Disegno #29

German Design 1949–1989 Two Countries, One History

20.03.2021 – 05.09.2021 The Quarterly Journal of Design #29 Summer 2021

This issue includes: Solar design with Marjan van Aubel; an architectural field trip through Myanmar’s empty capital; robotic shoe design with Kram/Weisshaar; a discussion about foam, upholstery, and all that lies underneath; the history of Iittala’s magical glassworks; tiny homes by Lehrer Architects for LA’s unhoused; FinTech’s efforts to redesign investment; Unesco’s plan to rebuild Mosul’s multi-faith community; and the problems of chronology.

UK £15

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D29_Cover_AKFB_final_OS_converted 3

Supported by

Vitra Design Museum

29

An exhibition by the Vitra Design Museum, the Kunstgewerbemuseum, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, and the Wüstenrot Foundation

07.05.21 10:23

SEE MORE AT CARLHANSEN.COM OR VISIT YOUR NEAREST FLAGSHIP STORE

Hans J. Wegner x Ilse Crawford

First Masterpieces

REIMAGINING THE CLASSICS

Ilse Crawford interprets Hans J. Wegner’s first five masterpieces for Carl Hansen & Søn in an exclusive color palette inspired by Nordic art and nature. The iconic chairs from 1949 – CH22, CH23, CH24, CH25 and CH26 – are offered in oak and finished with a water-based lacquer.

The limited-edition chairs are only available in 2021.

84 84 pendant light bocci.com info@bocci.com @bocci

Swipe Right Words Oli Stratford

I recently received a very promising text message from a friend. “It is probably not suitable for Disegno,” he began, temptingly, “but I’ve noticed an interesting sociological phenomenon.”

Well, he couldn’t have been more wrong. Interesting sociological phenomena are exactly what we look for at Disegno, to the degree that were we to start over, I’d strongly advocate changing our name to Phenomeno, The Quarterly Journal of Phenomena. After all, what is design if not a response to interesting social phenomena?

Well, I suppose it can be naked consumerism or else the intellectual posturing that often accompanies “design thinking”, but you get my drift. Actually, nobody can pronounce Disegno anyway, so changing the title is probably win-win. Welcome to this issue of Phenomeno!

To get back to my friend, the thing he’d noticed was his dating app, through which he lays romantic siege to the singles within a 5km radius of his home. Over the course of lockdown, he had observed a change in the way people were using it. “Pretty much everyone hasn’t updated their profile or photos since Covid,” he said. “It reflects, I think, a refusal to accept this as a new normal, with people continuing to identify by their interests from before.”

Introduction

Some of that strikes me as practical. Hobbies such as “drinking to excess in pyjamas” or “regularly eating family bags of crisps because it’s something to do, isn’t it”, aren’t as seductive as stalwarts like “going to the cinema with friends” or “outdoor pursuits”. Similarly, I just don’t know if there were a lot of worthwhile opportunities for photography over the past year. There haven’t been many evenings when, sat on my sofa staring into nothingness, I’ve thought, I should be documenting this.

But there’s also truth in what my friend is saying.

Throughout the pandemic we’ve faced an overwhelming sense of stasis, with everyone pinning their hopes on restoring the world to an antecovidian state. Because nobody likes this new normal. It’s awful. Like when CocaCola introduced New Coke in the 1980s and everybody just wanted it to die. Having said that, there are some aspects of that old normal I don’t want back. In design, I’ve enjoyed not destroying the environment by having 1,001 trade fairs and biennales to attend; in life, I actually think family bags of crisps are a practical, delici0us size.

So as the world starts to open up, I hope it updates its profile just a smidge. The pandemic has been dreadful, but some of the changes it has wrought are not all bad.

And in that spirit, please enjoy this edition of Phenomeno, and the many interesting phenomena it contains.

4

Contents 3

Introduction Swipe Right

6

Contents

8

Contributors

10

Masthead The people behind Disegno

13

Timeline February to April 2021 in review

17

Observation Twist Candle The talk of TikTok

18

Photoessay Sometimes Frivolous, Sometimes Philosophical 19 Chairs for ageing

24

25

32

Observation Afterlife Circular design, two ways Anatomy Chronology and Its Discontents How should we categorise design’s many histories?

Review Nothing About Us Without Us Who can speak for whom?

36

Process Two Lanes of the Same Highway Kram/Weisshaar’s model for digital/physical making

98

Interview Solar Culture Club A new democratic ideal from Marjan van Aubel

49

Observation Honext Building blocks from paper waste

107

Review Take an e-Seat Would you buy an unreal sofa?

50

111

History The Clock and the Hunchback Rebuilding Mosul’s sacred sites

Gallery A Potpourri of Concrete Nation-Building Dispatches from Naypyidaw

64

Photoessay Glass, Magic and Realism Finnish glass through the lens of Magic Realism

129

Observation Za A Super Normal stool

74

130

Review Are We All Investors?

The rise, appeal, and perils of FinTech apps

Roundtable What Lies Beneath Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about upholstery

78

Project So Little Building temporary housing for LA’s homeless community

97

Observation Invisible Lines Barely-there specs

6

140 Index Short stories from the creation of this issue 144 Seen on Screen Riget Lars von Trier’s cult hospital gets a reboot from 3XN and Link Arkitektur

STAY IN SHAPE. LIKE YOUR BATHROOM.

Contributors Glenn Adamson is a writer and curator based in New York. His most recent book is Craft: An American History. p. 25 Catherine Aitken is design director of the London based furniture brand Another Country. p. 130 Benjamin Bansal and Manuel Oka spent several months in the former Burmese capital between 2014 and 2015, researching their acclaimed Yangon guide. They survived several taxi rides together. p. 111 Choreo is a collaboration between the photographers Roman Häbler and Lars-Ole Bastar. p. 17, 24, 49, 97 and 129 Michel Baumgartner is the secretary general of EUROPUR. p. 130 Florencia Colombo is an architect who dedicates her free time to studying archaeology, hiking in the Alps, and trying to understand Rhaeto-Romansh. p. 64

William Daniels, Ivor Prickett, Tommy Trenchard, Teun Voeten and Iva Zimova are all photographers represented by Panos Pictures. p. 50 Stefan Diez is an industrial designer from Munich, who focuses on the potentials of a circular economy. p. 130 Ramak Fazel spent a portion of the pandemic making illustrations with a fine-point Sharpie. p. 78 Renée de Groot sometimes feels that she has too much stuff, and at other times like there’s room for even more. p. 98 Ville Kokkonen is an industrial designer, among many other things. p. 64 Michael David Mitchell is trying to walk in Herman Hesse’s footsteps in the vineyards of Ticino. p. 36 Jeremy Myerson is a design writer and academic, and has finally learned to play the tenor sax. p. 18

Timothy Cox runs Coakley & Cox. He mostly enjoys being on the factory floor. p. 130

8

Jesse Rice-Evans is a rhetorician.

Status: currently resting. p. 32 Anna Rohmann is trying to finish her degree to score a hat trick of MAs, each from a different country. p. 74 Daniel Schofield likes to keep things simple, play around with materials, and draw a lot. p. 130 Lemma Shehadi is gardening her way through the pandemic in Lebanon. p. 50 Kay Sunden wishes they could pull off perfectly circular specs. p. 97 Mimi Zeiger is a Los Angeles-based critic. She is currently pondering the centre of the United States as co-curator of the 2021 Exhibit Columbus, entitled New Middles. p. 78

The Quarterly Journal of Design #29 Editor-in-chief Oli Stratford oliver@disegnomagazine.com

Founder and publication director Johanna Agerman Ross

Publisher and commercial director Chris Jones chris@disegnomagazine.com

Deputy editor Kristina Rapacki kristina@disegnomagazine.com

Creative directors Florian Böhm Annahita Kamali akfb.com

Commercial executive Farnaz Ari farnaz@disegnomagazine.com

Creative producer Evi Hall eleanor@disegnomagazine.com

Designer Jonas Hirschmann info@akfb.com

Circulation and stockist enquiries Adam Long adam@logicalconnections.co.uk

Fact checker Ann Morgan

Cover The cover shows a photograph of the poetry of Vincent Bomar, a resident of the Chandler Boulevard Bridge Home Village, taken by Ramak Fazel. Vincent is looking for literary representation.

Contributors Glenn Adamson, Johanna Agerman Ross, Catherine Aitken, Ben Banzel, Michel Baumgartner, Choreo, Florencia Colombo, Tim Cox, William Daniels, Stefan Diez, Ramak Fazel, Alecio Ferrari, Renée de Groot, Evi Hall, Ville Kokkonen, Michael David Mitchell, Jeremy Myerson, Manuel Oka, Ivor Prickett, Kristina Rapacki, Jesse Rice-Evans, Anna Rohmann, Daniel Schofield, Lemma Shehadi, Oli Stratford, Kay Sunden, Tommy Trenchard, Teun Voeten, Mimi Zeiger and Iva Zimova.

Paper and print This issue of Disegno is printed by Park Communications on Arcoprint Extra White 110gsm. The cover is printed on Arcoprint Extra White 250gsm.

All of the paper used in this issue is from Fedrigoni UK.

Distribution The Logical Choice thelogicalchoicegroup.com

Thanks Many thanks to Daniel Schofield for organising a fascinating roundtable; Michael Regnier for his help corralling photographers from all around the world; Marina Vear for arranging site visits for our LA contributors; and AHEC for a fantastic collaboration on our Words on Wood podcast.

We are very grateful to all our contributors, and for the help of everybody who has supported us and helped make Disegno #29 possible. Not least to Billy, Elliot and Norman, lords of the aquarium and the latest additions to the Disegno menagerie.

Finally, we are sad to say goodbye to Farnaz Ari and Kristina Rapacki, who have contributed more than a decade of service to the journal. Without their wit, creativity, wisdom and kindness, Disegno wouldn’t be what it is. Farnaz’s warmth, knowledge and passion for the design industries have inspired us; Kristina’s intelligence, humour, and talent as a writer and editor have elevated everything we have done.

We will miss them, and wish them luck in the next steps in their careers.

10

Congratulations We are delighted to welcome Stella Dyke-Jones to the Disegno family, as well as extending our heartfelt congratulations to Alice, Chris and Jude – her actual family.

Contents copyright The contents of this journal belongs to Disegno Publications Limited and to the authors and artists featured.

If you are tempted to reproduce any of it, please ask first.

Disegno Works Disegno also runs the creative agency Disegno Works. disegnoworks.com The Crit You can keep up with Disegno and our work by listening to The Crit, our new podcast about design. disegnodaily.com/podcasts/the-crit Contact us 50 Wenham House Ascalon Street London SW8 4DZ disegnodaily.com

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FEBRUARY

You’ve got to stick the landing

requirements from a product don’t

It could have been $2.2bn wasted. The

also care about appearance. In the

Bezos begone

costs of developing the Perseverance

GO FlyEase, Nike may have created

In February, Jeff Bezos announced that

Mars rover were colossal, with teams

something of genuine value: an

he was to step down from his role as

at NASA working for years to get the

accessible product that everyone

chief executive of Amazon. But do not

design ready for launch (and if you’d

might want.

weep for Bezos. Rather than quietly

like to know more about this, read

retiring as the world’s richest man,

‘The Tourists’ in Disegno #26). But

he is to stay on as Amazon’s new

even after Perseverance lifted off

executive chair. His first task in

in July 2020, there was almost six

the new role, he explained in his

months of anxiety – Mars missions

final letter to shareholders, would

have failed before, with the 1999

be leading efforts “to do a better

Mars Polar Lander, for instance,

job for our employees”, striving

destroyed upon landing. So when

to make Amazon “Earth’s best employer

Perseverance touched down safely

and Earth’s safest place to work”.

on 18 February, the sense of relief

And who better than Bezos to do this?

at Mission Control must have been

After all, this is the man under whose

palpable. On Twitter, the rover’s

What is #Multiform? This was the

watch Amazon was recently forced to

account shared the good news with

question on Architecture Twitter’s

tweet a denial of allegations that

a small picture of a stony alien

lips in February, when curator

its workers choose to urinate in

landscape: “Hello, world. My first

Owen Hopkins launched a daring new

bottles, rather than risk being

look at my forever home.” It was

theory about an emerging sensibility

accused of time-wasting by taking

nice of them to let us know they

within the field. “#Multiform is the

toilet breaks. We have every faith.

got there safely. We would only

perpetually provisional architectural

have worried otherwise.

articulation of the complexities of

It’s a bird… it’s a plane… it’s… Multiform?

the contemporary world,” explained

Farewell to Fenty

Hopkins. “It meets today’s disorder

When LVMH partnered with Rihanna

with multiplicity, variety and

in 2019 to relaunch Fenty, a fashion

plurality.” Oh, so a bit like

brand that Rihanna had founded with

postmodernism? Wrong! “It is hard

Puma in 2016, it was supposed to

to define something that in its

represent a new future for the luxury

very nature is marked by hybridity,

conglomerate. Fenty was to abandon

heterogeneity and multiplicity,”

runway shows for regular drops; focus

Hopkins elaborated in Dezeen,

on digital direct-to-consumer sales

before listing a series of loose

as opposed to traditional buyers;

characteristics such as “collage,

Images courtesy of NASA and Nike.

be led by a woman with no formal

reference, quotation, and the bold

design training, but considerable

Make it accessible; make it fashion

and expressive use of colour, ornament

cultural cachet; and build its brand

It can be very easy to trash Nike

and materials.” Right, so very much

around ideas of inclusivity across

and its ilk, largely because their

like postmodernism, then? Wrong!

size, race, and gender. A year later,

model of rapacious fast-fashion

“Rather than pursue one particular

LVMH announced that in light of

generates so much, well, trash.

agenda – whether political, aesthetic

the economic slowdown prompted

But in February, the sportswear

or financial – and seek to impose

by the pandemic, it had “made the

giant launched a product that seemed

some kind of order," Hopkins explained,

decision to put on hold the [Fenty]

actually kinda… good? The GO FlyEase

“Multiform accommodates multiple

ready-to-wear activity, based in

is a new shoe that does away with

states of being and existing.” Now,

Europe, pending better conditions.”

laces or velcro in favour of a hinged

that really does just sound like

Fenty’s clothes didn’t exactly

design – step down on the insole

postmodernism. Wrong! “[That] is

set the world on fire – critiques

and the shoe clamps around your foot;

to fundamentally underestimate

focused on the line offering

press on the heel and it cracks open.

its importance and implications,”

derivative streetwear at inflated

It makes for a hands-free design that

apparently. Could have fooled us.

prices – so perhaps it’s no great

could have real benefits for anyone

loss, but the sense of what could

with mobility or dexterity issues,

have been is palpable. In an industry

as well as carrying a streetwear

that sometimes feel calcified, it's

aesthetic likely to appeal across

a shame Fenty never emerged as a

demographics. This isn’t something

The great renovators

breath of fresh air.

to be sniffed at – all too often

“Never demolish, never remove

accessible design foregoes fashion,

or replace, always add, transform,

as if those who have particular

and reuse!” This was the rallying

Timeline

MARCH

cry of this year’s Pritzker laureates,

Another department – not explicitly

Zeev Aram (1931-2021)

French architects Anne Lacaton and

chronological in nature – would

Having trained as a designer in the

Jean-Philippe Vassal, in their 2004

encompass sub-Saharan Africa, African

offices of Ernö Goldfinger and Basil

text ‘Plus’. This feasibility-study-

diaspora art, and Asia. “The curators

Spence, before moving into retail

turned-manifesto responded to a French

will be more stretched,” said the

with his store on London’s King's Road

governmental initiative to raze much

V&A's director Tristram Hunt, “but

in the 1960s, Zeev Aram might easily

of the country’s postwar housing

I hope the chronological approach will

have remained a man of his time –

and replace it with new-builds.

lead to more synergies between them.”

an instrumental figure in introducing

Re-adaptation, the architects argued,

Critics did not see synergies, however,

modernist design to the British public.

would be cheaper, greener, and better

but rather a siloing-off of Western

The fact that Aram, who died in March,

for the residents, who wouldn’t need

culture (treated chronologically) and

was much more than this is testament

to move out in the process. The duo

non-Western (treated as an ahistorical

to his enduring influence. Alongside

provided proof of concept in a series

mass). The backlash led the V&A to

his work with the modernist greats,

of projects in the 2010s, transforming

later backpedal on its plans, but

Aram was a firm advocate for young

tired postwar housing blocks in Paris

not to explaining why it had thought

and emerging designers, providing

and Bordeaux into light-infused towers

the initiative was a good idea in

an early platform for Jasper Morrison,

at around half the cost projected by

the first place.

PearsonLloyd and Thomas Heatherwick,

the French state. This was achieved by

and supporting many others through

expanding the floorplans of each block

his Aram Gallery for Experimental

through the addition of “winter

and New Design. We haven’t even

gardens” – enclosed balconies that

mentioned his work in restoring the

have become something of a Lacaton

great, but criminally overlooked,

and Vassal staple. This lightest

early 20th-century designer Eileen

of touches couldn’t be further

Gray to her rightful place in design’s

from the grandstanding of Pritzker’s

firmament. For a man active across

earlier starchitect laureates –

six decades of design, Aram was

and what a good thing that is.

never less than relevant.

Shining a light on dark patterns Kudos to California. In March the US state passed legislation banning dark patterns – deceptive digital interfaces designed to stop users personal data – just two years on from similar national legislation

The West and the rest

collapsing after failing to receive

Museums have had a hard time of the

a single vote in Congress. The new

pandemic. In London, the V&A found

law bans companies from using confusing

Sacking the Sacklers

that it needs to reduce costs by

language such as double-negatives;

“We recently introduced new way-

at least £10m by 2023 to make up for

forcing users to “click through

finding terminology to help visitors

lost revenue, and began redundancy

or listen to reasons why they should

distinguish between the two galleries,”

consultations with its front-of-house

not submit a request to opt-out

said a spokesperson for the Serpentine

staff in autumn 2020. By March 2021,

before confirming their request”;

Galleries, whose two exhibition spaces

these rounds reached the curatorial

and requiring users to scroll through

are found in London’s Hyde Park.

departments, 20 per cent of which were

detailed information to locate an

In practice, this meant renaming the

set to be cut. This was devastating

option to opt-out. Dark patterns

Serpentine Sackler Gallery – which

news in itself, but came with an

are slippery beasts, and doubtless

had opened in 2013 with funds from

added insult: the museum’s departments,

the new laws still leave unscrupulous

the Sackler Foundation – to Serpentine

traditionally organised by material,

companies with room to manoeuvre.

North Gallery. Why? It’s all part of

were to be reorganised chronologically.

Nevertheless, California’s efforts

a “rebranding process”. But dropping

Or, well, pseudo-chronologically.

to crack down are welcome: accepting

the Sackler name also has the effect

European and American collections

the sale of personal data should never

of distancing the institution from

would merge into three departments:

be the default setting.

the Sackler family, who have come

medieval to 18th century; 19th century

to epitomise the unsavoury practice

to 1914; and modern and contemporary.

of “art-washing” in the past decade,

14

Images courtesy of the Pritzker Foundation, V&A, Aram, Het Nieuwe Instituut and Reisinger Studio.

opting out of the sale of their

with their name plastered on galleries,

of Rotterdam’s Het Nieuwe Instituut

mid-April. It’s hard not to see it

arts spaces and curatorships the world

from Guus Beumer, who retires in May.

as an Emperor’s-New-Clothes-moment:

over. Members of the family run Purdue

Chen has an impressive CV, having

maybe blockchain enthusiasts realised

Pharma, the makers of the highly

worked as Beijing Design Week’s

there isn’t actually much you can

addictive opioid Oxycontin, and are

first creative director in the early

do with a Tweet that’s already in

currently embroiled in a tsunami of

2010s; helped develop the design and

the public domain.

lawsuits for their criminal marketing

architecture displays of Hong Kong’s

of the drug. In 2019, the Serpentine

M+; and, most recently, served as

– along with a swathe of other art

curatorial director of Design Miami.

institutions – pledged not to accept

Het Niewue Instituut, a research

any more money from the Sackler

institute which carries a lot of

Foundation. It’ll be interesting to

weight in Europe’s critical design

see how many other museums find ways

circles, should be a good fit for

to “rebrand” over the next few years.

