Disegno No.26

The Quarterly Journal of Design #26 Spring 2020

This issue includes: Formafantasma’s research into global timber networks; an app-based investigation of habit-forming design; Neri Oxman at MoMA; the radical history of São Paulo’s Casa do Povo; Alpine chalets denuded; Celine’s refashioning of retail; a new forensic kit; Eimear McBride’s literary hotel architecture; the kaleidoscopic medal games of Japan’s arcades; and an interplanetary trip with NASA’s Mars rovers.

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Here in My Home Words Oli Stratford

Well, this was only ever going to be about one thing, wasn’t it?

I’m writing this on the first day after the British government abandoned its initial coronavirus mitigation strategy (keep washing your hands – that’s about it), apparently after models suggested it would lead to 260,000 deaths. Instead, we now have a raft of recommendations that, if followed, will confine most of Britain’s population to their homes for the foreseeable future. Desperate times, but then many nations have gone further, earlier. At the time of writing 198,006 people have been infected; 7,948 have died. By the time you read this, those figures will be hopelessly out of date. The effect of Covid-19 on the design industry has already been pronounced. There have been the headline postponements and cancellations of the festivals that lend structure to the industry’s year – Milan’s Salone del Mobile and the Venice Architecture Biennale chief among them, along with the smaller events that play their own role in defining the discipline – as well as the temporary closure of museums, galleries and institutions across the world. It is terrible news for event organisers, exhibitors and the industries that rely upon them, but it is likely Introduction

to pale in comparison to the long-term economic and human costs to individual designers and makers. Jobs will be lost, businesses ruined, livelihoods destroyed.

Covid-19 is a virus that confines and reduces. It renders travel networks largely inoperative, gutting the physical infrastructure of an expansive, connected world. It is a disease that frightens and diminishes, endangering the most vulnerable. It is also a disease that, at present, admits of no easy answers. Pandemics rarely succumb to silver bullets. Sensible precautions are all we have.

Hence my writing this editor’s letter at home – a space to which I’m likely to be confined indefinitely. It’s been a relatively normal day. I’ve worked on some of the texts in this issue; updated Disegno’s website; and chatted online with colleagues, all of whom are also at home.

More than anything, I’ve been surprised by the distance between what I feel and what I see in the world around me – the silence with which coronavirus has progressed.

I’m scared of Covid-19’s effect on societies. But looking outside, everything seems strangely normal. Spring buds are starting to push through; traffic occasionally drones past; neighbours come back from the shop, laden with carrier bags (admittedly, toilet-roll heavy); and my cat Edward is dancing in and out the window, chasing twigs sent skittering through the undergrowth.

4

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Contents 45

Profile Formafantasma’s Findings Researching timber through design

60

Observation Chess on Earth by Daniel Weil for Owl & Dog Playbooks Demilitarising a martial board game

3

Introduction Here in My Home

6

Contents

8

Contributors

10

Masthead The people behind Disegno

13

Timeline December 2019 to March 2020 in review

61

Review Of Fashion and Space Contemporary art in luxury retail

18

Photoessay Out of Season The Alpine ski resort unveiled

65

32

Comment Neo-Neo-Classical Building “American values”

Essay A Pachinko Game on Anabolic Steroids The future of Japan’s prismatic medal games

81

Observation Easy Vinyl Maker by Yuri Suzuki for Gakken Record-cutting in miniature Comment Mega-Quarantine The infrastructure of containment

34

35

43

44

Comment Standards and Protocols Your toaster wants to speak to your table lamp

82

Anatomy The Crime Kit Redesigning forensic apparatus Observation AusAir by Isaac Honor, Elias Honor and Jack Graham The face mask as aromatic design experience Observation Jaga by Matthias Winkler Old skins for new boots

83

96

Report The Pursuit of ’Appiness How not to stare at your phone all day Observation Greta Grotesk by Tal Shub A grotesque appropriation?

6

97

Technology The Tourists Designing motion for Mars

113

Review A Hotel is a Plot The literary appeal of a room not of one’s own

116

Observation Expressive Proverbs by Attua Aparicio Torinos for MDR Gallery A meeting of waste streams

117

Advertorial A History of Rattan The rise, fall and renaissance of a material

121

Review The Impossible Designer On Neri Oxman at MoMA

125

Observation Rope Chair by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec for Artek Kinbaku for chair enthusiasts

126

History Place of Speech São Paulo’s Casa do Povo

140 Index Short stories from the creation of this issue 144 Seen on Screen Last Car of the Future Whatever happened to tomorrow?

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Contributors Glenn Adamson is a historian currently doing his best to concentrate on the future. p. 121 Annelie Bruijn is a photographer from Amsterdam who used to live in Italy. p. 45 Lara Chapman works as a design writer and curator. Were things different, she would likely be pursuing her aspiration to become a trapeze artist. p. 43, 60 Irene Cieraad likes to write about puzzling things, such as the global popularity of the Swiss chalet. p. 18 Brendan Cormier doesn’t drive, but writes a lot about driving. p. 144 Roman Häbler and Matteo Visentin sometimes work together, sometimes alone and sometimes with others. p. 43, 44, 60, 81, 96, 116, 125 Motohiko Hasui finds himself inspired by what he sees in everyday Japanese life. p. 65

George Kafka is a writer and editor who misses Brazil. p. 126 Joe Lloyd is oddly content to spend his evenings at home, gradually making his way through the Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference wine range. p. 35 Ali Morris has a newfound appreciation for rattan furniture after visiting Expormim’s factory in Valencia. p. 117 Luke Caspar Pearson is a designer and academic based in London, where he works between architecture and video games. p. 65 André Penteado enjoyed photographing the layers of history and politics at Casa do Povo. p. 126 Eric Pickersgill uses photography to question the way technology, digital screens and social media are forever altering humans and their relationships. p. 83 Paula Prats creates images that focus on details, shapes and colours. p. 117

8

Leonhard Rothmoser just finished his exhibition Projecting Age at Lothringer 13 Halle, Munich. p. 32, 34, 82 Alice Twemlow is based at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, where her research addresses design and expanded timescales. p. 45 Olaf Unverzart and Sebastian Schels came up with the idea of taking photos of winter sport resorts in summer during bike rides across the Alps. p. 18 Kate Wagner created the blog McMansion Hell and is the architecture critic at The New Republic. p. 32 Maxime Weiss is a writer and researcher who, when asked about her current project, gushes a little about land art in the 1970s and avoids mentioning the name “Robert Smithson”. p. 96, 116 Will Wiles is the author of three novels, including The Way Inn, a tale of cosmic horror in a modern suburban hotel. p. 113

The Quarterly Journal of Design #26 Editor-in-chief Oli Stratford oliver@disegnomagazine.com

Founder and publication director Johanna Agerman Ross

Deputy editor Kristina Rapacki kristina@disegnomagazine.com

Creative directors Florian Böhm Annahita Kamali akfb.com

Creative producer Evi Hall eleanor@disegnomagazine.com

Designer Jonas Hirschmann info@akfb.com

Subeditor Ann Morgan

Colour management Terry Smith Complete Creative Services completeltd.com

Editorial interns Lara Chapman Zlata Dijenova Maxime Weiss Bahar Yilmaz

Words by Glenn Adamson, Johanna Agerman Ross, Lara Chapman, Irene Cieraad, Brendan Cormier, Evi Hall, George Kafka, Natalie Kane, Joe Lloyd, Ali Morris, Luke Caspar Pearson, Kristina Rapacki, Oli Stratford, Alice Twemlow, Kate Wagner, Maxime Weiss and Will Wiles.

Images by Annelie Bruijn, Roman Häbler, Motohiko Hasui, NASA, André Penteado, Eric Pickersgill, Paula Prats, Leonhard Rothmoser, Sebastian Schels, Kate Strudwick, Olaf Unverzart and Matteo Visentin.

Paper and print This issue of Disegno is printed by Park Communications on Arcoprint Extra White 110gsm and Symbol Freelife Gloss 115gsm. The cover is printed on Arcoprint Extra White 250gsm. All of the paper used in this issue is from Fedrigoni UK.

Publisher and commercial director Chris Jones chris@disegnomagazine.com Commercial partnerships manager Jess Tully Sales executive Farnaz Ari farnaz@disegnomagazine.com Circulation and stockist enquiries Adam Long adam@logicalconnections.co.uk Distribution Logical Connections Distribution logicalconnections.co.uk

Thanks Many thanks to Roman Häbler for braving the horrors of FedEx; to Terry Smith for providing exemplary repro services in the face of the pandemic; to Johanna Agerman Ross for a snazzy new office design; to Expormim for welcoming us into its factory; to the MillCo project, Zetteler and Fritz Hansen for a splendid book club; and to healthcare workers the world over for keeping us all safe during this difficult time.

Finally, we are sad to say goodbye to Jess Tully, who provided seamless cover for the Disegno team over the past five months. We are very grateful to Jess for everything she accomplished while at Disegno and look forward to working with her again soon.

We are very grateful to all our contributors, and for the help of everybody who has supported us and helped make Disegno #26 possible.

Not least Fouz, the bravest of all the Disegno cats.

Contact us Studio 2, The Rose Lipman Building 43 De Beauvoir Road London N1 5SQ +44 20 7249 1155

We are also delighted to welcome the lovely Alma to the world, the newest member of the extended Disegno family. Congratulations to Annahita, Florian and Kaspar!

10

Contents copyright The content of this magazine belongs to Tack Press Limited and to the authors and artists. If you are tempted to reproduce any of it, please ask first.

Disegno Works Disegno also runs the creative agency Disegno Works. disegnoworks.com

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DECEMBER

step down as CEOs of Alphabet, the

as a band-aid for a phenomenon that

company behind Google. “We believe

will grow steadily worse as the climate

A conscious uncoupling

it’s time to assume the role of proud

crisis deepens. It now falls to the

After 18 years of transatlantic

parents – offering advice and love,

Australian government to determine

partnership, textile brands Kvadrat

but not daily nagging!” they wrote.

which land-management policies will

and Maharam announced they were to

The couple conveniently distanced

prevent another such devastating

go their separate ways. Danish Kvadrat

themselves from their now 21-year-old

season in the future. The goodwill

will launch solo operations in the

baby just as shit was hitting the fan.

of architects can only get you so far.

US, while American Maharam will do the

Sundar Pichai, Google’s long-serving

same in Europe. A clue as to the cause

CEO, has taken over parental duties

of the rupture came from Maharam’s

at a time when the firm faces a slew

Taliesin in a tangle

president Tony Manzari, who said it

of antitrust investigations, internal

In January, The School of Architecture

was “essential that each company shape

scandals, political criticisms and tax

at Taliesin revealed it was to close,

its destiny according to its unique

rows – fostering was always going to

citing a lack of funding. Despite

priorities and product offering”.

be tough. Meanwhile, the distant dads

having been founded by Frank Lloyd

With Kvadrat having rapidly diversified

retain their 11 per cent stakes in the

Wright in 1932, the school announced

its interests through the purchase of

trillion-dollar company, as well as

that it had been unable to reach

(or investment in) companies such as

super-voting power on the board.

a financial agreement with the Frank

Kinnasand, Magniberg, Febrik and Sahco,

Lloyd Wright Foundation, which owns

perhaps they just didn’t have much in common anymore?

its campuses at Taliesin in Wisconsin

JANUARY

and Taliesin West in Arizona. Cue

Images courtesy of Kvadrat and Andrew Pielage, The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.

Twitter outrage, with many pointing

To boldly go where man has gone before

out that preservation of the school

“After consultation with our Great

ought to form part of the foundation’s

Military Leaders, designers, and

mission. Good news, then, when in March

others, I am pleased to present the

the school announced that it was to

new logo for the United States Space

reverse its decision "in light of new

Force [USSF], the Sixth Branch of our

[external] support” following the

Magnificent Military!” announced

public outcry. The school’s future

Donald Trump. The statement’s grandeur

still isn’t assured – a deal remains

was somewhat undercut, however, by the

to be struck with the foundation – but

uncanny resemblance of the new USSF

it’s almost enough to make you think

logo to that of Star Trek’s fictional

that the original announcement wasn’t

Mystery pneumonia

Starfleet Command’s insignia. They’re

so much a declaration of defeat,

On 31 December, authorities in Wuhan,

almost identical. The USSF scrambled

as a savvy PR move.

China, revealed that medical staff

to point out that Star Trek’s design

were treating cases of a pneumonia-

was itself inspired by US Air Force

like disease of unknown cause – the

emblems, although this doesn’t quite

first public acknowledgement of

cut it. For a division that claims

Covid-19. In hindsight, it was the

it will “propel the United States

bleakest New Year’s announcement

into a new era”, it seems to be

imaginable, although nobody could

stuck in a black hole of mid-century

have predicted the scale of what

space-race tropes.

would follow. “I hope this pathogen is a less harmful one so it would not cause a major epidemic similar

Assistance after the fact

to Sars,” Leo Poon, a public-health

As bushfires raged across Australia,

expert at the University of Hong Kong,

burning up to 21 per cent of the

Big Met is watching you

told The New York Times. “It would

area covered by the nation’s forests

London’s Metropolitan Police

be a nightmare for all of us.” During

excluding Tasmania, a group of

announced in January that it would

the 2002-03 Sars outbreak, around 800

architects came together to combat

begin using live facial recognition

people died. At the time of writing,

the threat. Founded by Jiri Lev,

to track suspects. Frightening stuff,

Covid-19 has killed close to 20,000.

Architects Assist promised to provide

particularly given the history of

pro-bono services to people affected

racial and gender bias within face-

by the crisis, pairing victims with

tracking algorithms. The Met, however,

Proud parents abandon monstrous child

studios that could provide designs and

was quick to reassure the public.

Google’s founders Sergey Brin and

planning for replacement structures.

After two years of trials, the force

Larry Page published a letter on

It is a laudable, vital initiative

claimed to have achieved a 70 per cent

3 December announcing they were to

– but one that can only ever serve

success rate with the technology, with

Timeline

is unprecedented in modern times.”

an incorrect identification rate of just one in a thousand. Never mind

FEBRUARY

After a series of unseasonable cyclones in the Arabian Gulf generated

that the only independent review found just a 19 per cent success rate, or

The red wedding

ideal breeding conditions, vast

that a further test of the system in

When Caroline Baumann abruptly stepped

swarms

late February made eight matches, of

down from her role as director of the

than 10 countries in the East African

which only one was correct – a false

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design

and Gulf regions, ravaging crops.

identification rate of 87.5 per cent.

Museum on 7 February, few could have

These swarms are formidable, numbering

Like the Met said, it’s probably fine!

guessed the furore that lay behind

up to 80m adult insects per square km.

We, for one, feel very reassured.

her decision. Soon enough, however,

Even relatively small ones can consume

the news trickled out. Baumann

the same amount of food daily as

had been pushed, with an internal

around 35,000 people. Food security

Gaultier bows out

investigation finding that she had

is now at risk, with the UN asking

“I’m going to give you a scoop,”

used her “Smithsonian position for

for international funds to combat

said fashion designer Jean-Paul

private gain” in connection to her

the crisis. World governments ignore

Gaultier in a Twitter video posted

September 2018 wedding. Baumann

this threat at their peril. With the

in January. “This will be my last

denies all allegations, but the report

climate crisis rendering cyclones

haute-couture show.” After a 50-year

claimed that she had obtained free use

increasingly likely, phenomena like

career, during which he came to

of a Buckminster Fuller-designed venue,

the locust swarms will place supply

epitomise Parisian fashion at its

as well as a discounted wedding dress

lines under ever greater strain.

most

from a Brooklyn designer, in exchange

In a connected world, how we prepare

on. He will transfer his efforts to

for minor favours from the museum

and deal with these disasters is

other projects, a spokesperson later

– all of which seem to have been,

everyone’s problem.

confirmed, “in a field different

technically, within her rights to

to fashion”. Please let this be

grant. Naive and ill-advised, perhaps,

the return of Eurotrash, the Channel

but whether it merited her departure

4 late-night show that Gaultier

seems doubtful. Surely a slap on the

co-hosted with Antoine de Caunes

wrist would have sufficed?

decadent, Gaultier is moving

of locusts infested more

from 1993 to 1997. In its ribald parodied themselves, their subjects

Women in the Mall

and the Brits watching. Gaultier was

In a rare bit of good news for 2020,

all high camp and feather boas; de

the US House of Representatives

Caunes, the strait-laced prude. It was

approved plans in February to build

wildly popular and very, very silly.

a new Smithsonian National Women’s

“If Eurotrash was still airing,” one

Museum on or near the National Mall

A pair of Pradas

YouTube viewer mused in the comments

in Washington DC. The journey to this

In late February, the fashion press

section of an archive episode,

point had been a surprisingly long

were summoned to Fondazione Prada

“Brexit would NEVER have happened.”

one. Legislation for the museum

for a special announcement – Miuccia

was introduced in 1998, with little

Prada had appointed Raf Simons as

progress until 2014, when a commission

co-creative director of her eponymous

was founded to investigate the need

brand. The pair said the move would

for such an institution. Surprise,

provide “more strength” to “the

surprise: they found that there

creative aspect in the business”,

might just be such a requirement

with both Simons and Prada adamant

after all. It was a particular

that they would have “equal

triumph for Carolyn Maloney, the

responsibilities for creative input

member of Congress who launched

and decision-making”. The company

the original legislation. “This is

was quick to rebuff claims that it

about giving women, all women, our

was succession planning for Prada’s

rightful place in history,” she

eventual retirement (“Please don't

said sagely.

make me older than I am,” Prada, 70, quipped), although it seems a denial that ought to be taken with a pinch of

Not a threat to ignore

salt. Nevertheless, Prada and Simons’s

“This is a scourge of biblical

interplay in the short to medium term

proportions”, read a statement from

should make for fascinating viewing.

the United Nations. “Yet as ancient

The new setup is unprecedented within

as this scourge is, its scale today

fashion and the results may well be

14

Images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and Sven Torfinn.

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The original

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spectacular. But how “equal” can any

health and safety, but governments

rejecting starchitect-style individual

partnership be when one member’s name

also need to begin planning for the

celebrity in favour of recognition

is literally above the door?

aftermath. “[We] must ensure that arts

of their team as a whole. In the

organizations, large and small, will

face of this community spirit, how

be able to withstand the economic

did the Pritzker score an own goal?

devastation so many are facing,” noted

Well, as the Financial Times’s

Daniel H. Weiss, president and CEO of

Edwin Heathcote pointed out, when

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

honouring architects who stress the

“Cultural organizations are important

importance of the collective, it’s

not just because of the value that the

best not to accompany the press

arts bring to our lives but because

release announcing their triumph

these institutions also drive tourism

with a statement that “It is vital

and create jobs.” We couldn’t have

to note that the Prize does not, and

said it better ourselves.

has not, honoured a firm, rather it

MARCH

honours an individual architect."

A tale of two postponements

Conran sells up

On 25 February, Milan’s Salone del

Changes of the guard are inevitable

Mobile announced the postponement of

within business, but there was

its 2020 edition. It was a grave blow

nevertheless something surprising

to design, albeit the only decision

about the news that Terence Conran

possible given the impact of Covid-19

is no longer the owner of his eponymous

on Italy. Hosted without interruption

design retailer, The Conran Shop.

since 1961, Salone is the heart of

Despite stores across London, Paris,

design’s annual calendar – the event

Tokyo and Seoul, The Conran Shop had

at which brands set out their stall

become a loss-making operation, with

for the year ahead – and its deferral

accountants briefed in 2019 to “launch

has left exhibitors scrambling to find

a process exploring the sale, refinance

Michael Sorkin (1948-2020)

different methods to communicate their

and investment options for The Conran

Number 198 in the architect and author

work. Step forward Dezeen, which

Shop and its subsidiaries”. Enter the

Michael Sorkin’s essay-cum-list of

announced plans to launch Virtual

Marandi family, which hold investments

‘Two Hundred Fifty Things an Architect

Milan, a digital design week to help

across the hospitality sector and

Should Know’ is particularly pleasing:

fill the void. Not a bad idea, but

whose offer for the store was praised

“Why you think architecture does any

one undone by its creators' failure

by Conran as being “as close to my

good.” Sorkin, who died in late March

to consult Salone or the city of

dream and long-term vision for The

following complications from Covid-19,

Milan, laying itself open to charges

Conran Shop as we could ever wish

was an insightful and piercing critic,

of opportunism, insensitivity and

for”. It is probably a wise economic

unafraid of taking on the mores and

profiting from a crisis. The event

decision, but the absence of Conran

hypocrisies of the establishment.

was quickly renamed Virtual Design

will take some getting used to –

Writing with an acerbic wit, Sorkin

Festival, before being postponed

The Marandi Store just doesn’t

grappled eloquently with the challenges

indefinitely in the face of heavy

have the same ring to it.

of architecture and, when required, raked it over the coals. Most

criticism. “It quickly became clear

Pritzker individualism

of his intellect and his ability to

Even when the Pritzker Prize gets

zero in on points of interest that

it right, it still finds a way to get

ranged from the highfalutin to the

Design shuts down

it wrong. The award’s 2020 laureates

everyday. The 142nd thing an architect

As Covid-19 took hold, March

are an uncontroversial choice. Yvonne

should know: “The Venturi effect.”

became a month defined by shutdowns,

Farrell and Shelley McNamara of

The 143rd: “How people pee.” He will

postponements and cancellations.

Grafton Architects are talented

be much missed.

Across the world, design weeks and

practitioners who tick all the boxes:

biennales shuttered their upcoming

they’re socially engaged; actively

events; museums and institutions

involved in education; doyennes of

closed their doors; and brands tried

the growing Irish architecture scene;

to make the best of a period marked by

and, crucially, female winners in

inevitable staff absences, production

a field that remains male-centric.

delays and distribution challenges.

What’s more, Farrell and McNamara

For the duration of the pandemic, the

have long championed architecture

world’s attention should be on public

as essentially collaborative,

Dezeen’s editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs.

16

Images courtesy of Prada and Iwan Baan, the Pritzker Prize.

delightful of all was the sheer breadth

that we had got it wrong,” admitted

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Out of Season Words Irene Cieraad Photographs Olaf Unverzart and Sebastian Schels

Given that I share their passion for biking in the Alps, Olaf Unverzart and Sebastian Schels’s scenes of desolate French ski resorts in the summertime are familiar to me. They remind me of the disappointment you feel when, after a strenuous hill climb, you look up to see that the accommodation you booked appears to be in a mundane apartment block rather than a romantic wooden chalet. The moment you stand on the balcony, however, any initial disillusionment is forgotten. The view is worth the effort.

You may not realise it, but the temptation to climb mountains specifically to enjoy breathtaking panoramas is – from a historical perspective – a relatively new impulse.

In his 1761 novel Julie, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau sparked society’s obsession with Alpine landscapes and the Swiss chalet with the following description of mountain scenery: “the beauty of a thousand stunning vistas; the pleasure of seeing all around one nothing but entirely new objects, strange birds, bizarre and unknown plants, of observing in a way an altogether different nature, and finding oneself in a new world”. In the 18th century, the Alps represented Europe’s unexplored interior.

Rousseau’s vivid description of the mountains above Vevey in Switzerland made the town and its backdrop a place of pilgrimage. Julie prompted John Ruskin and Lord Byron, among others, to visit the region. On his first mountain hike, Ruskin fell in love with the chalet typology, which he deemed “the loveliest piece of architecture I had ever [seen]; yet it was nothing in itself, nothing but a few mossy fir trunks, loosely nailed together, with one or two grey stones on the roof”. By contrast, he vehemently criticised the inauthentic appearance of the so-called “Swiss cottages” that had been built in Britain since the novel’s publication, labelling them “a melancholy deception”.

Chalets and mountains became Switzerland’s main tourist attractions.

By the late 19th century, not only Vevey, but also villages such as St Moritz and Davos had become attractive destinations. They catered for a spoilt international elite, who wanted to experience “a thousand stunning vistas” but preferred an easier route than a sweaty climb. To please these visitors, novel forms of transport like cog railways were invented, while roads, conventional railways and tunnels were also built. In due course, hotels would be constructed along the winding tracks to the passes and close to the Alpine railway stations.

Alpine tourism was initially a summer affair, with snowfall seen as a killjoy that blocked mountain trails. Reportedly, winter tourism only began to make ground in 1864, when a shrewd hotel owner in St Moritz made a wager with some English summer guests to return in winter; if they did not enjoy their visit, he promised to refund them the cost of their trip.

To entertain them, all kinds of sports activities were organised, including iceskating, curling and polo. The attractions soon turned the village into the first luxury winter resort. At that time, skiing was still unknown – and only practised in Norway – but not for long. The writer Arthur Conan Doyle was one of the first foreigners to train himself in the sport – staying in Davos in 1893 with his wife Louisa, who was suffering from tuberculosis. In describing his crosscountry skiing trips in the English newspapers, Conan Doyle became an ardent advocate for the sport, predicting that “hundreds of Englishmen will come to Switzerland for a skiing season.”

The wealthy tourists revolted traditional Alpine society. The locals resented the visitors’ summer activities and the accompanying infrastructure, as well as the growth of winter tourism with its corresponding introduction of ski lifts

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and funiculars to support downhill skiing, which was seen as frivolous. Nevertheless, the hibernal revolution gained pace in the French Alps in the 1910s with the construction of the region’s first purposebuilt ski resort, Megève. Founded by the Rothschild family, whose members were allegedly disenchanted with the lack of ski facilities in St Moritz, this collection of chalet-shaped hotels soon became one of Europe’s most luxurious ski resorts.

In the postwar years, the growing popularity of skiing led to a boom in construction. In the 1960s, purpose-built ski resorts sprang up in the northern French Alps. This region did not target the jet-setting elite – who were already well catered for by architectural cause célèbre Avoriaz – and so its resorts are functional and modern, and offer relatively cheap, high-rise accommodation. To many, these city-style Alpine blocks may seem like eyesores, particularly without a soothing layer of snow, but Unverzart and Schels are clearly fascinated by the contrast between them and the landscape.

The urban architecture of purposebuilt French ski resorts is unlike that of their Swiss and Austrian counterparts, where the tourist structures blend in with the traditional chalets of the old village, respecting the prominence of the white-clad church tower as the highest point. It’s a contrast explained by the class history of mountain tourism. Visitors to Vevey wanted to see scenes from Julie; just as upper-class tourists valued St Moritz’s Alpine landscape dotted with chalets; and the Rothschilds knew that their ambitions to attract an elite clientele to Megève required the illusion of a Swiss village. It was only with the popularisation of winter tourism in the 1960s – and skiing in particular – that France took the initiative of building affordable accommodation on a grand scale. These were buildings to house “real” ski-lovers, those less interested in the romantic ambience of après ski.

Avoriaz, Haute-Savoie, France.

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Les Orres, Hautes-Alpes, France.

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Aime-la-Plagne, Savoie, France.

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Le Corbier, Savoie, France.

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Saint François Longchamp, Savoie, France.

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Val Thorens, Savoie, France.

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La Plagne Bellecôte, Savoie, France.

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Pila, Aosta valley, Italy.

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Pila, Aosta valley, Italy.

