture, both within the garden and when seen from 54th Street. Along part of the glass curtain wall on the opposite side of the garden, SmithMiller + Hawkinson constructed a quiet but pointed critique of the wall’s way of framing and separating garden and museum. Among other elements, a folded plane of plywood steps up from the garden floor, meets the glass, and then continues inside, effectively bringing the outdoors in. Also outside, a large black panel attached to steel columns blocks the garden view and reinforces the windows’ mirror effect. Reflected images and abstract forms crisscross the glass boundary, entangling viewer and viewed in a nuanced spectral play. The other interventionist projects actually introduce new programs, and both would make welcome permanent museum installations. At the Wexner, Stanley Saitowitz intensified a rather bland space that has been used as an informal seating area and passageway with Virtual Reading Room, a lovely ensemble of clear acrylic benches, reading lecterns, shelves, and horizontal planes suspended from cables. The work not only adds architectural definition with subtle optical and acoustic effects, but also offers people the chance to sit and read–a rare accommodation in museum galleries. With The Body in Repose, Kuth/Ranieri replaced a perimeter wall at museum with a sexy new skin; its layers of industrial felt have been clamped, clipped, tatooed, and cut to make little invaginated nooks at the edge of the gallery where you can sit or lie down. From this wonderful position of interior exteriority–you are simultaneously inside and outside the gallery, suspended in a layer of interstitial space–other things become apparent: the messy innards of the building wall, the fact that people usually stand in museums, and the enormous potential of the gallery wall freed from the institutional imperatives of the smooth white plane. To the extent that “Fabrications” can legitimize and promote installation as a form of architectural practice, it marks a significant moment in the development of contemporary architecture. The show demonstrates a broad range of innovative formal strategies and materials while, at its best, showing us–even the novices among us–something of how architecture can change our relationship to the world. Despite the uneven results of the first experiment, an ongoing, periodic forum conceived along these lines could move inventive architectural thinking beyond the design community to a broader, influential, and potentially interested public. As a model for future events, then, “Fabrications” promises something great: a chance for contemporary architecture to reveal–and stretch–itself.

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DAV URB

VID BANKE a youngster, who climbed the ladder, in weeks. by Jenna Flay photography by David Urbanke

Everyone loves an architecture show about houses because all that is required of someone looking at a house is, as Gaston Bachelard writes in The Poetics of Space, “the ability to transcend our memories of all the houses in which we have found shelter [and] all the houses we have dreamed we live in” — beginning, of course, with the house we first lived in. Although visitors may appreciate the solo exhibition of a major architect, they are not usually as intimately involved in the thought processes behind the design of a concert hall, for example, and are likely to give up on reading detailed drawings. But presented with the plan of a house, people immediately walk through it in their imaginations. And architects’ models of houses spark, as dollhouses do, a level of fantasy that makes it possible to experience the physical sensation of being in a new and yet familiar space. Also, house exhibitions are more about the future than they are about the past. When Barbara Jakobson (using the name B.J. Archer) staged “Houses for Sale” at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in 1980, she invited eight international

architects to design private dwellings, showing the form to be fertile ground for architectural invention — “a geometric object of balanced voids and solids to be analyzed rationally,” as she wrote in the catalogue. Isozaki’s House of Nine Squares foretold his Palladian classicism, and Emilio Ambasz’s Arcadian Berm House spoke of that architect’s concern for the environment and interest in solar energy. In 1985, the winning designs on view at the Boston Architectural Center, from a Minneapolis College of Art and Design competition called “A New American House,” dealt with community life and the need for cluster housing that could provide work spaces at home as well as convenient child care. These houses, with backyards and gabled roofs, lent an aura of traditional reassurance to new social trends. This year, with “The Un-Private House,” the Museum of Modern Art is displaying 26 houses designed since 1988 — all but six of which have been or are being built. The show deals with new social patterns that call for fresh architectural solutions, in particular ones that combine working spaces with living spaces and that find a place for the virtual world in the home. Like a computer, the contemporary house concentrates, according to

the museum, on transmitting signals to the outside world at the cost of intimacy and privacy. Also, in a reversal of the norms of the “family room” era, children are frequently banished to separate quarters, and clients are just as likely to live alone or in same-sex relationships as in traditional nuclear families. Terence Riley, who organized the show as chief curator of the museum’s department of architecture and design, poses the main question in his catalogue essay: “If the private house no longer has a domestic character, what sort of character will it have?” The answers come from a diverse group of architects, some better known than others, representing Europe, South America, Japan, and the United States. One curious aspect of the exhibition design is the selection of the old-fashioned William Morris Larkspur pattern as the wallpaper backdrop for the show’s large-format photographs and drawings. The Arts and Crafts movement as defined by Morris took inspiration from a romanticized past — but perhaps the contrast is the point. The wallpaper does suit the heavy worktables, beds, bookshelves, and other comfortable objects provided by the Furniture Co. that serve as readymade pedestals for the models and that give a workmanlike quality to the galleries, as if these rooms were part of an architect’s studio and home combined. On the whole, the houses and loft apartments on view are anything but cozy. Rather, the archi-