Chen, whose wealth of international experience may help bring its enviable work to a global audience.

APRIL Ducking the challenge When the US Supreme Court agreed to hear the case of Google v. Oracle America, it said that it would resolve two things: 1) whether the 11,000

So long to the LG phone

lines of Java that Oracle claimed

Nokia, HTC, Blackberry, and now LG

Google had illegitimately copied for

– giant electronics companies which

use in its Android operating system

have taken a tumble for not keeping

were copyrightable; and 2) if they

their smartphone offerings up-to-

were copyrightable, whether Google’s

scratch. In April, South Korean LG

use of them was fair nevertheless.

announced that it would retire its

In answer to the second question,

NFT mania

entire smartphone division, which

the court was fairly clear, voting

It was like people were possessed.

has reported losses totalling $4.5bn

6:2 in favour of Google: its use

A virtual furniture collection by

in the past six years. As recently

of Java was protected by “fair use”,

Andrés Reisinger sold for $450,000

as 2013, the company was the world’s

with Google having used the code

in February; electronic musician

third-largest smartphone manufacturer

to create a new “highly creative

Grimes sold a virtual art collection

after Samsung and Apple. How the mighty

and innovative tool for a smartphone

for $6m in early March; Gucci was

have fallen! Critics point to a number

environment.” On the first question,

suddenly selling virtual shoes; and

of hard- and software issues with LG’s

however, the court was silent, citing

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey flogged

recent models (although, to be fair,

“rapidly changing technological,

his first Tweet (the thrilling “just

they never put out an exploding product

economic and business-related

setting up my twttr”) for $2.9m.

– we’re looking at you Samsung),

circumstances” which made it easier

All before any of us had a chance

as well as a “stagnation in design”,

to simply assume that code could be

to look up what “fungible” actually

according to Forbes. Crucially, LG

subject to copyright. Well, while

means (OED: “That can serve for,

didn’t respond to the arrival of

Timeline would agree with this

or be replaced by, another answering

cheaper phones from Chinese makers

assumption (why wouldn’t it be?),

to the same definition”). A non-

such as Huawei, Xiaomi and Oppo in

it seems a strange question for the

fungible token (NFT) is a unit

the 2010s. It just goes to show that

Supreme Court to duck – particularly

that can’t be exchanged for another

resting on one’s laurels – even for

as it was the one who, erm, asked

similar file, because it’s held in

a moment – is simply not an option

it. Given the centrality of software

a blockchain. Selling artworks as

in the electronics business.

to contemporary design, surely

NFTs, then, is an effort to slap

it's an area we could do with

the concept of property onto a

some legal clarity on?

format – the digital file – which

The defence calls on Colin

has hitherto done a pretty good job

Here at Timeline, we like Aldi.

of escaping this by virtue of being

It provides decent, “non-brand”

A nieuwe artistic director

infinitely reproducible. By April,

supermarket food at affordable prices,

An exciting appointment: in April

however, things had calmed down a bit.

and its dirt-cheap Brasserie 1897

it was announced that the design

Artnet reported that NFT art sales had

French Lager has gotten us through

critic and curator Aric Chen will

dipped from a whopping $19.3m during

many a deadline when the Kronenbourg

be taking up the artistic direction

the second week of March to $5.5m in

1664 that it shamelessly apes has

Timeline

felt too expensive. But this time,

would you believe it, but Knoll

Aldi has gone too far. In April, Marks

has been knolled! In April, the US

& Spencer (M&S) launched legal action

furniture brand Herman Miller must

against the chain over Aldi's Cuthbert

have noticed that its great midcentury

the Caterpillar cake, a chocolate

rival was actually pretty similar to

sponge that M&S accuses of “rid[ing]

it, and so swiftly set about grouping

on the coat-tails” of its own Colin

the two. The result is a $1.8bn

the Caterpillar. For those who do

cash-and-stock deal that will see

not know, Colin is a British national

Herman Miller welcome Knoll into

treasure and the apex of the nation's

its portfolio of design companies,

culinary history: a deeply average

creating a kind of super brand for US

chocolate cake that has nevertheless

furniture design. Whether it’s healthy

sold more than 15m units since it was

for the industry to have so much

launched in 1990. Since then, Colin

design history in the hands of

has graced the birthday parties of

a single company is one thing,

every child in the nation, beaming

but at least we can all admire

cheerfully from his delicious chocolate

the aesthetic consistency: birds

face and happily waggling his lovely

of a feather must immediately

fondant-filled arse. Colin, in short,

be knolled together.

is brilliant, and Cuthbert a shameless knockoff who is not fit to lace the white chocolate shoes that grace Colin’s every segment. We would explain why this court case represents an interesting development for food design, with copyright issues rearing their ugly head within the world of industrial food products, but frankly we’re too angry. There is only room for one chocolate caterpillar, and Colin is our king.

Always buy Knoll Inc. Everyone likes knolling: you know, the thing that a janitor at the Images courtesy of Marks & Spencer and Knoll.

US furniture company Knoll invented, where you put everything at right angles and arrange stuff into pleasing visual constellations.

Always be knolling! It’s really easy too, as explained in the 'How to Knoll' section of the sculptor Tom Sachs's 10 Bullets zine, which contains tips such as “3) Group all ‘like’ objects”. Well, reader,

16

Words Kristina Rapacki

Image by Choreo.

Twist Candle, Lex Pott!The Rotterdambased designer Lex Pott disappears from the Zoom grid, then remerges holding two wax objects. “Two or three years ago we launched these Pillar candles for Hay,” he says. But these aren’t exactly the exuberant, Memphisinspired colour block candles on sale at Hay. The candles Pott holds to the screen look like tired, saggy versions of themselves, as if they’ve spent a year in self-isolation, staring at screens for too long.

Pott explains that their warped shape is due to thermodynamics rather than broken spirits. “There was a big heat wave in 2019, and we had these Pillar candles here in the studio,” he says. “It became 40°C plus, and that’s a temperature that candles don’t like.”

The more Pott looked at the droopy candles, the more they piqued his curiosity. “I realised that wax has this in-between state,” he says. “Of course we know it mostly in solid and liquid forms, but in this in-between state it almost becomes clay.” This was the germ of the idea for his latest candle project, Twist.

Twist consists of a single-wicked double-ended candle which keeps its two ends upright by coiling artfully at the centre. It is not dipped, but extruded (“basically the same way you’d make a sausage”) with blocks of wax fed through a special machine. It is then heated to 40-50°C – heatwave temperature – and moulded. “It sounds really easy, but it took us three months to figure everything out: what type of wax, what kind of wick, what kind of mould,” explains Pott.

Those three months of R&D were well-timed. In February 2020, Pott presented Twist and related experiments at Object, a small Dutch fair. “That was actually one of the last fairs before Corona kicked in,” he remembers.

“One or two weeks later, the world was a different place.” While the studio’s other projects were variously cancelled

or stalled, Twist took off. “Everybody was at home and wanted an affordable design object to cheer up their houses.”

Twist is eminently Instagram-friendly, and got a lot of traction there first. “Then TikTok came,” says Pott. Throughout 2020, #twistedcandles tutorials began popping up on the video-sharing platform. “It was like Instagram times 10. And lots of young people were copying the Twist in a charming, DIY way.” The tutorials tended to work with store-bought dining candles, and couldn’t get the length or exact shape of Pott’s candle. Pott didn’t mind, however. The level of engagement with his design was staggering, and entirely new to him.

“It was always a dream of mine to initiate, produce, and distribute a project on my own, totally independently and without any marketing or other companies involved,” says Pott. “And well, we did it!” Production and distribution eventually outgrew the capacities of Pott’s studio, however.

“It was out of control. The studio was packed to the max: boxes, pallets, wax everywhere!” Today, a US company called 54 Celsius – heatwave temperature! – manages the production and distribution of Twist. “I can’t look at candles anymore,” laughs Pott, presumably tired from having been burning the candle at both ends since launching Twist.

Observation

Sometimes Frivolous, Sometimes Philosophical Words Jeremy Myerson Images Alecio Ferrari

Attitudes to ageing and approaches to design have both shifted significantly since the 1980s. When the Boilerhouse Project at the Victoria & Albert Museum staged its landmark New Design for Old exhibition in 1986, the issue of how to design for older people was framed in strictly clinical and utilitarian terms.

Ageing was viewed as a medical disability that could be alleviated by functional design to make it easier and safer to do certain things in the home, such as cooking or bathing. Fifteen leading industrial designers were asked to propose new objects for independent senior living; I remember that the standout exhibit was a television set with a revolving head by Hartmut Esslinger of Frog Design, designed so that older people could watch TV lying down in bed. Such were the limits on ambition for this user group.

Thirty-five years later, the game has moved on for both ageing and design.

Our understanding of what it means to grow older is now broader and richer.

Dynamic ideas around healthy and active ageing in a “third age” of productive social engagement have begun to replace the passive image of the “elderly” confined to their own homes or institutional care.

There is growing cultural interest in our longevity – unprecedented in human history. And as the “first teenagers” of the baby boomer generation tip over into old age, familiar stereotypes around ageing are becoming outdated.

Similarly, horizons have expanded in design with the rise of digital technology and other scientific advances, disruping traditional standalone disciplines such as product, furniture or graphic design, and creating opportunities to innovate.

The newer, cutting-edge disciplines of service, interaction or experience design integrate desire, need and function in more comprehensive ways. Cultural exploration has become as important

as technical resolution across all fields of design.

The result of these changes is that we are now seeing a medical model of ageing (design to counter disease, dependency and death) being replaced with a social model of ageing (design to support social interaction and personal productivity) and even a cultural model (design to explore this phase of life as rich and unique). When I was recently asked to re-curate the original 1986 New Design for Old exhibition for a contemporary audience at the Design Museum (whose forerunner was the Boilerhouse Project), I retained a focus on the home but radically augmented the show with new sections covering identity, mobility, work and community to reflect the bigger ambitions and new, broader landscape of design for ageing.

It is within this enriched context that we encounter the 19 Chairs project by brothers Tom and Will Butterfield, an initiative conceived amid the global pandemic and aimed at supporting two charities, Age UK and Resourcing Racial Justice. The Butterfields designed and constructed a unique wooden chair every day over 19 days of lockdown and then shipped them to 19 creatives with a brief to “reinvent, reimagine or redesign your chair with an older person in mind”.

Bringing in a range of designers echoes the tactics of both New Design for Old exhibition and my follow-up, New Old, which was centred around six design commissions. However, the centrality and simplicity of a single object gives the 19 Chairs project its raw cultural power to explore ageing through design.

The result is an eclectic and imaginative collection of ideas and embellishments, sometimes frivolous and sometimes philosophical. Everyone will have their own favourites. Mine include Tom Dixon’s aspirational foil-covered chair for Buzz Aldrin; Emma Brewin’s cushioned Shag

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Chair made of shag scarves and pillows; and Benjamin Edgar’s blue-painted Tired, but Quite Optimistic chair with its drooping seat profile. A selection of the designs are displayed over the coming pages.

Exhaustion is frequently referenced in the collection, but also rebirth and renewal – not just in terms of repurposing the furniture but in seeing new possibilities in later life. This is what design brings to ageing now. No longer confined to fitness for purpose or else addressing medical emergency, it speaks more expansively of dreams and memories.

19 Chairs will be on display at Protein Studios, London between 20-23 May 2021. Bidding on the chairs closes on 31 May. More information may be found at 19chairs.co.uk.

Photoessay

by Tom (pictured) and Will Butterfield.

The creation of the base chairs, overseen

fluorescent colours familiar from the designer’s wider practice, but which have not traditionally been associated with designing for older people.

resting tool”. Smits converted the chair into two

walking sticks, arguing for the importance of physical

exercise, as well as transforming a chair for one person

into an activity for two.

Morag Myerscough’s Sun Chair introduces the vibrant,

Support the Elderly, by Helmut Smits, is an “active

20 is intended to express an abiding optimism.

exhausted”. Throughout, the brilliant blue colouring

a process described as a gradient from “rested to

sees the slats of its seat incrementally sag, in

Benjamin Edgar’s Tired, but Quite Optimistic chair

the guidance you need to assemble your own Nice Chair, designed by Tom Dicks On. “[You] wanna make a chair baby you can make a chair if you wanna baby,” adds Lycett.

to express comfort. “I wanted to translate visually the

feeling you get when you’re really tired and finally find

a good seat to sit on and you can really let go,”

Jullien explains.

Comedian Joe Lycett’s Chair Dunistrishuns provides all

Graphic artist Jean Jullien’s Raplapla chair is designed

Photoessay of furniture.

resembling a hairy beastie as much as it does a piece

scarves, Emma Brewin’s Shag Chair is fluffy and cuddly,

Designed from pillows and fur scraps taken from shag

whining, shining, signing, bearded, seeking full. shrunk, seeking, full.”

Lean and slippered, manly, childish, youthful,

reflecting on the passage of time: “Mewling, puking,

the centre of the seat, accompanying it with a poem

The Commode by Harry Grundy places a cactus in

wood structure when hit by sunlight.

person: the astronaut Buzz Aldrin.

around the seat and backrest for comfort, with the

translucency of the material revealing the underlying

Tom Dixon’s Foil is a seat designed for a specific older

Rubber by Sabine Marcellis: a sheet of rubber wraps

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a back and feet for the design out of waste plastic, extruded by a machine of Shaw’s own design. A “creepy hand rest” completes the work.

restores his chair into “a younger and rebellious

version of itself[...] before it got assembled into

something to sit on.” The artist keeps his method

a secret.

James Shaw’s Extruded Chair with Blob Hand Rest creates

“A complicated magic trick,” Max Siedentopf’s Rebirth

Photoessay full of antiques.”

sitting in our living room,” he explains, “which was

gold. “I grew up watching her paint her toes whilst

finish is inspired by Carlton’s grandmother’s love of

much of the original structure of the chair, but its

Grandma’s Antique, designed by Brandon Carlton, retains

Afterlife, Odd Matter for Supernovas!“It doesn’t directly say: I’ve been waste before,” says Els Woldhek, one half of the Rotterdam-based studio Odd Matter. “As a consumer you want something you’d want to use, not just because you can say it’s recycled. It needs to be precious.”

That precious thing is Afterlife, Odd Matter’s new furniture collection for London-based brand Supernovas. The collection contains a mono-material crate and a bench, executed in pop-bright colours produced by mixing postindustrial and post-consumer plastic waste. The crate’s curved, speckled form suggests the gravitas of granite, but souped up in a candy hue.

The crate was selected for the initial collection thanks to the typology’s flexibility – it can serve as storage, a plant pot, a beer cooler, a bin (the original idea), or “a perfect vinyl holder,” according to Supernova’s founder Massimiliano Rossi.

Both crate and bench are also stackable thanks to a system of curved “nipple” connectors. “I’m interested in things that evolve with me, rather than design that is framed as static,”

explains Rossi. “Instead of just having a table, I want to know what this table can be in three months.”

The design of Afterlife is intended to distil Supernovas’s overarching ethos of encouraging more circular modes of furniture consumption. The brand lets customers buy its products outright, or alternatively sign up for a “streaming” service whereby you pay a fixed amount each month up to the total cost of the product – a business model that ties to the rise of “buy now, pay later” services such as Klarna. After a short minimum period, customers can swap a design for another product from Supernovas’s range. Once a piece is fully paid off, you can keep it or, alternatively, return it to the brand for future discounts.

Returned products are resold or else recycled for future Supernovas designs.

This flexibility, the brand hopes, will mean that no product slips outside its cycle of recycling and reuse.

Supernovas’s model is an effort to avoid some of the wastefulness of fast furniture, without donning the hairshirt of environmental marketing.

“We started from a reaction to the doom and gloom of the narrative around sustainability,” says Rossi.

Rather than showing “images of rivers full of plastic just to sell a t-shirt,” he explains, Supernovas opted for a vibrant aesthetic. It is also, Rossi says, a rejection of the “buy once and use forever” philosophy familiar to the design world. Instead, it seeks to acknowledge the fact that people’s homes and desires change frequently.

It explains the kaleidoscope appeal of its collections – Supernovas leans into a desire for consumption and change, arguing that “designing for brevity rather than timelessness” can offer a new low-waste alternative.

Image by Choreo.

Words Evi Hall

Observation

Chronology and Its Discontents Words Glenn Adamson

I recently watched Tenet, the latest Christopher Nolan film, which takes as its premise the possibility of temporal “inversion”. Characters are able to reverse their direction in time, experiencing themselves going back into their own pasts, even as the world around them continues toward the future. For the film audience, this is initially confusing. And it stays that way.

But out of the morass of the movie’s confused tangle of a plot, I plucked a more-or-less coherent thought: this is what museums do.

Anatomy

Designer, Maker, User is the current display of the London Design Museum’s permanent collection. It employs a thematic, rather than chronological

Images courtesy of the Design Museum, V&A, Design Museum Holon and Haus der Kulturen der Welt.

curatorial approach.

Not literally, of course. But Nolan’s idea of time travel as a kind of scissoring action, with timelines sliding past one another in mutual witness, strikes me as an apt metaphor. It’s common enough for museums to be described as time machines, which implies a Back to the Future-style jumping around from one discrete moment to another. But I would argue that this is not really the experience that most visitors have, even if curators think they’re providing it. Very few exhibitions and even fewer permanent collection galleries are focused tightly on a single moment in time. Years, decades, or even centuries, and often multiple geographies as well, are compressed into a single space. Chronological displays are not actually chronological at all, in the sense of a rigid sequence from early to late. Numerous other variables – purely physical considerations like the size and shape of the works, for starters – are in play. In practice, museums with historic collections tend to offer a variegated “pastness”, composed of many temporal overlaps, which audiences implicitly contrast to their own unfolding present.

This topic is timely, if you’ll forgive the expression, given recent events at the V&A. A brief summary, in case you’ve somehow missed it: in February 2021, museum leadership announced a reduction in overall staffing levels, necessitated by income shortfalls resulting from the pandemic. In conjunction with these redundancies, they floated the idea of a thorough curatorial restructuring. Seemingly forever (actually, since the 1890s), the V&A’s departments have been organised by medium: Furniture, Textiles and Fashion; Sculpture, Metalwork, Ceramics and Glass; Theatre and Performance; and Word and Image, comprising paintings, works on paper, and books. The Asian department was an exception, on the grounds of area- and language-based expertise. The new plans would have replaced this configuration with four mega-departments, three devoted to Europe and the Americas – medieval through late 18th century; the 19th century to 1918; and modern and contemporary – with a fourth covering Africa, the African Diaspora, and Asia.

It’s important to note that the V&A’s galleries are already divided into medium-specific and geographical-chronological displays, an arrangement that seems certain to continue into the foreseeable future. Even so, the outcry about the proposed reorganisation was immediate and passionate.

Critics both internally and externally objected to the new structure’s “West and the rest” logic, and to the dissolution of the popular Theatre and Performance collections – which had their own museum in Covent Garden between 1987 and 2007, but now seemed like they might lose their autonomous character entirely.

The decisive argument, however, turned on the V&A’s unique, medium-based expertise. As my fellow craft historian Tanya Harrod wrote in The Spectator, this is the V&A’s intellectual DNA, and it has probably never

Chronological displays are not actually chronological at all, in the sense of a rigid sequence from early to late. seemed more relevant: “Just at the moment when there is widespread popular and academic recognition of the ontological dignity of material things and their creation, it is baffling that the world’s greatest museum of art and design should have its collections sliced along outdated 1066 and All That chronological lines.”

On 1 April, however, it was announced that the restructuring would itself be restructured, essentially preserving the V&A’s existing curatorial organisation, though with a handful of minor modifications. Whew.

Yet for all the uproar, the incident did usefully focus attention on the merits and drawbacks of chronology as an ordering principle. It’s a topic that museums have been wrestling with for two decades or so.