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Tignes, Savoie, France.

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Neo-Neo-Classical Words Kate Wagner Illustration Leonhard Rothmoser

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An executive order draft called ‘Make Federal Buildings Beautiful Again’ obtained in February by the Architectural Record revealed that the Trump administration is considering rewriting the 1962 ‘Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture’, the rules for the design and construction of US government buildings.

The original guidance, by Democratic politician and sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan, stipulated that “design must flow from the architectural profession to the government, and not vice versa”. Moynihan discouraged adherence to any strict aesthetic and maintained that federal buildings should exemplify their era.

This does not sit well, however, with a right-wing thinktank called the National Civic Art Society (NCAS). The chair of NCAS, which is behind the executive order, texted the following to The New York Times: “For too long architectural elites and bureaucrats have derided the idea of beauty, blatantly ignored public opinions on style, and have quietly spent taxpayer money constructing ugly, expensive, and inefficient buildings. This executive order gives voice to the 99 percent – the ordinary American people who do not like what our government has been building.”

The proposed executive order would create a “President’s Committee for the Re-Beautification of Federal Architecture”, which would enforce a design mandate of “classically styled” classicism. It is, essentially, an aesthetic power grab with the sole aim of forcing columns and pediments on hapless courthouses – a right-wing culture war that makes “traditional values” code for going back to the way things were before multiculturalism. Twitter accounts such as @Arch_Revival_ reveal an enthusiastic online community using classical architecture as a cover for claims that European heritage (cultural and otherwise) is inherently superior.

But Greco-Roman palatial architecture does not represent where many people in the US come from, and to those whose ancestors toiled under slavery at neoclassical plantation houses it is an insult. Equally, the oft-repeated claim that “nobody besides architects likes modernism” has been debunked repeatedly – witness the popularity of buildings like the National Museum of African American History and Culture, mid-century modern furniture, and the houses of Frank Lloyd Wright.

People enjoy a range of architectural offerings and to reduce plurality because of baseless assumptions does a disservice to the nuanced means by which human beings interact with the built environment. Beneath its populist exterior, the NCAS mindset shows a contempt for not only artistic expression, but also the 99 per cent.

Comment

Standards and Protocols Words Natalie Kane Illustration Leonhard Rothmoser

We all like getting along, don’t we? No one likes to be too different, because why would you, you attention-seeker. That’s why we have standards and protocols.

This January, Amazon, Apple, Google and the Zigbee Alliance (which includes Ikea) formed Project Connected Home over IP (PCHOIP), a working group to create a “royalty-free connectivity standard to increase compatibility among smart home products”. In short (and trust me, I’m trying), all smart devices need a way to talk to the device we control them with and the internet. But rather than all doing this in the same way, individual manufacturers just implement their own protocols in the name of getting one over on the others. This is known as “innovation”. As a result of innovation, nothing works unless you buy yet more connector-things, which leaves your house looking like Scrapheap Challenge.

We all remember the Smart Home, right? Magic toasters that spy on your children, door locks that forget who you are because they decided to update themselves while you were out getting milk – that sort of thing. Last year, BBVA’s OpenMind project estimated there would be roughly 3.6bn “Internet of Things” devices connected to the network by the end of 2019. Well, PCHOIP essentially wants to make it much, much easier for you to invite this creep-tech into your house, and much, much less likely that you’ll chuck it in a drawer once you’re bored of scrolling through all the colours on your Phillips Hue smart bulb.

With PCHOIP, you won’t have to negotiate several different types of common connections – such as Zigbee, wifi and Bluetooth – to introduce technological harmony into your daily life: the protocol should sit on top of the conflict and allow everything to get along perfectly. If you’d like to know more about this exciting development, all you have to do is read the alliance’s extremely long, extremely boring mission statement. There isn’t even a diagram to make it easy for you, or a funny mascot to tell you about device certification. Come on, give us a mascot!

I could explain to you why standards are important – they are, I promise – but it’s honestly just too boring. I’d much rather talk about why you’d want to bring an internet-connected lighting system into your home; let your fridge tell you what to eat based on exceptionally generalised data; or run the risk of your Bluetoothconnected vibrator being turned on remotely. Why do we have to put the internet in everything? It’s not like we’re particularly informed about cyber security. After all, we still struggle with passwords.

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The Forensic Kit A redesign

Words Joe Lloyd

In 1910, the criminologist Edmond Locard set up the first modern forensic laboratory.1 From his premises in the attic of a Lyonnaise police station, Locard – who had trained in both medicine and law – set about analysing hair, clothing fibres and skin. He wrote treatises on the uses of fingerprints (1914), tobacco ash (1929) and lip prints (1932) as evidence.2 Locard’s Exchange Principle, which holds that “every contact leaves a trace”, became the core maxim of modern forensics.

In the decades that followed, forensics developed exponentially, quickly becoming a science. In 1984, almost 20 years after Locard’s death, the British geneticist Alec Jeffreys pioneered DNA profiling.

Forensic scientists today can marshal a bewildering array of techniques: ballistics, fingerprinting, pathology and entomology, toxicology, DNA analysis, 3D modelling, and more besides.3 With such an extensive toolbox, its powers can seem miraculous when viewed from afar. TV dramas like Silent Witness (1996-present) and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000-15) have often fuelled this image, to the extent that by 2004 commentators in the US worried about the so-called “CSI effect”, where jurors place so much faith in forensics evidence that it distorts their judgement. “I just met with the conference of Louisiana judges,” recounted one expert interviewed for a 2007 New Yorker report, “and, when I asked if CSI had influenced their juries, every one of them raised their hands.”

Last year, the London-based designer Kate Strudwick discovered how false such glamorised ideas of forensics can be. Strudwick had become interested in forensics through the recent wave of true crime podcasts, led by 2014’s Criminal and Serial, and then spoken to family friends who worked as detectives for London’s Metropolitan Police about Future Crimes, a bestselling explication of cyber-crime from former Interpol adviser and FBI futurist Marc Goodman. “I just started having a conversation with them,” recounts Strudwick, “because as people who work regularly with evidence, I was interested in hearing their perspective.”

Strudwick’s interlocutors painted an entirely different picture from the CSI fantasia: a cash-strapped force reliant on cumbersome and outdated systems, where everything from the security of evidence on the crime scene to the labelling and logging of stored objects was prone to human error. As a student on the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London’s joint MA in Innovation Design Engineering (IDE), she decided to devote her graduation project to finding a better way to proceed.

For.Form is the result of extended research, experimentation and testing with potential users. After identifying the numerous flaws in the present processes, Strudwick set about designing items that would allow evidence to be secured on scene, stored and logged. The outcomes – a mouldable wrapping material; a kit centred on a piece of that material to protect and package evidence; a proposed system of storage – may, 1 2

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Forensics does of course have a long and diverting prehistory, stretching back at least as far as the Chinese bureaucrat Song Ci’s Washing Away of Wrongs, written in 1247.

In this, he was building on the work of fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, who in 1887’s A Study in Scarlet, was noted to have examined cigar butts. And indeed, Locard became known as the “Sherlock Holmes of France.”

It also has applications outside criminal cases, as the human rights research group Forensic Architecture’s work amply demonstrates.

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Kate Strudwick has developed a type of forensic packaging that holds items of evidence in position while minimising contamination.

Strudwick’s interlocutors painted an entirely different picture from the CSI fantasia: a cashstrapped force reliant on outdated systems.

Anatomy

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Anatomy

if put into production, mitigate many of the problems facing forensics officers today.

Strudwick began her project with extensive contextual research.

She visited a police station, the Old Bailey and a Home Office violent crime prevention workshop, and attended the annual Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 lecture by Susanna Challinger, a researcher into the applications of Kelvin probe force microscopy in examining fingerprints. A particularly eye-opening experience was a visit to the Forensics Europe Expo at Kensington Olympia, the only European exhibition covering every aspect of forensic science. “I felt like a spy,” she recalls. “There were a lot of military products like armour, but there was also some really advanced technology for detection.”

Among other things, Strudwick saw devices utilising Lidar measurements to create 3D simulations of crime scenes through laser light. The exhibition also included 3D mapping programs and technology for extracting deleted data from phones and apps. Other recent innovations with the potential to make forensics more accurate include the portable Lab-on-a-Chip, which could allow forensic analysis to be carried out on the spot by police rather than sent to labs, and the miniPCR, which rapidly creates billions of copies of a DNA sample in order to study it.4 However, it is unlikely that these devices will be used by police forces anytime soon. “There is a gap,” explains Strudwick, “between the sort of stuff being produced and the equipment the police can actually use. There’s budgeting and a lot of tests they have to go through to ensure that something answers every question it needs to.”

A decade of Conservative-led government in the UK has made budgeting increasingly tight. There has been an overall 19 per cent slash in police funding over the course of the decade, with around 45,000 staff lost across the country. “Crime scene management,” wrote Val McDermid in her 2014 book Forensics: The Anatomy of Crime, “has become the front line in the investigation of murder”. Nonetheless, according to Strudwick’s research, since 2010 the number of crime scene managers (CSMs) has halved, challenging the ability of those who remain to be on the scene during the vital “golden hour”, the early stages of the investigation in which the greatest police resources are deployed. One of Theresa May’s earliest edicts as home secretary was to close the government-funded Forensic Science Service, forcing police to rely instead on private-sector contracts. Due to the expense, as Strudwick learned, only five pieces of evidence can now be submitted for analysis, forcing CSMs to make quick decisions on the most pertinent gathered objects. The effects of this are reflected in statistics: Home Office figures show that, in the twelve months running up to March 2019, only 7.8 per cent of recorded offences led to a summons or charge, compared to 9.1 per cent in the previous year. A 2018 BBC News report, meanwhile, identified 4

DNA advances are particularly astonishing. In 2018, for instance, the serial rapist and murderer known as the Golden State Killer was captured for crimes committed between 1974 and 1986 after detectives uploaded a genetic profile from a rape kit to a genomics database, constructed a virtual family tree, narrowed down potential matches, and then collected DNA samples from the suspect’s car handle and a tissue in his garbage can.

“Without this technique,” said investigator Paul Holes, “I’m not sure we would have solved this case anytime soon.”

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Fingerprint tests carried out by Strudwick as part of her research.

a 70 per cent rise in England and Wales of cases that have collapsed due to a failure to provide evidence.

Through her conversations with members of the Met Police, Strudwick identified problems at three stages of the present system, beginning with protection of the crime scene. A rambling process, whereby firstresponse officers, then detectives, then finally the protective-clothingclad CSMs arrive, can see evidence exposed to natural contaminants. This is especially true outdoors, where crime scenes can span extensive areas.

Items used to cover evidence can take further time to arrive, and require cleaning before use. “Chances are,” said one of Strudwick’s interviewees, “you’ll ask for a tent [to cover part of the scene], and so and so has the key to get it and they’re busy, or they’re not working, or you get it and it hasn’t been cleaned since the last scene. We just end up using bin lids or crates, anything we can find really.” As the technologies available to forensic scientists become more sensitive, these deficiencies in police processes become more apparent and the margin of error wider.

Secondly, Strudwick found issues with packaging evidence once it has been removed from the scene. Forces currently deploy a legion of differentsized bags, in paper and plastic, with little consistency. “There are,” revealed another of Strudwick’s respondents, “about 43 different ways of packaging a knife or a bottle.” These bags are not sterilised before use, allowing for possible contamination. Plastic bags are not breathable, so wet evidence degrades, while paper bags are opaque, meaning that evidence cannot be seen without the bag being reopened. Both types suffer from weak seals.

In Britain, pieces of evidence may be retained for several years after a conviction, to allow for appeals. Strudwick’s third insight concerns the problems of processing and storing these items, which are often inconsistently labelled. The station Strudwick visited had a significant backlog of objects from different cases, preventing them from being quickly stored. And evidence can change over time. “There was a case in Italy,” explains Strudwick, “where the blood dried and became powder.”

While in storage, this powder gradually spread from its original location on the shirt, making it hard to use as evidence. The loose structure of a bag means that even fingermarks on the evidence within can move while being transported. Once evidence is stowed, in large boxes stuffed with rows of bags, their handwritten labelling can lead to further errors. “As there’s not a huge amount of investment into technology and future-proofing,” says Strudwick, “they’re struggling with certain things at the moment.”

Perceiving these problem areas, Strudwick set about designing a solution that could improve all three. The police’s stringent budget offered an unusual advantage for a student seeking an implementable product. “It’s interesting working on a student budget,” she says. “You’re forced to be quite cheap with your materials, which is exactly what the police have to be as well.”

While her initial sketches contained an imaginative range of ideas – early inspirations included silly string, origami, sticky back plastic and Monsters, Inc.-style vacuum pods – she narrowed down the possibilities through a series of “what if” questions that suggested a potential form.

“What if a mould could be made of the evidence on site to create a unique protective shell?” ran the first. She then investigated whether a membrane

Anatomy

‘It’s interesting working on a student budget. You’re forced to be quite cheap with your materials, which is what the police have to be as well.’

could be created to surround and gather information; whether the current plastic bags could be augmented to hold the evidence in place; whether the bags could be inflated in different ways to trap and protect; and finally, whether a membrane could take and preserve the shape of the evidence without requiring the use of any additional equipment. At each stage, she eliminated unsuccessful techniques. Using her home as a makeshift crime scene, she marked dummy pieces of evidence with her fingerprints. After the evidence was contained by her materials, she rubbed iron filings over the protected samples to test whether her fingerprints could be retrieved.

“I set down what the parameters had to be,” explains Strudwick. “What was necessary and what was ideal. I started playing around with different materials. It was quite rigorous and logical – not the most creative way of working.” Seeking materials that would be transparent, elastic, breathable, waterproof and able to morph while maintaining the shape of the captured object so that it could be removed, then repackaged in the same position, she worked methodically through more than 20 pre-existing substances: homemade organics such as agar and gelatine, alginate, thermoplastics, plaster, latex and parafilm. Strudwick consulted Imperial’s Future Materials research group for advice, while ordering small plastic samples from manufacturers, Amazon and artists’ supply shops. It eventually emerged that no single material met all of her objectives, so she began investigating composites.5 Strudwick invited the two officers she initially interviewed to test her work so far and assess what forms worked best and most intuitively.

The prototype that emerged from her findings centred on a weighted, transparent, mesh-like sheet that can be placed atop potential items of evidence. It then forms a dome around them, weighted down by a sandbaglike system. The skirted dome can be collapsed when crime scene officers arrive and turned into packaging without being directly touched by a human hand. A foldable, reusable plastic frame resembling a food clip can be used to seal the material. Finally, Strudwick proposed magnetic security cards to store the packages tightly and consistently, adding RFID chips6 that could allow each piece of evidence to be tracked automatically.

For.Form may prove the initial phase of a lengthy process of prototyping, testing and refinement. Although further development is on hold – Strudwick has recently started working at Google’s Creative Lab – she has begun discussions with a leading manufacturer of police equipment to develop her ideas further. “If they decide they want to use it,” she says, “and it makes a small improvement to an incredibly complicated system, that would be great. To know that you’ve done something to help – I think that’s what design is all about.” While high-tech developments continue to push forensics into the orbit of science fiction, For.Form may elevate the work on the ground. E N D 5 6

I will have to leave the reader to solve the case: Strudwick is under an NDA regarding For. Form’s material components.

Radio frequency identification tags (RFID) use radio waves to consistently monitor an object’s status or location. They are already used to track pets, cars, cattle and whether an aeroplane seat has a life jacket beneath it. Plans are afoot to use them for retail, so that at the check-out all the products in your basket would immediately be scanned and charged to your bank account, incidentally alerting the retailer to exactly what you have bought.

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The mesh material used by Strudwick in her redesigned crime kit adapts to the shape of each item of evidence.

Photograph by Roman Häbler and Matteo Visentin.

AusAir by Isaac Honor, Elias Honor and Jack Graham “It would be better if our product didn’t have to exist, but this is the reality of it,” says Isaac Honor.

Honor is the co-founder of AusAir, “the world’s first face mask with botanical properties” that blocks “97% of small airborne pollution and contagious airborne viruses”. It is a design that was developed in response to increasing levels of airborne toxicity, but which has found fresh relevance in light of environmental disasters like the Australian bush fires, as well as the Covid-19 pandemic. Herein lies the ethical dilemma of a product that thrives on crisis.

Recent events have seen face masks shunted into the spotlight of the Western media, with headlines highlighting a severe lack of stock and broken supply chains, but the masks have been ever present in other parts of the world for some time. In countries such as China, South Korea and Japan it is relatively common practice to wear a “courtesy mask” to limit the spread of germs, and they’re used even more widely

as protection against air pollution – which the World Health Organization estimates causes 4.2 million deaths every year in predominantly low- or middle-income countries.

Brands such as AusAir have identified a real issue, then, but they’re also capitalising on a global market that is rapidly skewing to cater to the affluent. AusAir’s lookbook shows photographs of young models sporting the deep black, light grey and soft blush (pink) face masks while cycling, conducting business and relaxing. “If you’re wearing nice clothing, it’s a bit weird to be wearing a mask that is quite clunky and factory-like,” says Honor. The brand seeks to distinguish itself from “factory-like” options through “unique botanical benefits” – replaceable filters infused with Australian essential oils. These have been chosen based on “research suggesting that botanicals can combat some of the problems of air pollution,” explains Honor. “Lavender, for example, reduces stress.”

According to AusAir’s Kickstarter video, these filters transform the mask from a conventional product into an “experience”. Quite why staving off chronic respiratory diseases needs to be an experience is unclear, but there is undeniable demand for AusAir’s service. At the time of writing, the brand has exceeded its Kickstarter funding target more than 5,000 times over, raising in excess of $700,000. In an age of toxic air, surging bush fires and coronavirus, perhaps the least we can do for people is give them a hit of lavender.

Words Lara Chapman

Observation

Words Oli Stratford

Photograph by Roman Häbler and Matteo Visentin.

Jaga by Matthias Winkler, ‘Dystopian Hunter’!It’s the tongue that gives the game away. Flipped up and out from the vamp, its leather is a little worn, a little patinated. Particularly around the tips of its atypical frilling, the soft camel has brûléed and stiffened. That this leather has had prior usage seems obvious. “It’s actually a part of the sides of a pair of lederhosen,” explains the shoe’s designer Matthias Winkler. “It’s a detail that gave more flexibility to the knee.”

The Jaga shoe’s upper is made entirely from antique lederhosen leather, and bears all the marks, scuffs and patina this suggests. It’s the kind of material that recurs across Winkler’s debut ‘Dystopian Hunter’ collection of non-binary footwear. Working from his Berlin studio, Winkler has crafted shoe uppers from vintage working gloves and antique buffalo-leather trousers, as well as deadstock cow, calf and deer hide. The soles of each shoe, meanwhile, are variously produced from repurposed bicycle tires, deadstock leather or rubber, and layers of natural felt and cork. The ensemble is held together with hand stitching and traditional wooden nails. “I cannot make you 100 shoes,” he explains. “The materials I’m finding and researching are, by nature, limited.”

Winkler’s palette is salvage – scraps plucked from the factory floor or picked up from flea markets. “I found factories which still have fantastic materials that nobody uses anymore, while the rest is basically things that people throw away,” he explains.

“People don’t wear lederhosen that much anymore.” Part of the design enterprise, then, is restoring the voice of waste materials that would otherwise remain silent – a process that brings challenges. “You’re working with materials that may be broken in some way,” says Winkler. “Pattern-cutting is difficult [given imperfections in the material] and there’s the additional challenge of needing to have the same

material for both shoes. At some points, I thought, ‘Oh my god, I’ve picked a way to make everything that is difficult [about shoe-making] more difficult.’”

In addition to this act of material reclamation, Winkler’s practice is further shaped by its commitment to revitalising craft techniques: the shoes are all produced in Berlin by master shoemakers Andreas Neuschwander and Stefan Kilian, working with traditional machinery and tools. “When I met them, they were largely doing repair work on shoes, like renewing heels,” says Winkler. “They were really good shoemakers, but they didn’t work in their craft anymore. These are people who weren’t doing what they’re good at anymore.”

Winkler’s brand, then, has a neat symmetry – pair dormant skills with dormant materials and let the two revitalise one another. “We’re living in a world where there’s too much of everything and I didn’t want to contribute to that,” he says.

“The only justification for me to make my own brand was to use these dormant resources that are already there and would otherwise go to waste. It’s a simple concept really.”

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Cambio installation shots by Gregorio Gonella and George Darell; research imagery courtesy of Formafantasma.

Formafantasma’s Findings Formafantasma’s home-studio space, a converted stove factory in north Amsterdam, is richly suffused with the aroma of smouldering cedar.

Words Alice Twemlow Studio photographs Annelie Bruijn Profile

The shelves are lined with paperbacks, positioned with their fore-edges facing outwards – a neutral backdrop for the residues of former projects and curios that have accumulated since studio founders Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin met in design school in Florence in the early 2000s. There are bones, chunks of basalt, lava ash-glaze tests, dollhouse-sized cardboard models of chairs and stacks of wabi sabi bowls. In the kitchen

Nevertheless, Formafantasma has framed its work this way since its founders graduated from the Master’s programme at Design Academy Eindhoven (DAE) in 2009. While the studio produces commercial objects for both galleries and industry, its work can be seen as a series of increasingly sophisticated and complex thesis projects (both self-assigned and commissioned) through which Trimarchi and Farresin foreground historical and applied research. Formafantasma’s investigations are typically focused on locally specific craft traditions (basketwork, textile dyeing, needlepoint and glassblowing, to name a few) and raw materials (sorghum, charcoal, fish skins, Slovenian limestone).

They are documented and made available (albeit in an edited, aestheticised way) through the “Process” section on the studio’s website, a tab that accompanies some collections of more familiar design typologies: vessels, lighting, furniture and textiles. “We see the two strands [research and commercial design] as separate,” says Trimarchi, “but, in the best possible scenario, they come together.”

De Natura Fossilium, the studio’s research into the properties and possibilities of basalt, lava and volcanic fibres, is a typical Formafantasma project. Beginning in 2010 as a matter of personal curiosity, it was subsequently fortified by a commission from Gallery Libby Sellers in the wake of the eruption of Mount Etna in 2013. Eventually, it was realised as an editioned collection of clocks, textiles, furniture and vessels. Five years later, when architectural materials brand Dzek approached Trimarchi and Farresin with a commission, they returned to lava. The pair have described the ensuing material research as “a battle of wills between man and volcano” that involved exploding, imploding, cracking and caving prototypes before they found the right combination of porcelain body, ash glazes, firing temperature and method to produce a commercial tile collection – ExCinere. “This is exactly how we would wish to work,” says Farresin of this trajectory, where one line of inquiry extends across multiple collections.

“We invest time into research, create a body of work, and hope there are clients who can understand that work. With their support, they allow us to take it to a different level and to a broader audience.”

This form of practice has a well-defined theoretical background. In 1994, the cultural historian Christopher Frayling categorised what he saw as three main types of design research in his paper ‘Research in Art and Design’. The first, research into design, is the most

‘We invest time into research and hope clients can understand that. With their support, they let us to take it to a different level.’ —Simone Farresin area, a wicker basket hangs on a rope, just in case an object or snack is urgently needed in the sleeping space above. It’s also a nod to Trimarchi’s roots in Sicily, where such devices are used by people lucky enough to live above an alimentari. Like everything in the space, the burning palo santo that I detect upon entering is far from extraneous. The pungent pine molecules provide the correct atmospheric conditions for our discussion of the designers’ most recent project – one that examines the extraction, production and distribution of wood products.

Cambio is a web archive and research exhibition that opened at London’s Serpentine Sackler Gallery in early March. “We conceived the exhibition as just one part of the outcome of the project,” says Farresin, describing an aspect of the undertaking that became unexpectedly significant when the show shut down in mid-March as galleries across the capital closed in response to the coronavirus outbreak. “It’s important to make the wider research available and we had already uploaded all the content of the show to cambio.website so that people can access it remotely.” It’s a pragmatic response, but it also highlights a peculiarity of the Cambio project, as well as Formafantasma’s wider practice.

Placing an emphasis on research rather than designed objects is unusual for an art-gallery context (and even for design, at least beyond academia).

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Formafantasma, founded by Simone Farresin (left) and Andrea Trimarchi (right) in 2009, is an Amsterdam-based design studio. The images accompanying this article include research materials and installation shots from its ongoing project Cambio.

In the kitchen area, a wicker basket hangs on a rope, just in case an object or snack is urgently needed in the sleeping space above.

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straightforward. It tends to be conducted through the lens of history or theory; is positioned outside design practice, looking in; and manifests itself in recognisable academic formats, such as written texts. The second variant, research for design, is a process of gathering reference materials. It leaves no trace, except in an embodied sense in the final design product. The last, research through design, is the most complex and expansive. It embraces experimentation conducted with the materials, technologies, processes and sensibilities of design in a self-aware manner, usually resulting in documentation but not necessarily a final designed product. The research is “still identifiable and visible”, as Frayling puts it, but undoubtedly “less straight-forward”.

It is this latter form of design research that resonates most fully with Trimarchi and Farresin.

Formafantasma is a self-described “commercial studio”, which designs lighting and tableware collections for high-end brands such as Flos, Hermès and Lexus.

Much of its research, therefore, feeds into making tangible, marketable products – research for design.

By inclination, however, Trimarchi and Farresin aspire to shift this emphasis onto research through design.

“We are not doing this kind of work within an academic context and we’re constantly struggling to find a balance between commercialism and research,” Trimarchi explains. “We are sure some people find that a weakness in our practice – we believe it is our strength.”

In 2017, a commission from the National Gallery of Victoria Australia (NGV) and Triennale di Milano to examine e-waste provided the studio with what Trimarchi calls “a laboratory for us to better understand how to do research”. At first, the NGV asked Formafantasma to create a collection of furniture from e-waste, but the studio insisted the project be expanded to embrace a broader and more thorough research process. It ended up taking three years and included visits to waste dumps and recycling facilities; interviews with lawmakers, manufacturers and scholars; the gathering of key documents and secondary literature; and videos of the deconstruction and taxonomical arrangement of the components of electronic appliances. For Trimarchi and Farresin, the heart of the project, titled Ore Streams, is not the final furniture collection, but its online archive and accompanying video essays.

Here, Formafantasma assembled all its research, which Trimarchi and Farresin encourage other designers to

use as “a platform for reflection and analysis” to better understand the material context in which digital design operates. The pair were disappointed, therefore, by ensuing requests from museums in the Netherlands and France to acquire the Ore Streams furniture but not the research. “When you talk about design in the context of museums, there is this idea that they are somehow progressive,” says Trimarchi. “But in fact, the ways that collections are organised and how things are acquired are still very stiff.” The designers attribute such curatorial “stiffness” to the historical configurations of design and decorative-arts museums, organised as they are around materials or typology.

Such categorisations do not easily lend themselves

‘We’re constantly struggling to balance commercialism and research. We are sure some find that a weakness in our practice.’ —Andrea Trimarchi to multidisciplinary approaches, with intangible outcomes such as online archives.