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“Lazy Sunday” David Urbanke

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tects are committed to design whose appeal lies in its response to and integration of advanced technologies and new materials. Sleekness here runs more than skin deep. After years of the decorative pastiche associated with Post-Modernism, it came as both a surprise and a relief that the reigning influence in this exhibition was Mies van der Rohe and, in particular, the Farnsworth House, which the architect designed some 50 years ago in Plano, Illinois, as a weekend retreat for his close friend, Dr. Edith Farnsworth. A glass box with a flat roof and evenly spaced structural steel I-beams painted white, the house dematerializes at night (even with the draperies closed) into a cube of light. There have been many copies since, but the architects in the museum show are creating radical variations on the theme, skewing the form by selecting and developing only certain aspects of Mies’s design to advance new ideas about the configuration of rooms and the requirements of the electronic age. Two houses in Tokyo by Japanese architects are among the most exciting. On one of Tokyo’s eclectic and densely packed streets, Shigeru Ban’s Curtain Wall House juts out on a corner like a billboard for Modernism. In reversing the fun-

damental order — by hanging glass inside and curtains outside — the architect explores the formal possibilities offered by the traditional Japanese shoji-screen house, where translucency is valued over transparency. The glass sits in sliding panels and retracts into corners of the house, and once drawn, the sailcloth curtain (besides making an obvious but witty allusion to non-load-bearing walls) provides shade during the day and privacy at night. More in keeping with Mies’s courtyard houses, the M House by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa is separated from its residential street by a wall of perforated metal, behind which translucent polycarbonate windows filter light into a two-story central courtyard that is sunk, along with the dining, work, and living areas, below ground level. This courtyard and two other light courts are open to the sky, so that in passing through them, one is exposed to the weather as in a traditional Japanese house. The rectangular rooms, upstairs and down, run between the light courts in a configuration that limits privacy within the house — although the streetscape is effectively screened out. Now under construction in Napa Valley, California, the Kramlich Residence and Media Collection, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, features an angular, flat-roofed Miesian glass pavilion over a series of subterranean galleries, including one in an underground garage, for the couple’s collection of electronic art. Even the curved inner walls of the pavilion function as screens for video, films, and digital art, which compete with the view of nature beyond the structure’s glass walls. In the same vein, Diller + Scofidio’s half-crescent-shaped Slow House, an unbuilt project for a site on Long

V “As he posted his work online it gained recognition and led to pres features including ABC News and New York Post. Because of such press, David moved to New York at the age of sixteen in 2011 and has since shot for clients including Flaunt, Bullett, U_Mag, and more”

Island, features a video camera that records the view through the house’s immense atelier-style picture window and allows for instant replay on a monitor inside. And the main walls of Hariri & Hariri’s project for a Digital House feature liquid-crystal displays that allow for videoconferencing with virtual guests in the living room and cooking lessons from a televised chef in the kitchen. Two row houses on Borneo Sporenburg in Amsterdam by MVRDV, meanwhile, play with transparency and opacity on a large scale: one presents a glass facade to the street, behind which most of its rooms are boxed off by inner walls; the other hides behind a traditional masonry facade but reveals much of its interior through a glass wall running along one side. (The pattern of boxedoff and exposed rooms recalls the vertical grid of Gerrit Rietveld’s Schröder House in Utrecht, a model of which is conveniently on view, along with one of Mies’s Tugendhat House, in the topfloor architecture galleries.) Whether Riley has proved his theory about the loss of privacy is questionable. Despite the intrusions of the outside world through glass walls and electronic hookups, people still retain the option of turning off their computers or otherwise retreating — and many of the architects represented in the show have proven adept at helping them do just that. Perhaps it is the incursion of professional work spaces into private homes and the concomitant loss of the “study” as an arena for contemplation (Riley calls it a nineteenth-century room) that is more indicative of the loss of privacy. But even some of the houses in the show offer this kind of refuge: The T House by Simon Ungers with Thomas Kinslow, for example, has a separate library tower of weathering-steel plates that can fit 10,000 books as well as a reading area. And there is also Rem Koolhaas’s Maison à Bor-deaux, where the wheelchair-bound owner can sit at his desk on an open elevator platform while it moves along a three-story wall of bookshelves — an expanded notion of the study, perhaps, but still a solitary place to think and to dream.