A bellwether was the opening of Tate Modern in 2000, with galleries organised by grand themes such as “Landscape/Matter/Environment” and “Nude/Action/Body”. Many critics panned the curation, concluding that (as an editorial in The Burlington Magazine put it) the cross-temporal juxtapositions were “often perplexing for a first-time visitor, increasingly irritating for a regular one.”

MoMA staged an experimental three-season shuffling of its own collection at around the same time, and according to equally blunt themes such

Anatomy

Black Box at Design Museum Holon.

Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas was a non-chronological attempt to map the “afterlife of antiquity”.

A gallery devoted to the V&A’s Ceramics and Glass department.

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as “People, Places, and Things.” In this case, it was an explicit attempt to explode the canon that MoMA itself had done so much to construct. The thematic exhibition structure was calculated to “take modernism out of the hands of the anointed few,” as Roberta Smith commented in The New York Times, and “show it instead to be an effort of hundreds of people working alone or together in a range of styles and mediums.”

It’s an approach that has informed curation ever since. The Design Museum – another London institution whose collection has never been its strong suit – opened in its new Kensington home in 2016 with a thematic presentation in its permanent galleries: Designer, Maker, User. More recently, the Design Museum Holon, near Tel Aviv, has displayed its permanent collection in an exhibition called Black Box, which aims to “expose the museum’s entrails,” and explore “a somewhat invisible aspect of the design world – the nature of the relations between objects and people”. The very first object on display – a primordial stone tool – implies that a chronology on the grandest of scales will unfold. But the exhibition immediately shifts gears, with a project by Ami Drach and Dov Ganchrow about “man-made contemporary prehistoric hand-axes”. That’s about as scrambled as chronology gets, and the rest of the exhibition follows suit, with sections focusing not on historical periods, but rather big issues in design: presumptions of value, research methodologies, discarded objects, and so on.

To be sure, chronology still reigns in many museums. The Stedelijk in Amsterdam (working with Rem Koolhaas’s office, OMA) and the Stockholm Nationalmuseum have both reopened in recent years with sequential installations of fine art and design, with objects from the two disciplines freely intermixed.

This is also the current approach of MoMA, which reopened in 2019 with a permanent collection presentation that was much lauded (including by me, in these pages).1 In this case, the museum’s canonical storyline was left intact, but with periodic asynchronous interruptions, exposing the blind spots in the conventional modernist narrative.

As the V&A’s recent experience suggests, debates about the virtues of chronology seem likely to intensify further. Consider the slow-moving controversy, itself

1

See ‘Rigorous Self-Referentiality’, Disegno #25.

generational in scale, over architect Peter Zumthor’s ambitious rebuilding plans for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). While most of the debate has focused on the plan’s financing, and its inexplicable reduction in overall gallery space, there is also ongoing disagreement over the institution’s curatorial priorities.

LACMA’s director Michael Govan envisions a programme with constantly shifting adjacencies, no permanent collection galleries per se. “Museums are almost waking up from a slumber,” he has said, “from a legacy of a hundred years of categorizing the world once and

It is not difficult to see why chronology is such a vexed issue. The canonbusting instinct has itself become mainstream. leaving it that way.” Others, though, aren’t so sure – among them Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight, who has cast doubt on radical fluidity as a way to form strong and lasting bonds with its public: “Busting up a colonial-era organizing structure is worthy, but to achieve it, maybe the collection’s important art should just be lined up chronologically in the new galleries. Put the oldest work first, the newest last. Done.”

It’s not difficult to see why chronology is such a vexed issue nowadays. The canon-busting instinct has itself become mainstream. Most museum collections being what they are – the accumulated freight of centuries of white supremacy and imperialism – it is far easier to dispense with the skeleton entirely, going boneless, rather than transplant a new spine into it.

For a global museum, or even one that wants to reflect the diversity of a single nation or culture, any one sequential storyline is always going to be problematic, centring some places and experiences at the expense of others. Then too, there are prevailing cultural winds which erode our sense of linearity, and may be reshaping audience expectations. If you want to see history disintegrate before your eyes, just enter a term into

Anatomy

The mixed chronological display at the Stedelijk, which exhibits Picasso’s Femme nue devant le

jardin next to Hans Gugelot and Dieter Rams’s 1956 Braun Phonosuper. (Photograph: Renée de Groot)

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Black Box at Design Museum Holon.

Google Image search. You’ll get an array all but unknown to previous generations (with Aby Warburg’s 1924-1929 Mnemosyne Atlas an honoured exception).

It’s an atemporal view – to cite the title of another MoMA exhibition, a single, shared, “forever now.”

Chronology and its discontents: it’s a pertinent topic for all museums, but perhaps particularly for those specialised in design. Until very recently, our field happily organised itself according to period styles – baroque, rococo, neoclassical, etc., offering the foundational building blocks of design history.

The V&A accounted for the 20th century in just this way, in a series of major exhibitions, beginning with Art Nouveau and continuing through the Arts and Crafts Movement, Art Deco, Modernism, Cold War Modern, and on finally to Postmodernism. I co-curated that last show with Jane Pavitt, and we were often asked what we would do after postmodernism. Our reply was: after postmodernism, there is no we. The “grand

narrative”, as Jean-François Lyotard famously put it, has given way to multi-perspectival fragmentation.

Now, 10 years on from our exhibition and three solid decades since the phenomenon of postmodernism itself, we’re still picking through the pieces. Proponents of chronological display will argue that time’s arrow gives audiences something to follow. And that may be; as Christopher Nolan’s films amply attest, departing from sequential narratives can be confounding. But an arrow is only worth following if you know what the target is. What museums should be offering their various publics is not unanimity, but diversity – more stories, and more ways of telling them. History, and life itself, are pretty confusing, last time I checked.

Maybe it’s not all bad if our museums are too… from time to time. E N D

Anatomy

Nothing About Us Without Us Words Jesse Rice-Evans

I have a pretty strict rule when reading about disability: I only cite books by disabled authors. When I was asked to review Sara Hendren’s new book What Can a Body Do?, I had already heard some of the critiques from disabled writers, and anticipated more of them. This collection has received a lot of attention in academic circles, and it felt critical to look more closely.

Disabled writers are tired of reading books about disability written by non-disabled people. Hendren has been granted the privilege to speak for a community to which she does not belong, just like so many non-disabled parents and caregivers whose heartbreaking tales of sacrifice have garnered so much mainstream recognition. Michael Bérubé’s memoir Life as We Know it: A Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child objectifies the author’s kid, born with Down syndrome, as Hendren’s first child also was. Other writers have also entered these waters after their own experiences with illness.

Sarah Manguso’s The Two Kinds of Decay: A Memoir pores over the author’s illness from an autoimmune condition, rife with eugenical metaphor after ableist metaphor (a wheelchair is described as “a sickening prop”). Non-disabled colleagues recommend these and other books to me, and I have to hide my disgust. These books are published in the US by conglomerates such as Vintage, Picador, and now Riverhead.

Meanwhile, brilliant disabled writers such as J.R. Hughes, Jimena Lucero, Karrie Higgins, and many others cannot secure contracts after publishing their searing poetry and prose in zines, blogs, and small independent magazines for years and sometimes decades. This disconnect is thick with the ableism of Western capitalist industries: without disabled editors, agents, and acquisitions

staff, without understanding audiences as including sick and disabled people, publishing has no motivation to do anything differently.

Regardless of what Hendren’s intentions may be, What Can a Body Do? capitalises on these exclusions, bringing

Without disabled editors, agents, and acquisitions staff, without understanding audiences as including sick and disbled people, publishing has no motivation to do anything differently. critical disability studies of the built world to an audience that is entirely removed from the disability justice organising and advocacy that has been growing throughout North America since the 1990s. “I was partly imagining readers who are nondisabled and thinking these subjects don’t have anything to do with their lives – like, here’s an invitation, this involves you too!” Hendren acknowledged in an August 2020 interview with Alice Wong from Disability Visibility Project.

Hendren’s own interests in art, design, and engineering – she’s an associate professor at Olin College of Engineering, a private non-profit college in Needham, Massachusetts – converge in a simplified

Review

narrative on “disability rights” that is without its essential framings of justice and intersectionality. Of which more later.

Throughout her text, Hendren centres theories of universal design, DeafSpace, cyborgian, and science and technology studies. Her first chapter, ‘Limb’, focuses on several amputees and the ways they’ve used adaptive technology alongside household items and their bodies to navigate the spaces they inhabit. Hendren discusses the difference between “assistive” and “adaptive” technologies and details how several of her subjects negotiate day-to-day tasks with everything from “bionic arms” to zip-ties. “Assistive technology”, Hendren argues, is redundant and misleading terminology, because “assistance is universal whenever we talk about tools”. Prosthetics are instead better captured as adaptive technologies: “Tools don’t run the show; they work together with bodies in a mutual exchange of adaptation.” The chapter also explores the creation of prosthetics and their distribution by exploring the “Jaipur Foot”: a below-knee prosthetic that is designed to be affordable and tough. Hendren emphasises the fluidity of each body’s access needs and the creative ways her subjects have adapted to their environments, sometimes with the aid of expensive rehabilitation engineering gear, sometimes with zip-ties and homemade pulleys.

For Hendren, these examples show how design illuminates problems and possible sites of innovation within assistance and technology, and the space where body-meets-world.

She acknowledges disabled people’s centrality to generative design, and the creative survival techniques of disabled people under the social model

“Our distinctions and specificities are important, but for disability and design in this book the we is both real and profound.”

—Sara Hendren

of disability, but the text still betrays Hendren’s own “inheritance of normal” as a sympathetic outsider. Even while her text neglects the work of disability justice activists – notably multiply-marginalised disabled activists like TL Lewis, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and Alice Wong – she centres work by canon non-disabled scholars and academics, building credibility with non-disabled audiences. “Our distinctions and specificities are important,” she writes.

“But for disability and design in this book, the we is both real and profound[…]

Not everyone should call themselves disabled, but everyone should recognize that both giving and receiving assistance are actions we will each take up in turn, every one of us. Human needfulness really is universal.”

Hendren tries to make her work ethical: the introduction especially is filled with authorial anxiety about her book, particularly in that scrutiny she applies to her use of “we,” an underexamined rhetorical strategy in writing across many fields. On page 5, in the book’s first footnote, Hendren explicates her choice to alternate person-first and identity-first language throughout the text. While I – a trained rhetorician, keenly aware of how choices around language influence and organise our thinking – appreciate this note, the hardcover and audio versions of the book differ interestingly: “I’ll also use nondisabled or atypical instead of normal,” writes Hendren in the text.

In the audiobook, the author says instead, “I’ll also use nondisabled

or typical instead of normal [emphasis mine].” I was struck by this, as the note is clearly included to articulate the goals of person-first language and identity-first language, and yet this minuscule syllable drop entirely changes the meaning of the aside. It’s likely just a typo that was then amended for the audio book, but the slip parallels Hendren’s confusing tone throughout the wider text. It is a common non-disabled refrain: non-disabled people ought to consider the ways bodies meet the built world because of their own future illness and debility (the “universally shared[…] misfit states that come for every body,” in Hendren’s words.)

For the uninitiated, I should mention that the person-first v. identity-first language conflict holds a lot of tension and disagreement within disabled circles: caregivers tend to fight intensely for person-first language (e.g. person with autism) to remind speakers that disabled people are people first, before they are their diagnoses or conditions. For most disabled and neurodivergent people, our illnesses, neurotypes, and embodied experiences are essential parts of who we are and cannot be severed from our person-ness, so we tend to prefer identity-first language (e.g. autistic person). This footnote neatly illustrates Hendren’s positionality: she is nondisabled but feels affiliation with the disabled community through her disabled child. She is a quintessential “disability mom”, who developed research interests in disability identity, history and culture, and has sought entrée to disabled space for her writing. “If you look at my work, I think you’ll see that I try to do my part in centring disabled voices, full stop,” Hendren told Wong. “I’d also like to keep articulating a place for folks like me, whose role in a life-long ecology of care as the parent of a person with Down syndrome implicates my very material life permanently and therefore connects me in a powerful, existential way to all disabled people.”

Hendren’s positionality becomes slightly obscured throughout the text, but we are hit with its sobering resurgence in the conclusion, ‘Making Assistance Visible’, where she writes: “How might we emphasize the figure, the symbolic person of the icon, more than the wheelchair? [emphasis mine].” Here, Hendren discusses her work on the

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International Symbol of Access (ISA) project, which includes the laudable goal of adding dynamic human movement to the long-used blue-and-white wheelchair user symbol, commonly seen on disabled parking and accessible entrances.

Unfortunately, the phrasing here makes a crucial, ableist error. By writing that we need to “emphasize the figure[…] more than the wheelchair,” Hendren assumes a non-disabled audience; an audience that requires regular reminders that disabled people – especially disabled wheelchair users – are human. By centring non-disabled viewers’ responses to the ISA, Hendren echoes common American ideologies of “colourblind” racism and flattening layers of difference into more comfortable (read: white, normative) forms. Why do non-disabled people need constant reminders that disabled people are human?

These things matter, and not solely in relation to disability alone. “No humans involved” has long been a designation used by carceral institutions in the United States to describe instances of violence against sex workers, Black people, disabled people, poor and homeless people, in order to avoid legal liability.

It is a practice which indicates the deprioritisation of marginalised and racialised people who don’t qualify as “human” under white supremacist metrics. Sylvia Wynter’s No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to my Colleagues (1994) explicitly details this “N.H.I.”

Interest in and observation of cultural phenomena for academic purposes does not an expert make. designation as being rooted in virulent anti-Blackness, stating that “whilst not overtly genocidal, [the impact of N.H.I. is] clearly having genocidal effects with the incarceration and elimination of young Black males by ostensibly normal and everyday means”. Notoriously, the Los Angeles Police Department used the N.H.I. designation when investigating the murders of Black women sex workers.

For Hendren to casually mention “the symbolic person” in the ISA without seeming to understand the impact of her

Image courtesy of Riverhead Books.

dehumanising gaze is troubling, especially considering her total lack of discussion of structurally disabling forces at work against Black people – both disabled and non-disabled. Disabled people aren’t “symbolic persons”, and despite Hendren’s well-meaningness, the total erasure of the intersections of Blackness and disability in What Can a Body Do? reflects a number of worrying patterns.

Interest in and observation of cultural phenomena for academic purposes does not an expert make. The myopia of academia holds a place for Hendren’s claims that “[a]ssistance, dependence, vulnerability: these embodied experiences have the dignity of the truly human about them.” But without establishing the relationship between “humanity” and the dehumanising ideologies that persist about Black, disabled, disfigured, and other multiply-marginalised people, Hendren’s words echo in a landscape devoid of meaningful context. To examine “the built world” requires a grasp on invisible structures that inform every single material condition Hendren wants to tackle.

Hendren manages to get through 191 pages of writing (out of 208 pages) on contemporary disability and design without including the topic of race.

The inimitable Audre Lorde appears in ‘Limb’, in which she is quoted at length from The Cancer Journals on the topic of prosthetics. But Lorde’s own work is only included to situate Hendren’s discussion of a handful of (presumably) white people’s experiences with their prosthetic limbs, missing the nuance of Lorde’s own experience with mastectomy and her Black lesbian sexuality. Hendren’s descriptions of characters in the book never include race, meaning that we are to assume their normative whiteness, and that “we,” the readers of the text, can assume a level of familiarity and comfort with those included in Hendren’s text.

This seems a failure at both authorial and editorial levels: it is incredible to publish a book on infrastructures of power that ignores the most visible and egregious forms of oppression that intersect with disability. One only has to look at rates of Covid infection and vaccination, and death for Black Americans to see this illustrated with profound effect.

But the fact remains: Hendren has been allowed into spaces by and

What Can A Body Do?: How We Meet the Built World by Sara Hendren.

Review

for disabled people, and despite her proximity to disability she inevitably misses much of the complexity that disabled people bump against in the built world. By focusing on utopian examples such as the D/deaf-centric architecture of Gallaudet University and the Adaptive Design Association’s work in New York City, Hendren avoids both the realities of carceral ableism (it is estimated that nearly 50 per cent of people murdered by police in the US are disabled) and the near-constant harassment and surveillance that mark the disabled experience, especially in the United States.

I have not been very forgiving here; Hendren is clearly a thoughtful writer, and some of the critiques I’ve made are not exactly her fault. Individual authors cannot be held accountable for the failures of publishing, of academia, of the non-disabled imagination’s fascination with the spectacle of non-normative embodiment. She takes pains to cite disabled scholars, including Aimi Hamraie, Alison Kafer, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson; some of her case studies are interesting and framed by researched context and insightful questions. But for disabled writers and scholars, none of these questions are especially groundbreaking.

Hendren’s “we” remains both non-disabled and utterly unfamiliar with the rich depths of disabled culture that have enabled her to peek into the surface of our worlds, our creative and liberatory interdependence, our uncommodified care and epistemology.

Perhaps the most infuriating section appears in ‘Clock’, Hendren’s chapter focused on crip time – the inevitable slowing and attunement to pacing and meeting the emergent needs of a disabled bodymind. In my world, Hendren would not even be allowed to utter or use the term “crip” anything as a non-physically-disabled person, yet in ‘Clock’ she details her disabled son’s capacity: his simple “joy” in schooling and living. Hendren and her husband’s sudden stumbling into the world of disability as a site of cultural value upon her son’s birth co-occurs with condolences and grief from friends and family upon learning of the child’s diagnosis, neatly illustrating how non-disabled people all too often

adopt an infantilising gaze onto disabled people. Ellen Samuels, a disabled scholar with whom I share a debilitating chronic illness, coined the term “crip time” after her capacity rapidly diminished as a young adult. I came to claim my own “crip time” for the same reasons: I went from waiting tables three days a week while in graduate school to using mobility aids daily in less than a year.

No diagnosis, no insight from medical testing nor dozens of specialists.

My experience is by no stretch unusual, and Hendren seems to struggle to grasp – as most non-disabled people do – that capacity is constantly in flux for all of us, disabled or not.1 But “unhealthy”

What if the future of design centred actual disabled people instead of people writing about us, as if our embodied lives are mere case studies for engineering students to learn from?

disabled people have a unique perspective on crip time: we have very little control over if or when we will feel well enough to work, socialise, or even leave the house or bed. Writing this review is an illustrative example: I promised a draft the first week of January, failed to meet my own deadline, and then waited until I could take medication to help me work against the crushing fatigue of my daily life, now shrunken to my two-bedroom apartment with partner and two cats during Covid.

While Hendren tokenises her child as an illustrative example of what a body can do, more precisely she is concerned with explicating for her readers, what can my child’s body do? A disabled child deserves privacy, to disclose their own needs at their own pace, to articulate their own experience in whatever way is best for them. The established pattern of disability moms (and dads) narrativising their children’s experience on their behalf is coercive and unethical, running counter to the disability activists’ code: “nothing about us without us.” In this case, however, Hendren’s text is entirely about us with very little of our own words: each quote is left up to Hendren’s interpretations,

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coloured as they inevitably are by her position in an ableist culture of publishing, academia, and the United States.

As I, too, quietly publish my work in zines, tiny internet mags, and small press chapbooks, I find myself quietly fuming at Hendren’s casual, chirping positivity for the future of design and access by citing neoliberal understandings of individuals and communities. What if the future of design centred actual disabled people instead of people writing about us, as if our embodied lives are mere case studies for engineering students to learn from?

These are not new concerns; far from it, in fact. But Hendren’s enthusiasm for collecting examples of innovative disabled individuals obscures the fact that we have been forced to survive creatively under the disabling conditions of white supremacist capitalism. Our innovation should be honoured, yes, but to single out the supercrips thriving in a eugenical world misunderstands the very structures Hendren claims to elucidate. In truth, the “networks of caretaking that sustain us all” do not, in fact, sustain many of us.

What Can a Body Do?: How We Meet the Built World by Sara Hendren is published

by Riverhead Books, price $27.

1

New research provides insight into diagnostic wait times for various “rare” illnesses in the United States; my own (still undiagnosed) chronic illness averages eight years between onset and diagnosis, and sometimes much longer than this.