With Cambio, by contrast, the commission came from a contemporary-art exhibition space rather than a museum. As such, it offered Formafantasma what Trimarchi refers to as “a more free-form approach to exploring research”. Cambio largely eschews products, a position that emerged through conversations with the Serpentine’s artistic director Hans Ulrich Obrist.

The last time the Serpentine devoted its gallery space to a designer was in 2014, when Martino Gamper created an installation of historic and contemporary shelving. Like Gamper, Trimarchi and Farresin identify as designers, but Cambio is less about design as a distinct discipline and more about what practitioners from the field of design, alongside those from science, literature and anthropology, can offer in thinking about an issue – in this case climate change.

The Cambio project addresses the environmental impact of the global timber industry. “It’s a topic that allowed us to talk about the complex relationship

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between species,” Farresin explains. “Trees are, first and foremost, living beings, and this was something we could not address with Ore Streams – the ethical and existential questions arising from the transformation of other creatures into materials.” What the designers also find compelling about the timber industry is the way its “tentacular supply chain” has grown out of the exploitation of the biological capital that took root throughout colonial territories during the 19th century, when it was realised that certain plant species, like mahogany, could be immensely profitable as a raw material. Trimarchi and Farresin acknowledge the enormity of this field, which they refer to as a “hyperobject” – a concept developed by the philosopher Timothy Morton to deal with objects that are so radically distributed across time and space that they defy categorisation. By definition, a hyperobject cannot be grasped in its totality, but this does not mean that any attempt to do so is entirely fruitless. “It’s almost as if you have a gigantic body,” says Farresin, “and you try to work as an acupuncturist, finding trigger points.”

Retooling a design studio to conduct this scale of research project has brought challenges. Despite financial support from the Serpentine, Farresin and Trimarchi admit that Formafantasma made a “heavy investment” into Cambio in terms of the sheer hours involved in research. To deal with projects of this kind in future, they may split the studio. The Amsterdam space would remain but be joined by another location, potentially in Milan. One would focus on research and, as Farresin puts it, be “more radical”, while the other would be centred on commercial work. Research through design is not exactly financially remunerative, however, and viable business models are difficult to apply at all scales. The architecture giant OMA has managed to subsidise its dedicated research studio AMO through commercial work, for instance, but it is much harder for a small atelier to follow this path.

“The more radical we go with our independent practice, the more commercial we will need to be to economically sustain it,” says Trimarchi. “On the other hand,” adds Farresin, “we think that clients will ask us to integrate the two in the long term. The research-based attitude we displayed in Cambio could be applied within a company and that kind of holistic analysis is even more urgent there.”

Trimarchi and Farresin are self-taught researchers drawing on familiar methodologies from the humanities

and social sciences. For Cambio, they dug through archives at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and the V&A; conducted visual and textual analysis; and interviewed experts connected to the timber industry. They are particularly fond of this latter method, believing it allows scientists and professors to be freer in speculating and making associations than they can be within the strictures of academic publication. “The interview allows us to get to know things that you cannot find in published materials,” says Trimarchi.

In order to understand the history, context and implications of a topic as massive as the global timber industry, the designers knew they would need to call in the expertise of specialists and institutions in

‘The more radical we go with our independent practice, the more commercial we will need to be to sustain it.’ —Andrea Trimarchi science, conservation, engineering and policymaking.

Videos and transcripts of interviews with wood anatomists, dendroclimatologists and professors of transnational governance can be viewed on the project website and read in the 90-odd-page catalogue elegantly designed by Studio Joost Grootens.

Formafantasma’s questions to these experts demonstrate their awareness of the finer points of the environmental impact of wood extraction, but also betray their designerly pragmatism about the expediency of extrapolating specific knowledge beyond discipline boundaries.

When speaking with a senior researcher at Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Leiden, for example, they ask him: “We wonder if understanding how plants have adapted to harsh environmental conditions throughout their evolutionary path might inform the discourse around climate change and the consequent need to design more resilient ecosystems. Is this something already embedded in your research project?” He responds: “Let me say, my first interest as a scientist, the reason 52

‘The research-based attitude we displayed in Cambio could be applied within a company. That kind of holistic analysis is even more urgent there.’ —Simone Farresin

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The studio made a tower of Ikea Bekväm stools, rebuilt in cherry, chestnut and oak, stacked according to how long each tree species took to grow before it was logged.

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why I decided to undertake this career, is to understand how plants function and why they evolve the way they do. Its potential social relevance is not something that prompted me to start this research.” Later, Trimarchi and Farresin say, “And here we see why disciplines like wood anatomy and wood evolution, which look into the microscopical features of trees, can have a positive impact across different scales”. By this time, the biologist knows more about where his interlocutors are coming from. He sensibly answers, “Yes.” Research, for Formafantasma, doesn’t just mean interviews and texts, however. Throughout Cambio,

‘In order to perform as designers today, we need to be aware of the macrodynamics of the context in which we operate.’ —Andrea Trimarchi information is animated in imaginative formats, ranging from three-dimensional data visualisations to a series of essay films. To illustrate the disconnect between the time it takes for a tree to grow and the time people tend to keep wood products, the studio made a tower of the popular £20 Ikea aspen Bekväm stools, rebuilt in woods such as cherry, chestnut and oak. These stools were then stacked according to how long each tree species took to grow before it was logged, and how much carbon dioxide it is able to store within its structure.

Elsewhere, a series of everyday single-use products made from wood or wood pulp – such as reinforced envelopes, paper towels, and takeaway containers and cups – are heaped in piles. These piles give physical form to the fact that it will take five years for a single pine tree growing in Central Europe to reabsorb the amount of carbon dioxide released when each stack is eventually discarded. The piles are alarmingly small.

Other exhibits include an array of samples selected from the 42,000 wood specimens held in the Economic Botany Collection at Kew Gardens, and microscopic imagery of the cellular structure of different woods species that illuminates the varying densities and

relationships between the vessels and fibres that give rise to their unique anatomical characters.

Experimenting with installations is important in the evolution of the research-driven exhibition, a genre whose stereotype involves little more than stacks of photocopied articles and documents with key passages highlighted. Although Cambio does still have its fair share of these, it is also staking out new ground for bringing to life the process of research through design.

The kinds of investigation involved in the exhibition might give the impression that design, as popularly understood, is in danger of dissolving into the entanglement of the social, political and economic issues being uncovered. This, you suspect, is not antithetical to the studio’s wishes, particularly given that the discipline’s connotations of luxury and, increasingly, waste, can easily impede the kinds of discussion Formafantasma wishes to generate about the realities of the climate crisis. “In order to perform as designers today, we need to be aware of the macrodynamics of the context in which we operate,” says Trimarchi. “Otherwise we are reducing what we do to form a styling or interface design. We can only be aware of our political and ethical responsibilities as designers if we are aware of this larger context.”

The design of a product sets in motion an environmentally damaging chain reaction of naturalresource extraction, refining and manufacturing processes, shipping and distribution, and waste disposal. Like many of their generation, Trimarchi and Farresin struggle with the existential quandary of wanting to make beautiful things, while also acknowledging design’s complicity in climate crisis. Cambio has not, for instance, completely resisted the allure of producing a commercial collection. The exhibition’s various exhibits are shown on a set of specially designed wooden tables, reading desks and shelves, which the studio will now retail through Gallery Giustini / Stagetti in Rome.

The Cambio furniture collection is intentionally low key, but its individual elements have nevertheless been brought to exquisite refinement in terms of their aesthetic and provenance. The entire exhibition display has been constructed from an amount of timber equivalent to one pine tree, for instance, sourced from the Fiemme Valley in Italy, where a storm felled tens of thousands of trees in 2018, and which is also the source of the wood used for Stradivarius violins. This fact led the designers to musical instrument production as

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a reference point for the series. Each element is built around an elegant tapered jointing technique that is derived from instrument production and eliminates the need for screws. The furniture pieces are additionally coated in the same finish used for wooden instruments, mixed with some grey, waterbased paint to achieve what Formafantasma calls a “foggy” feeling – a way to approximate the studio’s research journey through the timber industry.

“The display was purposely designed not to be a white plinth, which by nature is disposable and almost a symbol of the ephemeral condition of exhibition-making,” explains Farresin. “The idea was to make the pieces so obviously long-lasting so as to outlive the exhibition itself.” Nevertheless, one wonders if there were qualms about producing any new commercial pieces for a project geared towards analysing some of the follies of manufacturing processes and consumption. The sociologist Bruno Latour succinctly summarises this predicament in his book An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. “Between modernising and ecologising,” he writes, “we have to choose.”

For Formafantasma, research seems to offer a possible third route, as well as representing a practice that arms designers with the knowledge required to produce more responsibly. Far from being paralysed by climate crisis, Trimarchi and Farresin believe that being designers affords them a unique vantage point from which to engage with the issue. “Design has this very peculiar position,” Farresin says, “because it’s really in between the extraction of material and its transformation into a desirable object.” What precedes and exceeds material, is matter: the matter that goes into the making of design and the matter that remains after a designed entity’s period of usefulness is over.

Thinking of products in terms of the resources from which they are constructed – the rare Earth minerals that are transmuted into electronics, and the cellulose fibres that make up our tables, chairs, books, and toilet paper – helps us develop better ways of designing how they degrade, or do not degrade, after use.

As with Ore Stream’s online archive, Formafantasma says it wants Cambio to serve as a launching point for other designers to continue the research. It can, as Trimarchi puts it, be “appropriated[…] in a second moment”.

Formafantasma’s next research project will also be collaborative, but this time they will be working with students of a new Master’s course they are developing for their alma mater, DAE. Called GeoDesign, the course will address the ecological implications of the discipline and is due to launch in September 2020. The designers, who have been teaching at DAE for the past several years, say they have been “pushing” for a course to address the ecological implications of the discipline. “Everybody said, ‘Yes, but that’s common to all design,’” says Farresin, “but we strongly believe that is not the case.” Having collaborated with so many people from both design and beyond, the studio hopes the course will serve as “an umbrella,” according to Farresin, “for all the people who are currently dispersed”.

Cambio, as an ongoing investigation, is likely to figure in their curriculum. Trimarchi and Farresin plan to design the course using the model of a research group in an academic scientific setting, where students and teachers work together on commonly defined research projects, rather than each participant working individually to a teacher-set brief. The idea is that the group will collaborate to research a topic, share their findings and only then move toward developing individual outcomes. Through this, Formafantasma hope to generate the freedom to embrace a diversity of approaches instead of having to choose between defined routes that might include critical-theoretical, applied-product, and artistic and self-expressive.

As they say, “in order to tackle the complexity of climate crisis, we’re going to need all the approaches we can get.” E N D

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The Quarterly Journal of Design

Image by Annelie Bruijn.

Disegno, available in both print and digital editions disegnodaily.com/journal

Words Lara Chapman

Photograph by Roman Häbler and Matteo Visentin.

Chess on Earth by Daniel Weil for Owl & Dog Playbooks!In the 6th or 7th century CE, a game called chaturaṅga began to be played in India. Its name translates as “four divisions”, referencing the infantry, cavalry, elephantry and chariotry sectors of the military at that time. Chaturaṅga pitted two armies against each other and played out through a strategic series of moves intended to exploit the enemy’s weaknesses. “Historically, chess must be classed as a game of war,” wrote historian Harold James Ruthven Murray in his 1913 text A History of Chess.

Certainly, this status was recognised by the Persians, who quickly adopted the game to teach young princes and nobles military strategies.

It was then “handed on by the Persians to the Muslim world, and finally borrowed from Islam by Christian Europe,” explains Murray. During the 9th century, Europeans further codified the game, tweaking the rules such that the queen and bishops were more powerful, thereby evolving it into the modern version of chess that we play today.

Daniel Weil, a partner at Pentagram since 1992, says he is fascinated by this social history of chess that has its “origins in warfare and court”. His recent project Chess on Earth, a storybook-cum-flatpack-chess-set, departs from this violent history and introduces young children to the game through playful anthropomorphic characters representing day and night (rather than black and white). “First to

move will be the day,/ then the night will join the play,” reads the book, which is written entirely in rhyme.

The design of each chess piece was inspired by geographical landmarks – the Earth King, the Moon Queen, the Mountain Rook, the River Knight, the Waterfall Bishop and the Tree Pawn – which were selected for how they embodied the movements of their corresponding piece, guiding children on how to manoeuvre through the game. “The River Knight flows left or right,” writes Weil. “It springs over tops on its watery flight.”

“It’s a not very coded message about peace on earth,” Weil acknowledges of his decision to strip away some of chess’s martial origins and install natural features in their place. He hopes that by getting four- to six-year-olds involved in the “wonderfully social and friendly activity” of chess, he can also get them thinking more about nature and our relationship with it – and less about warfare.

Observation

Of Fashion and Space Words Johanna Agerman Ross

Celine Art Project, a contemporary-art collection presented by the luxury-fashion house Celine, prompts a look into how fashion continuously reinvents its retail spaces.

The Celine store on Bond Street, London.

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Images courtesy of Celine.

“The circus-like and theatrical element of commerce is quite extraordinarily heightened,” wrote an unusually keen observer of the 19th-century Parisian department store. These words appear in Walter Benjamin’s unfinished set of notes on the Paris arcades, written between 1927 and 1940, and published in English in 1982 as The Arcades Project. The book gives snippets of insight into how the acts of shopping and wandering the city changed in the aftermath of Baron Hausmann’s sweeping alterations to the architectural fabric of Paris. “The department store is the last promenade for the flâneur,” concluded Benjamin.

This was before the arrival of the internet.

In the 21st century, the acts of walking and buying have taken on new guises. Sixty-three per cent of all shoppers’ journeys now begin in the virtual arcades of online stores. We click our way through the pages of the web, largely guided by the inscrutable algorithms of targeted advertising, while the consumers of mid-19th century Paris strolled the streets, drawn in by shop displays and mirrors. Ours is not just a quick outing for cheap conveniences, such as cat food and fast fashion, but a deeply committed hike for luxury products, such as sofas, designer handbags and even jewellery.

Today, the tug of war between the virtual and the physical means that bricks-and-mortar stores have to work harder to bring in their clientele. This is particularly evident in luxury fashion, where considerable investment goes into creating environments that embody clothes in physical spaces – inevitably at exclusive addresses – as extensions of a brand’s value. Take the Louis Vuitton store on London’s New Bond Street, with its multicolour starburst facade decoration and brightly coloured interiors – it is a far cry from the maison’s previously sombre boutiques decked out in brown wood. Or the nearby Paul Smith store on Albemarle Street, the sinuous cast-iron exterior of which was designed by 6a Architects, which features eclectic interiors stuffed with trinkets that the brand and its founder have accumulated from around the globe. Even this is likely to be squeezed, however. It is thought that around £1 of every £5 spent with UK retailers now changes hands online – a figure predicted to rise to 53 per cent

of all retail expenditure within a decade.

As shopping online is increasingly regarded as easier, more convenient and, in light of Covid-19, safer, luxury retail spaces are playing up their cultural cachet and visual titillation as a differentiating factor. Typically, this is achieved through investment in architecture, design and art.

Since the 1950s, the fashion boutique has been the domain of architects and designers – practitioners chosen to give the desired sense of individuality to a brand’s premises.

Designer and entrepreneur Terence Conran worked with Mary Quant on her second Bazaar boutique in London in the 1950s, and subsequently modelled his own design store Habitat, which opened in the 1960s, on Bazaar’s fun and easy-going atmosphere. The architect Eva Jiřičná, meanwhile, created the sleek and minimal interiors of London-based fashion brand Joseph in the 1980s. “One thing I realised through all those years of doing interiors,” Jiřičná told the Guardian in 2006, “is that the prime reason for having an exterior of a building is the necessity of having an interior.”

In the 1990s and 2000s, architect Peter Marino broke the mould of working on stores locally and instead rolled out global store identities for many of fashion’s most prominent houses, including Christian Dior and Chanel.

While Marino’s portfolio of retail designs became increasingly ostentatious and grand, setting the tone for an era of so-called “flagship stores”, his creations were still places for shopping. “My work, like advertising, is built on the statistic that of the four people who enter the shop three will leave without having bought anything,” Marino told the Financial Times in 2019. “The point of my doing a beautiful store is that, aspirationally, those three people will return and become one of the purchasers next time.”

Then, in 2001, the architecture firm OMA designed the Prada Epicenter in New York, setting a distinctly different tone for the consumption of fashion.

The 2,200sqm store still exists today and is more akin to an event and art space than a boutique, dominated by the “Wave”, a 54m-long ramp that doubles as a collection showcase, podium and seating. For OMA’s founder Rem Koolhaas, the Prada Epicenter was an attempt to move away from what he

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described as “the Flagship syndrome” or “a megalomaniac accumulation of the obvious”. Alongside Rei Kawakubo’s Dover Street Market – which opened in London’s Mayfair in 2004, with its loose layout of shops within shops modelled on the multi-brand fashion space Kensington Market – the Prada Epicenter pointed to another function for fashion retailers.

They are not just as spaces for commerce, but venues for cultural interaction, hosting talks, book launches and exhibitions.

They encourage a loosely defined form of brand engagement over shopping.

In the digital age, an increasing number of fashion brands are taking this route, devising curated environments that invite people in without commitment to purchase. Take, for example, Loewe’s new stores in Madrid and London, which feature a number of historical and contemporary art and design pieces selected by creative director Jonathan Anderson; or footwear brand Dr Martens’s The Boot Room, which is an intimate music venue in London’s Camden Market.

“It’s not a fashion store,” Anderson told interviewer Nosheen Iqbal in 2019 when asked about Loewe’s London flagship.

“I mean, yes, that’s the purpose, but I want people to be able to go in. It’s this idea of[…] changing the way in which we see stores.”

The Celine Art Project is the most recent example of this approach. Helmed

by Hedi Slimane, Celine’s creative director, the initiative launched last autumn and currently comprises works from 33 artists displayed in Celine stores globally.

Slimane is working closely with the participating artists and their galleries to either select existing works or commission new ones. Encouragingly, the collection has skewed towards a younger generation of artists (almost everyone featured in the Celine Art Project is under the age of 40, with the exception of a handful of established artists, such as David Nash, Luisa Gardini and Theaster Gates) and exhibits a far healthier gender balance than many similar undertakings.

The pieces in the Celine Art Project are not for sale, but instead form part of Celine’s growing art holding, an integral element of the brand’s new store interiors. Under Slimane’s direction, these spaces have become large and open-plan, with the look and feel of a Chelsea art gallery. Through this process,

Oscar Tuazon’s 2019 Mobile Floor installation for Celine’s rue de Grenelle boutique in Paris.

Slimane seems intent on creating boutiques in which his vision for Celine can take fresh root, rather than slavishly following any perceived existing identity attached to the fashion house. “We arrive with our own stories, our own culture, a personal semantic that is different from the ones of houses in which we create,” said Slimane upon his appointment to Celine in 2018. “We have to be ourselves, against all odds.”

The artworks acquired by Celine are almost exclusively sculptural and draw from a material palette of solid wood, stone and metal composites. They exist as stand-alone volumes in the boutiques, rather than serving as accessories to the clothes. When walking up Mount Street in London, for instance, a towering column of reclaimed timber and metal

by Canadian artist Lukas Geronimas – paired with a squatter, concrete volume

by Norwegian artist Tiril Hasselknippe – are the first things you see in the store’s window. The works are beckoning you to stop and look, but they also create a sense of permanence within a window that would otherwise be used to

display the season’s fashions. These artworks are installed in the boutiques, not just for a few months, but as part and parcel of the store experience, alongside carefully considered pieces of minimalist furniture, all of which have been designed or selected by Slimane.

In Celine’s Paris rue de Grenelle outpost, the US artist Oscar Tuazon has re-cast part of the floor using steel, fir, oak and fibre concrete. It’s a definite, lasting mark in a space of transitory fashions.

In some senses, the project builds on an existing flirtation between fashion and art that blossomed throughout the 2010s. Summing up the trends of the previous 10 years as the decade came to an end, Guardian fashion writer Jess Cartner-Morley wrote that “the unspoken style ideal was to look like you worked in the art world.” Meanwhile, Vogue stalked global art fairs to snap fashionable women for their trend reports – the Frieze Art Fair even has its own tag on the magazine’s website. The French fashion brand Jacquemus commissioned Canadian artist Chloe Wise to paint its advertising campaign for spring 2019

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and, this spring, the Miu Miu advertising campaign features model Bella Hadid in the act of painterly creation, playing a feminised Jackson Pollock splashing colours onto a horizontal canvas. The two fields are comfortable bedfellows, lending each other a sense of what the other seems not to have: art gains a sense of cool and levity, along with a considerable cash injection; fashion acquires longevity and criticality.

This represents a relationship of commodification, undoubtedly, but the Celine Art Project is unusual for not exploiting art or artists as a point of inspiration or as a fleeting engagement for a season only; instead, it is collaborating with and investing in a group of artists who stand to benefit from their work being acquired by a permanent collection and displayed globally, in a publicly accessible context.

Even if that context is the exclusive confines of a luxury-fashion store.

A Pachinko Game on Anabolic Steroids The world of a Japanese arcade is where sensory excess and deprivation occur at the same time.

Words Luke Caspar Pearson Photographs Motohiko Hasui

The images accompanying this article were shot in the arcades of Tokyo by photographer Motohiko Hasui. Disegno commissioned Hasui to capture medal games in action, as well as to document the spaces in which these games are found.

That these two conditions exist side-by-side is a product of a relationship between anonymous interior spaces and the vivid objects they contain. This situation can be experienced in places like Adores, an arcade that sits on the main drag of Tokyo’s Ikebukuro district – a much-visited part of the city that is home to sprawling department stores and countless outlets for gamer and otaku (nerd) culture. Adores occupies a corner site, tucked beneath a storey-high backlit sign that shows branded panels flanked with glowing red columns. This entrance is full of gleaming glass boxes stuffed with fluffy toys, candy boxes and vinyl figurines being furtively prodded and stroked by the metal tongs of UFO catcher or crane games. It is not uncommon for a brief conversation between customer and attendant to result in the desired item being repositioned more favourably to keep the thrill alive, even if the claws of the crane arm remain slack. Deeper into the ground floor of the arcade are the purikura units: booths where young girls and couples dance in and out of printed curtains that envelop camera cubicles and screens for editing artfully posed selfies.

Upstairs, the Adores experience becomes more excessive and isolated. Natural light disappears to be replaced with cigarette smoke and the pulsing glow of rows and rows of rhythm games, where teenagers (often wearing low-friction gloves) trace elaborate paths across screens and buttons in time to throbbing J-pop. Alongside classic dance games, many of these machines use more esoteric interfaces involving dials and cubes; one title even lets players design their own anime pop idol and tap away at the screen as she and her bandmates dance around a virtual stage.

At this point, the arcade is already overwhelming.

Yet, up another escalator, sits an object even more intense and luminous. It is a large cabinet containing what appears to be a miniature theme park, full of spinning carousels and juddering armatures that whirl around a pulsating landscape of laser-cut plastic and LED lighting strips. It’s like a pachinko game on anabolic steroids. According to the signs, this object is called Fortune Trinity and it is a type of lottery machine known as a medal game.

My first encounter with medal games was at the nowclosed Anata No Warehouse (“Your Warehouse”) arcade in Kawasaki on the outskirts of Tokyo. I was visiting for the place’s idiosyncratic architectural design, which included a panelled facade recalling the Jawa

sandcrawler from Star Wars – faux-rusted metal panels dotted with cosmetic pipework. This hulking presence was punctuated only by the luminous red triangles of Japanese regulation fire access stickers.

You entered from the street through a series of orange-lit concrete tunnels, while accessing the parking garage required navigating stepping stones that hovered above a room flooded with green “toxic goo”. Inside, half of the ground floor was devoted to a recreation of the Kowloon Walled

It is a large cabinet containing a miniature theme park, full of spinning carousels and whirling, juddering armatures.

City, housing vintage arcade cabinets. The space was detailed down to the bowls of replica duck meat sitting on the countertop of an imitation noodle bar. The third floor was dominated by a fibreglass replica of the Trevi fountain, which took significant liberties with the composition of the original and contained no water. The fountain was lit by hot-pink spotlights and surrounded by chequerboard tiles. It was an environment that would be considered too gaudy even for some of Las Vegas’s lower-rent casinos.

Anata No Warehouse was an energetic environment but, just as in Adores, I found its most striking architecture to be the visual carnage of the game cabinets that populated the arcade floor.

It is hard to stand out in such a context, but one structure drew my eye – a case containing a spinning diamond riding atop a fountain of confetti that grew in intensity to the accompaniment of a pounding techno soundtrack. Beneath this sat a miniature castle that was seemingly built from rotating ice, pulsating with lights and dotted with smaller plastic structures – a series of jagged-toothed ramparts rendered in plasticky gold – upon which silvery orbs danced.

Running along the top of the cabinet was the exclamation “HYOZAAAN!!” As I later learned, this roughly translates as someone shouting “Iceberg!”

Hyozaaan!! and its sister title Kazaaan!! (“Volcano!”) are medal games produced by Sega and, like all these games, they are technically lotteries. Yet there is no

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money to be won. These machines operate at the very edge of Japan’s confusing and seemingly contradictory gambling laws. Articles in the country’s 1907 Penal Code prohibit not only the operation of gambling establishments but also classify habitual gambling as a crime that can be punished by a prison term.

At the same time, Japan’s pachinko industry has long generated multi-trillion-yen profits, making it one of the world’s largest gambling markets, despite not

are distributed to competitors at random. For a country where gambling is supposedly broadly illegal, Japan boasts a highly developed gambling economy, although it is an industry facing new pressures. In 2018, the Japanese government passed a controversial law legalising “integrated resort” casinos – multifunctional gaming properties combining gambling halls with hotels and other amenities like those found in Las Vegas or Macau. With only three casino licences currently available, American and multinational gaming companies stand poised to invest in the country, with the expected result of a further hit to Japan’s pachinko market (which is already shrinking despite its large revenues).

The introduction of casino games will add another layer of complexity to Japan’s gambling legislation, but if there is one form of betting that may remain untouched, it is medal games such as Hyozaaan!! which have never relied on monetary reward. In these games, players exchange their cash for “medals” – small coin-like tokens that provide a symbolic and legal buffer to the transaction between money and chance. These medals cannot generally be traded for prizes, and can never be exchanged for money, but they can often be “banked” for later play. Unlike pachinko machines, medal games are unconnected to more formal gambling structures and are nearly always located in conventional game arcades rather than pachinko halls. A disclaimer on the side of Sega’s Bingo Galaxy machine reads: “I will play in a place of amusement”. The medal, then, can be seen as a physical manifestation of the legal structure that separates gambling from amusement by detaching the thrill of scooping the jackpot from a monetary prize. They are, in sociologist Roger Caillois’s term, games of pure “alea”, answerable only to luck because “destiny is the sole artisan of victory”. Winning medals ultimately only offers more time playing to win further medals – a longer engagement with chance. The medal is a token that can be wagered, but a jackpot can only ever facilitate more wagers. It has no other transferrable value.