Two Lanes of the Same Highway Words Michael David Mitchell

Clemens Weisshaar rolls his motocross up to a hangar in the middle of arid land somewhere southeast of Lisbon, the dirt cloud from his bike settling in the distance. He pulls off his helmet and, on his way into the studio, walks past three crates labeled [FUTURECRAFT] with the address “Design Museum London” neatly taped to each one. Inside the crates is the Strung Prototyping Cell #8, a robot and software package that could transform the sport shoe industry.

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Images courtesy of Julian Schulz and Kram/Weisshaar.

“If it wasn’t for COVID, you’d be here in person talking with me and Reed about some really cool shit,” Weisshaar tells me, explaining that his partner, Reed Kram, isn’t in Portugal to participate in the interview either. Weisshaar is manning the practice’s Portuguese “Atlantic Office”, Kram its “North Office” in Stockholm. If I had travelled to the hangar in Grândola, Weisshaar continues, he wouldn’t have had to frequently switch between face mode and the front camera to show the beautiful mess that is the abandoned warehouse-turned-design-studio. “There’s always something better to do than unpack,” he half-apologises.

Talking about cool shit seems an apt description – the Strung robotic platform for Adidas’ Futurecraft project is a possible revolution in the art of shoemaking. The system makes it possible to create a shoe upper in minutes without any waste, all while integrating and testing data from different types of runners for each individual shoe, and enabling new types of thread and filaments to be tried and retried in different patterns to create custom zones for support, breathability and flexibility.

All of this physical work of weaving the upper is done by the robot, which can lay thread in 360°, driven by a specially developed software that integrates knowledge and insights from across the shoe industry directly into the digital design tool. “Much of the technology used to make shoes and textiles has been around for centuries,” Weisshaar explains. “Strung is a completely new way of making shoe uppers.”

For this, the Strung machine has earned a spot in Sneakers Unboxed, an exhibition at London’s Design Museum opening in May 2021.

Weisshaar and Kram have worked on projects together for more than 20 years, but not once have they formally shared an office. “The way we work together mirrors how our project teams work together,” says Weisshaar. “We have people fly in from around the world and work for us for maybe 20 or 30 days a year, and they are integral members of the team even if they have other day jobs.” So not much changed for Kram/Weisshaar (K/W) in 2020 when the pandemic and lockdowns drove studios and companies around the world into a distributed working model. “You have a lot of people around the table, have great dinners together, and then you just crack on with stuff during the day,” Weisshaar explains. “When the work is done, everyone flies home.”

K/W are so at ease with this way of working that they pulled off the Futurecraft project in 12 months, no small feat considering that – in order to be competitive in the market – they are up against existing industrial technologies that are extremely difficult to match in terms of cost and speed. “We went from a research idea and proof of concept, to a fully functional, industry-competitive system in that year,” says Weishaar, explaining that teams of researchers, designers and engineers were working around the clock. With the K/W offices in Sweden and Portugal joined by Adidas collaborators on the West Coast of the US and in Asia, Weisshaar and Kram are still orchestrating three eight-hour shifts to code, test filaments, integrate new data, set up servers, build robots, and code some more. “We build the technology and make it available,” says Weisshaar, “and then others can join in and make their designs and tests on this platform.”

Process

Work underway on the Strung robot in Kram/Weisshaar’s studio in Portugal.

As with most of K/W’s work, Strung is built around a fluid relationship between the digital design, the means of production and the physical object itself: the Strung system is as much robot as it is bespoke design software. The shoe is first conceived on the design interface. This custom platform allows designers to draw infinite layers of various threads in any direction – much like layers on a photo-editing software – but can also directly integrate sweat, heat and stretch maps into the design space, helping to guide the designer along the path. These maps become clear parameters, directly incorporating performance data from individual athletes into the design process. “Everyone who designs sport shoes knows the sport science, but this knowledge gets stuck in PowerPoint presentations and is rarely really integrated into the shoe design,” explains Weisshaar. “By integrating these insights directly into the software, we are empowering designers. We are redesigning design.”

For K/W, creating this type of product-specific software can bring designers into closer contact with the data and best practices of whatever field they may be working in. In the case of Strung, the software allows for a level of specificity and tailoring in relation to athletes’ biomechanical data that would otherwise be impossible. “Getting the designers closer to the lab with the athlete, getting the designers closer to the workshops where shoes are actually made, getting the designers closer to the factories – there’s a huge value in that,” Weisshaar tells me. Once the designer draws the shoe upper on the Strung software, one click sends the file through to the robot. The Strung robot itself consists of a poured concrete base bolted to the floor, 10 spool systems that work much like the spools on a sewing machine, a large plate with pins around the circumference upon which the patterns are woven, and an extremely fast robotic arm equipped with a custom grabber/cutter tool. “Getting the fastest robot on the market is a great motivator for the team,” says Weisshaar. “They’re so fast they blow you out of the water!”

Once the design is with the robot, its arm grabs one of the threads and weaves a couple of figure eights around two starting pins on the plate, then races with lightning speed from one side of the plate to another until a pattern emerges: a series of almost parallel lines with one or several conjunction points. The arm then weaves another figure eight and cuts the thread, placing the thread back in place and quickly picking up another one for the next layer. This process is repeated until the design is complete, before someone removes the plate to be heat pressed. As each yarn has a filament of thermoplastic glue threaded in, this pressing process consolidates the shoe upper into its final form.

What results from Strung is a shoe that is more a prosthetic extension of the human foot than a piece of fashion or sport equipment. Weisshaar shows me a spiked sport shoe prototype that the studio has just finished.

“It looks like a claw more than a shoe, like an augmented foot!” Weisshaar almost shouts from behind his phone. “We want to make a shoe that allows the athlete to do something he or she couldn’t do without it.”

The three-dimensional weaving technology used in Strung is a concept borrowed from carbon-fibre manufacturing in the boating and aeronautic industry, but which has never been applied to textiles 38

Members of the K/W team, which assembles on a project by project basis. Clemens Weisshaar is shown top right, Reed Kram bottom left.

Getting the fastest robot on the market is a great motivator.

They’re so fast they blow you out of the water!” —Clemens Weisshaar

The finished Strung robot.

Process

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or shoemaking before. “We couldn’t work with just one kind of fibre as with the carbon-fibre technology, but wanted many colours and different fibres that we could combine in one textile,” explains Weisshaar. “And we wanted to be fast enough to make it relevant as an industrial process.”

In order to innovate within the sport shoe industry, K/W must prove that their technology can go beyond the current king of the hill – the knit. “The last big advance in shoemaking was the knit, which is a good technology,” Weisshaar continues. “But our shoes are not knitted, they are strung. A strung shoe has seamless, truly seamless, transitions between patterns with different properties. We can combine these properties through layering to make new ones, making shoe uppers that perform unlike any other.” Whereas a knit fabric is made on a machine using the traditional two-axis loom, Strung can lay thread in any direction, theoretically opening the door to an infinite amount of combinations when layered – more possible combinations than a knit could ever provide. These combinations should lead to a better fit and increased performance for the athlete.

To be commercially viable, however, the Strung robot must be fast and robust enough to integrate into existing industrial production models. “With this type of automation, you’ll have a couple fewer workers in the factory, but they’ll be doing more interesting things,” explains Weisshaar. “The robot does the stupid monkey work, which is what robots are good at. Strung can make a shoe upper in minutes and we can scale up to make hundreds of thousands of them quite easily.” In order to potentially transform the shoemaking industry, K/W first had to learn everything about making shoes, taking it all apart and rebuilding the production model using entirely new technology. “It’s just insane amounts of materials and shit,” Weisshaar explains. “So you’re not only dealing with sensors, robots, computers, cables, and everything, but you’re also dealing with very soft things like yarns and textiles.

We spent a lot of time speaking to people in the industry to understand materials and best practices – all of that is part of the technology mix.”

In this sense, Strung is a culmination of more than 20 years of the studio’s thinking about engineering complex systems – a dialogue between design and jocose intellectual exploration through technology that began back in 1999 when Kram and Weisshaar were working for Rem Koolhaas on Prada stores in New York and LA, and which was then solidified in 2002 with their own project, Breeding Tables.

At the end of the 1990s, Koolhaas poached Weisshaar from his first year of masters studies in design at the Royal College of Art in London.

Kram, meanwhile, was a founding member of the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the MIT Media Lab. He was brought in as an external consultant to develop media for the Prada Epicenter Stores that Koolhaas’s OMA and AMO architecture and research studios were developing at the time. The Prada project marked the first time that the pair had worked together, and their mutual affinity for crossing disciplines became immediately apparent. “Product branding, industrial design, coding, and digital media design were seen as completely separate disciplines,” says Weisshaar. “We made what we did in the 42

K/W’s work on the Prada Epicenter Stores, the studio’s first project.

Prada stores simply because there was no way to do it the old-fashioned way, and we realised how cool the stuff was that we were able to make together.” The pair created an installation for the stores that involved screens hung vertically on the racks between clothes, displaying catwalk footage as well as designers’ sketches of the surrounding garments.

At the time, there wasn’t a suitable graphics card available to play videos in portrait mode – so they built one themselves. “The Prada stores anticipated the approaching digital inflection point, with computers everywhere and storms of images to connect these pants to that jacket because it looked like this on the runway,” explains Weisshaar. “It was a simulation of what we now live in, a sort of local eCom site, creating all of the connections for the client and the consumer.”

Working on the Prada project brought Weisshaar and Kram to Milan in 2002 and, as they walked around the city’s annual Salone del Mobile trade fair, Weisshaar describes a sense of frustration setting in. “Wow, this design world was so much about the next coffee table, the next plastic chair,” he recalls. “It felt almost embarrassing, and as I showed Reed around my world I was like, ‘Right, this is fucked up.’ Things had become very stylistic and everything was about styling objects to cost, and to be minimal and beautiful. We knew there was space for doing something completely different.” While in the US, working out of OMA’s New York office, the pair had experienced growing hype around new technologies and the internet, and come to believe that design had the potential to move in a new direction altogether by placing digital technology and production tools at the centre of the discipline. On their way back to New York from Milan, K/W had the idea of generating an infinite number of tables using a custom algorithm. They based the mathematical formula on DNA replication and Weisshaar scribbled the words “Breeding Tables” on a napkin at the airport. The name stuck.

The Breeding Tables are generated by a computer program coded

by K/W. Equal parts thought experiment, new production model and provocation, the tables became collectors’ items and were featured in The Double Club, a conceptual London nightclub thought up by the artist Carsten Höller. “A table is a seemingly simple object,” says Weisshaar, “but once you put that DNA logic in place, it’s very easy to make it go mad. It was really about making a statement by illustrating a vision of what manufacturing is and could be in 2002.” To breed a table, the computer program takes certain parameters – such as weight-bearing capacity of the materials, the desired height and size of the finished table – as well as the physical limitations of the bending machine and laser cutter that subsequently produce the design. The algorithm then churns out a potentially infinite number of designs, which are subsequently paired together using a DNA model as if the two tables are now parents of a third one, creating additional sets of infinite tables. “You couldn’t possibly process all of these versions of tables as a human, so play is the only way to explore,” says Weisshaar.

“That’s what we do – experiment with technology, play with technology, and maybe push technology to see what can be done and understand Process

Breeding Tables (2003).

“Things had become very stylistic. We knew there was space for doing something completely different.”

—Clemens Weisshaar

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Process

the potential. But we also push it so far that sometimes, you’ve made something that overrides your own aesthetic vision.”

Despite this play with technology and digital techniques, K/W are careful not to divorce these worlds from physical processes. “We very much see the digital realm as a hyper-extension to our physical space,” stresses Weisshaar, who describes the digital as “another lane on the same highway as the physical – and we are driving the car down the middle.” The first element of this extended space is overtly physical: the infrastructure such as graphic cards, servers, robots and so forth that actually drive digital processes. Compared to 20 years ago, there are now a lot more off-the-shelf hardware components available, making life easier for K/W. Yet these components are still often modified by the studio and put together in specific ways to create systems that can fulfil complex tasks, as they did with the Strung robot: transforming a robotic arm into a three-dimensional weaving apparatus by cobbling together diverse elements. In this sense, the physical components of the digital infrastructure are the malleable substrates upon which a project can be realised. Without the capacity to manipulate the plastic, metal and silicon, K/W wouldn’t have the means to produce their desired outcome.

The second element of digital is the code on which this hardware runs. While minds may tend to wander when one speaks of coding and computer languages, it is enough to understand that K/W build logical systems within which a large amount of play and experimentation is embedded. As authors of the code for their projects, they are creating the logic upon which they and other users can test and execute formulas.

In short, the code allows them to pull in data, design the object on the computer screen, and then create it in the physical world. Taken together, all of this forms a system – part physical, part intellectual – that becomes a new tool for creating design. “We’re using tools to build tools for others to use,” Weisshaar tells me, in what seems the most succinct description of K/W’s activity. “We do this by playing around with the logic within a system and pushing the physical limitations of the materials and production process. It’s all very exploratory and sometimes we’re not sure one part of the experiment is going to work, but we’re almost always sure we’re headed in the right direction.”

Another of K/W’s projects, Robochop (2015), illustrates this idea of creating tools for others and also highlights the importance the studio places on experimentation, play and familiarising the public about the link between digital design and physical production. The project consists of an online digital design interface that is open to the public and a robot that manipulates a 40x40x40cm foam cube. Anyone with a web browser can then cut and slice into a digital representation of the cube, before sending the design to a dedicated production system. The digital cuts are precisely replicated by the robotic arm, which can push and pull the foam cube in almost any direction against a heated wire. The result is hundreds of individually designed objects. “At first people wanted to buy the objects that other people had made, which made me furious,” admits Weisshaar. “I wanted to yell at them to go make their own design – the robot will make it for you for free!” Subsequently, however, he says 46

Robochop (2015).

K/W’s exploration of digital design has always been married to an interest in physical production.

Process

that he has come to terms with varying interpretations of the studio’s work: “We’ve been called the designers’ designers, and while that may be true of those who intellectually really get our work, it’s more exciting for us to reach a large audience and observe unbiased reactions.”

Much like Strung and Breeding Tables, the Robochop interface integrates the physical limitations of the production model directly into the design platform. There are some types of cuts that simply won’t work physically, and these are rejected by the system. “These limitations are the fence around the playground,” says Weisshaar. “When you realise that you can’t go outside of the fence, you’ve got all the freedom to play within these limits.” And therein lies the link between K/W’s digital design practice and the physical manifestation of the objects: the digital as a mirror of the physical, or two lanes of the same highway.

All of which brings us back full circle to Strung: a 20-year apotheosis of thinking and practicing design. In spite of the apparent complexity of the Strung robot, K/W’s lasting contribution to the shoe industry is more likely found in its software platform for designers. “By building specific software to make shoe uppers this way, the platform can evolve along with the technology,” explains Weisshaar. He’s prescient enough to know that there will be ever-faster robots, new filaments, and better data, but the real challenges in the project come from taking the depth of human knowledge about material and sport science, and then combining this with athlete data to create a testing and production platform that can be used anywhere in the world.

“You have a lot of people who happily let technology drive them, rather than being the ones who drive technology,” says Weisshaar.

“But we have found that the best way is to make the technology ourselves and actually physically test on that technology. We test again and again to create insights that we can then lift into the digital realm to make reusable by others.” The end product of Strung is less a new type of shoe than it is a process that allows for shoe upper production to be based on aggregating insights from across the industry. “We’ve designed and made the tools that can consolidate that data and make it usable,” says Weisshaar. “To turn that information into actionable insights requires insights beyond just the raw data.”

As this article was being written, the K/W studio in Portugal was receiving a shipment of robot parts to be assembled in the space.

The idea is to ramp up testing with a view to creating shoe factories full of robots. “On a day like today we are a robot-building workshop; the next day we’re testing shoes; and before that we were setting up the IT infrastructure and prototyping,” summarises Weisshaar. The studio’s approach to the modulability of its space echoes their philosophy that almost anything is possible with the right team, knowledge set, and enough electricity to run their servers, laptops and robots. Weisshaar sees their work as essentially connecting the dots between designers, humans and machines. “You should probably scrap that earlier metaphor of the digital and physical being two lanes of the same highway, because it’s actually impossible to draw that dotted line,” he says. “It’s overlapping, it’s fluid, it’s a helix.” E N D 48

Strung shoes, produced using K/W’s new methodology.

Words Oli Stratford

Image by Choreo.

Honext!Back in 2011, a paper mill approached the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya with a problem. “A huge problem,” explains Pol Merino. “The primary sludge.”

Primary sludge is exactly what it sounds like. As paper is recycled, the cellulose fibres within the material become shorter. “It’s a really stressful mechanical process for the fibre, which is damaged quite badly,” says Merino.

“So after a point, the [shortened] fibre simply falls through the filter and cannot be recycled any further.” This is the primary sludge, a cellulosic slurry to which Honext estimates 10 to 15 per cent of recycled cellulose is lost, causing around 7m tonnes of it to be produced each year. “There are two options,” says Merino. “Incineration or landfill.” Poor sludge.

A problem, then, but one to which a solution began to emerge. “If you take paper, put water on it and shape it, then it has some strength once it has dried,” Merino explains. “That’s because cellulose fibres have a natural ability to form hydrogen bonds. When we saw the waste, it was really the worst fibre you could imagine, but it still had those same properties.” The university’s team knew that the primary sludge could never become paper again, but they still wanted to see whether it could be moulded into something new instead.

The result is Honext, a material predominantly used as a construction board in the style of MDF or drywall, which can be used as either interior partitioning or as interior cladding.

Honext has similar functional traits to these competitor materials, but differs in that it does not include binding resins, which are non-recyclable and can, in the case of MDF, emit harmful particles such as formaldehyde. By contrast, Honext is entirely recyclable, made using only the primary sludge in conjunction with non-toxic additives to aid with moisture resistance and to ensure fire retardancy. “We love our material, but ultimately it’s a partition in a building,” says Merino, who serves as the company’s managing director.

“Honext has to have the lowest

environmental impact possible, because otherwise the building is going to look really nice, but we’ll have destroyed the world to build it.”

The trick, of course, is moving from that primary sludge to the final board. “That’s the work of an enzymatic cocktail,” Merino explains. Enzymes increase the surface area of the damaged cellulose fibres, allowing the matter to be shaped in a press. With the application of heat, the material can then dry into its final form. It is a complicated process, but one which the company is hoping to roll out more widely. Honext’s first plant is based at the Vacarisses Waste Treatment Facility in Catalonia, but the company is now finalising a modular version of their equipment that can be installed directly within paper mills.

“Instead of trying to build a huge site and have the raw materials shipped in, we can go inside paper mills and locally transform waste that would otherwise go into landfill,” says Merino. “We envisage a distributed production network and we want the mills to operate this. They won’t have the costs of incineration or landfill any more, and we’ll pay them to operate the site.” If the plan comes to fruition, it’ll be a lifeline for sludge everywhere.

Observation

The Clock and the Hunchback Words Lemma Shehadi!Photographs William Daniels, Ivor Prickett, Tommy Trenchard, Teun Voten and Iva Zimova

The damaged base of the al-Nuri Mosque’s al-Hadba minaret (above). The structure is now to be restored as part of a Unesco project to rebuild Mosul’s religious sites.

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Images (from top to bottom) by William Daniels and Tommy Trenchard. Image on previous spread by Ivor Prickett.

“Mosul is a city that dreams of the past,” says Saqr Zakaria, a 30-year-old activist from the devastated city in northern Iraq. “We hear about Mosul in the 20s, of its Golden Age, of the important families, and the writers and poets who once lived here.

But my experience of the city has been one of occupation, radicalisation and weapons.” Zakaria is among many young Maslawis who are working to rebuild their city, which was occupied by IS in 2014, and reduced to rubble in the subsequent US coalition war to liberate it three years later.

A year ago, Zakaria took over a heritage home in the medieval part of the old city, which he turned into a period-themed arts space and café called Bytna (Our Home). Inside, several rooms decorated with antiques, local crafts and old photographs provide venues for community workshops. A traditional teahouse serves over a hundred locals daily. “We want people to come and connect with Mosul’s past and its real identity,” he says. “Many Maslawis have no knowledge of what the city was once like.”

As one of the world’s oldest cities, Mosul has many pasts to turn to. The medieval city, where Zakaria’s arts space is, was built on the western flank of the Tigris river. A short walk away are the remains of the 12th-century al-Nuri Mosque and its leaning minaret, built by the city’s Seljuk ruler, and destroyed during Mosul’s occupation by the armed jihadist group Islamic State (IS). Beyond al-Nuri is a Dominican monastery established in the 19th century, which brought the region’s first printing press and modern manuscripts library. Further on is a complex of churches, including the remains of a 7th-century chapel of the ancient Syriac order. And on the other side of the river are the ruins of the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh, dating back to 6,000 BCE. These buildings point not only to Mosul’s deep history, but also its diversity. The city was once a major Levantine hub on the trade route to India, where communities of different faiths and languages co-existed for centuries. Yet decades of sectarianism and conflict, compounded by IS’s occupation, eroded this social fabric. Mosul became known as a homogeneous, religiously conservative city, and a hotbed of terrorism.

This historic coexistence is now the subject of Unesco’s $110m cultural heritage recovery project, which aims to “revive the spirit” of the devastated city.

“Mosul is Iraq’s second city, and it has always been

an important centre for culture and trade,” says Paolo Fontani, who leads Unesco’s mission in Iraq.

“We want to revive its spirit as a city of exchanges and a city of culture.” With $50m funding sourced from the UAE, three major landmarks of the old city that were destroyed during the Battle for Mosul will be rebuilt: the al-Nuri Mosque and its leaning minaret, the 19th-century Dominican monastery, and the 19th-century Syriac-Catholic Cathedral of al-Tahera.

“These icons stood for centuries as the living symbols of Mosul’s cultural ethos and its rich and diverse civilisational identity,” says the UAE’s Minister of Culture Noura Al Kaabi. The UAE opposes political Islam and projects an image of diversity and tolerance, which it has also applied to its presence in Mosul.

“We are committed to playing a decisive role in bringing peace and prosperity to all parts of our region, including Mosul and Iraq,” she adds.

Alongside this is an EU-funded project to restore heritage homes, revive the city’s crafts, and build new schools.

But can a city that has lost its social fabric be restored through its buildings alone, and which past do Unesco and its partners hope to restore it to? The questions are pertinent not just to Mosul, but to several Middle Eastern cities that have been destroyed in the last 10 years and require reconstruction. In Syria, the architectural heritage of cities like Homs and Aleppo are being rebuilt, while millions of their original inhabitants were made refugees. This intractable relationship between the built environment and its social fabric highlights both the role and the limitations of architecture and cultural heritage preservation in a post-conflict setting.

The name Mosul is believed to come from “wasala”, an Arabic word for link. For millennia, this city served as a crossroads linking North to South, and East to West. Muslin, a cotton-based fabric, is said to have derived its name from its Mosul traders, the musuliyin, who imported it from South Asia to Europe. Culturally, the city was closer to the regions in modern-day Syria and Turkey than it was to Iraq’s capital, Baghdad. “As the historical land of the Assyrians, Upper Mesopotamia, where Nineveh (now Mosul) lies, belongs as much to Syria to the West, as it does to Iraq to the South,” says Percy Kemp, a Paris-based author and historian of Mosul.

“Etymologically, the name Syria derives from the

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name Assyrian, so that one might say that Syria belongs to Mosul as much as Mosul belongs to Syria.”

The medieval city grew on the Western banks of the Tigris, but has since expanded onto the Eastern Bank.

These two sides are now referred to colloquially as the “Left” and “Right” coasts of the city.

“In modern history, two conditions had to be met for Mosul to prosper and flourish,” explains Kemp. “The city had to have unhindered access to the Mediterranean Sea, so as to be able to fulfil its role as a trade link between East and West.

And concurrently, a strong and autonomous local power needed to be in place, failing which the advantages of trade would be siphoned off by the central government or else by some powerful neighbour.” The city declined under Mongol rule, which began in the 13th century, but was redeveloped in the 16th century by the Ottomans, before prospering under the rule of a local dynasty, the Jalili family, who were appointed the walis or governors of Mosul in the 18th and 19th centuries. As such, the modern erosion of Mosul’s cosmopolitan identity began with the drawing of borders by British and French colonial powers in the early 20th century. In 1926, Mosul became a part of Iraq, whose capital was Baghdad, and its natural geographical connections to Syria and Turkey were disrupted. “Successive governments after that turned Mosul into a local Iraqi city, rather than maintaining its international links,” says Omar Mohammed, a Paris-based historian from Mosul, who lived through the IS occupation and blogged about daily life there under the pseudonym Mosul Eye. Today, the city’s population has a Sunni Muslim majority. Yet traces of Mosul’s more diverse social fabric are still found in the old city’s urban layout and buildings. “Mosul’s powerful families gathered Christians and Jews to live in their quarters,” says Najeeb Michaeel, Archbishop of Mosul’s Chaldean Church, who was born in Bab al-Bayd, one of the city’s historic gates. “Every quarter felt like its own city.”

Across the rest of the Ottoman Empire, non-Muslim minorities lived in closed quarters, and their gates were shut to strangers after the evening curfew.

Mosul was the only major city where these Christian and Jewish quarters remained open, a sign of the co-existence it enjoyed under local rule.

The market life that developed along the city’s Ottoman ramparts helped foster this diversity.

Mohammed Hadid, the Iraqi politician and father of the late architect Zaha Hadid, describes the habits and lifestyle of Mosul’s merchant class in the early 20th century in his 2007 book Memoirs. His family lived in a series of interconnected homes around the Bab al-Saray, or Palace Gate, which still houses markets: “The home was divided into separate quarters for men and women,” he wrote. “The entrance to the house had four doors, leading to these quarters.

The walls along the main roads had no windows.”

These Ottoman walls had simply been incorporated into homes as Mosul expanded over time.

“One might say that Syria belongs to Mosul as much as Mosul belongs to Syria.”

—Percy Kemp

Iraq’s political upheavals, however, often led to backlashes against the city’s minorities. Michaeel recalls the aftermath of a Communist revolt in Mosul when he was a child in the early 1960s. At the time, many of the city’s Christians were members of the Iraqi Communist Party. “The reprisals targeted Christians in the city and in the surrounding villages,” he says. “People were tied to cars and dragged by their feet across the city, or they were hanged outside the Mosul hospital.” Yet despite violence such as this, Mosul’s cosmopolitan spirit survived through most of the 20th century. During the city’s annual Spring Festival, for instance, the statue of the Virgin Mary outside the Dominican monastery would be strewn with offerings and images from the city’s different communities: Christians, Muslim Arabs, Kurds, Turcomen and Yazidis. It was an indication of the city’s heterogenous nature: many languages, many faiths, largely coexisting despite the tensions and difference between them.

Fast-forward to June 2014, and Mosul, now a city of more than one million people, was seized by IS overnight. The city became a part of its selfproclaimed “caliphate”, which consisted of vast swathes of mostly deserted territory in Iraq and Syria. IS placed Mosul’s culture at the heart of

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Mosul photographed during the 2016-17 battle

Images (from top to bottom) by Iva Zimova and Tommy Trenchard.

between IS and US-led coalition forces.

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its propaganda. The city’s Muslim heritage that did not conform to more puritanical understandings of Islam was its first target. After destroying all of the historic Muslim shrines, including 12 conical domes, it blew up the tomb of the Prophet Jonas, a pilgrimage site for all of the city’s religions. Then it turned its destruction to the ancients, who were not only preIslamic, but potent symbols of Iraqi nationalism: the Assyrian city of Nimrud, the ruins of the Kingdom of Hatra in the Nineveh Plains, and artefacts at the Mosul museum. Finally, it drove out minorities from both the city and the Nineveh Plains. This assault resulted in the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, who fled to cities in the Kurdistan region of Iraq.

The US-led coalition’s battle to liberate Mosul saw further cultural destruction – and all but obliterated the city. Mosul’s ancient churches, believed to be hiding spots for IS fighters, were reduced to rubble in air strikes. Then, as IS came close to defeat, the al-Nuri mosque with its leaning minaret imploded, with both sides accusing the other of destroying it.

According to the UN, 800,000 residents fled the city

the project ignores the less-documented and often overlooked decline of Mosul, which began several decades before IS’s take over. Decades of autocratic one-party rule had already eroded political life in the city. The Iran-Iraq war, the invasion of Kuwait and the ensuing UN-embargo on Iraq in the 90s, isolated the country. Meanwhile, Saddam Hussein’s “Arabisation” policies brought Arab Sunni tribes to the Nineveh Plains, and the giant dam that he built north of the city in the early 1980s destabilised buildings in the old city.

In the 1990s, Saddam, who fashioned himself as a secular Arab nationalist, launched the Faith Campaign, aimed at reviving Islam in public life to consolidate his rule as the country was crippled by sanctions. “In Mosul, this gave a pathway to the Muslim Brotherhood,” explains Rasha Al Aqeedi, a senior analyst and the head of the nonstate actors programme in the human security unit at the Newlines Institute for Strategy and Policy. “Mosul was always religiously conservative, but its approach to Islam was closer to [the] Sufi approaches of the Levant. When the Brotherhood took platform, these Sufi traditions were frowned upon. Discrimination and intolerance towards other religions grew.”

Sectarian troubles after the US-led invasion in 2003 caused further devastation to Mosul. “After the regime fell, we hoped for progress and an opening to the world. Unfortunately, we went backwards and not forwards,” says Abu Bakr Kanaan, director of Mosul’s Sunni Endowment Office, a religious authority that owns the al-Nuri Mosque and minaret, among other landmarks in the city. The newly-formed Iraqi government marginalised Mosul because of its majority Sunni population, which was viewed as sympathetic to Saddam and Sunni Islamist groups.

Al-Qaeda took hold of the city in 2006, and staged frequent attacks. “We experienced a brain drain.

The city’s doctors, lawyers and engineers started leaving,” says Kanaan.

During this period, Mosul’s non-muslim minorities were targeted. “Many Yazidis who worked in the public sector once lived in Mosul – Saddam had given them land and a home in the city – but they all left after the fall of the regime in 2003,” explains Nasr Hajj, a Yazidi activist from Bashiqa, a neighbouring district in the Nineveh Plains that is home to an important Yazidi community. Mosul’s Christians, meanwhile, dwindled to a few thousand. To compound this, Iran-backed

“We hoped for progress and an opening to the world. Unfortunately we went backwards.”

—Abu Bakr Kanaan

and more than 40,000 civilians were reportedly killed. Throughout the research for this piece, the complete destruction of the city to get rid of IS was often described to me privately as being vengeful or unnecessary.

IS made a deliberate spectacle of its iconoclasm, and Western media embraced its propaganda videos as a symbol of a clash of civilisations. The joint Unesco and UAE project adopts a similar narrative, of using culture to combat radicalisation. “The youth of Mosul who [are working] side by side with their Muslim and Christian peers on the mosque and church sites[...] will be able to attest to the power of fraternity and tolerance,” says Al Kaabi. But in adopting this tack,

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Pope Francis travelled to Iraq in March 2021, visiting cities including Mosul as part of a bid to recognise the nation’s declining Christian

Image by Ivor Prickett.

community, and encourage those who have left to return.

Shi’a militias, who were sent by the Iraqi government on the pretext of controlling al-Qaeda, subjected the city’s civilians to frequent acts of torture and humiliation. This included the forced displacement of Sunni Shabaks, a Kurdish-speaking minority, from the Nineveh Plains. “It was a fertile recruitment ground for al-Qaeda,” says Al Aqeedi.

Today, the continued marginalisation of Mosul

by Iraqi authorities hampers attempts to develop a new civic life. In October 2019, when youth protests took hold across Iraq, Mosul and other Sunni-majority cities remained silent, fearing retribution from the government if they participated. A Maslawi theatre troupe did, however, release a music video on YouTube in solidarity with the protestors elsewhere. The song’s title, ‘Bliya Djara’, means “no solution” in a slang that has remnants of Turkish. The song itself is a pastiche of the Italian anti-fascist folk song ‘Bella Ciao’.

Mosul’s people built their city’s shrines, palaces, mosques, markets synagogues and churches,

but today Unesco and the UAE, alongside other organisations, are attempting the reverse process: by rebuilding the city’s heritage, they hope to revive its social fabric. “Mosul is coming back,” says Unesco’s Fontani. “I speak to Maslawis and there is a lot of willingness to revive the city. I’m confident they will make Mosul even better than it was before.”

Unesco and the UAE’s joint project focuses on the reconstruction of the city’s religious buildings, rather than its market activity. “These buildings represent the essence of the social fabric of the city. Therefore, restoring these buildings, is an important step in restoring the social fabric of Mosul,” says Al Kaabi.

The challenge of rebuilding Mosul has no precedent, adds Fontani. “We hope it will serve as an example in how to rebuild other cities that have been destroyed by conflict.”

This idea that reconstruction can restore coexistence was echoed during Pope Francis’ visit to Iraq in March 2021, which aimed to highlight Iraq’s dwindling Christian community and encourage the

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hundreds of thousands who had left the country to return. In Mosul, where just dozens of Christians now live in the city, the Pope spoke amid the rubble and ruins of al-Tahera, which is part of a complex of four churches that also includes an Armenian church, a Syriac-Orthodox cathedral, and a 7th-century chapel, known as the “old” al-Tahera. Together, they outline the age and diversity of this community. “Such a rich cultural and religious fabric […] is weakened by the loss of any of its members,” said the Pope, who also highlighted the relationship between the Dominican Monastery’s clock tower, which once rang in the city every 15 minutes, and al-Nuri’s leaning minaret, whose prominence in the old city’s skyline helped orient visitors. “The two buildings call on each other and serve as points of orientation,” explains Fontani.

“One tells the time, the other indicates your position in the city.”

The biggest physical challenge in Unesco’s reconstruction efforts will be restoring this 12th-century leaning minaret, al-Hadba, which means “hunchback”.

After its destruction, only the base of the 45m-high minaret was still standing. Omar Al Taqa, a Unesco engineer leading the reconstruction of the complex, says it took months to clear the site. “We cleared 5,000 tonnes of rubble and found remnants of exploded IEDs,” he explains. “In the al-Nuri Mosque, we found 20 unexploded IEDs hidden within the walls of the mosque and active bombs in the prayer hall.” Today, 44,000 pieces of the structure’s original material have been collected and indexed. “We don’t know exactly who destroyed the mosque and the minaret, but people who were living in the area at the time say IS exploded the complex, because it was the seat of their caliphate, and they didn’t want to return it to a liberated city.”

The reconstruction will preserve the minaret’s famous lean, which was noted as early as the 14th century by the traveller Ibn Battuta. Al Taqa believes that the lean is connected to the changing temperature of the bricks. “The bricks grow and shrink throughout the day according to the temperature,” he explains.

A monitoring system has been installed at the base of the site, to measure its width, temperature and inclination. “Until now the minaret [has been] stable and we’re not seeing any movement.”

In addition, an architectural competition in April selected designs by a team led by Egyptian architect Salah El Din Samir Hareedy for al-Nuri’s renovation, as well as an adjoining park and school. “It will

serve as a place for worship, reflection, learning and exchange. Its gardens and memorial site will allow residents and visitors to engage with the history of Mosul,” says Al Kaabi. But many original features will be preserved following the results of a survey that was conducted among the city’s residents. Al Taqa’s team is working with craftsmen from Mosul to rebuild the wooden foundations, and the alabaster marble columns of the prayer hall. The mosque and minaret may take on a new significance in the city after its reconstruction. “Al-Hadba is a landmark in the city,” says Al Taqa, who is 30 and a resident of Mosul. “But before it was destroyed, young people like me didn’t visit it much. When we were in our 20s and IS took the city, we couldn’t go there at all. But we have stories about it from our fathers and grandfathers, who even went up to the top of the minaret.”

Just a few minutes walk away, the Dominican monastery is remembered as an important centre of learning in the city. In addition to its prominent clock tower, the stone two-domed building includes a refectory, individual monastic cells, and a library.

“Three elements make up a monastery: the church for prayer, the refectory reflects communal life, and the library is a space for contemplation and the study of God,” explains Olivier Poquillon, a French brother of the Dominican order who is overseeing the reconstruction.

The current premises were built in the 1870s by the French emperor Napoleon III. Princess Eugenie, Napoleon’s wife, gifted a clock to the church, through which the building’s church gets its name “Our Lady of The Hour”. In Arabic, it is colloquially known as al-Saa, meaning “the clock”. “It was the first clock in Mesopotamia,” says Poquillon. “It may appear like a mundane object today, but at the time it represented high technology.” Until the 1930s, the area around the al-Saa hosted the diplomatic outpost for the French Consul and the Vatican.

The Dominicans opened the region’s first modern schools for boys and girls in the building in the 1840s, which attracted both Muslim and Christians pupils, as well as the first printing press and manuscripts library. Thinkers, poets, and musicians of all faiths and communities visited the monastery to access these resources. “The first Arabic Bible, and the first book of Kurdish grammar were printed here,” says Poquillon. “Manuscripts were once the reserve of Mosul’s prominent families,” explains Mohammed,

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the historian, “but the library made these records more widely accessible to anyone in the region.

It helped democratise learning.”

Both historic and contemporary attempts to diminish this influence are visible around the building,

“The two buildings call on each other. One tells the time, the other indicates

Image on previous spread by Teun Voeten.

your position.” —Paolo Fontani however, such as a mosque facing the church that Saddam built in the 1980s. During IS’s occupation, the complex served as a military court and execution ground, its clock tower was damaged, and parts of the clock itself were looted. Tiles from the ceiling have fallen and when the walls were stripped a Unesco clearance team uncovered hidden weapons.

The library’s 800 manuscripts were transferred to safety in Erbil in 2014, the capital of the Kurdistan region, where they remain. Today, the former girls’ school, which closed down in the 1960s, is used for parking cars.

An earlier renovation of the monastery in the 1990s focused on the building’s interiors. A symbolic colour scheme and restoration style was developed to show the city’s suffering and resilience after the Iran-Iraq war. The vaulted ceilings are patterned with a mosaic of interlocked white, grey, blue and earth red tiles, with calligraphic inscriptions in Arabic on the rims of the rounded arches. But today, the recovery efforts go beyond physical challenges towards intangible ones: reviving the monastery’s social and educational role. “It’s not about re-decorating,” says Poquillon. “I don’t want the building to become a museum. It’s about allowing the social, religious and innovative elements that make up the space to continue.” But can this be achieved when much of the community the monastery used to serve has now left the city?

In this spirit, Mohammed, who is also active in several efforts to revive the city’s heritage, is working on the development of a “green path:” a tree-planting project between the al-Nuri Mosque and al-Saa. “We

can use public space to create stronger connections between the two buildings,” he explains. The plan, he adds, has a precedent. In the 1930s, the French consul commissioned drawings for a public garden connecting the mosque to the church. The housing between both buildings prevents such a garden today, so instead he is planting trees in the streets.

But while the spirit of coexistence is present in the urban outline of the old city, it is no longer part of its living social fabric. Sabah Adeeb works as a security guard at al-Saa and grew up in the old city of Mosul.

But today he lives alone in Tel Kaif, an Assyrian Christian town outside of the city. “My family’s home is close to the al-Saa church,” he explains, “but we sold it in 2012. Many Christians had started leaving.” His wife and son live in the Netherlands, and his daughter is in the USA. “I’m waiting for us to be reunited with them again,” he says, “but I also urge the Christians to come back to Mosul.”

This issue is more acutely felt in the desolate remains of the al-Tahera Cathedral, the third building to be restored by Unesco and the UAE. The church was used as a military court by IS and subsequently destroyed by a coalition airstrike. All that is left today are four bare walls. Anas Al Zayad, the Unesco engineer overseeing the reconstruction, says that simply rebuilding the cathedral is not enough.

“The complex is entirely destroyed,” he explains.

“If Christians visit al-Tahera once it is complete, they will see all the destruction around it. They won’t want to come back and live here.”