The relationship between Japanese society and symbolic tokens is longstanding. Omamori, for instance, are small charms and tokens bought at temples to confer good luck in health, academia or love. Omikuji are fortunes purchased at shrines, which are chosen at random from a box and can provide both blessings and curses. Saisen bako,

For a country where gambling is supposedly broadly illegal, Japan boasts a highly developed gambling economy. ostensibly offering cash rewards to players. This success is predicated not only on the addictive properties of the experience itself but on the fact that players can actually win rewards – including cash – through legal loopholes such as “special prize” tokens that can be obtained by trading in pachinko balls. These tokens can then be redeemed at nearby TUC (Tokyo Union Circulation) shops, away from the hall itself.

Although the 1907 code prohibited the buying and selling of lottery tickets, subsequent acts have changed lotteries’ legal status as they became important revenue-generating mechanisms for the government. Today, nationwide takarakuji lotteries are popular, especially given that they are classified as amusements and have no minimum-age rules (unlike pachinko, which requires entrants to the parlours to be over 18). Since the late 1990s, Toto football pools have also been available to those over 19, along with associated lotteries based on football scores. There are four more sports upon which Japanese citizens may gamble, the kōei kyōgi (public sports) of horse racing, keirin cycling, motorcycle speedway and powerboat racing, betting on all of which was legalised in the mid-20th century. These operate using a highly regulated pari-mutuel system, where bets are pooled such that the government can take a significant revenue cut. An extra layer of chance is added as riders and vehicles are often anonymised and identified only through the colour of their livery.

In the case of powerboat racing, boats and engines 68

offertory boxes also located at shrines, involve a transactional relationship between spiritualism and currency, in which monetary offerings of coins are made to the gods. Many of these boxes have special grates and sloped interiors for catching money quickly and quietly. With these systems in mind, we might speculate that Japan, a country that has such tokens of chance woven into its religious heritage and still possesses a strong cash culture,1 is not particularly attuned to the credits system employed by American gaming machines. Discussing machine gambling in Las Vegas in her 2012 book Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll describes how modern slot machines dematerialise “money into an immediately available credit form” to speed up gambling but also to overcome the “limitations of human motor capacities by removing unwieldy coins”. By contrast, medals are physical and saturate the experience. They are purchased with cash and dropped into cups; they are fed into the machine, won, sorted and banked.

The materiality of the transaction in a medal game is that of plastic, light, LCD screen and chrome. These large cabinets, often constructed at the same order of scale as a minivan, hold complex and energetic mechanisms for shuttling and spinning balls and other tokens through their systems, while the player places bets on which trajectory they will follow. To play a game, money must first be traded for medals using a vending machine, typically emblazoned with numerous laminated notices warning that medals cannot be exchanged for prizes and should not be confused with cash. After collecting medals in a plastic cup and taking up position on a leatherette stool, players can operate most games by inserting tokens and pressing various combinations of buttons.

Some machines let players line up medals in small hoppers, while others use more elaborate gun-style mechanisms to aim them. Many games are based around a coin-pusher action, with a jackpot often bringing into play other buttons that activate further stages of the lottery process, such as giant roulettestyle wheels, digital screens and various other mechanisms unique to the theme of each game.

Without a potential cash incentive, the architecture of the medal game serves as a spectacle that holds the 1

According to The Japan Times, as of August 2019, four out of five purchases in Japan are still made with cash.

player in position and makes them spend money. In his 2013 book Uncertainty in Games, game designer and writer Greg Costikyan argues that “games of pure chance[…] rely for their appeal on the tension of winning something of real and tangible value”. For Costikyan, roulette without real stakes would mean “watching a ball rolling around a wheel [which] might be fascinating to a cat, but not to a human being”.

Without the tension of monetary reward, therefore, the architecture of the medal-games cabinet has to move far beyond a simple ball and wheel in order to captivate the player. In fact, it resonates with Schüll’s studies of electronic gambling machines in Las Vegas, where people are drawn to “the world-dissolving state of subjective suspension and affective calm they derive from machine play”. As Schüll argues, the design of such machines – from their physical interface to the

The design helps draw players into a zone of nothingness, where spending time is a motivation that goes beyond monetary reward. programmed jackpot schedule and even their positioning within casinos – helps to draw players into a zone of nothingness itself, where spending time on a device is a motivation that goes beyond monetary reward. Given that medal games dispense with money jackpots entirely, and medals won can only be fed back into machines or banked for later play, their neutered form of gambling foregrounds the aesthetic pleasure of the gadget and repeated engagement with its highly articulated mechanisms of chance. In this context, cabinet designs are not incidental or gratuitous but should be considered an intrinsic part of the gaming process.

There are a number of companies that produce medal game machines, many of whom will be instantly recognisable to video-game fans. Manufacturers such as Capcom, Konami, Namco and Taito share a similar history, all having been established as some form of importer or manufacturer of amusement machines and having had a role in the late 1970s arcade boom.

As Japan’s gambling laws have tightened and relaxed over the last century, all of these firms have played key roles in the development of legal, amusement-

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based lottery machines. Taito, in particular, still operates many arcades in Japan, meaning that their medal-game innovations can quickly be brought to market.

Although these companies share some history, the largest medal-game producer, and the firm with the most influential and international reputation, is Sega. Sega’s background as one of the leading medal-game manufacturers far precedes Hyozaaan!!! and dates back some 40 years. Sega began life as an enterprise called Service Games of Japan – an American-owned importer and producer of slotmachine games for US servicemen stationed abroad.

Sega Amusement Machine Research and Development Department #4 (Sega AM4), the designs from which focused primarily on user engagement with arcade machines. This group was most notable for its ride-on hydraulic arcade cabinets (the taikan series), such as Out Run (1986) and Hang-On (1985). In time, another group spun off from this to form Sega AM6, a division that worked exclusively on medal games and the user relationship to these machines. In his 2018 book The Sega Arcade Revolution, game historian Ken Horowitz details how “cabinets were planned in real sizes (no miniatures were used), and planning was done around players”. Rather than mere casings, the architecture of cabinets and their machinery became R&D projects.

Other manufacturers, possessing similar backgrounds in amusement machines, also retain specialised design divisions. Technical accomplishments by all these medal-game manufacturers are protected by patents and each new title typically involves numerous supporting applications on technologies from ballretention systems to lighting configurations.

As described in a 2011 patent application for Sega’s Kazaaan!!, the cabinet design “makes it possible for the player to directly visually confirm the lottery process, and thus it is less likely to give rise to doubts about software operations and cheating, and it has credibility for the players”. In the same application, Sega’s engineers argue that the three-dimensional mechanisms make it more difficult for the player to predict the lottery’s results than they would find it if they were faced with software routines displayed on a screen. As Schüll points out, mechanical systems “perpetuate the player’s sense of being involved with a game that reacts to them in a kinetically lively and direct manner”. The flashing lights and spinning objects in a medal-game cabinet are designed as a system that prizes physical spectacle as inherently more truthful than screen graphics, while simultaneously making it harder for the player to discern and exploit patterns.

Another title by Sega that I have regularly encountered in Japan is The Medal Tower of Babel (2016). Ostensibly a typical coin-pusher game, it is enlivened by the addition of an ever-growing stack of medals that spin as they rise, looming over tiny plastic villages below. The mechanisms of the game twist and pile these thin metal discs into concentric circles laid layer-upon-layer, rising to a point above a standing observer’s eye level.

The flashing lights and spinning objects in a cabinet are designed as a system that prizes physical spectacle as inherently more truthful than screen graphics.

Around the 1960s, the company transitioned into arcade and amusement games, later moving into video games. Many of its titles began as reproductions of casino environments: the roulette-based Faro (1974), Caribbean Boule (1992) and Roulette Club (1996), the latter of which had a set of demountable loggias that could encase the cabinet, increasing its visual presence while making overt references to the gaming-pastiche architecture of Las Vegas.

Sports arenas have also provided inspiration, from the horse-racing track simulations of New Grand Derby (1981) and Starhorse 4 (2019), through to Boat Race Ocean Heats (2001) based on kyōtei powerboatracing courses. These machines are medal-based representations of the kōei kyōgi legal gambling sports, yet unlike their real-world counterparts all finances are placed and won in medals. Set against these titles are more esoteric medal cabinets such as Castle Coaster (1995), a coin-pusher containing a Disneyesque castle and miniature rollercoaster, and ticket-redemption games such as Udderly Tickets (1997), a life-sized cow-milking game released by offshoot company Sega Pinball Inc. Game cabinets were typically the work of specialised subdivisions of the company, such as 72

When a player wins, the mechanism topples the tower, sending showers of tokens tumbling into the jackpot trays. Such a display is intrinsic to maintaining the

Within these cases, pulsating lights and swinging armatures create an attention-grabbing event around the machine as others are drawn in by the seemingly imminent jackpot. spectacle, with Sega’s engineers designing elaborate mechanical choreographies “in order to create anticipation for the lottery draw or to make it easier to see the latter stages of the lottery from the surrounding area”. The aim of these cabinets is not only to captivate the player but also to capture the attention of people nearby.

In The Medal Tower of Babel, medals manifest as stacking discs, but they take various forms in other games. Their designers at Sega define them thus: “spherical balls, disk-shaped medals, and multi-sided objects such as dice and similar.” There can be any manner of movement – for example, “rolling accompanying rotation of the lottery media, or sliding not accompanied by rotating”. Medals are designed in relation to the choreography that they are expected to perform within a system, and movements are often translated from one medium to another. Konami’s Marble Fever (2018) uses elaborate systems of branching marble runs, along with digital screens, to regulate its lottery.

The act of display is not only limited to mechanical systems. Takeya Ltd’s ‘Display Device for Gaming Machine’ technical document presents innovations including exploiting electrical phenomena for rapidly suppressing the “afterglow” of LED bulbs within a cabinet to produce flashing light effects.

Engineers realised they could utilise the same system to extend the LED afterglow for dramatic light fades during tension points in the lottery. The second stage in the Sega title Gingaaan!! (2016) uses a rapid sequence of lights and the subtle undulations of a metal plate to produce various effects as balls wobble towards (or away from) one of nine holes.

Should they plop into the correct holes, the next stages begin, featuring a roulette-style spinning

wheel and a spherical bingo ball blower, both of which are covered in LED strips.

The Medal Tower of Babel or Gingaaan!! are cabinets of significant size, but they pale in comparison to the scale of machines such as Sega’s Hokuto no Ken Battle Medal (2013), which can seat six people around a lottery machine inspired by the long-running manga series of the same name.

Hokuto’s proportions come from its horizontal coinpusher mechanisms and the giant plastic statue of Raoh, the main villain of the manga, who sits at the centre of the cabinet. Larger still is Konami’s Grand Cross series, which can seat up to 32 players at a time, all gazing into an encapsulated space of whirring mechanisms and cascading colours that is not too far off the size of a typical Tokyo onebedroom apartment. Within these cases, pulsating lights and swinging armatures create an attentiongrabbing event around the machine as others are drawn in by the seemingly imminent jackpot. In the past, these contraptions would have simply replicated casino games, but real gaming floors are now coming.

In response, medal-game designers are creating ever more fantastical worlds within their cases as surrogates for the lost tension of hard currency.

Obtaining a jackpot in medal games is a matter of chance, influenced only by the number of the tokens one is willing to funnel into the cabinet. Unsurprisingly, however, there are numerous internet resources to help players try to flout the probabilities. Websites such as Medalgamefan have dedicated communities producing tables and spreadsheets that document the odds of each game to understand the sequences of events that lead to a jackpot. Vast tables of game stages and odds are uploaded by volunteers interested in the inner workings of lottery machines. These players attempt to unpick the algorithm of the cabinets to make sense of displays that have been designed by their manufacturers to be intriguing yet unintelligible. The site even contains interactive “jackpot simulators” that players can use to explore the systems of a game online. We might see this as obsessive. But, as literary critic Hiroki Azuma argued in his 2001 book Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals (translated by Jonathan E. Abel and Shion Kono), otaku culture operates on a model of “database consumption”, a form of consumerism that moves away from grand narratives towards information

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sorting. The “narrative” theme of most medal-game cabinets is used to attract players, but it does not need to make logical sense. In fact, it is the workings of the lottery that the most enthusiastic players really want to consume.

These principles apply across different medal games, which often share similar features.

Mechanisms such as coin pushers, ball runs and crane arms are very common. Most cabinets have some form of symmetrical polygon plan, and are typically constructed from moulded plastic, acrylic panels and water-cut metal components.

But they also often share computer architecture.

Many Sega titles were built using its Naomi model (New Arcade Operating Machine Idea), which is a close relative of its 1998 Dreamcast console.

The horse-racing medal game Star Horse (2000) uses the same underlying system as the more internationally known arcade game Crazy Taxi (1999). As games theorist Ian Bogost argued in his 2006 book Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism, the underlying architecture of games (software called “game engines”) provides a connection “far beyond literary devices and genres” as “game engines regulate individual video games’ artistic, cultural, and narrative expression”. There is still an innate connection between the medal game and the arcade on the level of systems architecture.

In fact, there are several titles that blur this distinction between a large kinematic machine and a videogame. Capcom’s Mario Party Fushigi no Korokoro Catcher (2009) is a giant cabinet integrated with a version of Nintendo’s Mario Party 8. As coins are pushed through the mechanisms and bonus balls are captured with crane arms, the famous plumber jumps around a virtual boardgame, picking up prizes or falling prey to traps and monsters. Mario is licensed to Capcom by his owners Nintendo and subsequently placed into a completely different context – doomed to jump around a world dictated by chance as giant moulded plastic versions of his red cap circle overhead and coins shuffle back and forth. The aesthetics of the cabinet mechanisms are directly integrated with the virtual worlds that Mario traverses, full of castles and dungeons populated by monsters. In Mario Party, as with Hokuto No Ken and other titles, well-known cultural characters and narratives are used to draw players to the lottery,

even if their original narrative context has been completely removed. Using themed characters in this way reinforces Azuma’s contention that “in the multimedia environment[…] it is only characters that unite various works and products”. The lottery is played out across both the physical and virtual architecture provided by the game, as well as across cultural spheres. Medal games have moved from

The lottery is played out across both the physical and virtual architecture provided by the game, as well as across cultural spheres. casino simulation into a world of exuberant mechanical systems and onwards into videogameintegrated units that attach culturally iconic figures to the lottery process.

What is the future of the medal game and its unique position in Japan’s gambling economy? The true impact of the legalisation of integrated-resort casinos is unlikely to be felt for several years and they are expected to be strictly regulated. While the potential for casino resorts has piqued the interest of American groups such as MGM and Las Vegas Sands, parent companies of medal game manufacturers such as Sega Sammy Holdings have expressed an interest in bidding too. Sega Sammy also produces pachinko machines, alongside firms such as Sankyo and Heiwa Corporation, but the pachinko industry will, in all probability, be challenged by casino slots and their American manufacturers like Bally and IGT. Whatever effect the law has on the pachinko industry – most likely to accelerate its contraction – it is unlikely to have a large bearing on medal games because of their unique position of being gambling lotteries with no financial incentive and therefore destined never to escape the upper floors of the arcade.

However, this wider arcade industry is now under threat from other quarters, following prime minister Shinzo Abe’s announcement of a rise in consumption tax, with arcade operators expected to absorb any shortfall to keep the industry running on 100-yen coins. But given that money could be electronically changed into medals at an exchange rate of the arcade’s choosing, if any machines have 78

the capability to survive this threat to the urban typology of the arcade, it will be the medal games that are becoming ever more intricate, complex and striking in their displays.

Over the last few years, I have photographed, drawn and researched these games to understand their status as design objects. These drawings, alongside photographic recordings made on visits to Japan and studies of technical documentation, reveal the elaborate and inscrutable systems that underpin them. Beneath the moulded-plastic surfaces are layers of water-cut aluminium and steel, ball runs and hoppers, and devices for sorting, jiggling and bouncing medals through the system. Despite the complexity of the visible workings, there is still a distinction between those elements designed to be seen and those working beneath the surface.

This places the medal game in Japan’s long history of automation, comprising everything from Edo-era karakuri puppet automata to architect Arata Isozaki’s robots for Expo 70, as well as the country’s ubiquitous vending machines. Yet unlike the Edo automata in which, as architect Kishō Kurokawa argues in his 1997 book Each One a Hero: The Philosophy of Symbiosis, “the technology that was incorporated into a device was not displayed on its exterior but incorporated invisibly in the interior, giving people a feeling of wonder and mystery,” the medal game’s enigmatic qualities come from the relationship between mechanism and operation. If, as Kurokawa says, “the role of machines was not to express their own independent identities but that of human beings,” then in medal games this identity is not anthropomorphic, but a manifestation of our desire to engage with chance and uncertainty. In this regard, the medal game may veer closer to Reyner Banham’s definition of a gizmo in his Design by Choice (1981): “a small self-contained unit of high performance in relation to its size and cost, whose function is to transform some undifferentiated set of circumstances to a condition nearer human desires.”

What is unique to the medal game is the architectural complexity visible within the cabinet.

Each example is a world within a world, an environment made for orbs and coins. Rather than evoking a human activity, like the tea-making karakuri, each medal game has its own set of logics and fictional scenarios playing out behind the glass. Divorced from monetary exchange, it has no alternative way of being other than

to envelope the senses of the player. The luminosity and intensity of these machines is such that it does not matter if they are placed on faded carpets, next to the toilets, or on the fifth floor of a nondescript building in a rarely frequented neighbourhood: they will draw you towards them through almost any cacophony. Once in their presence, it is up to the viewer whether to try and discern their patterns or simply give in and drift into the overload, medal by medal. E N D

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Photograph by Roman Häbler and Matteo Visentin.

Easy Vinyl Maker by Yuri Suzuki, Gakken!If you search “otona no kagaku” on YouTube, you will find an entire subgenre dedicated to videos of people building small-scale machines. There are mini-theremins, little drawing robots, tiny Stirling engines and film projectors, all assembled from kits made mainly out of plastic, paper and wee circuit boards.

Creators and viewers comprise a small but enthusiastic community of crafty DIY-ers.

“Otona no kagaku” means “science for adults” in Japanese, and is also the name of a monthly magazine and DIY-kit series that has been produced by educational publisher Gakken since the 1970s. “I grew up with that magazine,” says the sound designer Yuri Suzuki. “I remember a lot of fascinating devices and toys – a synthesiser, a letter-press machine, a zoetrope.” Gakken’s wax-cylinder recorder – based on Thomas Edison’s 1877 patent for the phonograph – is one that stood out especially. “It wasn’t so sophisticated,” laughs Suzuki. “Almost the same quality of sound as I imagine Edison’s had.”

Enter Easy Vinyl Maker, a compact five-inch record-cutter and player designed by Suzuki and produced by Gakken. Set

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for a 2020 launch, it’s a standalone piece accompanied by a special publication. While the user won’t build it themselves, Easy Vinyl Maker is meant to offer something of the pedagogical insights that the Otona no kagaku series provides. “For many people, it’s sort of magic how vinyl records work,” says Suzuki. “The act of engraving sound into a plastic disc is a great way of showing the physics of recording.”

Easy Vinyl Maker has two stylus arms: one for cutting and another for playback. An auxiliary cable or USB can be used to connect the recorder to a digital device – a laptop, phone or tablet – through which users play the audio they wish to record. Lower the robotic cutting arm and it will incise a spiral groove of micro-modulations, or “squiggles”, which can in turn be registered and reproduced in audio form by the playback stylus.

The resultant five-inch vinyl will be compatible with other record players.

“Today, we have a lot of recording devices – you can easily make a sound recording on your phone or dictaphone,” says Suzuki. “But it’s all digital.”

Meanwhile, vinyl-record collecting is experiencing something of a renaissance, with Sony Music, for instance, restarting in-house vinyl production in 2017 for the first time since 1989. “I think people miss the physicality of sound,” says Suzuki.

A professional record cutter will set you back at least $10,000, according to Suzuki. Easy Vinyl Maker’s retail price of £65 is fairly inexpensive by comparison. “The interesting thing about Gakken is that it has the knowledge of how to make this kind of scientific kit quite cheaply,” explains Suzuki. When it launches, Easy Vinyl Maker will be the only affordable cutter on the market. “As an object, it’s really quite unique.”

Words Kristina Rapacki

Mega-Quarantine Words Evi Hall Illustration Leonhard Rothmoser

Small stone boulders surround the village of Eyam in Britain’s Peak District. They form neither a charming fairy circle, nor a prehistoric curiosity. Instead, they’re a warning.

In 1666 villagers voluntarily cordoned themselves off in a bid to limit the spread of bubonic plague. It was a simple, self-sacrificing health measure and an even simpler urban intervention. Now, more than 350 years later, another community has started a domino effect by sealing itself off. Wuhan, a megacity of more than 11 million people, has undertaken the largest city quarantine in history in response to Covid-19.

Wuhan’s lockdown is unusual. Epidemics are typically managed by identifying and removing infected individuals, while the metropolis remains open as usual. The sheer scale of these measures – “unprecedented”, according to the World Health Organization – has drawn global attention, with city lockdowns becoming go-to solutions to slow the spread of the virus. The allure for governments may, in part, be explained by how easily contemporary conurbations lend themselves to quarantines.

Wuhan’s transport infrastructure, for instance, was quickly pressed into the service of the lockdown. The majority of inhabitants are reliant on public transport and are therefore stranded when routes are frozen. Meanwhile, many of the highways surrounding Wuhan are interstate toll roads, which are set up for tracking vehicles and establishing temporary blockades. Systems geared towards enabling mass mobility can easily be flipped to ensure stasis. Similarly, the megacity’s favoured building typology, the apartment block, is ideal for controlling the egress of multiple residents, while even delivery networks can help in times of lockdown: takeaways and grocery deliveries sustain self-isolating individuals and explain the presence of some of the few vehicles left on the roads of Wuhan.

But the megacity exists beyond its physical infrastructure. In the days after quarantine was imposed, many Wuhan residents who had left the city were tracked by the Chinese state through WeChat or transport tickets purchased using phones or ID cards. These individuals were later contacted by authorities and ordered to selfisolate, sometimes with their details published on social media to facilitate the process, presumably through social stigma and public shaming. Those residents who had left Wuhan had effectively taken the city’s quarantine with them, despite no longer being within its physical confines. Wuhan’s lockdown shows how the modern megacity’s walls have dissipated: with far more invasive ways to curtail its population’s movements, it has no further need for stone circles.

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The Pursuit of ’Appiness Words Kristina Rapacki Images Eric Pickersgill

Silicon Valley’s tech giants have recently become concerned with their customers’ “digital wellbeing”.

But how well-equipped are the makers of our devices to wean us off them?

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Every spring since 2013, tech-industry professionals in Silicon Valley have gathered at the Habit Summit.

The conference, organised by the author and consultant Nir Eyal, brings together entrepreneurs, behavioural scientists and designers to “share their hard-won insights on how to build habits”. Speakers have included representatives from Twitter, Facebook, Google and Airbnb, delivering talks and workshops on topics such as “How Twitter built user habits” and “Investing in habit-forming businesses”.

Eyal insists that getting people hooked on their devices can be a good thing. “When used appropriately, habits can help people live happier, healthier, more productive and more connected lives,” he said during the opening remarks of the event’s 2014 edition. Of course, getting customers to use devices and digital platforms habitually – that is, with “little or no conscious thought”, by Eyal’s own definition – also benefits the makers of those devices and digital platforms. “Creating habits supercharges growth,” he declares. “The longer a user engages with our product, the more they’re worth to us as a customer.”

This is about as concise a description of the “attention economy” as can be found. The longer you spend on your smartphone – scrolling, tapping, posting and interacting – the more data you generate about your interests and preferences. That data is then monetised by being traded with advertisers who wish to target receptive audiences. “If I want to reach women between the ages of 25 and 30 in zip code 37206 who like country music and drink bourbon,” writes Jonathan Taplin in his 2017 book Move Fast and Break Things, “Facebook can do that.” Like most free-to-use online platforms, Facebook is essentially an advertising company. Although you’re a user, you’re not its customer. You are, in fact, the product.

There is a powerful economic imperative, then, for tech companies to keep users on their platforms for as long as possible and to do so with the help of interface design. As to ensuring that we don’t overuse our devices; that our habits don’t slide into addiction; that we don’t keep scrolling when we’d rather be doing something else – well, what’s their incentive for that?

There is no Hippocratic Oath for techies. Legally, Facebook and Google are governed by contract law, which assumes a peer-to-peer relationship between user and provider. They are not bound by fiduciary law, which applies when the provider is deemed to be in an asymmetrical power relationship to the user and

ensures that any information shared between the two parties is employed only in the user’s best interests. Traditionally, that form of law applies partly to lawyers, physicians and priests. But who do you reckon has more detailed information about your most shameful desires and your most crippling anxieties: Google, with its complete record of your search history, or a priest?

The Habit Summit grew out of Eyal’s research for his bestselling 2014 book Hooked: How to Build HabitForming Products. It has become something of an industry textbook for entrepreneurs hoping to emulate the addictive feedback loops of Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. “Innovators build products meant to persuade people to do what we want them to do,” writes Eyal. “We call these people users and even if we don’t say it aloud, we secretly wish every one of them would become fiendishly hooked to whatever we’re making.”

Hooked pays special heed to user-interface design, one of the most important tools for holding people’s attention. It breaks down features such as pull-to-refresh (invented by Loren Brichter for Twitter in 2008), which it analyses as an example of a “variability reward”. “Research shows that levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine surge when the brain is expecting a reward,” Eyal writes. “Introducing variability multiplies the effect, creating a focused state, which suppresses the areas of the brain associated with judgement and reason.” Never mind that what you actually see once you’ve refreshed your inbox, Twitter feed or YouTube page rarely feels like a reward. It’s the anticipation that is thrilling and, by extension, potentially addictive. “Although classic examples include slot machines and lotteries,” writes Eyal, “variable rewards are prevalent in many other habit-forming products.”

The study cited by Eyal in this passage is a 2013 paper from Socioaffective Neuroscience & Pathology entitled ‘Pathological Gambling and the Loss of Willpower’, which ought to give readers pause.

Nevertheless, he insists that designing habit-forming tech products has nothing to do with addiction. For anyone concerned, Eyal writes, “it’s important to recognise that the percentage of users who form a detrimental dependency is very small.” Pathological addicts – even those hooked to the most habit-forming products, including slot-machines – make up only one per cent of the total number of users, he explains.

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w

The photographs accompanying this article are part of Eric Pickersgill’s series Removed (2014-present). Taken across the world, the images recreate the poses in which the sitters often unwittingly find themselves: ignoring their surroundings and absorbed in a hand-held device. Before each photo is taken, Pickersgill removes the sitter’s phone, leaving only a strangely vacant gesture.

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That, at least, is according to Eyal’s source, a 2010 white paper from the American Gaming Association.

Ten years on, it is becoming increasingly evident that habitual smartphone usage is leaving many people feeling permanently distracted, frustrated and depressed – if not pathologically addicted. In the past decade, Facebook alone has been the subject of a swathe of studies in the American Journal of Epidemiology and Computers in Human Behavior, among others, which have found that frequent use of the platform is correlated to higher rates of envy, depression and loneliness. As John Lanchester writes in his 2017 London Review of Books essay ‘You Are the Product’, “there is a lot of research showing that Facebook makes people feel like shit.”

Facebook is not the only culprit here. When the entire business model of free-to-use online services relies on maximising “time on device” (a gamblingindustry term), there is hardly an app that does not in some way employ variability rewards or other design tricks to keep us engaged. As a result, reports of smartphone addiction and other internet-related disorders have risen steeply in the past decade.

Recently, a study from King’s College London found that roughly a quarter of young people use their smartphones in ways that would qualify as addiction.

“We don’t know whether it is the smartphone itself that can be addictive or the apps that people use,” said Nicola Kalk, one of the report’s authors. Perhaps it’s an amalgamation of both?

The tech industry has made moves in response.

In 2018, Apple launched Screen Time for iOS, a feature that tracks your smartphone use and delivers a bracing weekly report (“Your screen time was up 8% last week, for an average of 2 hours, 33 minutes a day”) and a detailed breakdown of app usage. That same year, Facebook (which owns Instagram) and Google (which owns YouTube) introduced features that let users track their time on each of their platforms and ask for stop cues after a set amount of time. The British journalist Paul Lewis interviewed a number of Silicon Valley engineers in 2017 – Justin Rosenstein, the inventor of Facebook’s “Like” button, and Loren Brichter among them – in what became an explosive Guardian long read. As it turns out, they were all fearful of the features they had unleashed on the world. “Everyone is distracted,” Rosenstein lamented. “All of the time.”

Even Eyal, the organiser of the Habit Summit, seems to have sensed a paradigm shift. His latest

book, published in 2019, addresses not the entrepreneur wishing to hook their user, but the user driven to distraction by the hook. Both poison and cure, addiction wizard and self-help guru, Eyal is a parable for tech in our time. His new book is called Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life.

A pandemic is a hell of a time to be thinking about wellbeing, digital or otherwise.

I started working on this article while the official guidelines on Covid-19 containment in the UK, where I live, were to wash your hands frequently. Now, as I write, London is in lockdown and I am self-isolating in my flat. My digital devices – a laptop and smartphone – are lifelines providing connection to family, friends and colleagues, as well as access to essential information.

I wouldn’t do without these products or the apps on them, but it’s also becoming evident that overusing

I turn to Twitter for information, but leave, long after I’ve satisfied my initial impulse, with a galloping sense of panic.

Why can’t I just stop? them is detrimental to my mental health. Perhaps readers recognise themselves in this: I turn to Twitter for information, but leave, long after I’ve satisfied my initial impulse, with a galloping sense of panic at the interminable flow of facts, testimonies, analyses and conspiracies that eventually begin to coalesce in the blur of the infinite scroll. Why can’t I just stop?

Perhaps it’s the perfect time to ask this and do what I’d initially intended – namely, try some of the digital wellbeing apps that have appeared in the past months and assess how they work. In particular, I have been looking at a collection of so-called “Experiments” that Google began rolling out at the end of 2019 as part of its Digital Wellbeing initiative. The 11 Experiments include Screen Stopwatch, a smartphone wallpaper that tracks your usage in real time; a printable paper

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envelope that restricts the features you can use on your Google Pixel phone; and Post Box, an app that holds back notifications until you’re ready to view them.

While some are by external design studios, most are made by Google’s own Creative Lab. All, however, are

notifications, a staple of most platforms and operating systems. These notifications are variability rewards in themselves. (What’s behind the red dot? An Instagram “like”? A message from a lover? An important LinkedIn notification? Usually nothing so exciting, it turns out, but that’s not the point). Tristan Harris, Google’s former design ethicist and now a prominent critic of manipulative tech, explained to Paul Lewis in the Guardian that designers at Facebook had initially conceived its notification alert as a blue blob, in keeping with the platform’s colour scheme. “But no one used it,” he said. “Then they switched it to red and of course everyone used it.” Now, the red notification blob is standard across platforms from Facebook to iOS, a universal sign for “tap me”.1 In addition to restriction, another strategy common to a number of Experiments is that of selftracking. Screen Stopwatch, for instance, is a blackand-white wallpaper that tracks my phone use in real time. As soon as I unlock the phone, its three rows of numbers come alive. Hours, minutes, seconds: the last row ticks away at an alarming rate, mimicking the movement of an analogue flip clock. It’s visible whenever I’m navigating the home screen and is, quite frankly, a distraction in itself. Perhaps the point is to make the interface so stress-inducing that I’ll stay off it – a circuitous, and potentially counterproductive, route into digital wellbeing. Self-tracking is the main feature of Apple iOS’s Screen Time too (albeit presented less invasively) and it forms an important part of many tech companies’ efforts to promote a better relationship with devices. But based on my experience, I doubt its efficacy.

“The prevailing line in the media implies that digital experiences are inherently shallow and frivolous,” writes the digital anthropologist Theodora Sutton in her 2017 essay ‘Our Virtues and Devices’. It’s true: the increase in smartphone addiction has been accompanied by a rise of cold-turkey “digital detox” programmes (see, for instance, the quasi-spiritual Camp Grounded that has been running in California since 2013 – “an alcohol and drug-free environment where you[…] check all of your technology in at the entrance”) and a general consensus that using your phone is just bad. I, for one, have

Perhaps the point is to make the interface so stress-inducing that I’ll stay off it – a circuitous, and counterproductive, route into digital wellbeing. open-source. This means designers and developers can access and customise the code through the development platform GitHub, or even build their own software proposals. The Experiments are an effort, writes Google, “to encourage designers and developers to build digital wellbeing into their products”. Ultimately, the company wants to help us all find “a better balance with technology”.

A better balance with technology seems, generally, to mean less technology. That is the implication of the Experiments, at least, most of which impose restrictions or otherwise limit phone use. Take Desert Island, an app that acts as a “launcher”, meaning it replaces the home screen of a Pixel phone. To activate it, I need to select a few apps I know I will use on a given day: Messages, Phone, Calendar, Maps and Camera, for example. Instead of being presented with a full array of thumbnails when I unlock my phone, I land on a minimal display set against a white background.

It gives me the time and date, a little illustration of a desert island, and, in list form, links to the apps I have pre-selected. It needs to be reset every 24 hours, although it took me only five minutes to figure out how to override and quit it.

There are obvious restrictions encoded into Desert Island, but its design operates subtly. The fact that my chosen apps are listed simply as “Gmail”, “Maps”, and “Camera” in plain sans-serif text creates a calm interface, rather than the usual busy patchwork of icons. Crucially, the listed apps do not feature

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To be fair to Google, the notification alerts on the Pixel’s home screen are pastel blue and pink. If you are not convinced that the colours of these dots matter, try going into your settings and switching your phone’s interface to grayscale – see what happens.

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internalised this, often catching myself feeling insufferably smug about bringing out a book, rather than a device, on public transport. It’s an asinine impulse. Who’s to say that the young man fiddling with his phone opposite me isn’t texting a loved one?

Or looking up a travel route? Or reading Wittgenstein?

Using a device that has come to permeate most aspects of our lives – from how we travel, work and stay fit, to how we communicate, socialise, find information and love – shouldn’t be considered shameful.

Yet, it is precisely shame that I feel when I receive my weekly Screen Time reports or see the seconds,

“[Screen Time] might make me more mindful, but mostly by making my selfloathing more self-aware.”

—Ian Bogost

minutes and hours rack up on the Screen Stopwatch Experiment. Even with the information presented neutrally, self-tracking of this type will always be “a punitive matter,” according to game designer and academic Ian Bogost, writing in The Atlantic.

Self-tracking attaches a blanket judgement to overall use and is a blunt instrument with which to quantify digital wellbeing. “[It] might make me more mindful,” Bogost notes, “but mostly by making my self-loathing more self-aware.” This is a dangerous tactic for tech companies to pursue. Scholars such as Sutton warn against capitalising on shame around device usage, arguing that it may make us feel worse. “In short,” she writes, “we don’t need another thing to feel anxious about.”

Instead, the most successful Experiments are those that make you think differently about the way interfaces are designed. Envelope is one of two Experiments by London-based design studio Special Projects. It’s something of an outlier, in that it straddles the digitalphysical divide: it combines an app with a printable paper net that can be wrapped around a Pixel phone, changing both its appearance and functionality.

“The issue of digital wellbeing is really complex and I don’t feel like we’ve solved it at all,” says Adrian

Westaway, who runs Special Projects together with Clara Gaggero Westaway. “It was always meant to be an experiment and a provocation.”

It’s certainly not a long-term solution: Envelope transforms my phone into a device that can only make and receive phone calls from dial mode or tell me the time. Having migrated so much of my life onto my smartphone (it’s my calendar, map, camera, radio, newspaper, recording device and notepad, to name just a few functions) I couldn’t go through a normal working day without Envelope constituting a major bother. But that’s not the point – the paper wrapping doesn’t survive long in a pocket or bag, and it’s not meant to. The point, for me at least, is how my phone looks once ensconced within its paper casing.

The envelope has a radically pared-down design: 12 circles make up the grid of a standard telephone keypad, while below it two buttons signify call/hang up and a time prompt. Along the side of the Envelope, a line and plus/minus signs signify sleep/wake and the volume bar respectively. And that’s about it. When the envelope is painstakingly cut, glued and fitted around a phone, the accompanying launcher app lines up with the printed interface with surprising precision.

I can tap the keypad through the 80gsm paper and the underlying app responds with a delicate pulse of white light in the shape of the button. The call/hang up circle shines either red or green, softly diffused through the paper. When I press the time-prompt button, it flashes four successive numbers on the keypad: 1, 1, 2, 9 for 11:29, for example. The sound design is gentle and vaguely skeuomorphic, harking back to the dual tone multi-frequency soundscape of analogue telephones.

“What we love about this is the physicality of it,” says Westaway. “It’s more than just another app screen.”

This, I think, is the success of this particular Experiment.

While restriction and self-tracking are both at work – the app informs me how long I’ve kept my phone encased once I’ve ripped the envelope open and quit the Experiment – it is the calmness of its interface, the absence of notifications and the intuitive simplicity of Special Projects’ design that leaves the biggest impression. Envelope draws clear inspiration from the minimalist Light Phone, first launched in 2017, with a second model, Light Phone 2, appearing in 2019. This is a low-tech device that has garnered a significant following despite the fact that it is, according to its own developers, “designed to be used as little as possible”. A small credit card-shaped feature

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phone that can call, text and act as an alarm, it has a bare-bones greyscale operating system that borders on the austere. Like the Light Phone, Envelope is an attempt to design “calm technology”, a term coined

by Xerox Parc computer scientists Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown in a 1995 essay. Weiser and Brown were early to identify the growing need for designers to create interfaces that both “encalm and inform” – that is, provide us with information without demanding our full focus. “A calm technology,” they wrote, “will move easily from the periphery of our attention, to the center, and back.”

This is easier said than done. But the ambition is for devices not to pester us with constant demands but instead to present information subtly enough for the user to register it and decide whether or not to attend to it. As such, it’s an inversion of the manipulative “hook” model that has been so seductive to Silicon Valley in the past decade. Both concepts lay claims on the semi-conscious ways in which our attention can be directed but with very different desired outcomes. Envelope is a brief glimpse of what designing calm technology might look like and it won’t set you back the $350 price of a Light Phone.2 “Ultimately, we wanted a solution that gives you a bit of space for a period of time,” says Westaway, “to figure out what the difference is between using your phone a lot and using it a little bit less.”

Senator Hawley’s bill is still under review and notably has no co-sponsors. It has been criticised for being too broad in its formulations and too sweeping in its measures – The Verge’s Casey Newton “suspect[s] Hawley’s bill will not become law” for these reasons.

But it is indicative of a slow awakening of US regulatory powers to the dangers of manipulative, attentionsnatching user-interface design. Last year also saw the introduction of the bipartisan bill for the ‘Deceptive Experiences To Online Users Reduction’ (DETOUR) Act, which proposes that any online platform with more than 100 million monthly users cannot lawfully “[rely] on user interfaces that intentionally impair user autonomy, decision-making, or choice”. This is considered much more likely to pass into law.

Digital wellbeing will never be a priority for companies operating under the current business model – if people, en masse, began using their devices and platforms less, it would be directly correlated to a loss of revenue. Regulation may help and the bills that are beginning to appear are a start, however vague and ill-conceived. In the meantime, we will have to make do with short-term tools designed to help us resist getting distracted by features that are, themselves, designed to be distracting. When I reached out to Google for a commentary on the Digital Wellbeing Experiments, I received emailed responses to all of my questions, except one: “Is it in Google’s interest that people spend less time using Google’s devices and services?” It was a simple yesor-no question and it was ignored. E N D

In the summer of 2019, Republican Senator Josh Hawley presented a bill for the ‘Social Media Addiction Reduction Technology’ (SMART) Act in the House of Representatives. According to the bill, Congress had found that: “The business model for many internet companies[…] is to capture as much of their users’ attention as possible. To achieve this end, some of these internet companies design their platforms and services to exploit brain physiology and human psychology. By exploiting psychological and physiological vulnerabilities, these design choices interfere with the free choice of users.”

In response, the bill proposes to make it unlawful for social-media companies, in particular, to employ design strategies such as infinite scroll, autoplay, “engagement” badges and “the elimination of natural stopping points”.

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Although, unless some clever GitHubbers adapt it for iOS, you’ll need a Pixel 3a for it to work.

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Photograph by Roman Häbler and Matteo Visentin.

Greta Grotesk by Tal Shub!After Greta Thunberg registered for several trademarks earlier this year, the young climate activist’s name could soon be officially off limits. But what about her handwriting?

Greta Grotesk, a typeface mimicking Thunberg’s penmanship, surfaced online for open-source download last autumn. Created by New York-based designer Tal Shub, the text consists of a limited set of uppercase Latin characters and symbols that were developed through close examination of Thunberg’s protest posters. “I was really impressed by the bold design and clarity of the message,” Shub explained to It’s Nice That.

The font is one of countless Greta-branded products that have become available since the activist’s arrival in the media spotlight two years ago. Polyester Greta-faced T-shirts and Greta-shaped garden gnomes made of toxic acrylic can now be found all over the internet. While these products are

emblazoned with Greta’s likeness, she is not – as their materiality ought to make clear – the divine creator of this Greta-sphere.

Instead, Thunberg has disassociated herself from this paraphernalia, clearly stating her disapproval of the media idolisation she’s received. “I think there is a lot of focus on me as an individual and not on the climate itself,” she told German broadcaster Deutsche Welle. “I think we should focus on the climate issue because this is not about me.” The availability of Saint Greta Prayer Candles, however, suggests that her request has been ignored.

Greta Grotesk seems to present another example of this tendency, transparently conflating the activist’s handwriting with her ideology. One redeeming feature, however, is that the open-source typeface is not exactly straightforward merchandise – instead, Shub hopes it will serve as a reminder of “the actions we must take to bring real change”.

“The obvious usage would be to produce any sort of collateral that relates to climate change,” Shub told It’s Nice That. “But I think the biggest contribution this could have is actually beyond the immediate urge to use it in a poster.” Instead, Shub hopes the typeface will filter into everyday usage, thereby spreading awareness of climate collapse. “It’s conveniently located right above Helvetica – so you won’t be able to avoid it.”

On Shub’s schema, the typeface may make its way into endless documents or the email chain of anyone with a computer and a penchant for caps lock. It’s hard, however, to imagine any possible use for the typeface that wouldn’t be a grotesque appropriation of the handwriting of a 17-year-old who has made it quite clear that she would rather people not co-opt aspects of her identity. It’s a problem exacerbated by the typeface’s short punctuation list – curiously, the quotation mark is nowhere to be found in case one should want to exactly replicate the words of another.

Words Maxime Weiss

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The Tourists Words Oli Stratford Images NASA

Sunk into sites close to Canberra, Goldstone and Madrid, parabolic dishes scan the skies. A tripartite antenna system, positioned approximately 120° apart around the Earth, the NASA Deep Space Network (DSN) waits for transmission.

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senders’ location. These are harsh locations. Bathed in an atmosphere of around 95 per cent carbon dioxide, and experiencing temperatures that range between 20°C and -153°C, the Martian surface is prone to gigantism.

There is Olympic Mons, a shield volcano two and a half times taller than Mount Everest; the Hellas Planitia, an impact crater 7,152m deep and 2,300km across;1 and Valles Marineris, a canyon some 4,000km long, 200km wide and 10km deep. “The mountains

Founded in 1958, the DSN is the Earth’s most sophisticated means of interplanetary exchange – the system by which NASA passes telemetry data between Earth and its spacecraft. Each 70m-diameter dish listens patiently, picking up radio signals from across and beyond the solar system. This in itself is a miracle. “[Only] a small fraction of [a spacecraft’s transmission will] actually hit the Earth and only one ten-billionth of that fraction [will] hit the actual receiver,” explains journalist Oliver Morton in his book Mapping Mars. Given the astonishing faintness of the signals, the capacity to receive any transmission from the void, writes Morton, “has been one of the least celebrated wonders of the space age[…] an ability at least as wonderful as that of actually launching things into space”.

The DSN is NASA’s locus. Far away, the agency’s spacecraft roam the solar system, harvesting data from bodies whose distance renders them otherwise silent. Untouched, unseen, these astral bodies are captured and conveyed as radio waves, before being reconstructed back on Earth. They are, in Morton’s parlance, bodies “created by[…] instruments and mappings”; worlds “transformed by the imagination that runs over [them]”. It is only when a spacecraft’s data arrives on Earth that the places it has visited become fully real to us. Overseen by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, California, the DSN is the means by which Morton’s one ten-billionth of a fraction becomes one ten-billionth of a world, and whereby missives coded into a radio signal are reformed to provide scientific imagery and instrument readings.

Since 2004, however, the JPL has transformed a portion of the data it receives into a new form of constructed world. “Postcards,” writes Jim Bell, a geophysicist at the JPL and Arizona State University who led the initiative. “That word sounds a little small to me[…] but that is what we called them when we shot them and as they came back from Mars, and I can’t call them anything else now.”

Mars has hosted three different sources of postcards. Two are now dead, the third is still mailing. of Mars are the size of American states, its grandest canyons continental,” explains Morton. “Plains the size of Canada lie flooded by undivided sheets of lava.”

Nevertheless, from the ground, the planet seems somehow formless, its features lost amidst their own enormity. The surface of Mars is not consistent – it is variably smooth, hummocky, cracked, dune-like or mottled – but it is relentless. “Even stripped of people, with their cities and their borders and their histories, a map of earth would not be this unyielding,” says Morton. “Global truths and discrete units of geography would draw the eye. River catchments would tile the plains, mountain ranges would stand like the backbones of continents. There would be seas and islands, well defined. But Mars is not like that. It is continuous, seamless and sealess.” Roger Wiens, a planetary scientist who has worked at the JPL, frames this same point in terms of loneliness. “The beautiful but deserted terrain of Mars evokes the feeling of an abandoned mansion,” writes Wiens in his 2013 book Red Rover. “It seems that everything is there except the occupants. The same sun rises and sets.[…] The wind blows the sand grains ever so slightly from day to day. But no one is there.”

The Martian postcards begin to impose some sense of perspective and agency on this infinitude.

They are photographic coordinates – a Wish-youwere-here to the folks back home – stitched together from thousands of images and then rendered to erase the seams. Most importantly, they are shot from

Over the past 16 years, Mars has hosted three different sources of postcards. Two are now dead, the third is still mailing. If all goes to plan, a fourth correspondent will be in place come 18 February 2021.

In the context of Mars, postcard is meant quite literally. The Martian postcards are panoramas of the planet’s landscape – 360° images documenting their

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The energy released in the impact that created Hellas would, Morton notes, have been sufficient to “[boil] half the Earth’s oceans dry”.

Images of Mars shot using NASA’s MOLA (Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter), an experiment on the Mars Global Surveyor orbiter (1997-2006), which created elevation maps precise to within 30cm in the vertical dimension.

Development work on the Mars Helicopter at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, part of the Mars 2020 rover mission.

ground-level, as opposed to the satellite imagery we are accustomed to from orbiters. “[They’re] the closest representations yet made of what it must be like to be there, standing on Mars,” Bell writes in his 2006 book Postcards from Mars, a document of his time at the JPL. Each postcard, Bell explains, is “a combination of science, past experience, and some artistic license”.

In creating a postcard, numerous design decisions are made. “It [takes] thousands of additional images to produce [a] single view,” explains Janet Vertesi, a Princeton sociologist who has spent years studying NASA’s spacecraft teams as an ethnographer. “[There are] not only the individual frames that make up the panorama, but a digital trail of images that [are] displayed, annotated, dissected, planned, disputed, and ultimately agreed on.” Decisions are taken to standardise colouration across the component photographs2 and to determine the point at which to “cut” the panorama to produce a two-dimensional image, as well as how to crop the composite image to frame the vista it shows. “The relation to reality that all art must bear is a particularly strange one for this project,” Bell notes. “It is not abstract art, but it also isn’t a reality that any human has quite witnessed yet, either.” The images that form a Martian postcard may not be shot by people,3 but nor are they captured by just any kind of spacecraft. Critical to the concept of the postcard is the nature of the correspondent.

For the majority of the Space Age, Mars’s surface has been known either through the satellite imagery provided by orbiters like Mariner 9 (1971-72), whose top-down vistas began the work of mapping the planet (revealing, in the words of Mariner geologist Michael Carr, “a wonderland[…] unfolded before us”), or else through on-planet lander photography. The first lander images date from 20 July 1971, when NASA’s Viking 1 reached the Chryse Planitia, a smooth plain in Mars’s northern equatorial region. “When the signal came that Viking had landed safely at 5:12 a.m.

(PDT),” says political scientist W. Henry Lambright in his 2014 book Why Mars: NASA and the Politics of Space Exploration, “everyone at JPL gave a loud cheer, followed by hugs, laughs and other expressions of sheer relief”. The relief was merited – Viking 1 was NASA’s first spacecraft and only the world’s second,

to successfully soft land on another planet.4 For the first time, the faintest signal of Mars’s surface, seen from the ground, began to reach the DSN. A static observer, Viking 1 set to work photographing panoramas of red rock and rubble beneath salmon-pink skies.5 A second lander, Viking 2, began its work from Mars’s Utopia Planitia in 1976.

“Mars is really talking to us and telling us something,” enthused Harold P. Klein, the chief biologist for the missions, praising the Vikings as they probed the landscape, carving out knowledge of Mars’s history, geology and chemical makeup. The images provided by these landers were so vital that NASA’s Pathfinder team, when threatened in 1994 with budget cuts that imperilled their mission’s camera, penned a protest letter. “Try to imagine two successful Viking landings on Mars in 1976 followed by no images[…],” the team wrote. “Try to imagine the successful landing of Apollo 11 on the Moon with only voice communication – no pictures, no samples, and no televised ‘first step.’

It is important to recognise that images from the surface of Mars will prove success to the American public (and Congress) and provide them with tangible results they can comprehend.” But the Vikings weren’t sending postcards. At least not in Bell’s sense of the term.

In his 1980 book Cosmos, the astronomer Carl Sagan set out the limitations of the Vikings. “I found myself unconsciously urging the spacecraft at least to stand on its tiptoes, as if this laboratory designed for immobility, were perversely refusing to manage even a little hop,” he explained. “How we longed to poke that dune with the sample arm, look for life beneath that rock, see if that distant ridge was a crater rampart.[…] For all the tantalising and provocative character of the Viking results, I knew a hundred places on Mars which are far more interesting than our landing sites.”

In part, Sagan’s frustrations are the friction inevitable in designing any spacecraft – the interrelation between scientists and engineers.

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The images are taken over the course of several hours, allowing for shifts in colour as atmospheric conditions change over time.

Or at least not directly; the connection between spacecraft and their operators is a knotty one.

The honour of being the first fell to the Soviet Union’s Mars 3 probe, which landed on 2 December 1971 but failed after 20 seconds – although it did transmit a partial panoramic image that shows no detail. To understand “soft land”, compare it to the hard landing of Mars 3’s predecessor – Mars 2 – which crashed into the planet’s surface on 27 November 1971. Attempts to contact Mars 2 were, unsurprisingly, unsuccessful.

A colouration that had to be later corrected. The Viking team ultimately determined the Viking lander site’s rocks to be “moderate yellowish brown” and its sky “light to moderate yellowish brown”. Less catchy, but the Red Planet is perhaps more accurately the Moderate Yellowish Brown Planet.

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A “self-portrait” of Curiosity atop the Vera Rubin Ridge – an image assembled from dozens of photographs taken in January 2018 by the rover’s Mars Hands Lens Imager (MAHLI), positioned at the end of its robotic arm.

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Edward Relph in his 1976 phenomenological study Place and Placelessness. “In our everyday lives places are not experienced as independent, clearly defined entities that can be described simply in terms of their location of appearance,” wrote Relph. “Rather [they] are sensed in a chiaroscuro of setting, landscape, ritual, routine, other people, personal experiences, care and concern for home.” Relph’s full chiaroscuro of experience is likely impossible to obtain through the robotic exploration of Mars, but even a partial version becomes difficult if we cannot imagine movement across the planet’s rocks. “A place is not a place[…] if all you can do is look at it,” writes Morton. “[For] a place to be a place, you must also be able to move around it, to go away and look back, to see it from more than one angle.”

Without movement, what chance is there of Mars ever becoming a planet of places in Relph’s sense of the term?

Motion is particularly important to the idea of a postcard – a record of a journey undertaken deliberately and of places visited through freely determined movement. “The difference between the views of Mars from the Vikings [and the Martian postcards is the] difference between ‘acquiring images’ and ‘taking photographs’,” writes Bell.

“Acquiring images is a technical, science-driven, resource-limited activity.” By contrast, the creation of a photograph requires the freedom to shape its frame that is betokened by movement. “I can think about the same kinds of issues that landscape photographers consider in their quest to capture the spirit and stories of the land,” writes Bell. “How can we frame this particular shot?[…] What is the balance of sky and ground? Do we visit the scene in natural light or with enhancing filters? And how do we interpret the view later, in the computer ‘darkroom’ where we process the images?” As Sagan noted in 1980, “The ideal tool is a roving vehicle carrying on advanced experiments, particularly in imaging, chemistry, and biology.” Only a rover is able to send postcards.

“Usually, astronomers and scientists want systems that are going to be much more capable than we can design,” says Manan Arya, an engineer at the JPL. “It’s a process of negotiation of telling them what is achievable within realistic costs and schedules, and then meeting them halfway.” Missions are launched for the benefit of the science resulting from them, but their operation is dependent on engineering strategies.

Adding to the complexity of this interrelation is the fact that engineers’ experience of the spaces they are designing for is almost entirely mediated by the knowledge generated by scientists. “It’s a lot of talking to people and experts,” confirms Arya. “You’re constantly learning new physics [for the] environment you have to design for, and intense amounts of modelling goes on. Part of it is building an intuition for what an environment is like, and there is also an intuition that develops slowly over time about things that are going to work and things that are not going to work. At this point, for instance, I know not to put dissimilar metals together because they’ll expand at different rates and temperatures.” All spacecraft are limited, then, but not necessarily through any paucity of the design process; given the spaces they have to navigate and the complexity of the tasks they have to perform, it’s a wonder they operate at all.