Even if this was addressed, it is unlikely that those who fled Iraq and now live abroad will come back to the battered city and country. Across the river in the Left Coast area of the city, the Bishara church holds the only regular Sunday service in the city, attracting about 50 to 70 people. Outside, some locals have said, young Muslims gather to watch the service, curious to know about the city’s Christian heritage which, unlike their forebears, they have no connection to.

Beyond Unesco’s remit, other recovery and reconstruction projects are also seeking new ways of defining the city. Beneath the Tomb of the Prophet Jonas, German archaeologists working with Mosul’s Sunni Endowment Office and the Iraqi Ministry of Culture uncovered the remains of an ancient Assyrian palace. “The tomb is a landmark of Mosul’s heritage and civilisation,” says Kanaan, the endowment office’s director. “We set the first stone to rebuild it as soon

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The remnants of the al-Nuri Mosque (above), destroyed in the final days of the battle of Mosul.

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Images (from top to bottom) by William Daniels and Ivor Prickett.

as East Mosul was liberated, while the West was still under occupation.”

The Tomb’s reconstruction also evokes questions of Mosul’s religious identity. Sufism, a more syncretic form of Islam, was dominant in the city until the early 20th century. “It was common for us to visit the tombs of dead saints,” says Al Aqeedi, recalling Sufi traditions that persisted in Mosul during her childhood. “The Faith Campaign put an end to that.” IS’s puritanical ideology, and more orthodox forms of Islam, forbid the worship of saints. But today, Mosul’s wealthier families are contributing to the reconstruction of the mosque attached to the Tomb. “Local families have asked to restore the mosque themselves, without the government’s support,” adds Kanaan.

Such are the layers of Mosul’s collective memory, that other communities also claim the shrines as theirs. Hajj, the Yazidi activist from neighbouring Bashiqa, says that the shrines of the Old City, including the Tomb of Jonas, could have Yazidi origins. In their tradition, he explains, Yazidis also built shrines dedicated to dead saints. “Some of the shrines in the Old City have features of Yazidi shrines,” he says. “We believe that over time, they were transformed into mosques or husseiniyas [a site of mourning for Shi’a Muslims].” The origins of the syncretic and ageless Yazidi religion are disputed and, today, the majority view themselves as a distinct ethnic group. “We will not be participating in the reconstruction of the shrine, because we feel there are still tensions between us and the Muslim community,” says Hajj. “Nonetheless, a Muslim woman from the city donated towards rebuilding the shrines that were destroyed by IS in Bashiqa.”

But some memories of Mosul, and the buildings attached to them, were deemed not worth preserving by local authorities. Among these is the modernist National Insurance building in West Mosul, which was designed in the 1960s by the pioneering Iraqi architect Rifat Chadirji. The building had a slim row of arched windows that was typical of Chadirji’s experiments in blending international modernism with a local Iraqi vernacular. “It was one of the most important buildings in Mosul,” says Chadirji’s London-based widow Balkis Sharara. “Rifat was very proud of it.

It was the first building he’d worked on with stone, whereas buildings in Iraq were normally made of brick.” But Maslawis remember how IS executed prisoners by throwing them from the heights of the

seven-storey building. It was demolished soon after liberation. “The IS occupation is part of the memory of the building and of the city,” adds Sharara, who opposed the demolition.

The reconstruction of Mosul’s cultural heritage may seem odd given the city’s overwhelming humanitarian requirements. “Even the basic services like electricity and water, schools and hospitals, aren’t available,” says Unesco’s Al Zayad. Hundreds of thousands of residents have yet to return. Amid all this, however,

“Mosul is the city of peace, coexistence and love.”

—Abu Bakr Kanaan

Maslawis are adamant that cultural heritage can help restore the city’s identity. “We’re seeing Mosul’s young people coming together to rebuild the city and reject religious fundamentalism. They give me a lot of hope,” says Michaeel, the city’s archbishop. It is a sentiment with which Kanaan agrees. “I want Mosul to be a city of peace, a city of love. I want my Christian and Yazidi brothers to return to the city,” he says. “We are working on healing our wounds and bringing the people back to the city hand in hand. News reports say that Mosul is a place of terrorism, from which terrorism sprung.

This is not true, Mosul is the city of peace, coexistence and love.”

But other, intangible, factors may be needed for the city’s “spirit” to revive. “You can’t recover Mosul’s identity without restoring its international connections,” says Mohammed. “Mosul has never been a local city, and it should never be. Post-IS is our chance to put the city on the global map.” To achieve this, however, more must be done than restoring the city’s architecture. “The essential characteristic of a crossroad – and Mosul is a crossroad – is that it cannot exist by and for it itself,” says Kemp, “It can only exist by facilitating the flow of life, or the flow of trade if you prefer, between other places that lie North, South, East and West of it.” END

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Glass, Magic, and Realism Words Florencia Colombo and Ville Kokkonen

There’s a legendary story that has passed from glassblower to glassblower at the Finnish glassworks Iittala. Back in the day, deep in the middle of winter, there was a drunk man who came looking for somewhere warm to spend the night.

He found his way to the Iittala glassworks, where the door had been left open. He went inside, where it was nice and warm, and fell asleep. In the morning, the man woke up to see a flaming red fire pit and people brandishing sticks, moving around and working in perfect sync with molten lava – a beautiful but frightening choreography. He thought he’d woken up in hell and the glassblowers were the devils. He screamed and ran out.

That story changes slightly every time it’s told, and we have probably changed it too, but it does capture something of the supernatural quality of Iittala’s glassblowing, and glassblowing in general.

When we were asked to curate Iittala’s 140th anniversary exhibition at the Designmuseo in Helsinki, and produce a corresponding publication for Phaidon, we wanted to reflect this by calling the project Magic Realism. Although it eventually came to be called Iittala – Kaleidoscope: From Nature to Culture, the notion of Magic Realism came to define our approach. We wanted to show the slightly lesser-known aspects of Iittala: not just different variations of the Alvar Aalto vase and the Kastehelmi coasters and tableware that everyone has already seen.

In literature and cinema, Magic Realism refers to the extraordinary within the everyday, or the sublime within the normal. It doesn’t usually get used in the field of design, but it somehow seemed pertinent to Finnish culture and Iittala’s history in particular. It’s not an aesthetic category, or a formal category, but it does bring together many different elements and qualities that have been present in Finland for centuries or even millennia.

Historically, Finnish society has evolved with a reciprocal relationship to nature. This was an intense relationship that can be seen in the region’s prehistoric craftsmanship, and which remained interwoven with the country’s industrial development throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Finland’s sawmills and forestry companies were generally interlinked with the glass factories, because the glassworks used the waste from the sawmills for fuel, and they all relied on the same logistics: the rivers, waterways, and lake networks. The affordances of the surrounding environment – climate, landscape, flora and fauna – informed both belief systems and material culture.

Magic was pragmatic.

On one hand, these ideas became visible in the Kalevala, Finland’s national epic; on the other, they emerged in the sociopolitical ideologies that developed during the first half of the 20th century, linking beauty to objects that were seen as functional, universal and inclusive.

In this manner, the natural world provided the functional, formal and conceptual inspiration for Finnish material culture.

This became especially significant after the Second World War, when Finland lost territory to Russia as part of the negotiation to maintain its independence.

There was a quest to establish a strong autonomous identity both within the country but also internationally, where it was perceived as being sandwiched between the concepts of East and West.

Within this context, design became an important channel to create a collective identity. Motifs from the Kalevala (which is itself full of sorcery and witchcraft) appear throughout the 20th century within the nation’s architecture, art, and design. To mid-century Finnish designers such as Vuokko EskolinNurmesniemi and Antti Nurmesniemi, design became a “civic duty”, and a way of communicating Finland as

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an independent Western nation with Finland’s participation in world fairs, triennials and strategic travelling exhibitions. This was also the birth of “Scandinavian Design” as a concept.

Although Finland is part of the Nordics, but not Scandinavia, it nevertheless became associated, internationally, with this latter “brand”. Iittala participated in all of these events and many of the iconic products from its current portfolio stem from this era. Design had acquired a heroic role, and this was particularly true of glass. It became an allegorical material through which many of these concepts could be translated.

Magic Realism is not just about the past and the Kalevala, however.

It’s linked to an element of surprise that is still present today, and which is most obvious if you actually live and work in the factory. In the past, Iittala used to have designers-in-residence, who understood this. Timo Sarpaneva slept on the factory floor during night shifts and Tapio Wirkkala was an in-house designer too. The glassblowers say that these designers truly understood what the possibilities were with glass; what techniques could be used to produce, say, thinner walls and curves; and how to use different colours in different places. We must also consider the new manufacturing technologies that were incorporated to Iittala, such as the centrifugal casting explored by Wirkkala, who actually carved the mould that was then introduced to the factory. Wirkkala often worked from the north of Finland, and many of his works are based on the different states of water. He combined craftsmanship in carving his own moulds, and new experimental technologies such as centrifugal glassblowing, to create everyday wares through serial production.

It is a beautiful cycle.

This, of course, feeds into the realism of our Magic Realism. In the 1950s and

Images courtesy of Designmuseo Helsinki and the TWRB Foundation-EMMA.

An Iittala glassblower in action, paired with a sketch (c.1949) of this same process, produced by the designer Tapio Wirkkala, who worked in-house at the Iittala glassworks.

Photoessay

60s, Iittala had a strong dedication to creating unique experimental artworks and small editions. However, many of these expressions were then developed to suit designs for daily wares and mass production. Iittala is a brand, as well as a glassworks and a concept, and each of these three aspects have followed different paths. The glassworks have remained relatively unchanged for 140 years, but the brand has merged with different companies, and had many different owners, throughout that same period. For many decades it was actually Karhula-Iittala when Iittala and Karhula (another glassworks) were both purchased by the Ahlström corporation. Many of the works that we know today as part of Iittala, such as Aino Aalto’s Bölgeblick glass, Göran Hongell’s Aarne glass, and, of course, Alvar Aalto’s vases, were actually first produced in the Karhula glassworks. Decades later, Iittala again merged with Nuutajärvi, another icon of Finnish design. So then there was the Iittala-Nuutajärvi brand, through which Kaj Franck and Oiva Toikka were introduced. In 2002, Iittala was reintroduced as a “lifestyle” and finally, in 2007, the Fiskars Corporation took over.

The history of Iittala and KarhulaIittala has a strongly experimental nature, built upon the symbiotic relationship between glassblowers and designers.

In our interviews with Iittala’s glassblowers and chemists, there remained a feeling that you can never fully control glass.

Even though they’ve been doing this all their lives, and even through the company has been trying to perfect it over the course of 140 years, there’s still an element of surprise and weirdness.

Even when a recipe is correct, something unexpected could still happen in the process of blowing the glass – a moment of surprise. The glassblowers, chemists and factory workers all say that they are

excited to work with the process of glass manufacture, as it has an element of magic. It is a term that they use as a part of their everyday work, just as Iittala designer Gunnel Nyman did in 1948, when she wrote in an essay that “there is something magical about glass, and no one who comes under its spell can ever leave it”.

When we talk about Magic Realism, it’s not a strict definition. It brings together different elements, some of which belong to Iittala’s history in particular, and others which belong to the history of glassmaking, to Finnish design, as well as to some of the links to nature that have existed from prehistory. This, from our point of view, is something sublime. It is an epic history, and it deserves an epic effort from all to tell it.

Based on an original interview with Kristina Rapacki and Oli Stratford.

Iittala – Kaleidoscope: From Nature to Culture is at Designmuseo Finland until 19 September 2021. The exhibition’s book is published by Phaidon, price £59.95.

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Images courtesy of the Finnish Architectural Museum and Ari Karttunen/TWRB Foundation-EMMA.

An aurora borealis clay relief, designed by Alvar Aalto, shown alongside Tapio Wirkkala’s Pyörre.

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Erkki Vesanto’s mouthblown glass carafe (1954), produced by KarhulaIittala/Iittala glassworks. The sketches were produced by Kaj Franck in the 1970s, and show a series of overlapping objects.

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Images courtesy of Johnny Korkman/Iittala, Designmuseo Helsinki and Ari Karttunen/TWRB Foudnation-EMMA.

Sarpaneva’s wooden mould for Finlandia (1964).

Tapio Wirkkala’s Breshnev bowl and Timo

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Drawings for Aino and Alvar Aalto’s Aalto Flower (1937), alongside a glacial tafone, a sacred site for traditional Sámi culture.

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Images courtesy of the Alvar Aalto Foundation, Eino Nikkilä, Finnish Heritage Agency/Picture Collections and Designmuseo Helsinki.

1950s advertising images by Studio Pietinen/Aarne Pietinen for KarhulaIittala, next to Yrjö Rosola’s mouthblown Manalan tuli (Fire of the Underworld) vase (1936).

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An experimental production piece by Santtu Mustonen for the

Pace exhibition at the Iittala & Arabia Design Centre (2018), next to Harri Koskinen’s 2015 Alue (Area), which encases vibrant colour within a solid clear glass volume.

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Images courtesy of Iittala, Scope, and Rauno Träskelin.

An illustration from Olaus Magnus’s 1555 book Historia de Gentibus

Septentrionalis (History of the Northern Peoples), next to Gunnel Nyman’s 1947 work in glass, Ylösnousemus (Resurrection).

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Are We All Investors?

Words Anna Rohmann

At the beginning of this year, we saw what happens when millions of small-time investors coordinate to make money, with the bonus effect of annoying Wall Street: the GameStop short squeeze.

The video game retailer GameStop was in trouble. Its asset growth rates had been in the red for several years, its equity was declining constantly, and hedge funds had begun to short the company’s stock.

For those unfamiliar with the practice, shorting sees investors borrow stock in order to sell it, intending to buy it back later at a lower price before returning it to the lender – thereby making money off the difference between sell and buy price.

As Gamestop’s shares (GME) fell, however, amateur investors took note of what the hedge funds were doing and began buying up the shorted stock, thus driving prices up again.

GME’s value jumped from $13.66 at the beginning of December 2020 to $347.51 by the end of January 2021. Hedge funds that had bet on the price falling were forced to buy stock back at a higher price, thus losing money on their investment.

One of the funds caught in the squeeze, Melvin Capital, lost 53 per cent of the $13bn it was managing at the start of January, forcing it to take an emergency cash injection of $2.75bn from two other hedge funds. What became clear was that amateur investors could now exert enormous influence over markets which had previously been the purview of professional investors. The opening up of these secluded spaces can be linked to a significant change in the financial industry – the rising popularity of FinTech.

While app-extensions of financial services such as managing your bank account or transferring money through PayPal have been around for some time, a multitude of apps now exist with the purpose of gamifying finance and allowing amateurs access to the stock market:

TD Ameritrade, eToro, Acorn, Moneybox, or E-Trade, to name a few. The disruptive potential of these trading apps lies in their personalisation of investing and the way in which they allow everyone, independent of professional background, to trade whenever, from wherever. One FinTech provider in particular, Robinhood, made headlines with its involvement in the GameStop short squeeze, serving as the platform of choice by which the amateurs, who largely organised themselves through the subreddit r/wallstreetbets, took on the professional traders.

“Millions of new investors have entered the market for the first time as technology transforms the world. It’s time for the financial system to catch up.”

—Vladimir Tenev

Founded in 2013 by Vladimir Tenev and Baiju Prafulkumar Bhatt, Robinhood is one of the most popular (and most controversial) retail brokerage firms on the market. In a blog post from December 2020, the company reports a recent increase of “3+ million people who joined Robinhood this year”, which it attributes to the pandemic. While global lockdown may have provided many with a motivation to get their personal finances in a row, FinTech companies deliberately target tech-savvy customers with the technical know-how, financial means and confidence to trade online. In particular, they focus on millennials, who are assumed to be both digital natives and eager to maximise

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profits on what they’ve earned from entering the workforce. Having grown up during the economic crisis in 2008, these users may be wary of established financial institutions. Against this backdrop of generational wealth transfer and progressing digitalisation of services, Tenev and Bhatt realised that there was an underserved market to which their app could provide a solution – millennialfriendly financial inclusion. It was a vision of techno-optimism, which Tenev set out on the company’s blog. “Millions of new investors have entered the market for the first time as technology transforms the world,” he wrote. “It’s time for the financial system to catch up[…]

As industry leaders, we need to meet this moment with a vision for the future and a focus on the people we serve[…]

Technology is the answer, not the oft-cited impediment.”

In contrast to the image of traditional bankers, FinTech providers claim that wealth accumulation is possible for everyone, not just the professional traders we see depicted in movies like The Wolf of Wall Street. In Robinhood’s first ever television commercial, aired during the 2021 Super Bowl, the company states that “We are all investors”, underlining this message by featuring diverse individuals making emotional investments in non-traditional trading settings – a process that the company likened to financial investments in order to encourage uptake on its services.

A woman colouring her hair pink, for instance, is framed as making a short-term investment; a Black-owned business opening is presented as a long-term one. When a young woman

Images courtesy of Robinhood and eToro.

Robinhood, one of the apps that enabled the GamesStop short squeeze.

uses the app while getting her morning coffee, the narrator explains, “You don’t need to become an investor, you were born one.” The company’s name alone indicates that it likes to associate itself with ideas of social justice and the wealth transfer from rich to poor. This, however, is unique to Robinhood. Other FinTech companies have opted to align themselves with existing financial hubs, such as eToro playing on the bull as the symbol of Wall Street. What all these companies have in common, however, is that they profess to democratise finance by turning the well-known Occupy slogan, “We are the 99%”, into the promise of getting a seat at the table.

The most intimidating aspect of trading for most amateur investors is the knowledge barrier. Financial markets are notoriously complicated, but these apps claim to have got you covered with everything you might need. FinTech often incorporates features that go beyond simply facilitating investment, including providing information about market news, market data and tools for financial literacy: eToro has a podcast, while Robinhood offers a blog, and plans to introduce a learning platform soon.

Amateur investors bring a more social dimension to trading, which eToro also capitalises on by marketing features that “[extend] well beyond the trading platform itself”, such as a newsfeed and its popular investor program. Robinhood, meanwhile, offers analyst ratings, features such as “people also bought” and “featured in” recommendations, and the ability to search not only for specific stocks, but also top movers in the market. All of these elements of user experience (UX) design are helpful tools for inexperienced traders to gather digestible investment tips; Robinhood’s goal is “to make investing in financial markets more affordable, more intuitive, and more fun, no matter how much experience you have (or do not have)”. The software providers’ efforts reminded me of the European Stock Market Learning competition, a scheme run by the European Savings and Retail Banking Group that simulates trading transactions for high school groups. Contrary to the high school programme, however, real money is lost and won on FinTech.

Entry barriers to these apps are shockingly low – all you need are a Wi-Fi connection and a bank account

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(technically, you don’t even need a smartphone, as most services have a web version), and in case you don’t want to monitor money flows between your account and the apps, they also offer to set up direct deposits, pay per cheque, or schedule auto deposits. All of this is designed to make participating in the world of finance as convenient and stress-free as possible. Robinhood has even removed the financial entry barrier that many FinTech apps still have. As its website states, there is no minimum deposit and trading is commission-free to rectify the fact that “big Wall Street firms pay effectively nothing to trade stocks, while most Americans were charged commission for every trade”.

To unlock this kind of access to the markets, you just need to download the app. Robinhood’s swipe-to-trade feature makes investing convenient and the range of trade options unique to its service guarantees that everyone finds what they are looking for. Order types include market orders (activity at current market price) and conditional orders (activity when certain conditions are met, with specific types such as limit order or trailing stop order also available).

Apps and platforms such as eToro aim to make investing legible and accessible.

Setting price alerts, recurring investments, or investing in a certain amount of money or a certain number of shares, either in stock or options, is all possible. Robinhood and Acorn, an app that lets you make micro-investments by rounding up, also allow you to buy fractional shares, reducing costs and thereby removing another barrier to entry.

If this ease of investing paired with accessible information is not enough, Robinhood has more to motivate you to trade. New users receive some stock as a welcome-present, which makes getting started even easier, and the accompanying visual of confetti raining down the screen positively reinforces investing behaviour right from the get-go. Merging aspects of game design with elements of the trading experience is a way to make investing more engaging and enjoyable, and of drawing people back to the app. The Robinhood home screen, for instance, displays a graph with ever-changing

stock values followed by daily and total returns. This illustrates at one glance what market movements mean for you, and subsequent navigation is simplified through whimsical icons, such as a wallet for viewing your investment history or a graph for the homescreen. Combined with a sleek interface, this contributes to user-friendliness, with Robinhood further allowing users to personalise its colour scheme. In the default setting, the app uses colours to signal if the stock market is open (white) or closed (black); and if investments are above (green) or below (red) market value. This gamification, the researchers Arjen van der Heide and Dominik Želinský have argued in the Journal of Cultural Economy, does not only make apps more informative, but also functions “as a means to construct highly stylized understandings of finance that reduce the ‘complexity’ of the financial world”. For its straight-forward design, Robinhood won the 2015 [app] design

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awards USA and the Apple Design Award in the same year.

It is safe to say that amateur investing is trending, but does this mean that we should all take up the opportunity to start investing on our phones? Too much techno-optimism can obscure what is at stake for amateur investors, who are trading with their own, limited resources, fuelled by idealistic online communities.

On r/wallstreetbets, the online investor jcosmosstar posted during the Gamestop short squeeze: “~$70K actual loss but still diamond hands,” which is Reddit slang for investors holding stock for a collective cause regardless of risk. This shows the ease with which some users put their savings on the line and face significant losses, and the ideologies which FinTech can support. As GME stock fell in February following its meteoric rise, many investors faced substantial losses. Posting on r/wallstreetbets on 2 February, investor SimplyPwned wrote, “no sane long-term

investor would consider to invest into any of these investments – this is about ‘get rich or die trying!’. This is not r/investing!”

Like most apps, FinTech also suffers from technical failures. The difference from other apps, however, is that technical failures in FinTech can cost users much more than losing their top score on Candy Crush. Nathaniel Popper, the author of Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money, explains in an article for The New York Times that “the risks of trading through the app [Robinhood] have been compounded by its tech glitches”. Known glitches include delays, which matter when market prices can change rapidly, or trouble with the execution of conditional orders. When investors do not willingly risk losses for ideological reasons, like jcosmosstar, app failures can have devastating consequences. Popper reports that one user had reported in a suicide note that he had “killed himself after he logged into the app and saw that his balance had dropped to negative $730,000. The figure was high partly because of some incomplete trades.”

There are other risks of amateur investment. The ready access to updates and news provided by FinTech apps can discourage independent research, placing a lot of weight on the curation generated by the apps’ algorithms. Algorithms are routinely used in trading, but cannot entirely replace human judgment, as the hack crash of 2013 demonstrated: a false tweet sent from a hacked Associated Press account about an attack on the White House caused the financial markets to crash as the algorithms used in trading treated it like real news. Furthermore, FinTech is in danger of oversimplification on multiple fronts: interpreting stock markets is sold as something that everyone can do, but it is not straightforward at all.

While it’s true that everybody can trade, there is still a significant knowledge imbalance that is tipped in the favour of professional traders and industry insiders.

Reducing confusion is good, but can also be misleading. As Van der Heide and Želinský note, it “simultaneously reinforces the boundaries between insiders and outsiders by cultivating very specific forms of financial knowledge”.

Professional traders retain the upper hand with their knowledge of the

market’s inner workings and ability to pore over financial reports, whereas amateurs must rely on their own judgement and the selected information that the app provides them with.

While it may be satisfying to watch graphs rise, it is also dangerous: the allure of gamification can lead users to invest more than they had originally planned and draw those with less experience to riskier trading. Highly volatile stocks make for nice graphs and might yield big wins, but also big losses. This, however, is not accounted for by FinTech apps, which actively encourage users to invest by making it extraordinarily easy to move

Although it seems evident that FinTech makes finance more accessible, it is less clear whether it makes the field more democratic. money. Linking an app to a bank account allows for uncomplicated transactions of large sums, while the UX also influences the perception of choices that investors have. Robinhood offers buy and sell as its only trade options, but this is not an accurate representation of the choices actually available – another important option for generating revenue is to hold.

Failing to make this a clickable option, however, encourages actions that can lead to increased market volatility.

Although it seems evident that FinTech makes finance more accessible, it is less clear whether it makes the field more democratic: the interests of financial institutions remain those that are still best protected and served. When the GameStop short squeeze led to hedge funds losing huge sums, Robinhood temporarily restricted trading of GME stock. Many users spoke out against this perceived hypocrisy, dropping the app’s Google Play store rating to one star, while this critique was backed by a wide range of celebrities from Elon Musk tweeting that “shorting is a scam legal only for vestigial reasons”, to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, on the same platform, saying, “This is unacceptable. We now need to know more about @RobinhoodApp’s decision to block retail investors from purchasing stock while hedge funds are freely able

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to trade the stock as they see fit. As a member of the Financial Services Cmte, I’d support a hearing if necessary.”

Robinhood defended itself by arguing that its clearing broker, the intermediary behind the app and the markets that actually handles the exchange of money and stocks, “put the restrictions in place in an effort to meet increased regulatory deposit requirements, not to help hedge funds.” Yet Robinhood’s measures ran counter to what its name suggests and eventually led to the congressional hearing that Ocasio-Cortez proposed. This is not even the first time that Robinhood has been under review by the SEC, the United States’s security and exchange commission, for its business model.

The app makes its money by acting as a broker between retail investors and investment firms; in other words, it gets compensated for directing orders to these firms as part of a process called “payment of order flow”. While information about this business model can be found on Robinhood’s website, it is not immediately obvious through the app, which the SEC criticised in December 2020. In a press release, the SEC stated that a lawsuit pertaining to actions from 2015 to 2018 had been filed “for repeated misstatements that failed to disclose the firm’s receipt of payments from trading firms for routing customer orders to them, and with failing to satisfy its duty to seek the best reasonably available terms to execute customer orders.” Robinhood agreed to pay $65m to settle the charges.

The GameStop short squeeze and Robinhood’s involvement in it shows that strengths in user experience simultaneously carry weaknesses of oversimplification. FinTech can do great harm to individual amateur traders: those who are less protected by market regulations and who are more likely to trade from a precarious financial position.

While the gamification of finance makes the historically elitist space of finance accessible to a wider audience, it is a double-edged sword that reinforces existing imbalances and, in the end, benefits established financial institutions most. FinTech should be treated with care. It democratises opportunity for profit and loss simultaneously.

Robinhood and eToro are both available from various app stores.

So Little What is the aesthetic of nothing? Not in terms of a meditation on minimalism, or the luxury of pareddown colour palettes and clean lines, but nothing itself.

Words Mimi Zeiger Photographs Ramak Fazel 78

The chain link perimeter fence surrounding the Chandler Boulevard Bridge Home Village provides privacy, as well as a sense of orientation to passersby.

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A view of the housing that emphasises its scale, and which shows how colour has been used to define the spaces surrounding the common area.

Vincent Bomar is a writer and reciter.

His books of poetry and writing reference his upbringing in Ohio. His poetry features in the photograph on the cover of this issue of Disegno.

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How do you design with the fewest possible resources for those who have so little and need so much? This question rumbles in my head as I get off the 134 Freeway and drive wide, San Fernando Valley boulevards lined with new condo buildings on my way to the Chandler Boulevard Bridge Home Village in North Hollywood – 39 white, red, blue, and yellow tiny homes for the unhoused on a sliver of land between a metro rail line and a busy street. It’s not much of a site, a stingy slice of previously undeveloped municipal property in a sprawling city, but to those who live there it is everything. And it is also nothing.

Nothing demands everything. Let’s consider this the brief behind the Chandler project, designed by Los Angeles-based firm Lehrer Architects and Ford Construction with the Bureau of Engineering (BOE) for the City of Los Angeles as a pilot programme to address the homelessness crisis in Los Angeles. Just as survivors need refuge after a national disaster, here in the shadow of multi-million-dollar homes perched high in the Hollywood Hills, architecture is deployed as triage.

Every component of the design is value-engineered down to the essential; even the schedule snipped into rapid response mode. The North Hollywood project was designed and built in a seemingly impossible 13 weeks.

This need for speed reflects the scale of the crisis.

According to the 2020 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count, there were 66,436 unhoused people in LA County pre-Covid, an increase of 12.7 per cent over the previous year. There’s no hard data yet to account for people experiencing homelessness on account of pandemic lockdowns, job losses, and evictions – but the impact is obvious at street level. Tents and makeshift lean-tos line the sidewalk block after block along Skid Row, the area that historically provided food and medical services to the unhoused. Encampments crop up in public parks and freeway underpasses.

Los Angeles’ struggle to house all its residents stretches back decades. The city is a beacon for many: migrants looking for a better life, actors hoping to catch a break in the industry, queer teens fleeing the Midwest, or people simply caught up in the spell of palm trees and balmy breezes. But the need for affordable housing chronically outstrips what is available. Lack of supply drives up rents. And housing precarity isn’t confined to those we traditionally think of as being in poverty – many middle-income workers are just one lost paycheck away from finding themselves couch surfing or living out of their car. First-time homelessness was reported

by some two-thirds of those polled in the 2020 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count, with more than half reporting economic hardship.

Chandler Boulevard Bridge Home Village is part of the “A Bridge Home” initiative of the LA Mayor’s Office.

Previous bridge homes opened as communal shelters – multi-bed facilities for upwards of 100 homeless

“The sense of urgency on the part of the city was very real – palpable in a meaningful way. The schedule was not realistic, but we made it realistic.”

—Michael Lehrer

people, a model rendered unsustainable under Covid conditions, which made shared facilities less than ideal. Chandler is the first of 17 projects conceptualised under the tiny house village model and five of those are currently under construction around the city. Each uses small, individuated homes manufactured by the Seattle-based company Pallet, a contracted vendor chosen by the Mayor’s office. The homes are quick to construct and provide a combination necessary during a pandemic: privacy and safety. Lehrer Architect’s Alexandria Park Tiny Homes Village, 103 tiny homes in a park in North Hollywood, is scheduled to open this spring. In total, there are nearly 2,000 beds in the pipeline.

“The sense of urgency on the part of the city was very real – palpable in a meaningful way,” says architect Michael Lehrer, weighing the need to bring a design sensibility to the Chandler project against the intensity of a 13-week time frame. “The schedule was not realistic, but we made it realistic.”

Under its A Bridge Home plan, the BOE can construct temporary housing on land leased or owned by the city.

Each of LA’s 15 council districts are supposed to identify parcels, but what makes a piece a land suitable is arguable. Not-In-My-Backyard (NIMBY) sentiments combined with access to services and infrastructure

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Pandemic guidelines dictate that one resident be assigned per home, but as these rules are relaxed the units will come to house two people.

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With the help of her son, a newly arrived resident has begun settling into her living quarters.

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At the entrance of the village residents are provided with “amnesty lockers” where both valuables and prohibited items can be kept under lock and key.

create spatial chokeholds, squeezing out everything but properties that emerge as weirdly shaped leftovers – diagrams of valuelessness.

When I arrive at the village, I park in front of a large, neighbouring warehouse emblazoned with bold letters: LASHIFY. It’s the headquarters for a company that makes luxury eyelash extensions. When its corporate logo looms into view, it’s a cringingly ironic reminder of the uncomfortably vast wealth gap in Los Angeles.

Chandler’s site was previously a dirt lot: long and wedge-shaped with a thin tail that runs along an adjacent rail line. It sits across from a large public

The City of LA knows we need to do a large variety of these. You will do something wrong before you do something right.”

From aerial photos, Chandler resembles a fragment of 1980s graphic design. Bright yellow slashes. Green and white stripes. Confetti of red umbrellas. Meanwhile, the programme is basic: rows of tiny homes, a hygiene trailer with bathrooms and showers, and a long prefab building that houses administration and laundry.

Communal activities take place at the centre of the site, where there’s an open-air dining area and a small, fenced dog park. At the narrowest end, dozens of 60-gallon garbage cans are provided for residents to store belongings that don’t fit in their allotted house.

Lehrer Architects’ chromatic, eye-catching aesthetic acts like razzle-dazzle, the camouflage used to hide battleships in plain sight. It would be easy to scoff at the playful design, to accuse it of trying to gussy up nothingness with a bit of bold colour. And while that’s somewhat true (alas, there’s only so much that paint can do), it’s not the only truth. According to the design team, changing the paint colour doesn’t add significant cost to the project as the asphalt would need to be sealed anyway. The bright patterning does, however, distract from some of the inherent challenges posed by the location, programme, and code restrictions.

That line of green and white stripes, for example, cuts a wide swath across the site, demarcating a fire lane that must be kept clear. Such an imposition, necessary of course for safety, hollows out the site interior, pushing everything towards the chain-link fencing edging the property. Lehrer’s design uses paint to break up the space. The white (and a couple of red) fields align with the walls of the tiny houses, so that a patch of paint seems to stretch from each home. This porchlike gesture goes a long way in extending the footprint given to each resident. And like a porch, flowerpots, folding chairs, and muddy sneakers have cropped up at entrances.

The challenge in a project designed to serve unhoused residents under emergency circumstances is between providing what Quinonez lists as “privacy, community, and dignity” and doing it as efficiently as possible. It’s a conundrum encapsulated by the 8-by-8ft Pallet shelters used at Chandler and other tiny house projects in development. The prefab homes are designed as a kit-of-parts that can be assembled by two people in less than two hours. For approximately $9,000 apiece, each one comes with heating, cooling,

“Better, faster, cheaper isn’t intuitive. You will do something wrong before you do something right.”

—Michael Lehrer

park, where homeless people tend to congregate, and near public transit, but it had no sewer connection or sidewalk. Two of the priciest components of the $3.487m project were a new 550ft sewer line extension, and levelling the existing street and adding concrete barricades in order to create safe and accessible entry to the site. Figures given to the Los Angeles Times by the BOE note that $1.5m was spent preparing the site prior to construction and another $651,000 for the sewer connection. Perhaps the largest take-away from these numbers is that nothingness comes with a price tag. If a council district is miserly when it identifies locations, everyone pays.

“Site selection is crucial; we are doing a better job to choose sites,” says Marina Quinonez, senior architect at the BOE, whose office is responsible for assessing site feasibility and working through the rats’ nest of permitting and life-safety bureaucracy prior to engaging a contractor and architect for each project.

Moving forward, she notes, sites will be paved, with close attention paid to the availability of utilities.

“Better, faster, cheaper isn’t intuitive,” says Lehrer.

“There is an experimental quality to these projects.

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The arrangement of furniture in “porch” areas provides greater definition to life in the village.

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Vincent Bomar shares some of his work, including his poem ‘Through the Eyes of a Child’.

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Before moving to Los Angeles, Nine lived in Memphis, Tennessee, where his interest in music took root.

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and a smoke detector. There are two beds, some shelving, and an escape hatch. Windows are smallish and residents have already decorated them with a variety of makeshift curtains.

Nerin Kadribegovic, an architect and partner at Lehrer Architects, refers to the 64sqft shelters as “pixels” – little squares arranged according to code and site constraints. “They are Monopoly pieces, little drawings of home,” he says. “They are the essence of home.” But is that enough? As spaces, the homes are cell-like. Under Covid, the county health department mandates one person per unit, but occupancy is meant to be two. Belongings – bags of clothes, shoes, papers – accumulate on the floor, shelves, and the extra bed in a demonstration of just how much and how little is necessary to live on the streets.

Chandler is run by aid organisation Hope of the Valley, which provides meals, laundry, Covid testing, and case management, including helping residents find permanent housing, employment, and substance use treatment. Most of the residents are from a 3.5-mile radius around the village. They have lives and friends in the neighbourhood, so are free to come and go before the 10pm curfew. Still, on-site case manager Christopher Hernandez notes that some stay inside, preferring privacy. The ability to lock one’s own door and crank the air conditioning is a universal luxury in Southern California.

Privacy, community, and dignity are laudable goals for these projects. Out of this trio, it is community that seems the most difficult to achieve through design, especially since this housing is meant to be transitional.

Laurie Craft, chief programme officer for Hope of the Valley, says that ideally the organisation would like to house residents within three months of entry to the programme. “We know that many people are not housing ready in three months, in those cases we extend their stay and continue working with them,” she says.

Lehrer Architects’ design, based on the programme requirements given by the BOE, is thin on amenities that might foster community. A cluster of picnic tables with umbrellas stand at the centre of the project.

Spaced apart for social distancing they connote individuation more than collectivity. A Hope of the Valley staffer mentions that folks tend to eat meals at separate tables as a precaution.

On a spring morning, a handful of residents are outside their units. The sun is already blazing and there

are few shaded outdoor areas that might draw people away from the AC. I notice that a store-bought canopy has been erected for the security guard, who sits under

“They are Monopoly pieces, little drawings of home.

They are the essence of home.” —Nerin Kadribegovic it in a folding chair. She looks warm in her black uniform and baseball cap. A bearded resident in a wheelchair slowly rolls himself over to a shadow cast by one of the houses. According to Quinonez, a generous, permanent shade structure comes with extra expense and fire code complications that are beyond the scope and budget for the project.

Indeed, the issue of community might be structural, not about design or aesthetics at all. One of the earliest and most famous tiny house experiments in service of homeless populations is the Quixote Village in Olympia, Washington, a cluster of some 30 ground-up homes where residents are self-governed. They elect leadership and follow a set of collective membership rules, while a nonprofit board provides funding and oversight.

Community is constructed through shared action.

At Chandler, on the other hand, residents are subject to the protocols established by Hope of the Valley, some of which manifest in built form. They must adhere to a curfew, take a Covid test and agree to be searched before entry, and put any banned items in a locker outside the front gates.

One resident, Carolina, grew up in the valley and lived in a tent for 10 years before moving into a home she shares with her boyfriend. At Chandler for six weeks when we spoke, she kept referring to the world beyond the white-striped, chain-link fence as “out there” – an ambiguous, somewhat fearful expression. For her, the rules of inside were worth the exchange for food and security. She had gained a little weight from regular meals and had gotten some plants to decorate.

“A tiny house is better because you can lock the door,” says Carolina. “Nobody touches your stuff.

You are safe.” E N D 92

The house that anchors the westernmost point of the site, a few hundred yards from Highway 170.

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The communal area is dominated by tables and benches. The restroom and shower facilites are on a trailer that can be seen in the background.

A view through the homes evokes the narrow passageways of older urban spaces.

Imaginary Lines, GamFratesi and Minä Perhonen for Ørgreen Optics!“We both wear glasses, Stine and I,” says Enrico Fratesi. “I wear them all the time, and she wears them only when reading.” Fratesi’s partner Stine Gam, with whom he runs the Copenhagen-based furniture design studio GamFratesi, chimes in: “And Enrico and Akira, the two of them have both always worn perfectly round glasses.”

These reflections marked the beginnings of Invisible Lines, a capsule collection launched in collaboration between GamFratesi, Akira Minagawa of the Japanese fashion brand Minä Perhonen, and the Danish glasses-makers Ørgreen Optics. The collection consists of two pairs of circular titanium frames: one larger model, Hemisphere, and the other, Equator, a smaller, more tightly-wound set of spectacles. GamFratesi worked primarily on the shape of the frames, while Minagawa developed the colour ways: they are available in six colours, including matte peach, gold, and pine brown.

The invisible lines of the collection’s title are intended to reflect the designs’ origins: lines of friendship between Fratesi, Gam, and Minagawa (they’ve known each other for years, having first met at a party); lines of influence between regions and design cultures (Minagawa’s Finnish brand name

takes inspiration from a visit to the Nordic countries, while Ørgreen produces all of its spectacles in Japan); and lines of transit across the globe (samples were sent back and forth between Tokyo and Copenhagen during a year in which no-one could travel as a result of the pandemic).

Not that travel would’ve been necessary for the inspection of samples.

Titanium, a material in which Ørgreen has come to specialise, is ultra-light and well-suited for transport. “When you’re working with titanium, the challenge is to make it as minimal as possible,” says Fratesi. “The idea to have something which is just a few grams was very attractive to us.” This also gave rise to the circular shape of the eyeglasses. “The circle is a very natural and almost naive way to express a line around the eye,” he continues.