Nevertheless, Sagan was broadly right in his lament: landers are a frustratingly limited form of exploration. As robotic emissaries for humankind, they open a window onto Mars, reframing an alien world in new, more human terms. In Morton’s words, they have helped transform Mars into “a world of science, untouchable but inspectable and oddly accessible, if only through the most complex of tools”.

Thanks to the images sent back by the Vikings and their ilk, Mars has become “a world of places and views, a world that would graze your knees if you fell on it, a world with winds and sunsets and the palest of moonlight. Almost a world like ours, except for the emptiness.” But it is this same emptiness that highlights the limitations of a static lander. In any kind of exploration, movement is primary, not least in the context of a planet where no human has ever set foot.

It is through movement within a space – the capacity to adopt different perspectives and to choose the way in which we frame an environment – that a location begins to become legible and take on attributes that might allow us to describe it as a “place”. This idea is rooted in the arguments set out by the geographer

To date, Mars has welcomed four rovers of three different kinds. Each varies considerably from the others, but the principle is the same – “A little car [that can] drive out,” as physicist Geoffrey Briggs put it in 1990. The first of the Mars rovers, Sojourner, landed on 4 July 1997 as part of NASA’s Pathfinder mission and remains the vehicle that best fits Briggs’s bare-bones description. The 0.6m-long Sojourner was solar-powered, a tabletop buggy whose aesthetic was

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more remote-controlled car than advanced planetary vehicle.6 Trundling around its landing site in Mars’s Ares Vallis, Sojourner was a tech demo that nevertheless carried out useful science – applying an alpha-particle X-ray spectrometer to the surfaces of rocks to determine their chemical composition – as well as serving as an important cultural touchstone.

“It was Sojourner, more than anything else, that turned the landing site in Ares Vallis into a place,” notes Morton, citing the images showing the rover’s slow progress and the treads it left in the ground.

“Sojourner put activity into the images and brought change to the changeless surface. Her tracks in the dust brought time and motion to Mars. They made the landscape a place of purposeful activity, rather than just a site for disembodied study[…].” Driving a total of 0.1km, at a speed of 0.024km/h, Sojourner traversed the small rock garden that formed its range for a total of 83 sols or 85 days,7 photographing its world in miniature. They were not yet postcards – Sojourner was unable to take panoramas – but the rover’s freedom of movement set a template for what was to come. As Louis Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society, put it, Sojourner “reawakened the [Apollo-era] image of NASA as ‘the can do’ agency”, fed in large part by its website (the first “internet mission” of its kind), which supplied regularly updated news from the rover and its lander. “[No] event up to this time had as many ‘hits’ on the Internet – 80 million a day in the first days, 450 million by the

‘People literally went to grief counselling. It was so hard to keep that little guy alive.’—Kalind Carpenter beginning of August,” writes Lambright. “This decision to use the Internet brought about the largest virtual participation in exploration by people since the world watched the Apollo Moon landing in 1969.”

Sojourner was followed in 2004 by the twin Mars Exploration Rovers (MER), Spirit and Opportunity.

The first of the fully fledged Martian correspondents, the MER rovers borrowed basic design principles from Sojourner – such as its rocker-bogie suspension which

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“Puny”, as Wiens puts it.

A Martian day is known as a sol, and lasts for a mean period of 24 hours 39 minutes 35.244 seconds.

forewent springs in favour of six wheels whose joints could rotate and conform to the contours of Mars’s surface8 – but otherwise tore up the copy book.

As a NASA press release from the time had it, Spirit and Opportunity were to be fully fledged “robotic geologists”, each one able to “see sharper images,[…] explore farther and examine rocks better than anything that’s ever landed on Mars.” To help enable their mission, each rover would carry a Pancam: a pair of cameras positioned on a 1.5m mast to obtain high-resolution images of Mars in wavelengths from ultraviolet through to infrared. “Pancam,” Bell explains, “would be providing the only colour pictures from the rovers and would be the first moving set of (essentially) human eyes on the planet.” It is Pancam to which we owe the first postcards – our first record of something approaching free, uninhibited movement across the Martian landscape.

It is easy to animalise Spirit and Opportunity – they’re adorable. The two rovers were solar-powered like Sojourner, but instead of aping their forebear’s flat rectangle of photovoltaic cells, their solar panels were designed to wrap neatly behind their bodies like a swan’s wings. Meanwhile the Pancams have a WALL·E-esque charm,9 as if each rover were peering quizzically at the world it found itself in. Spirit and Opportunity were engineered to travel a maximum of 100m per sol and remain operational for up to 90 sols. Part of the appeal of the MER rovers, however, is the seeming earnestness with which they set about their tasks, and the manner in which they wildly bucked expectations. Spirit remained active for 2,623 sols, covering a distance of 7.7km and faithfully reporting back to the DSN throughout, despite suffering a series of crippling engineering setbacks. “[About] seven hundred days into what was expected to be a ninety-day mission, the rover’s right front wheel jammed at an awkward angle, never to turn again,” writes Vertesi in her 2015 book Seeing Like a Rover. “[After that, the] engineers [had to] drive the robot backward, and gingerly at that, dragging its stuck wheel.” Spirit eventually fell silent after 751 days stuck in soft sand at a site named 8

9

A system that David Baker, an ex-NASA scientist and now editor of the British journal Spaceflight, rates so highly that he dismisses “Earth-based off-road vehicles and SUVs” as having “failed their owners in not seizing this logical form of mobility”.

Pixar researched WALL·E by visiting the JPL, where the MER rovers were designed and built.

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the agency that [Curiosity] was the most technologically challenging vehicle ever designed to move across the surface of another world in space,” notes ex-NASA scientist David Baker in his 2013 book NASA Mars Rover: Owner’s Workshop Manual. Certainly, Curiosity has little of the cuteness of its predecessors. Its purpose is clear in its robust titanium wheels and chunky frame, giving it the appearance of futuristic farm equipment – an interstellar combine data harvester.

Curiosity is the size of a small SUV, more than three times the weight of the MER rovers, and carries 10 times the weight of science equipment. Its rockerbogie suspension gives it 0.6m of ground clearance for traversing rocks, while its mast (topped with Pancam’s successor Mastcam) stands 2.2m off the ground, with the rover’s capabilities bolstered by a robotic arm that can extend an additional 2.2m. To cap it off, Curiosity is not solar powered like its predecessors – and therefore hostage to Mars’s fluctuating seasons and weather patterns – but rather fuelled by an inbuilt radioisotope thermoelectric generator. The vehicle is so heavy that NASA was forced to abandon its method of landing rovers on Mars – cocooning them in airbags and letting them bounce to a rest – in favour of a new methodology dubbed “sky crane”, in which a rocketpowered descent vehicle lowers the rover on nylon tethers. Part of the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission, Curiosity represents a fulfilment of the promise of the earlier rovers: an “observatory on wheels” as Lambright puts it, and an opportunity to explore Mars more fully. The creation of MSL, argued NASA’s former chief scientist James Garvin in an October 2008 letter to the editor of Science, meant that the JPL was “ready to assault the Martian frontier”.

Troy.10 “People literally went to grief counselling,” notes Kalind Carpenter, an engineer at the JPL whose work focuses on mobility systems. “It was so hard to keep that little guy alive and get it unstuck.”

Opportunity, meanwhile, was an even greater success. MER had been devised to find evidence of past water activity on Mars and, shortly after landing on the Meridiani Planum, Opportunity began returning imagery showing hundreds of ball-bearing sized grains littering the ground. These grains were a form of mineral deposit that the MER team dubbed “blueberries”, and which were later determined to have been left over from the evaporation of a salty body of water.

“Opportunity’s sort of the glamour girl,” Vertesi reports one of the MER operators explaining. “She went to Mars to find water, and she sort of fell into a hole and opened her eyes and there’s evidence of water.” That Opportunity remained operational for 5,352 sols (15 years), covering a distance of 45.16km and sending back postcards every step of the way, only added to the sense of triumph and endeavour surrounding the programme. “Within a few weeks of landing, we had found key evidence that there was once liquid water on Mars and that the environment must have been much more Earthlike at some point in the distant past,” notes Bell, who argues that this prestige was enhanced in the public consciousness by Opportunity’s postcards. “We have not been the first to see the surface of Mars, but we have had the privilege of being the first to see the places we have visited in an entirely different, and ultimately more human way.” When Opportunity finally fell silent on 10 June 2018, after reporting a low battery and approaching storm,11 public grief was palpable. “Was I a good Mars Rover?” Opportunity asks the Grim Reaper in a widely shared meme. Wide-eyed and trusting, Opportunity is led across the Martian sands by Death. “No,” the Reaper responds. “I’m told you were the best.”

The best, perhaps, but not the most capable. On 6 August 2012, the Curiosity rover landed on Mars. In comparison to its predecessors, Curiosity is leviathan.

“It was universally accepted within NASA and outside

The frontier metaphor has recurred throughout the Space Age, but seems particularly apposite in the case of Mars. “[When] the world thinks of Mars, the images it conjures up are, more often than not, images of the American West,” notes Morton, and it matters little that the physical resemblance between the two is slight12 – the metaphor is chiefly ideological rather than aesthetic.13 “Since the 1960s, America has ceaselessly

10 “[The] rovers were finite resources and[…] their short lives could be over at any time,” writes Vertesi. “This was colloquially referred to as ‘the sniper’: as in the expression ‘the sniper could strike at any time.’”

11 This went viral when a rather poetic translation of Opportunity’s final data transmission duped people into thinking that the rover had literally transmitted the words: “My battery is low and it’s getting dark.”

12 Although, as Morton notes, it is not absent altogether: “the planet undoubtedly looks more like Arizona than it does Arkansas or the Ardennes[…] Mars may not be very similar to the American West – but it is similar enough to give the metaphor substance.”

13 It is blatantly nationalistic, with more than a smattering of colonial connotations also.

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An image captured by Spirit’s hazcam of a rock called Torquas, taken in March 2007.

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Sojourner approaches the first rocks it investigated, Barnacle Bill and Yogi, in an image taken by the Pathfinder lander on sol 3 of its mission.

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talked about space as a new frontier, a continuation of the nineteenth century’s expansion – and one result of this rhetoric has been an eagerness to see the landscapes of the solar system in terms of the landscapes of the American West,” Morton argues, adding that the comparison expresses a “continuity between the pioneers of the space age and the pioneers of the West”. Rovers feed into this narrative readily, in part because of their aesthetic connections to the railways, the form of transport that defined the American West. “Rover tracks,” concludes Morton, provide a clear symbol of planetary exploration, “just as railway tracks defined the Columbia River landscapes of Carleton Watkins in the 1880s”.

Certainly, the Martian postcards are normally framed so as to position either a portion of the rover or its tracks prominently in view. The tracks are particularly evident – gouged deep and crimson into ground on which the rover has disturbed the blanketing layer of planetary dust. This imprint generates a sense of activity on an otherwise desolate planet, as well as imposing a veneer of human-generated order. “Locating viewers in a stark landscape with a scene laid out around them[…] recalls the picturesque convention in eighteenth-century landscape painting,” notes Vertesi, who understands the postcards as embodying a form of “Martian picturesque”, an aesthetic that transforms a rover’s activities into a human visual experience. “It arranges the landscape around an observer who is embedded within it at a particular location,” she notes. “Human presence on Mars thus appears natural and seamless, arising from the landscape.” Through postcards, an alien planet is rendered both familiar and, crucially, attainable.

It is, Vertesi writes, a “practical image craft that draws Mars as the new American frontier.”

As it stands, this frontier is being pushed back daily. Since Curiosity landed on Mars, it has driven 20.4km; exceeded its designed lifespan of 668 sols by well over 2,000; found evidence of persistent liquid water in the planet’s past, and organic carbon in its present-day rocks; and supplied a steady stream of postcards that have documented its movements across the 154km-wide Gale crater. As John Grunsfeld, a former NASA chief scientist, puts it, “The action right now is on the surface, and that’s where we want to be.”

Bolstered by this ongoing success, the JPL is currently prepping a new correspondent for Mars:

Perseverance. Scheduled to launch as part of the Mars 2020 mission between 17 July and 5 August, the rover is expected to land in Mars’s Jezero crater (thought to be the site of an ancient, dried-up lake system) in February 2021. Once on the planet, Perseverance will begin searching for signs of past microbial life on Mars, caching rock core samples within sealed tubes that may be recovered and returned to Earth by a future mission. The new rover will carry different scientific equipment to Curiosity, and has received a redesigned set of aluminium wheels to allow for steeper climbing, but is otherwise closely modelled on its predecessor. “We know how to control costs,” said Mike Griffin, NASA’s then-administrator, in 2008: “just build more of what you built the last time.”

While Curiosity cost around $2.5bn to develop and launch,14 Perseverance is currently estimated to top out at $2.04bn. It is a significant saving, although given that NASA’s total federal budget for the 2020 financial year is $22.6bn, it is still a considerable investment. “[Perseverance] is meant to be build [to] print,” explains Carpenter of the JPL’s design for the new rover. “People have saved a lot of money through lessons learned and a lot of the designs from the last one.” Nevertheless, there have been changes to the blueprints, although NASA is not necessarily keen to communicate these in detail. “If you’re under contract to build the same thing and you go off-script – and if people aren’t necessarily aware of that – then they can get very touchy about what you’ve done on their dime,”15 notes Carpenter. “But one thing I will say is that it is not the same rover. Its science goals are very different; the location is very different; and its instruments are completely different. [Perseverance] should be exciting to everyone.”

Some changes are obvious. The flashiest is the presence of the Mars Helicopter, a solar-powered drone that will be carried by Perseverance as a tech demonstration of powered flight in the Martian atmosphere. “For the helicopter, we’ve been waiting for the power density of motors, the power density of batteries, and the processing power [to become

14 “I [like] to explain that Curiosity cost the price of a movie ticket for every person in the United States,” says Wiens of this cost. “The public would get its money’s worth.”

15 This is hardly surprising – space travel of any form has always been intensely political. “Large technical achievement, especially when dealing with government and costing billions over many years,” explains Lambright, “does not happen automatically.”

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data as we can, and then someone colorises it,” notes Carpenter of the decision to include the camera, which NASA describes as a “public engagement payload”.

“But this time you’re going to be able to see as if you were standing on Mars, which to me is a no-brainer.

As a child, I wanted to go; I wanted to walk around. As much as the scientist and engineer in me realises that [this camera is] not as important as other [instruments], there’s no reason not to give that to the world.”

sufficient],” says Carpenter. “It suddenly hit a point about six years ago where we looked at those three parameters and realised that the technology is finally there. We can fly on another body.” Less glitzy, but probably more immediately meaningful, are the inclusion of two new pieces of equipment that may help expand the way in which we experience the Martian surface: microphones and a methane sensor.

“One of the coolest things going on with 2020 is that it’s going to have ears – you’re going to be able to hear Mars and the sounds of the rover’s wheels as it’s driving around,” says Carpenter. “Another thing we’ve added is the methane sensor and it’s going to be interesting to see if we [can use that to] see the chemicals and the [atmospheric] makeup [of the planet]. You could easily have an installation where you could move around with the rover and hear and smell what it’s like to be on Mars.”

One of the smallest design gestures on Perseverance, however, feels particularly significant: the presence of a visible-light camera. It is the first time this technology has travelled to Mars and the photographs that emerge will be different to the postcards supplied by either the MER rovers or Curiosity. “One way to see Mars is by combining a set of filters through red, green and blue channels in an image-processing program,” explains Vertesi of the way in which both Pancam and Mastcam have functioned. These combined filters produce an approximate true colour (ATC) image, “an estimate of the actual colours you would see if you were there on Mars”. Vertesi advises caution with this vocabulary.

True colour images, she warns, are no more “true” than those produced through other kinds of filters. “[ATC] is a technical term that refers to a particular combination of filters that approximates the range and type of light sensitivity exemplified by the human eye,” she notes. Even Bell, an advocate par excellence for the MER postcards, acknowledges that the colours seen by Pancam are “approximate” and, at best, “a good estimate of what humans[…] would see if they had been there.” With Perseverance, the imagery returned by the visible-light camera will finally move beyond this estimate.16 “We normally never do this because we’re looking for the extended range to get as much

This sense of connection between rovers and people is at the heart of the Martian story, particularly in terms of their operation by teams at the JPL. All of the NASA rovers have been autonomous to a degree,17 but their movements are nevertheless carefully mapped and prescribed from the neighbouring planet. “The rovers do not conduct science or see by themselves,” explains Vertesi. “Each day they received detailed instructions from their human team on Earth about where to go and what to do.” It takes somewhere between 13 and 24 minutes for radio signals to pass between Mars and the DSN, rendering constant communication impractical. As such, rover teams connect with their robots once a sol, encompassing both “downlink” (receiving all data from the previous sol) and “uplink” (sending detailed commands to the rover for the upcoming sol).18 “I take as a first-order assumption that the rovers cannot be understood without the complex network of people and software on Earth that animate them,” says Vertesi of this relationship, while acknowledging that many at the JPL would frame this sense of intimacy even more sharply. “We are the corpus, the body of this rover,” she describes one operator explaining. “We are making that thing do what it does on Mars.”

Visualisation is critical to this form of operation.

Perseverance will carry nine engineering cameras, divided between hazcams, navcams and a cachecam.

17 Each rover has been successively more autonomous than the last.

Perseverance, NASA promises, has “greater independence than Curiosity ever had[…] [allowing it] to cover more ground without consulting controllers on Earth so frequently.”

18 This, of course, brings challenges in terms of scheduling.

“Rovers don’t care about nights or weekends on Earth,” notes Bell.

“They don’t care about holidays, or your kids’ birthdays, or your anniversary. They don’t care if your son had to have an emergency appendectomy, or that you had to deal with weeks spent away from your family every month. All they care about is waking up, getting their commands, measuring, photographing, and radioing the results back to Earth, and then going back to sleep.

Relentlessly. Like robots!”

16 This is not necessarily Vertesi’s point, however. The human eye is itself a kind of filter and it is worth thinking about why we ascribe more verisimilitude to the wavelengths it detects than the extended range perceived by a rover.

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A polar projection of the 360° “McMurdo” panorama shot by Spirit between April and October 2006. The image shows Spirit and its surroundings on a small hill called Low Ridge.

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Of these, it is the former two that are relevant for movement.19 Hazcams are located on the body of Perseverance and point downwards so as to detect obstacles to the front and back of the rover; navcams are mounted on the rover’s mast and provide stereo imagery to help plan a route. “[The] rover’s view of the world when driving is very much like your view of the world if you imagine yourself trying to make your way through a dark, cluttered room with nothing but a flashbulb,” one MER operator told Vertesi. “So you can kind of take a picture in the world, and you can get a sense of where there’s a safe path, and you walk a little way along that safe path and you pop the flashbulb again.” The rover follows paths and objectives set by its operations teams based on the imagery it provides; calculates the distance it has been asked to drive through measurements of its wheel rotation; and then proceeds slowly. “[Although] Rover team members joke about getting the ‘keys to the rover’,” notes Vertesi, “there is no joystick that controls real-time operations.”

To facilitate this shared responsibility for movement, rover operators practice a form of projection. “My body, by the way, is always the rover,” one engineer told Vertesi, before contorting herself into a variety of poses to demonstrate how each of her body parts might map to the structure of a rover – her chest becoming the robot’s front, her shoulders its solar panels, and its antennae erupting from her spine.

“In order to be fully prepared for my job… I need to literally be that vehicle.” The critical point, of course, is that being a rover is not very much like being a person.

Throughout a mission, rover teams attempt to see in a different way in order to take advantage of the fact that it is not them that is crossing the Martian landscape, but rather robots with alternative forms of perception, locomotion and communication. “[A rover operator] confessed to me,” notes Vertesi, “that while planning a drive, ‘I have frequently tried to put myself in the rover’s head and say, [‘What do I know about the world?[…] The rover has senses that we don’t have[...]

It never really sees the world in colour but it can see parts of the spectrum that we can’t.’”

Rovers may be proxies for the human exploration of Mars, but they are not proxies for humans – their modes of being in and experiencing the world are radically different to our own. The majority of images returned from the Martian rovers, for instance, have

not been easily identifiable postcards, but rather technical shots designed to help steer, or else vistas captured through filters and conducive to the overall scientific mission – what Bell might term “acquiring images” rather than “taking photographs”. These images show worlds in shades of violent blue, pink and yellow, with landscapes illuminated like folds of the aurora made solid, oozing with chemical signals that leach livid from the ground. These forms of imaging, Vertesi writes, are strange and take practice to read, but they are vital to the operation: “One scientist I interviewed who was looking for sulphate content on Mars explained, ‘If you get a particular [filter] combination the sulphates just jump out at you. It’s like they turn green or blue or something.’” Another rover scientist went further in arguing for the need to move beyond approximate true colour images: “Okay, we know Mars is red, we get it! Seeing more natural Mars colours isn’t helping, I’m not learning anything.” Rovers communicate visually, but they extend this medium to express the non-visual too.20 They not only let us see worlds we cannot at present view directly, but facets of those worlds that we could never hope to see.

If Perseverance lands successfully in February 2021, it will not simply be an ambassador for humankind in an inhospitable environment. It is a technology to extend our natural capabilities – a planetary machine designed to transform the alien into the understandable. “[Rover operators] do not project themselves outward, into the body of the rover as human proxy,” says Vertesi.

“Rather, they themselves adopt the rover’s bodily apparatus with its unique bodily sensitivities in order to understand and interact with Mars.” The postcards that the rovers send back, however, stand contrary to this. They locate viewers on the Martian surface, reversing Vertesi’s dynamic and representing an instance where the rover mimics the bodily apparatus and sensitivities of a human. “[The Martian picturesque] is not a view from nowhere or a God’s-eye view,” writes Vertesi. “Nor is it especially a rover’s eye view.”

Which is why they resonate. The Martian postcards are a human’s view, a record of movement, belonging and presence sent from a world that will admit of none of these things. “I wanted them to be postcards,” writes Bell, “views showcasing the beauty of the natural environment that we now found ourselves in.” This is perhaps overstated: we are not there yet. E N D

19 Cachecam will be used in the storage of rock core samples.

20 Non-visual to a human viewer, anyway.

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A Hotel is a Plot Words Will Wiles

A trip into Eimear McBride’s novel Strange Hotel reveals the rich literary potential of hotel architecture.

Strange Hotel, Eimear McBride’s third novel, is a monologue exploring the past of its unnamed narrator as she visits a series of hotel rooms that she may have been in before.

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The hotel is not strange, at least not in one sense of the word.

She has been here before. It’s the south of France and it’s hot: “the foyer sags with humidity, unleavened by the indoor trees[…] Fronds dust-patinated to rust.” There is a ritual to perform with the man behind the desk, with credit cards and passports – he disinterested, she impatient. It might be a familiar hotel, but the man is different – or is he? It scarcely matters. “Framed in keys, who is he to me, this arbiter of rooms?”

The key – not a swipe card but an actual key – doesn’t work on first try in the “scratched, dull lock”. It must be coaxed.

This is the opening of Eimear McBride’s third novel Strange Hotel. It’s also indicative of much of the rest of it.

A woman moves from hotel room to hotel room across the world, travelling alone.

In each place, we learn she has been there before. She does what might be described as “hotel things”. She drinks.

She thinks. She stands on balconies and looks out of windows. She watches pornography and masturbates. She conducts one-night stands with strange men, or thinks about doing so.

Of course, none of these “hotel things” couldn’t also be done at home, but hotels have particular advantages: quiet, privacy, anonymity, a bar down the hall and a well-stocked fridge in the room, an unfamiliar view to look at. The result is that these mundane and even seedy activities are given emphasis in a hotel setting, perhaps because the self is isolated from its usual surroundings and contact, and free to self-examine, self-reflect, self-obsess – all those selfish things.

“Tonight I am in a strange hotel and, therefore, an ulterior me,” the narrator observes, later on. Ulterior – on the further side, beyond, remote. Or strange?

It’s the last in that list of hotel things – the one-night stands – that the hotel makes dramatically easier compared to home. Besides anonymity and privacy, there’s a ready supply of strangers, all of whom are experiencing the same freeing anonymity and privacy, and there are congenial shared surroundings in which to get to know them. Afterwards, there’s the hygienic purge of check-out and disappearance.

This makes for a libidinal, even permissive, atmosphere, with altered social boundaries. Very few individuals

– a tiny percentage – really do hop into each other’s rooms, but the knowledge that that kind of diversion might be available if desired influences the mood of the whole. In his collected food criticism, The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Prawn Cracker, the author Will Self reflects on the “curiously interior public space” of the hotel breakfast room, where the hush of the patrons conveys a sense “that we have trespassed on each other’s dreams”. “It’s intimate,” writes Self, “this breakfasting so close to where we’ve all slept, and so we avoid one another’s eyes, for fear of rupturing more barriers normally only breached by coitus.”

Even as we evade each other’s eyes, the intimacy of the hotel invites us to speculate about the people sat across from us in the bar or restaurant: their

The anonymity of the space gives us licence to reflect on our own stories; perhaps to edit and embroider them, or else to pretend something entirely new. We can amuse ourselves by acting the spy or the incognito millionaire. origins; why they are here; where they will go next. And as we do so, the anonymity of the space gives us licence to reflect on our own stories; perhaps to edit and embroider them, or else to pretend something entirely new. We can briefly amuse ourselves by acting the spy or the incognito millionaire. And because we know that we are free to play in this way, we naturally project a degree of imposture onto others. Who is to say that they are not faking as well? No one. The hotel is the natural home of the trickster and the con artist.

This makes a hotel the perfect environment for the kind of interior depiction of a life that McBride provides in Strange Hotel, one that conceals far, far more than it gives away. Her inner monologue plays a game of cat and mouse with the truth that forms the main narrative impulse of the novel. The other characters, such as they are – the passing men, the past man – are never more than ciphers. That’s the nature of the hotel.

There’s no past or future in a hotel room.

“Never to be less or more, better or worse,”

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writes McBride. “Just this crystallised extending version of self. Liberated from the scourge of accountability as well as hope of reprieve. But no… not exempt reality. Still moving forward. Still on the inside of time.”

Strange Hotel is more or less plotless, but that is of limited importance.

“In a sense, [a hotel setting] relieves the scriptwriter of the obligation of inventing a plot,” Rem Koolhaas observes in his 1978 “retroactive manifesto”, Delirious New York. “A Hotel is a plot – a cybernetic universe with its own laws generating random but fortuitous collisions between human beings who would never have met elsewhere. It offers a fertile cross section through the population, a richly textured interface between social castes, a field for the comedy of clashing manners and a neutral background of routine operations to give every incident dramatic relief.”

A hotel, especially a large hotel, thus operates as a vast generator of coincidences, as well as providing an unobtrusive canvas for reflection. That’s very useful for the writer, as chance meetings and coincidences are the very stuff of plot, its whizzing, popping core. But even if you don’t need a plot – and McBride doesn’t – the hotel provides a stable background in which something else can unfold, freed from the expectations of routine and the accumulative experience of the everyday.

In the hotel, everything is continually wiped back to zero. The other part of Koolhaas’s formula is just as important: the hotel is a universe with its own laws, with “a neutral background of routine operations”. Even though the most rigid internal hierarchies are solidly built into its fabric, from the cupboard-like single to the penthouse suite, it is a perversely levelling environment: in a hotel, nobody is at home.

“Opportunities for increased billing and superfluities aside, she will not, cannot deny that, once distilled all hotel rooms are essentially alike, if not exactly the same,” McBride writes.

“A place built for people living in a time out of time – out of their own time anyway.” In a hotel, we’re alone.

Even if we’re staying in them with people we know and possibly even love, they are associated with aloneness if not loneliness. They’re a favourite destination for couples, but it’s the

Image courtesy of Faber & Faber.

alone-ness that is part of the appeal – being alone together.

That sense of collective alone-ness is not unique to couples – it extends to the rest of the clientele. Although every hotel presents itself as a Fort Knox of discretion and privacy, it also contains a subtler and more transgressive world of performance, surveillance and voyeurism. A hotel room is a standard blank template awaiting the imprint of a personality and a hotel is an environment to be read. In 1981, the artist Sophie Calle did just that in The Hotel, an uncomfortable masterpiece of surveillance-as-art. While working as a room attendant, Calle took meticulous notes about the absent occupants of the rooms she cleaned, analysing every detail of their possessions and the traces of their activities in order to construct a biographical portrait of them, even reading their diaries. The intrusion involved is shocking but at the same time routine – she is finding what has been left out to find and the delving goes only a little further than the private speculations that anyone might make in the same situation. Her greatest transgression is to explode the nonsensical but necessary social fiction of the room attendant as invisible, silent, sightless and without inner life.

Calle could easily have acted the secret policeman, compiling dossiers for judgement and prosecution, but her room-portraits are more poignant and intimate than that. “I shall miss him,” she writes after one of her studies checks out. Nevertheless, there’s another word for this voyeurism, and many of the other qualities of the hotel and its rooms: creepy. Or, to be a little less judgemental, eerie. Or strange?

No wonder there’s such a long tradition of ghost and horror stories set in hotels, from Wilkie Collins’s The Haunted Hotel to Stephen King’s The Shining – and even my own novel, The Way Inn. This tradition is a study for another place, but it’s telling that regardless of whether the setting is traditional (ancient inns, creaking floorboards) or modern (the purpose-built Overlook), the hotel offers distinctive possibilities for eeriness not really found in the house but native to an environment of duplicated, unfamiliar, mostly closed rooms.

The duplication found in hotels is a powerful source of unease. Their whole

model depends on cloning, replicating the same or similar rooms over and over again. “The clone remains a touchstone of the uncanny,” Joshua Comaroff and Ong Ker-Shing write in Horror in Architecture.

“Ghastly multiplication” was one of Freud’s sources of the unheimlich, Comaroff and Ong note, and he “shivered at the notion of endlessly re-encountering the same individuals and places, of stumbling, after Warhol and Nietzsche, through an ‘eternal recurrence of the same’”. Cloned environments hint at cloned occupants, suggesting “a mode of reproduction that is fundamentally in- or post-human, as does the undifferentiated character of its offspring”.

A hotel is obliged to propagate this cloning, toning down any excess of character that might be off-putting and doing all it can to remove any suggestion that anyone was in the room before you.

The duplication found in hotels is a powerful source of unease. Their whole model depends on cloning, replicating rooms over and over.

We might bemoan the place’s impersonality, but the last thing we want is any trace of the individual who was in that space before: the toenail in the bedsheets, the false eyelash on the mirror, or worse. Now that’s horror. So hotels must maintain, at least as a pretence, an atmosphere of sterility.

Strange Hotel has an echo of O. Henry’s story ‘The Furnished Room’, in which a young man pursues a lost love through the cheap, generic rented rooms she has been in before. He finds, in the squalid traces left in these undermaintained rooms, hints of what befell her. But in Strange Hotel, the narrator is pursuing herself and traces matter less – it is memories that count here.

You can’t step in the same river twice, Heraclitus said, and so it is with the hotel. Which of course makes it the ideal metaphor for the uninhabitable past. And you mustn’t spend too long looking at yourself – for yourself – in the hotel mirror, even if hotels often go in for mirrors in a big way. The bathroom has a well-lit acre of reflection, of course, sometimes in a triptych, so if you catch

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the angle right you see many versions of you at different angles. The lifts sometimes have mirrored interiors, making them boxes of twilit infinity.

And there are mirrors in the lift lobby that we can pose or preen in while we wait, distracted by vanity from the passing of time.

A hotel releases its guest from many of the obligations that bind them but only so long as they stay put. Linger for too long, however, and the self corrodes. Because of the fundamental sameness of hotels, skidding from one to another is little better. For McBride’s narrator, the rot appears to have set in – or could it be that such a peripatetic lifestyle appeals to those whose selfhood is somehow impaired in the first place?

To live in a hotel seems utopian at first glance, horrible on deeper consideration – the purgatory experienced by damaged characters from Howard Hughes to Alan Partridge.

Strange Hotel recalls Joanna Walsh’s Hotel, a contribution to The Atlantic and Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series of essays about “the hidden lives of ordinary things”. Hotel is a profoundly digressive study of the hotel as a typology, digging deep into Freud and other thinkers; but it is also really a kind of memoir in which Walsh recalls being a hotel reviewer, purposefully spending as much time as possible away from home as her marriage collapsed. “[Heidegger] meant we do not dwell in our environments,” Walsh writes. “Our thoughts dwell also elsewhere. Our environments always allude to something else.”

Introspective? Sure. Strange Hotel is a massively interior novel, a story enclosed – almost crushed – by rooms and the walls of the skull. You’re trapped in a small space on a hot day and the unpleasant thoughts are grinding away.

That’s not for everyone – I’m not even entirely sure it’s for me – but as a way of drilling into a self, it’s effective.

Introspective, it might be called, or even self-indulgent, but that’s to miss the point, spectacularly. That’s what the hotel is for.

Strange Hotel by Eimear McBride is published by Faber & Faber, price £12.99.

Words Maxime Weiss

Photograph by Roman Häbler and Matteo Visentin.

Expressive Proverbs by Attua Aparicio Torinos for MDR Gallery!In 2019, the designer Attua Aparicio Torinos travelled to Jingdezhen, China, to undertake a design residency focused on the city’s centuries-old porcelain tradition. “I started to look at plates,” she explains. Behind the city’s daily market stalls and factory complexes loitered mountains of rejected porcelain objects that were deemed too flawed for sale. “There were plates everywhere, which looked so beautiful in a way, but also wasteful.”

Porcelain production is a large component of Jingdezhen’s infrastructure and makes up more than half of the city’s waste. Given the associated costs of recycling, waste plates are often simply abandoned. It is a material chain that Aparicio Torinos soon connected to that of another material. “My partner works with borosilicate glass, which has a different composition to normal glass, meaning that it can’t be put into regular recycling [streams],” she explains. “Because it’s used in very small amounts compared to normal glass, there is no real recycling system.

I started thinking about how I could use this glass to make something.”

Aparicio Torinos saw a potential companionship between her two discarded materials. Porcelain in Jingdezhen is fired at up to 1,310°C, making it an ideal carrier for a material like borosilicate, which can likewise withstand extremely fierce heat. While common glass would melt into a slick pool at such temperatures, chunks of

borosilicate retain some form. When fired, the glass melts like chocolate chips, producing rock-like, speckled glaze formations that bloom with igneous textures. “Even a lifetime isn’t enough time to master the potential of ceramics,” says Aparicio Torinos. “You always feel that there are still things to try.”

Armed with the new technique, the designer set about producing Expressive Proverbs, a series of 100 plates, handpainted with traditional Chinese proverbs that have been overlaid and glazed with emoji forms. “There can always be a language barrier when you travel, but it felt more extreme in China because the alphabet was totally alien to me,” she says.

“There were so many cultural layers that I wanted to understand, but I felt like I understood nothing. Emojis were all I could use to communicate.”

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A History of Rattan

Made for Expormim

Left: two Gata dining chairs, designed by Miguel Milá and Gonzalo Milà for Expormim in 2017.

Above and below: the rattan production department, revived in 2012, at Expormim’s factory outside Valencia.

Made for Expormim

The financial crisis of 2008 marked a tipping point in the design industry. As economies around the world spiralled, industry was forced to reassess its attitude towards an approach to furniture design that had become increasingly ostentatious and wasteful. In a period of austerity, the conditions were set for consumers, and therefore designers, to become concerned once again with longevity, provenance and craftsmanship.

At this time, the family-owned furniture brand Expormim was in the midst of its own reinvention.

Newly helmed by the third generation of the Laso family, the Valencia-based company was experimenting once again with the production of rattan furniture – a typology that had played an integral role in the firm’s history, but had fallen out of favour in the 1990s when the market shunned natural materials in favour of high-tech, manmade finishes. “People said we were crazy,” recalls Mercedes Laso, who has led Expormim with her sister Monica since taking over from their father, Miguel Laso Llopis, in 2008. “‘Rattan furniture made in Spain?’ they asked, but I told them, ‘This is different.’”

At the 2012 Salone del Mobile in Milan, Expormim revealed the first fruits of what it had been working on. This new wave of rattan designs included Fontal (a chair with a curving minimal frame designed by Oscar Tusquets Blanca) and Nautica (a hanging seat conceived by MUT design that references some of the first pieces produced by Expormim in the 1970s).

Gone were the crude lengths of cane that were previously used to fix rattan elements together, and in their place came seamless, sculpted connections made with just screws and glues. Clean-lined and elegant, these pieces appear as if they are made from hard wood, but weigh much less and can be steambent into shape without the use of heavy machinery.

“Before then, rattan had been impossible to sell,” explains Alberto Ales, who heads up Expormim’s design department, which was set up in 2005. “At that time, the material was perceived as old-fashioned – something that was cheap and imported. It didn’t have good values. We knew we needed a new direction and to add value through design, so we started to work with it in a different way.”

It was fitting that Expormim should have led this reinvention of rattan – throughout the second half of the 20th century, the company had been at the forefront of designing with the material. Expormim

was founded in 1960, in the small, rural town of Moixent, by local man Miguel Laso Tortosa, the grandfather of the current generation of the Laso family. It went by the name of La Exportadora del Mimbre (“The Exporter of Wicker”), but quickly supplemented its design of small wicker products with furniture, which required a stronger and more robust material – rattan. Sourced from a local supplier, the rattan was initially imported from Indonesia where there were large and high-quality plantations. The company rode the wave of Spain’s golden age of tourism, producing furniture for German, French and Swedish tourists who were buying up second homes along the Mediterranean coast and wanted furniture to fill their terraces and porches.

Business was booming and the brand shortened its name to Expormim to appeal to an increasingly international customer base. In the 1990s, however, the market became flooded with hundreds of indistinguishable copycat designs made cheaply and in huge quantities. Demand for rattan gradually dropped off and, by the early 2000s, Expormim had shifted its focus almost entirely to the production of furniture made from materials such as oak, aluminium, stainless steel and rope. “When you started to see rattan products available to buy at low prices in the supermarket, it became clear that the market had moved on,” explains the brand’s design consultant Javier Pastor. “Sometimes you have to let go of something. It was really difficult, especially for the people working with the material in the factory, but it is the only way. You have to cater to the market.”

This is why the decision to return to rattan in 2012 was such a bold move, albeit one based on an understanding that, post-crisis, the market was shifting once again – back towards natural materials and craftsmanship. “At the time it was a risk but we made a revolution,” says Laso. “We opened our doors to new designers and they brought a new perspective to this traditional material.” Since 2012, the brand’s rattan furniture collections have grown dramatically in number, with celebrated designers such as Jaime Hayon, Mario Ruiz and Miguel Milá joining the Expormim fold. Today, rattan furniture accounts for 25 per cent of the brand’s sales (up from 3 per cent in 2008) but the team is at pains to point out that this is not a purely commercial venture. “Producing rattan again has helped us rediscover the roots of our brand and this area of the country,” says Pastor. “It’s helped

Made for Expormim

‘Producing rattan again has helped us rediscover the roots of our brand and this area of the country. It’s helped us more culturally than it has financially.’

—Javier Pastor

us more culturally than it has financially. We wanted to create something solid, something real.”

“As far as we know, we are the only company still producing rattan furniture in Europe,” he adds, noting that most rattan furniture is still manufactured in Asia.

“All of our product is produced in Spain – we want to create real history in our own context.”

Expormim’s rattan is sourced from Indonesia, where it is grown in renewable forest plantations and obtained by Expormim through a local supplier.

Some of the more experienced craftsmen who work with this rattan in the factory, which is still based in Moixent, have spent their entire career with the company and remember using the material in the 70s and 80s. These days they are passing on their skills to the younger generation.

“The challenge today,” says Ales, “is finding the right balance between efficiency and handcraft.”

For instance, the Huma chair’s comb back was previously made in a metal jig and holes were drilled into the frame by hand – a process that would take 45 minutes. Now a 5-Axis machine, which drills all of the holes at precise angles, does the same job in just three minutes. “Of course, we have to be competitive commercially,” he explains, “but we try to use the technology in the right sense. For contract projects, where 200 Huma chairs are needed within a tight timeframe for instance, the speed is essential.”

Going forward, the company is striving for slow and sustainable growth. The team wants to continue to work with carefully selected designers who have a deep understanding of the material and the philosophy of the company, and not those who seek them out because rattan is having its moment on the merry-goround of design trends. “With rattan we try to do ‘slow cooking’,” says Ales. “We try not to rush products just for the sake of having something to present at Salone.

We want these products to last, to become future design classics.”

Words Ali Morris Photographs Paula Prats

Made for Expormim

The Impossible Designer Words Glenn Adamson

Neri Oxman’s new show at MoMA presents a possible future led by biological design, but what value does this form of experimentalism possess?

Totems (2018) by Neri Oxman and The Mediated Matter Group is a proposal for a biologically augmented facade – an environmentally responsive, melanin-infused structure that would provide UV protection during the day, while enabling stargazing at night.

Review

I recently had my first Impossible Burger.

You have probably heard of this miracle product, which is eerily meat-like in its colour, texture and taste – it even “bleeds” when cut. Its inventor, Pat Brown, intends the Impossible Burger to be a direct assault on the beef industry, which is causing untold ecological havoc, to say nothing of the suffering of millions of cows.

He hopes to displace cattle entirely as a source of protein and save the planet.

It’s a scenario right out of science fiction: food grown in a lab through a complicated process most of us can’t understand, which might change, literally, everything.

“Impossibility”, in this novel sense of the term, signifies an eruption of the future into the present, the onset of a paradigm shift. And it flows like an electric current through the works of Neri Oxman, as featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s current, monographic exhibition Neri Oxman: Material Ecology, curated by Paola Antonelli. It may seem impolite to compare Oxman’s exquisite, often perplexing, designs to a veggie burger. But she would probably embrace the comparison – for Oxman aims at the fundamentals of human existence. She hasn’t got around to addressing eating yet (as far as I know), but clothing, shelter and death are all leitmotifs in her work, each one a problem to be solved anew.

Oxman, now 44, has become a celebrity over the past few years.

The main events of her biography are well-known: her upbringing in Israel as the daughter of two architects; her decision to drop out of medical school and instead study architecture herself, first in Haifa and then in London; her doctoral work at MIT and the founding of her own research group, Mediated Matter, at the MIT Media Lab, in 2010. Nor, perhaps, is it necessary to describe her work in detail, given that it has been so widely disseminated in so many forms: a 2015 TED Talk (viewed 2.4m times and counting), an episode in the Netflix documentary Abstract: The Art of Design and now the MoMA exhibition. I might also put in a word, here, for her recent appearance on the Time Sensitive podcast, hosted by Spencer Bailey, in which she thoughtfully discusses her work in light of the experience of becoming a mother.

If you’ve somehow missed all of this media exposure, suffice to say that, with a few exceptions, Oxman is known mostly

for her experiments with living organisms and organic compounds through an approach that she calls “material ecology”.

She has produced biodegradable construction materials made of chitin, the compound that hardens the exoskeletons of crustaceans and insects, and melanin, the chemical that darkens skin, which might allow a building facade to respond to sunlight. Alongside such neo-alchemical marvels, Oxman has collaborated with fashion designer Iris Van Herpen and the pop star Björk, and, in her project Maiden Flight, sent a queen bee and her retinue into space as a payload on one of Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin sub-orbital rockets.

The idea was to test the insects’ responses to extreme temperatures and G-forces: if we ever settle Mars, we’ll need bees to pollinate our plants for us, so why not start planning now?

Then there are Oxman’s long-running series of death masks, inspired partly by the golden casket of Tutankhamun and partly by plaster casts of the faces of historic notables, such as Beethoven.

One of her early masks, Lazarus, is named for the Biblical figure who was raised from the dead. Its surface area is based on a facial scan of an individual near death, with interior contours that map the currents of that person’s breathing – Oxman describes the artwork as an “air urn”, which preserves the act of expiration.

She followed up this haunting object with a series of related works, entitled Vespers, which serve as habitats for live microorganisms. These “life masks” are both material tests and artworks that evoke the spirit or soul.

Journalists love to write about Oxman’s work, but they typically do so in a tone of stunned reverence, leaving her with the job of explaining what it all actually means. One of her central premises is that the digital era is coming to an end, to be replaced by a new biological epoch – goodbye ones and zeros, hello the four-base-pair genome.

This near-future will echo the deep past, as we learn to emulate the very first biological “innovations” that occurred on earth, when life itself evolved from microbial muck. The shift is occurring partly because technology makes it possible, but also because it is necessitated by climate change: we simply must find a way to live in greater harmony with the environment.

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Soon enough, she says, “the only client will be nature”.

In line with these big ideas, Oxman believes that designers should learn to channel nature’s inherent excellence, particularly in the arenas of eusocial communication and material sophistication. Ideally, this would not be achieved through biomimicry – artificially imitating what animals and plants can already do – but instead through actual partnership, which extends the capabilities of humans and other organisms. She speaks of “co-fabricating” with bacteria and silkworms, and of “evolution by design”, a process by which living things are gradually re-trained to optimise their performance. In her TED Talk, Oxman describes this as a whole new territory, which lies “between the chisel and the gene, between machine and organism, between assembly and growth, between Henry Ford and Charles Darwin”.

Alongside all these statements about her work, Oxman has mastered visual rhetoric. Put simply, the objects she creates are unnecessarily beautiful. Their refined aesthetics have nothing to do with their putative status as research tools; charismatic emissaries for science and engineering, they nonetheless exist in an undefined relationship with those disciplines, and indeed with the whole concept of utility. Oxman definitely wants to change the world, but she doesn’t really try to do it right now. Her MoMA show includes not a single conventionally functional object. There are prototypes aplenty, demonstration pieces and material tests developed to initial concept stage but no further. There are also bespoke “wearables” that would in fact be very difficult to wear, and artworks which elude objective evaluation entirely.

Notably, she chooses typologies that are historic and even escapist in character – armour, masks, pavilions – allowing her to concentrate on process and aesthetics.

Oxman’s investment in suggestive appearance rather than actual application does mark a return – not all the way back to the Precambrian era but rather to the 1930s, when industrial designers first established themselves as figures to be reckoned with. I was recently talking to the design critic Sarah Archer, who joked that Oxman is “the Norman Bel Geddes of decarbonisation”. This seems absolutely right to me. Oxman deploys organic form

A collection of material experiments from Oxman’s Aguahoja I (2018), a body of research looking at prints produced using geometric toolpaths, generative design, bio-composite

Images courtesy of MoMA.

distributions and variable fabrication parameters.

much in the way that Bel Geddes and other designers of his generation used streamlining – as a stylistic shorthand for the world of tomorrow.

Also like Bel Geddes, Oxman’s most ingenious creation is arguably her own persona. I don’t mean this as a criticism: indeed, it is worth celebrating the fact that the US’s most prominent designer is a highly intelligent and ethical woman, rather than a glib showman. But we should recognise just how conjectural her work really is. Rem Koolhaas investigates the future of buildings, Rei Kawakubo the future of garments. But for Oxman, architecture and fashion are mainly pretexts – vehicles of macroscopic implication. She often emphasises the importance of ranging across different scales, sometimes purposefully conflating them (for instance, she likes to describe the human body as a small building, and her masks as metaphorical facades). This

telescopic methodology, a contemporary echo of Charles and Ray Eames’ famous film Powers of Ten, means that Oxman can be a visionary without having to engage at length with any one particular scale and its frictional demands. Her practice is a futuristic all-purpose vehicle whose rubber never hits the road.

This forward-looking approach fits perfectly with the funding structure that keeps the MIT Media Lab going. Oxman’s professorship is funded by and named for the Sony Corporation, which is not atypical for her institution: it is a concentrated node for venture capitalism and a place where companies – “lab members” such as Hyundai, Samsung and Panasonic – can outsource their R&D without worrying about immediate results or internal accountability. She had a rare moment of adverse publicity when it emerged that her research group had taken $125,000 from the disgraced

Review

financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, part of a scandal that brought down the Media Lab’s director, Joi Ito, in 2019. It would be unfair to assign Oxman much blame in this, but it would likewise be naïve to ignore the role that money plays in her arena. Where there’s money, there’s power and, inevitably, complication.

Thus, there is even more to Oxman’s work than meets the eye. She exemplifies a mode of cutting-edge design practice in which large-scale implementation is suspended so that innovation can have room to breathe. It’s no coincidence that she was first introduced to the general public in another MoMA exhibition, also curated by Antonelli: Design and the Elastic Mind (2008). (The project she showed there, Cartesian Wax, was an architectural tile system in which each unit was customised through gradual variations in temperature.) This prescient show was pitched as an exploration of

Mask 5, from Series 1 of Oxman’s 3D-printed Vespers masks (2018).

a new, omni-flexible approach to design, freed from established genres and hybridised with both science and art. Oxman has continued to be a standard-bearer for this direction of thought, alongside a few other figures who were in that show, among them Joris Laarman and Aranda\Lasch. What they all have in common is an ability to translate extreme complexity into seductive form – meanwhile sidestepping the messy world of supply and demand that typically discourages such adventurousness. “Designers stand between revolutions and everyday life,” Antonelli wrote in the exhibition

catalogue. They “give life and voice to objects, and along the way they manifest our visions and aspirations for the future, even those we do not yet know we have”.

This remains a satisfying way to look at Oxman and her oeuvre. The intensity of her optimism is striking, sometimes even startling. From her perspective, even the existential threat of climate change can look like an opportunity. On the Time Sensitive podcast, she told Bailey: “One cannot think about birth without death, one cannot think about growth without decay, one cannot think about peril without opportunity. Every project, when it starts with this dark side of life or death

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or humanity, ends up with possibility.

I don’t see them as separate fates.”

This unshakable equanimity is another leitmotif of contemporary design.

Witness the influential trend forecaster Li Edelkoort, who was able to see even the coronavirus epidemic as a blessing in disguise: “a quarantine of consumption,” which has already resulted in a significant fall in carbon emissions. Perhaps, she mused at the Design Indaba conference in February, this could be an opportunity to reset our priorities as a global society, leading in the long run to “another and better system to be put in place with more respect for human labour and conditions”.

Few would dare to think this way, what with people dying of a terrifying new disease all over the world. And you can easily see the counterargument: it’s easy to make such proclamations from a position of relative safety.

(Design Indaba might be among the last conferences Edelkoort, or any of us, attends for a while.) Perhaps designerly “elasticity” is just a thinly disguised form of irresponsibility?

There’s something to that. But I, for one, appreciate the unvarnished frankness of Edelkoort’s thought experiment; and I also remain firmly in Oxman’s cheering section. When faced with late capitalism and its various discontents, it is easy enough to declare defeat. But Antonelli was right to argue, back in 2008, that it is the designer’s job to try to point the way forward, no matter how difficult the terrain. Yes, Oxman and her kindred experimentalists are flying high, evading the obstacles that designers operating at ground level must face. But would we really want a field where no one was trying to look that far ahead?

So maybe someday we really will live on Mars, in buildings grown rather than made, wearing gorgeously baroque garments that express our relationship to deep time. Even failing all that, perhaps we will at least find a way to follow Oxman’s lead, and get to watch nature and culture dissolve into a single, inseparable, sustainable whole.

Improbable? Maybe. But impossible?

Only time will tell.

Neri Oxman: Material Ecology opened at MoMA in New York on 22 February 2020 and ran until MOMA’s temporary closure.

Rope Chair by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec for Artek!

There are many strands to the appeal of rope, if you’ll excuse the pun.

First there’s its strength. Think nautical ropes in the rigging of sailing ships; the yellowed climbing apparatus of an old school gym; or industrial coils winching cargo – all reassuring in the tension they can bear. There’s also its tactile appeal: rough flax ropes that are warm to the touch, or the silkiness of nylon twists. Taken to its extreme, the appeal of rope’s tactility is celebrated in kinbaku, an elaborate and highly codified form of Japanese bondage, in which binds and trusses restrain and accentuate the body.

While Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec’s Rope chair for Artek isn’t a fetish object (well, unless you really like chairs), the connection between rope and the human body is central to its design. “If you move, the rope moves with you, so if you slide further down the chair because you’re tired, the rope moves

with your back. It’s surprisingly comfortable!” says Ronan Bouroullec delightedly, as if this is entirely down to luck.

The chair is simple, however.

A tubular steel frame conceals a single piece of rope, which runs up the front leg and emerges to form an arm. From there, it passes up through the back, before appearing at the top to create a horizontal backrest. The process then runs in reverse, with the rope held in place by a small plastic screw inside each of the two front feet. “That’s the rock,” says Bouroullec. “There’s no glue, so that’s the only connection.”

Despite this economy of construction, the chair’s conception was somewhat serendipitous. “We didn’t start with the idea that we would design a chair using rope, so I don’t know where we got the exact details from,” explains Bouroullec. “When we went back through my sketchbook, trying to find the way we reached the idea, we just found two drawings that were almost exactly what we now have in front of us. The finished chair, in fact, is almost like a drawing.”

Photograph by Roman Häbler and Matteo Visentin.

Words Evi Hall

Observation

Place of Speech The Casa do Povo Words George Kafka Photographs André Penteado

In contrast to the early-20th century skyscrapers of downtown São Paulo, or the gated high-rise apartment buildings of the city’s newer suburbs, Bom Retiro is a squat neighbourhood. Its shortness should not, however, be mistaken for insignificance. The lowlying district falls in the geographical centre of the megalopolis, just north of Luz station, and owes its morphology to an industrial history that was vital to the development of São Paulo. Old warehouses speak to the role that coffee played in the city’s late-19th century economic boom, while the garment industry that dominated in the 20th century continues to thrive: whole blocks are devoted to stores selling beads, fringing and fabric.

Amidst these markers of industry are symbols of the industrious – those immigrants who alighted at Luz station from the 1880s onwards to profit from the growing coffee market and have populated Bom Retiro ever since. Today, the neighbourhood is home to tens of thousands of Koreans, as well as new waves of Bolivians and Paraguayans, and has housed significant populations of Greeks, Lebanese, Syrians, Italians and eastern European Jews. It is this latter group whose influence, at least on the area’s architecture and design, remains most visible. Along ruas Talmud

‘They decided to create a living monument – an empty space where to remember is to act.’

Thorá and Lubavitch, and their adjacent streets, are synagogues, kosher restaurants and the Casa do Povo.

Walking past the Casa do Povo (House of the People), you might be forgiven for not giving it a second glance; a wide staircase behind a generously glazed entranceway, peppered with posters, suggests a relatively mundane school building. Viewed from the Korean supermarket across the street, however, the building takes on a more monumental quality, thanks to a concrete arch that rises through two and a half storeys of the elevation and interrupts the otherwise rectilinear character of the thoroughly modernist facade. First opened in 1953, the Casa do Povo was designed to consolidate the cultural life

of the politically progressive Jewish community that had grown in Bom Retiro through waves of immigration from Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Germany and elsewhere during the 1910s-40s.

During these decades, the Yidisher Kultur Farband (Jewish Culture Association), an organised anti-fascist cultural movement, began to spread through Jewish communities around the world. Growing out of the Paris Antifascist Congress of 1935, the network encouraged the founding of cultural organisations – theatres, libraries, newspapers, schools – to support Jewish communities in the fight against global fascism. Bom Retiro was no exception and the neighbourhood became home to initiatives including the Scholem Aleichem Israelite school, amateur Yiddish theatre groups, and the Nossa Voz (Our Voice) newspaper.

The end of the Second World War marked a turning point for this dispersed network of groups in Bom Retiro, albeit in a rather unexpected way. Benjamin Seroussi, the current director of Casa do Povo, explains that the defeat of Nazism came to be seen as a moment of celebration, not simply a time to mourn the destruction wrought by the Holocaust.

“The narrative was, ‘We won the war, how to celebrate?’” he says. “There was a need to bring together all these associations in one building and to build a monument to those who died in the Shoah[…]

Instead of just building a cultural centre or making a memorial, they decided to create a living monument – an empty space where to remember is to act.”

This empty space would come to be the fourstorey structure that today stands relatively unchanged, nearly 70 years since it opened. Designed by Ernest Robert de Carvalho Mange – a one-time intern of Le Corbusier and native Paulista, whose wife Sarah Friedman was a prominent member of the Casa do Povo community and the Brazilian Communist Party – the building is a concrete-framed hulk that is peppered with the high-modernist ideas of his mentor: a free facade, a roof garden, raised ground floor and free-plan floor plates.

Today the building has the familiar ambience of an old school hall. Its open spaces bear marks from decades of varied community uses, with scratched floorboards, peeling paintwork and the paraphernalia of numerous activities paused mid-sentence: loose chairs, books, mannequins. The Casa housed a school for its first three decades, practising Montessori-style

History

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This spread, clockwise from top left: An artwork by Carlos Fajardo (photo: Edouard Fraipont); Benjamin Seroussi, director of the Casa do Povo; printed matter from the centre’s workshop; the ground-floor hall; the Casa do Povo under construction in the 1940s; and the printing workshop.

History

experimental pedagogy for under-15s, alongside other early users, such as a Yiddish choir and a Brechtian theatre group who performed in the full-scale theatre in the building’s basement (the only out-of-action part of the site today). Photographs from the time show packed dinners, social gatherings and exercise classes on the roof. Meanwhile, remaining true to the leftist politics at its core, the Casa also hosted avant-garde performances, debated Zionism and became a stronghold of resistance during the Brazilian dictatorship; some teachers at the school were arrested and tortured, and Nossa Voz was forced to close in 1964.

Rather than signal an optimistic new dawn, the end of the military dictatorship in 1985 coincided with a period of regression at Casa do Povo. The school stopped using the building in 1981; its student numbers had dropped as a result of dictatorial oppression, the deterioration of the nearby downtown area, and the subsequent move of large portions of the Jewish community to other neighbourhoods, such as the more affluent Higienópolis. “The worse Brazil is, the better Casa do Povo is,” chuckles Seroussi. “It’s more a joke than anything else, but it is true that we are more relevant in adverse contexts.” The Casa struggled through the 1990s and early 00s, although it never closed and continued to host disparate events and groups. The Yiddish choir kept rehearsing, a poorly attended film club rented DVDs to watch together and a Korean church group used the first floor. But the departure of the school and the end of the dictatorship had brought about a surprising symbolic loss. “When the dictatorship ended, the place somehow lost its enemy,” says Seroussi.

Today, of course, there is a new enemy. The Casa do Povo in the era of Jair Bolsonaro is a reinvigorated place. Its latent radical and critical energy seems to have burst forth following its years in hibernation – as though its rich history of resistance to fascism was preserved in its concrete frame (and, of course, in its Yiddish choir). Today, the Casa’s busy calendar – which features psychoanalysis, yoga, theatre, a print studio, artist installations and much more – is largely down to the directorial approach of Seroussi, whose previous experience in cultural programming for the São Paulo Art Biennial and Centro da Cultura Judaica contrasts with the relative amateurism of those who preceded him when he joined in 2013.

“The organisation was a totally derelict situation,”

he explains, “There was a group of old people with very good intentions, who were quite courageous but not really knowing what to do with the institution.

They knew it was important to maintain, because it was built as a monument to those who died in the Shoah, against fascism.” A major part of his subsequent

‘It’s like finding a hammer on the table, but its users have disappeared. I have to work out how this tool can be relevant.’ work has been to re-situate the institution’s Jewish and anti-fascist tradition within the changing neighbourhood, city and broader cultural context.

“It’s like finding a hammer on the table, but its users have disappeared and there are no nails,” he explains.

“I’m using this hammer and I have to deduce the user and the nail to work out how this tool can be relevant today.”

The question of institutional relevance – particularly from a Jewish perspective – is a fascinating one in the context of Bolsonaro’s Brazil. According to a 2019 report on antisemitism in the country by the Brazilian Center of Studies in Law and Religion for the UN, incidences of “hate speech” or “hostility” against Jews exist in “specific and isolated cases, mostly on Internet and online social networks”. The report goes on to state that “the Jewish community has good relations and dialogue with the Brazilian government[…] and it is generally safe in the country”. This amenable relationship represents a significant contrast to Bolsonaro’s relationships with other minority groups, which have been defined by attacks on indigenous, afro-Brazilian and immigrant rights.

Indeed, Seroussi suggests there exists a “philosemitism, or a philo-Judaism” in the midst of Bolsonaro’s otherwise evangelically Christian-infused political ideology. This ties into the broader “Unusual Relationship” between evangelical Christians and Jews that was described by the academic Yaakov Ariel in his 2013 book of the same name. Ariel writes

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Previous page: The theatre in the basement of the Casa do Povo.

This spread, clockwise from top left: Resident trans performance group Mexa holds a rehearsal; the library, designed by Grupo Inteiro (photo: Haroldo Saboia); the rooftop garden, under construction (photo: Camila Svenson); an exercise class for the Scholem Aleichem school, active at the Casa do Povo from 1953-81; and Andar de cima, an artwork by Renata Lucas (photo: Edouard Fraipont).

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History

of an “unprecedented devotion toward the Jews as God’s chosen people and as heirs and continuers of historical Israel” by evangelical Christians, who remain “confident that the Jews will eventually come to recognize Jesus as their Lord and savior”. What’s more, Bolsonaro’s “philo-semitism” chimes with his invocation of an apparent Brazilian “Judeo-Christian tradition”, as he put it in his presidential inauguration speech. However, as the historian Udi Greenberg wrote in The New Republic last year, this notion of the “Judeo-Christian” tradition has been used for exclusionary and reactionary political purposes in the United States, typically as a code for whiteness, and “as a cover for a very specific Christian (and mostly evangelical) agenda, especially on education and abortion”. He continues: “Some thinkers on the radical right even rely on it while spreading antiSemitic conspiracy theories.”

In the current Brazilian context, this rings true.

Not only does an imagined “Judeo-Christian” Brazil reinforce Bolsonaro’s anti-indigenous and racist politics, it also provides cover for antisemitic actions, some more explicit than others. During a trip to visit Israel and his right-wing ally Benjamin Netanyahu in 2019, Bolsonaro publicly supported an antisemitic theory espoused by his minister of foreign affairs,

‘We are a Jewish institution in that we understand our Jewish legacy as being open to radical alterity, otherness.’

Ernesto Araújo, that Nazism “had fundamental traits that recommend classifying it on the left of the political spectrum”. More recently, and even more outrageously, Bolsonaro’s then-culture minister Roberto Alvim directly invoked the language of Nazism while announcing a new national art award in a video published on Twitter. Facing the camera from behind his desk, flanked by a Brazilian flag and a patriarchal cross (while overlooked by a portrait of Bolsonaro), Alvim outlined his vision for a national culture to “save” the youth of Brazil. Via what he later described as a “rhetorical coincidence”, Alvim went on to quote Joseph Goebbels: “The Brazilian art of the

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next decade will be heroic and will be national, will be endowed with great capacity for emotional involvement[…] deeply linked to the urgent aspirations of our people, or else it will be nothing,” he proclaimed.

By comparison, in 1933 Goebbels is reported to have announced to a group of theatre managers and directors that “The German art of the next decade will be heroic[…] it will be national with great pathos and binding, or it will be nothing.” In an additional twist, at once farcical and chilling, the video was set to music from Richard Wagner’s opera Lohengrin.

Alvim was quickly sacked by Bolsonaro, who used the opportunity to re-affirm his “full and unrestricted support for the Jewish community, of which we’re friends and share many common values”.

This affirmation is, unsurprisingly, of little solace for Seroussi, who recognises the threat of Bolsonaro and his policies on non-Jewish communities who are inherently tied to Casa do Povo’s responsibility as a Jewish institution. “We are a Jewish institution in the sense that we understand our Jewish legacy as being open to radical alterity, otherness,” he says.

“If the Jews were the Others during the 20th century, a Jewish space has to be in that spirit.”

This is evident in Casa do Povo’s institutional programming, which is as experimental and avantgarde as one might expect from a maverick organisation.

Rather than a series of regular events or exhibitions arranged by one curatorial team, activities are generated by around 20 groups that are hosted within the building.

Each of these receives a key and is allocated time to use the Casa, rather than occupying specific spaces within the building. Among the groups operating there today are Énois, a journalism school for young people living in the outskirts of São Paulo; a branch of Publication Studio, an international, decentralised, print-on-demand publishing house; Ateliê Vivo, a textile pattern library that promotes sustainable and equitable professional practices while paying tribute to Bom Retiro’s garment industry history; Boxe Autônomo, an antiracist, antifascist boxing club; and, of course, the Yiddish choir.

Part of the rationale behind this decentralising of curatorial decisions is to distribute power within the institution such that no group or individual speaks in place of others. In Brazil this is referred to as “lugar de fala”, which translates directly as “place of speech” but means “standpoint” or, more informally, “staying in your lane”. Seroussi uses the example of the trans

Previous page: The Casa do Povo is home to Boxe Autônomo, an antifascist, antiracist boxing club.

This spread, clockwise from right: A detail from the Casa do Povo’s walls, painted by Rodrigo Andrade; the main hall, with its characteristic arch; the inaugural 1953 meeting in the same space; and membership cards for a youth club held in former days (photo: Haroldo Saboia).

Overleaf: A meeting of the Reflection Circle on Contemporary Judaism (photo: Camila Svenson).

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History

performance group Mexa, one of the organisations in residence at the Casa do Povo, to illustrate the point.

“All museums want to talk about women, migrants, and so on, but usually it’s a white male heterosexual curator who will talk about them, and that’s unbearable,” he explains. “It’s important to talk about trans issues, so we should hire trans people, but also some of the people that use the space should be trans groups, so

‘All museums want to talk about women, migrants, and so on, but usually it’s a white male heterosexual

president. For example, Rejuvenate! was a 2018 group exhibition conceived by artist Renata Lucas to “take a stand” in the midst of the election campaign. When it opened, the show – which featured work by Mauro Restiffe, Carla Zaccagnini and many others – had no fixed closing date, reflecting what its manifesto described as “the passage of time towards an uncertain future”. More than 18 months on, Lucas’s work retains a presence at the Casa. Andar de cima is a flagpole that pierces through three levels of the building’s interior, disrupting the open floor plates and forcing activities to take place around it. A Brazilian flag at its peak looks “exhausted and crestfallen with its own weight”, as Fernanda Brenner wrote in Frieze. For Seroussi, the work serves as a reminder that in Brazil under Bolsonaro, “things aren’t normal”. He hopes, one day, to take it down. E N D

curator who will talk.’ they discuss themselves about what they do.” This is of particular importance in the context of the openly anti-LGBTQ+ Bolsonaro, presiding over what was already the most dangerous country in the world for trans people. In 2019, nearly 40 per cent of all murders of trans and gender-diverse people reported worldwide took place in Brazil.

Through this heterogeneous institutional identity, one might see the Casa do Povo as a true reflection of Brazil’s diversity. While the Bolsonaro administration seems keen to produce a restrictive vision of the ideal Brazilian subject – definitely masculine or feminine, ideally Christian, certainly not indigenous – the Casa do Povo provides a space to celebrate variety. This is evident on a neighbourhood level, in the re-launch of Nossa Voz, for example. Originally published in Portuguese and Hebrew, Nossa Voz was a source of Jewish news from both Brazil and the wider world. Today’s issues feature texts and interviews corresponding to works and events at the Casa do Povo, reflections on the institution’s history, as well as local news and listings. Despite no longer being published bilingually, the polyglot masthead reflects the diverse demographic of Bom Retiro today. It reads: Nossa Voz, 우리 목소리, ‫אונדזער שטימע‬, Nuestra Voz. Applying a wider lens, however, the Casa do Povo has also become a place to discuss, reframe and expand notions of Brazilian identity and to nurture a sustained critique of national life under a far-right

History

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Writer’s note: Justin Shubow, of National Civic Art Society infamy, asked me if I wanted to have coffee and hash it out in the marketplace of ideas. Due to social distancing I had no choice but to decline.

—Kate Wagner

COMMENT: NEO-NEO-CLASSICAL pp. 32-33

Photographers’ note: When we began thinking about this project, we were prepared for deserted places – regions populated, at most, by Alpine artisans. In fact, we found the resorts to be extremely lively and colourful, home to many mountain bikers, hikers and families. The idea of going to such a place for a summer holiday suddenly didn’t seem so strang.

—Olaf Unverzart and Sebastian Schels

PHOTOESSAY: OUT OF SEASON pp. 18-31

Writer’s note: Since I wrote about AusAir in February, interest in face masks has exploded as a result of Covid-19. While some brands have monetised this need, a counter-narrative has unfolded with many organisations donating face masks to hospitals. In the Netherlands, the Stedelijk Museum, Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh Museum have all donated their supplies, usually used for conservation. In the US, TV shows such as The Good Doctor, Grey’s Anatomy and Chicago Med have passed on their stores too. Meanwhile, Balenciaga, Prada, Gucci, Zara and H&M are all utilising their supply chains to manufacture face masks and distribute them to hospitals. —Lara Chapman

Architects Assist – architectsassist.com.au The Conran Shop – conranshop.co.uk Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum – cooperhewitt.org Dezeen – dezeen.com The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation – franklloydwright.org Google – abc.xyz Grafton Architects – graftonarchitects.ie Jean-Paul Gaultier – jeanpaulgaultier.com Kvadrat – kvadrat.dk Metropolitan Police – met.police.uk Prada – prada.com Pritzker Prize – pritzkerprize.com Salone del Mobile – salonemilano.it The School of Architecture at Taliesin – taliesin.edu United States Space Force – spaceforce.mil

PROFILE: FORMAFANTASMA’S FINDINGS pp. 45-58

Matthias Winkler – matthiaswinkler.org

Writer’s note: I’m typically a little squeamish about leather goods, but Matthias’s attitude towards sustainable production strikes me as eminently sensible and worthy of plaudits. Searching for new, exciting eco-materials is all well and good, but making use of dead stock and waste materials should be de rigueur.

—Oli Stratford

OBSERVATION: JAGA p. 44

AusAir – shopausair.com

OBSERVATION: AUSAIR p. 43

TIMELINE pp. 13-16

Writer’s note: Credit where credit is due: the pun in the title of the piece was conceived by Lara Chapman, a talented young design writer who did work experience with Disegno earlier in the year. —Kristina Rapacki

REPORT: THE PURSUIT OF ’APPINESS pp. 83-95

Writer’s note: This comment was written in the early days of March, as Europe was slowly shutting up shop, country by country. As we go to press, a quarter of the world’s population is under some form of quarantine, including my home city of London, which has experienced the opposite of the invasive, proactive tracing and quarantining techniques used in Wuhan. In fact, the confusion around London’s response, as well as the apparent lack of buy-in by many citizens, is currently making for a sobering comparison case. —Evi Hall

COMMENT: MEGA-QUARANTINE p. 82

Gakken – otonanokagaku.net Pentagram – pentagram.com Yuri Suzuki – yurisuzuki.com

Writer’s note: When Disegno met with Yuri Suzuki and his team, we got to try the vinyl cutter ourselves. We chose to cut the first bars of Anna Meredith’s ‘Nautilus’, a track that has pride of place on Disegno’s production playlist. Played back, it sounded, rather appropriately, as if it had been recorded many leagues under the sea.

—Kristina Rapacki

OBSERVATION: EASY VINYL MAKER p. 81

Sega – sega.com

environment, so it was a much healthier way to spend time than I imagined (although I am a smoker). It was just getting dark as I left and I was able to snap a plum tree shining in the sunset. —Motohiko Hasui

Index

Kate Strudwick – katestrudwick.com

Writer’s note: The splendidly-named Washing Away of Wrongs, written in 1247 by the Chinese physician and judge Song Ci, contains an example in which a murder was solved by asking villagers to lay down their sickles. The murderer confessed after his sickle became a magnet for blowflies, drawn to the invisible traces of the victim’s flesh. —Joe Lloyd.

ANATOMY: THE FORENSIC KIT pp. 35-42

Writer’s note: When I mentioned on Twitter that there are no funny stories about internet standards, a lot of folks tried to prove me wrong. Their examples all proved just as boring as actual standards. The most interesting, however, was the “Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol”, a facetious communication protocol for controlling, monitoring and diagnosing coffee pots.

—Natalie Kane

COMMENT: STANDARDS AND PROTOCOLS p. 34

Photographer’s note: I really enjoyed playing Tower of Babel for about two hours, buying 180 medals for ¥1000. The arcade is a smoke-free, no-alcohol

ESSAY: A PACHINKO GAME ON ANABOLIC STEROIDS pp. 65-80

Celine – celine.com

Writer’s note: As a student, I used to stroll through Selfridges at the height of London heatwaves, just to take advantage of its air-conditioning. I spent hours at a time browsing. —Johanna Agerman Ross

REVIEW: OF FASHION AND SPACE pp. 61-64

Owl & Dog Playbooks – owlanddog.com Pentagram – pentagram.com

Writer’s note: At one point in our interview, I asked Daniel how many chess sets he owned. He laughed.

“I don’t collect chess sets,” he explained, “I just come across them. I have the set that was given to me at 13 as a gift; the ones I designed, which I received for free; and then at least another two which have been given to me. I have a wonderful set, for instance, that I was given by my students at the Royal College of Art when I left as a professor. Each of the students made a piece, so there are 32 pieces designed by 32 students. It is a great, great set.” —Lara Chapman

OBSERVATION: CHESS ON EARTH p. 60

OBSERVATION: GRETA GROTESK p. 96

Cambio – cambio.website Formafantasma – formafantasma.com The Serpentine Galleries – serpentinegalleries.org

Writer’s note: As part of the MER project, NASA had to translate “rover” into the Algonquian languages for an outreach programme. So far, so simple, you might think, but Algonquian words are complicated by the fact that they make a fundamental distinction between things that have animacy and things which do not: cars and trains don’t have it, people and animals do. After consultation with tribal elders, it was decided that Spirit and Opportunity possessed animacy. I couldn’t agree more. —Oli Stratford

TECHNOLOGY: THE TOURISTS pp. 97-112

Tal Shub – tal.nyc

Writer’s note: I was amused to learn that typefaces are considered to have personalities, which dictate traits like friendliness and rudeness, flexibility and assertiveness. This concept is the bedrock of a 2019 study published in the journal Communication Studies, which concludes that typefaces are also perceived to have political bents. Serif fonts lean conservative, while sans serifs are considered liberal. —Maxime Weiss

Apple – apple.com Digital Wellbeing Experiments by Google – experiments.withgoogle.com/collection/digitalwellbeing Special Projects – specialprojects.studio

Photographer’s note: I live in Amsterdam-Noord, the neighbourhood in which Formafantasma’s studio is based. I never imagined that there was such a beautiful space hidden away in this mainly industrial area.

—Annelie Bruijn

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Attua Aparicio Torinos – silostudio.net MDR Gallery – moderndesignreview.com

Writer’s note: Coloured borosilicate glass is used predominantly in the production of laboratory equipment and novelty bongs. While both products benefit from the extreme heat tolerance that the material offers, bong producers also market its durability. Trafficking beaker-shaped and rainbow-coloured borosilicate bongs of all sizes, badassglass.com boasts that “when you buy a scientific bong, you are buying a bong for life.” —Maxime Weiss

OBSERVATION: EXPRESSIVE PROVERBS p. 116

Faber & Faber – faber.co.uk

Writer’s note: A couple of years ago I used to regularly walk past the construction site of a multi-storey hotel in Aldgate, about a mile from where I live in east London. As the concrete service core rose from the earth, with floor numbers stencilled onto it, it revealed a curiosity: there was no fourth floor. Shortly afterwards notices appeared on the site hoardings explaining the gap: “A few people have thought that we have lost the plot… Dorsett City Hotel is for a Hong Kong based client and the number 4 is considered an unlucky number in Chinese because it is nearly homophonous with the word ‘death’. Due to that, many numbered product lines skip the ‘4’ and many buildings do not have a 4th floor.”

People must have noticed the gap, necessitating the explanation. An effort to erase an unfortunate connotation had only served to signpost it. —Will Wiles

REVIEW: A HOTEL IS A PLOT pp. 113-115

JPL – jpl.nasa.gov Mars 2020 – mars.nasa.gov/mars2020 NASA – nasa.gov

Writer’s note: I spent my paternity leave watching the Back to the Future trilogy. My wife complained constantly that the films were too noisy; something about the soundtracks to 1980s movies is especially grating. The third movie is truly awful.

—Brendan Cormier

SEEN ON SCREEN: LAST CAR TO THE FUTURE p. 144

Casa do Povo – casadopovo.org.br

Photographer’s note: Documenting the empty Casa do Povo, I could almost feel the ghosts of the activists who once walked its halls. The whole building is charged with the feeling of change – that change must happen; that we have to act on it. —André Penteado

HISTORY: PLACE OF SPEECH pp. 126-139

Index

Artek – artek.fi Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec Design – bouroullec.com

Writer’s note: While the Rope Chair was designed to complement Artek’s collection of 20th-century furniture, I couldn’t help but feel that there is something of a Shaker quality to it. The rope’s slack makes you want to pick it up and hang it, while the simplicity of materials and joins serves as a reminder that these principles aren’t just the preserve of modernism. —Evi Hall

OBSERVATION: ROPE CHAIR p. 125

MIT Media Lab – media.mit.edu MoMA – moma.org Neri Oxman – neri.media.mit.edu

Writer’s note: No chitinous arthropods were harmed in the writing of this feature. —Glenn Adamson

REVIEW: THE IMPOSSIBLE DESIGNER pp. 121-124

Expormim – expormim.com

Photographer’s note: I learned a lot about rattan doing this. It was amazing to see how Expormim’s staff believed in it as a material and how it has grown in popularity in recent years. We also had one of the best paellas ever. —Paula Prats

ADVERTORIAL: A HISTORY OF RATTAN pp. 117-120 Associative Design – associativedesign.com p. 17 Bocci – bocci.com p. 5 Carl Hansen & Son – carlhansen.com p. 1, inside front cover Complete – completeltd.com p. 12 Dinesen – dinesen.com p. 2 Duravit – duravit.com p. 7 Ercol – ercol.com p. 9 Squarespace – squarespace.com outside back cover Vitra Design Museum – design-museum.de p. 11 Vola – vola.com p. 15

ADVERTISERS

Last Car to the Future

“Uh, well, it’s a DeLorean, right?” says Marty McFly, 19 minutes into the 1985 blockbuster Back to the Future. The car makes its on-screen debut rolling out the back of a steaming lorry, as the camera sweeps around to catch the logo emblazoned on the front. When the gull-wing door swoops open, it releases thick smoke, aping Doc Brown’s wispy mane as he stumbles out. Zany adventures ensue. Plus two sequels.

Counterintuitively, there’s not a whole lot of “future” in Back to the Future. The first instalment spends most of its time in 1955 – nostalgic reverie for the yuppie classes. The second jumps to 2015, before darting back to a dystopian 1985 and then 1955 again. As if bored by what the future has to offer, the third film leaps back to 1885, for an aesthetically made-forTV romp through the Wild West.

The trilogy tells us a lot about how the way we look to the future has changed. The 1950s could be considered the 20th-century highpoint of technooptimism. While Marty and Doc feel compelled to hide their DeLorean for

fear of shocking people, it might not have seemed so strange: mid-20th century American car companies were pumping out future-car concepts such as General Motors’s jet-plane-esque Firebird series. By the 1980s, however, the US had suffered economic decline, two oil shocks and the Vietnam War, while terrorism, HIV and the crack epidemic loomed on the horizon.

Malaise about the future hasn’t improved much since then, with Silicon Valley in particular promoting a brand of escapism. Take Elon Musk. On 21 November 2019, he unveiled his latest project, the Cybertruck. While DeLorean allusions abound in its stainless-steel panels and profile, it has a unique viciousness. Features like Tesla “armor glass” (which failed to resist a steel ball lobbed at it during the premiere) and a bullet-resistant body – as well as the timing of the event in the month, year and city in which the dystopian Blade Runner is set – suggest Musk’s hope for the future is murky.

In contrast, Back to the Future’s DeLorean has none of this ambiguity.

144

It takes an already impressive-looking car and endows it with superpowers.

Off the big screen, the DeLorean was a stunning flop – with only 8,563 built before the Delorean Motor Company filed for receivership in February 1982 – but this didn’t matter when set against its incredible futuristic appeal. Designed

by Giorgetto Giugiaro, the car boasted several unusual features – gull-wing doors, a stainless-steel body and rearwindow louvres – that made it stand out.

In the movies, the DeLorean was a vehicle for time travel, but its real value was escapism – a revelry in the good old days when people were optimistic about the future. Since the DeLorean, few cars have had much futuristic appeal, with automotive companies instead churning out retro rehashes not too dissimilar from the film industry’s obsession with reboots.

On that note, Robert Zemeckis has been adamant that the Back to the Future trilogy will not get a redo. That’s probably a good thing: Elon Musk’s Cybertruck would make a sad stand-in for a time machine.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Words Brendan Cormier

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