Equator, in particular, has the look of a line-drawing of Le Corbusier’s chunky Bonnet frames.

The colour ways counter the severity of the shape, however. “The idea is for the colours to make the wearer happy,” explains Minagawa.

“Happy, light, and fresh – like fruit!”

This is an approach that he shares with GamFratesi, he explains. “There’s a sympathy between how we all think about colour.” As a whole, the project became an extension of an alreadyexisting friendship and shared design sensibility. “It was like old-school letters between two countries,” says Fratesi. “Three designer friends from different sides of the world, exchanging frames which are round, like the globe – it’s a nice story!”

Image by Choreo.

Words Kay Sunden

Observation

Solar Culture Club Interview Evi Hall Photographs Renée de Groot

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I went into my interview with solar designer Marjan van Aubel expecting to quiz her on the photon-absorbing properties of dyes; discuss the material impact of titanium dioxide versus silicon semiconductors; or reflect on the refractive qualities of crystal and glass. A lover of all things popular science, I felt that interviewing van Aubel on her work would be a trekkie’s equivalent of interviewing Scotty on the Starship Enterprise: I had a fan’s overly confident grasp of the theory and was eager to coo appreciatively at sleek-looking tech.

An hour and a half later, I left with a changed perspective. Van Aubel is making objects, sure, and covetable ones at that. She was happy to talk about her range of work, and the constraints and considerations that go into it, but I got the sense that this wasn’t where the real challenge lay for her. Van Aubel knows her field well enough to use whatever technology is best suited to a particular project at a particular time; she knows what’s out there and that the field of solar energy is constantly changing. The challenge is more philosophical than technological: how can we change people’s expectations of and behaviour around solar power?

The result of these questions is that the objects van Aubel creates are teasers – little temptations to persuade us to jump aboard her wider working ideology of “Solar Democracy”. She describes this as the idea of “solar energy for everyone, everywhere,” and it’s this last word that best captures the concept.

Instead of thinking of solar power as just another source of electricity supplying your mains, van Aubel wants a world populated by objects generating a little bit of their own power, from the sun, all of the time.

It’s a shift in perspective about how we handle energy production and consumption.

Materialising on my screen, van Aubel’s Amsterdam studio glows with pale daylight and is soundtracked by alarmingly loud birdsong. The studio is a tall white room, large trees rustling behind its sash windows, and the only object in the foreground is a grid made from racks of incubated plants. Everything seems light, airy, alive.

Van Aubel says that she turned to solar design because it seemed obvious: every flat surface is an opportunity to collect energy, a plane which ought to be harvesting photons. But at present there aren’t the products, nor often the tech, to take advantage of this. As such, van Aubel has focused her career

around working with universities or research groups, rather than brands. Power Plant (2018), for instance, was developed in conjunction with Het Nieuwe Instituut and the University of Amsterdam, among others, manifesting as a greenhouse structure with panes of transparent solar cells that power a hydroponic system nurturing plants growing within.

Current Table (2014), meanwhile, has a warm orange solar surface, like a sheet of boiled sweets, which collects energy from diffuse light to let you charge devices via a USB port: it was developed through a grant from the Dutch Stimuleringsfonds. Current Window (2015) was created through this same fund, and is much the same as its table stablemate, but works on the perpendicular plane and features eye-catching variegated colours and patterns compared to its horizontal counterpart: a modern stained glass window. The Energy Collection (2012), one of van Aubel’s earliest solar pieces, was built on technology developed at the EPFL and formed into a set of solar charging glassware, which discharge their collected energy into a battery storage cabinet as another helpful USB charging point.

Her momentum is growing. Van Aubel is now working on the Dutch Biotope for the Dubai World Expo 2020, a vast conical pavilion of plants and fungi, topped with a solar power stained glass roof that sends electricity back into the grid. The project was delayed by Covid-19, but is now scheduled to open in October 2021. These delays have, however, allowed her to focus on another project. Sunne is a solar powered light that has launched on Kickstarter as the first of van Aubel’s objects to have a more direct commercial focus – this is something for people to want and buy.

Sunne is a sleek lozenge shaped pendant light, which hangs from two wires suspended from fastenings that screw into the ceiling. It has three different ombre LED light settings: ‘sunne rise’ and ‘sunne’ set shine with different saturated hues, while ‘sunne light’ offers a warm task light glow. It’s the first product in her plan to build a solar brand, with the aim to make this technology more pervasive in everyday life and bring solar powered products into people’s homes. Part of this process is creating products that help people integrate their expectations around solar power into their lives. Key to Sunne’s development is an accompanying app that lets the user know how much charge Sunne is collecting, and how many hours it will shine for. It also offers adjustable brightness settings to adapt its output

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accordingly. Without the need for a power socket or wiring, van Aubel likens Sunne to a house plant – it’s relatively easy to unscrew and move around depending on how much light it needs and what you require.

Despite being directed toward the consumer market, Sunne does not depart from van Aubel’s typical development methods. To create a competitive technology for market, she partnered with the Energy Research Centre of the Netherlands (ECN.TNO).

The plan is to make roughly 200 lights for the initial backers, while concurrently refining the design of the appliance and setting up a viable procurement and production line. The plan is to scale up and reduce costs to eventually sell Sunne to everyone.

It’s the first step for van Aubel, both for her brand and her revolution.

you say “sun” and then “nuh”. It comes from the English language, but it sounds very Swedish. You hang Sunne inside, in front of a window. On one side there are solar panels that charge during the day, while the other side contains a light. Sunne detects the amount of light it receives and can turn on automatically when it gets dark. You get this moment when the sun sets and Sunne starts to shine. I think of it as the first step in considering how we can make all of our objects solar-powered, and change the way we handle energy.

Evi Why did you launch this on Kickstarter? Is the lighting industry not interested in embracing solarpowered products?

Marjan It’s different than a conventional lighting project, because there isn’t a solar-powered brand yet – it’s new for everyone. I’ve had lots of conversations with different brands, but I actually find that it’s really satisfying to do it yourself. You learn a lot. I remember when I was working with Swarovski,1 it felt like I made the drawings and then, all of a sudden, the object was actually there. It went from design to product so quickly, and I wasn’t involved in the part I enjoy the most which is the development stages. It’s a lot of work but I enjoy thinking about how something

is going to be made, what it’s going to be made of, and what goes where. What I like about using Kickstarter is that you can test things: if no-one wants them, it’s not a big risk because you haven’t got the development costs that you might get with conventional production.

Also, you reach a bigger audience, so your backers become your advocates. Now we have backers all over the world; it’s the first step in seeing if the world is actually ready for something like this.

Evi In a lot of your previous works you’ve used dyesensitised solar cells, which use pigments to absorb photons and generate current. Is that the same technology in Sunne?

Marjan Sunne uses a different technology called SunPower cells, which are currently the strongest in the market. The dye cells are so specific – they work much better in lower light levels, for instance – that the market for them is not very big. If you want to make a product available to a larger group of people, then dye cells are not the best option because they’re more expensive and less commercially available. Sunne has less surface area than something big like a table, so you need stronger solar cells – these SunPower cells. The Lightyear One car2 actually uses the same solar cells that are in Sunne – I got a research grant to work with ECN.TNO, which helped develop them.

When working with the wider solar industry, I’ve found that people are usually concerned with how you can make the biggest possible impact. So you have to think about scale. For instance, the industry was previously very interested in calculations around how many solar panels people might need on their houses to meet energy demands, but that didn’t account for the fact that not enough people actually want these panels because, most of the time, their integration is quite poorly done. So now they have really shifted their focus to seeing how we can improve that as well.

How can we work with design, for example: can you develop a technique where you can print on solar panels, or change the look of them? The people at ECN.TNO have been super interested in that. I think they were keen to test my ideas out.

Evi In Current Table, the colour of the solar panel determines how much light it absorbs. Can you explain a bit more about how colour and technology interplay?

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2

Evi Hall I wanted to start with Sunne – am I pronouncing

it correctly?

Marjan van Aubel Yeah, it’s the Old English for sun, so

The Cyanometer collection (2017) for Swarovski which used the brand’s signature crystals to concentrate light onto solar cells to increase their efficiency.

A long-range solar powered electric vehicle designed in the Netherlands, the first models of which are due to be released on the market in late 2021.

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Marjan It varies with different technologies. So, for

example, I’m designing the roof of the Dutch pavilion at the World Expo and that uses organic photovoltaic cells.3 These also use the properties of colour, like dye-sensitised solar cells, but the chemistry works very differently. So with organic photovoltaic cells, blue is the most efficient colour, whereas with dye cells it isn’t. It really does depend on the chemistry and technology you use. For Sunne, it’s just using one type of cell, which is very dark blue. Because the solar panel is so thin and fragile, you have to think about how it has been laminated and what kind of filter you put on top. Mostly when you see a solar panel on a roof, for example, there’s a piece of glass on top of it which is quite bulky. I didn’t want that for Sunne, because glass reflects light, so you lose a lot of photons and Sunne is already behind a window.

So the cells are all laminated on the panel in series, and the surface is matte which helps with making the solar panel as invisible and efficient as possible.

Evi What can consumers expect from Sunne? Should they have the same expectations as they would from conventional lighting?

Marjan It’s a “natural” light: if there’s no sun, then it doesn’t work. Going back in time to when we used sailing boats, for example, if there was no wind, then you couldn’t sail. It wasn’t this thing that was there all the time like taking electricity from the socket.

Solar is a different way of looking at and using energy.

The sun is our most reliable energy source because it’s always there, but it’s not always shining everywhere equally, so it’s a question of what technologies we use to counterbalance this. Wind and solar are quite compatible in a way – when there’s no sunshine, very often there are wind and storms. You could also have technologies around that in your home, for example.

I think of it as small systems, instead of big installations, which can be integrated more into the things we use.

Evi So what brought you to solar power and not wind?

Marjan It’s more tangible. If you look at a small solar cell, you see a surface that’s activating as a material: it takes in light and converts it to something else. Wind is so… foooffff! You have to build a massive wind tower, which is so far from our human scale. Solar is something that we can learn more about and integrate more in our 3

Organic photovoltaic cells use conductive organic polymers or small organic molecules to absorb photons and from there generate current.

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environment. It’s something you can actually use as a material and design with. I’m fascinated with how a material can take in sunlight and, because of its chemistry, turn that into current. I think this love of solar happened after I graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2012. I was doing different things at the time, but when I moved back to the Netherlands four years ago, I decided to purely focus on solar because it gave me the most energy.

After moving back here I found I was much closer to the research, the universities and what was going on in the industry, which made things much easier.

“I’m no longer the weird girl wanting to do something with solar.

There’s more support.”

Looking back over the past few years, you can see the technology is changing quite quickly and slowly simultaneously, but the mentality of where we want to go with solar is becoming much more aligned.

I’m no longer the weird girl wanting to do something with solar. There’s much more support now.

Evi What are the expected lifespans of your objects?

Marjan All the materials and technology that I use can last for 40 years. For Sunne, I’ve really thought about how to make it circular and modular, so you can take the parts apart and re-use them. The only problem now is the battery – it doesn’t have a long lifecycle because it works with battery cycles. That’s an issue, but at the same time it’s also a matter of programming the battery so that it doesn’t overcharge. You need to know the limits of your technology. But so many new things are happening in the field that it’s also about looking further than the obstacles that are here right now. So far, the solar industry only looks 40 years ahead, but what if we look to the next 100 years?

What will happen with the materials we use then?

What do we want our world to look like and, more importantly, how are we going to build this world based on that vision? I think we have to be aware now such that we don’t make the wrong decisions.

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Do we really want to fill our landscapes with big solar parks? I’m not sure that’s the way to go, which is why it’s important that design comes in now. There’s a designer called Pauline van Dongen, for instance, who integrates solar into fashion. We knew each other’s work in the past, but it wasn’t until we properly met that we were both struck by the

“In our minds we still have this image of a blue panel.

That’s the first thing we need to change.” fact that people in this field exist in silos. We all talk about and want the same thing, but we never talk about it with each other. Because of this we started a “solar movement”. We’ve had a couple of sessions now with people from industry and philosophers, which have been focused on how we can change the narrative of solar power. Often if you talk about solar design in public, the responses you get go something like, “OK, so, are you making them super efficient or cheap? What’s the pay back time?” These questions are ones that, as users and consumers, we’re all trained to ask. But in a lot of countries, solar has already become the cheapest source of energy: it’s not a debate anymore. The questions should be about what we want from solar and how we are going to design that. Institutions and researchers are going towards that, but how can we do it together? Coming back to design, we’re organising a Solar Biennial next year in the Netherlands to show all these new potential possibilities.

Evi What have you learnt from working with each other?

Marjan Everyone has different expertise, but we are all aligned in how to we want to get to this future. So we are on the same page, but how do we get architects and designers to also look at solar like this? How can we do the same for the broader audience of end users and consumers? How can we change their perspectives?

That’s our main question: how do we get there and what steps do we need to take? So the main location of the Solar Biennial will be Het Nieuwe Instituut,

and it will not only be a showcase of solar technologies, but also include researchers from the institute tackling issues like materiality. The aim is to enlarge this solar movement through workshops, lectures, and events like the biennial. Another key area to look at is how we can change policy. The current regulations for a building in 2040 stipulate that everything has to be CO2 neutral, but why can’t we change the way we build so that every house could harvest a certain amount of energy? Installing solar panels on a roof is expensive, so why can’t we have different loans from banks where the pay back time is better integrated? All these different questions arise when we’re talking to people with different kinds of expertise.

Evi What do you think about the fact that solar cells require the extraction of metals, and therefore contain a lot of embodied carbon? We often focus on questions of efficiency and production issues, but do you think these are fair concerns around solar technology?

Marjan I understand why we’re concerned with efficiency, because at first it was really expensive to make solar cells – you couldn’t just cover your whole roof. You’d install one panel which had to be super efficient because it was so costly, but that’s not the case anymore – it’s not as expensive as it was.

Now you can have a solar panel with twice the surface area that works better, or you can have solar panels made using different materials. For example, the Dutch Expo is made out of organic photovoltaics which use recycled plastic and coloured dyes. If you compare it to one square centimetre of a traditional solar cell, then it’s less efficient. But if you look at how it’s been made and what the materials are, then arguably it’s better – we have to work with different values. It’s also about what the future impact is going to be, which is why I think it’s so important to see solar differently.

Maybe we can view it as cultural. You can make art with solar energy, you can print on it, you can integrate light, like solar-powered neon, for example. Now we can have flexible solar cells, so you can have something mobile or circular – all these new things! But in our minds we still have this image of a blue panel. That’s the first thing we need to change.

Evi A lot of your work seems to be moving away from thinking of solar as a pure utility – it’s almost domesticating solar energy. You mentioned your interest in solar technology and fabric, for instance.

Marjan I’ve stopped using “solar technology” and I talk about “solar design” instead. That opens up a lot of Interview

different things, because technology is the thing we know – the blue panels you put on the roof. But if you think about solar design, it opens it up to every part of your identity. It’s asking, “What is your opinion about solar?” I’m doing a lot of research at the Sandberg Institute and writing a book about solar design, asking questions such as: what is the future of solar panels? Can it be part of our infrastructure?

Can it give space instead of taking space? It’s opening up all these possibilities and the question of how we will look at solar in 100 years. If we look back, is it something we’ll be proud of? I give the example of Dutch windmills, which are basically robots from 200 to 300 years ago, and which still exist now as part of our heritage. What is the difference between those windmills and what we now view as technology?

You have to look at it as technological philosophies: what is the tipping point when technology becomes something else? Our clothing, for example, is also a form of technology, but has become something else.

Evi In this analogy, do you see you see your work in solar design as more akin to modern-day wind turbines or the old Dutch windmills?

Marjan I hope this is only the beginning. Think about the architecture of the windmill and how energy harvesting is part of it – the two things enhance one another. When we’re looking at the way houses are built, think about the Ancient Greeks and how they positioned their houses such that they were built towards the sun. They lived with the sun, but now we’ve lost that connection. What if you turned it around and said, “OK, solar design has to be part of a good design. A building should harvest its own energy.” You would build differently then. We should consider a building to be broken if it doesn’t generate its own energy and that’s something I believe we’ll say in the future. Similarly, how can you grow food in a building? All these things are our basic needs, and we should start thinking about integrating them into our architecture.

Evi Before Sunne, a lot of your designs were much more passive – they were surfaces that could collect light, but which didn’t directly do anything themselves.

They saved and stored energy that you could then use elsewhere. With Sunne, you’ve moved to an object that collects energy to then give it out as light. It’s a switch from a passive object to a more reciprocal one.

Marjan A table and a window are things you need anyway, so those pieces were sort of a double function.

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But Sunne is an autonomous object – it functions from itself. We are talking about whether you should be able to charge your phone from Sunne, but that’s not really the point. I like that it’s so autonomous and powers itself. In a way, Power Plant does that too. It’s also an autonomous system, because its “skin” is powering the inside and the growing that’s happening there.

But I want to do more around this idea of what can be autonomous. How can you create shade for example, such that you protect yourself from the sun but you’re also using that power for something else? Sunne is inspired by the idea that if you look at surfaces you can see everything as a solar activator – it’s a surface that is an opportunity to harvest energy.

Evi If you had the funding, what would be your next step in solar design?

Marjan At first I thought about what would happen if you designed a large building where every surface was an energy activator: what would that look like?

How would that function? But now I’m thinking bigger: you could design a whole city like this. How would the streets function if they could harvest energy and what would this energy do? How does this system work then?

What is the impact? How might we live with it? E N D Sunne’s Kickstarter closed on 2 April 2021.

To find out more or join the waiting list, visit marjanvanaubel.com.

Take an e-Seat Words Johanna Agerman Ross

In February 2021, the designer Andrés Reisinger sold 10 pieces of virtual furniture as non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

The pieces, part of a collection named The Shipping, fetched $450,000 on the digital art auction site Nifty Gateway.

To those interested in furniture design, the sale felt like the surreal culmination of a year in which digital has come to dominate our lives in previously inconceivable ways. Artists and designers, in particular, have been forced to reconsider their options for reaching prospective customers. In recent months it has been difficult to avoid news of record-breaking “firsts” of NFTs issued for design, architecture and art projects.

A few weeks after Reisinger sold his digital collection, auction house Christie’s announced the sale of a digital collage by the artist Beeple (Mike Winkleman) for almost $70m. The single-lot sale, Christie’s boasted, marked “the first time a purely digital work of art, also known as a Non-Fungible Token (NFT), has ever been offered by a major auction house.”

Following Beeple’s record-breaking sale for digital art, the artist Krista Kim sold her Mars House for over half a million dollars on the online marketplace SuperRare, which described the sale as the world’s first of a digital house verified by NFTs. An NFT is an authentication certificate that is stored on a blockchain, a type of digital ledger that is best known as the enabler of cryptocurrencies. While Bitcoin has become the proto-example among cryptocurrencies, the currency that is most frequently exchanged for NFTs is Ethereum. Since its creation in 2015 and decline in the late 2010s, it has built renewed momentum this past year: from being valued at less than $100 in March 2020, Ethereum hit a high of more than $2,700 in April 2021, with some analysis suggesting this might rise

as high as $5,000 by the end of the year. While this rise has been largely driven by the cryptocurrency’s role in decentralised finance, it is Ethereum’s appearance within an art and design context that has brought it to mainstream public attention. With the cancellation of art and design fairs, as well as physical auctions, the sale of NFTs have proven a reliable route to reaching a wider audience when even access to physical artworks have had to be mediated digitally. Christie’s, for instance, counted 22 million participants during the final moments of the Beeple sale.

While some art forms seem wellsuited to be experienced in a digital format, furniture is a more challenging proposition – to state the obvious, its

Even Marc Newson’s Lockheed Lounge can be used for reclining – however tentatively one might choose to do so. key function is to be physically used.

The chairs we sit on, the desks we work at, the cupboards we store things in, the lamps we read by: while this transactional relationship is far from the only function furniture fulfils, it is the most common, even when furniture is sold at high prices at auction or via design galleries. Even Marc Newson’s Lockheed Lounge (the current record holder for the most expensive furniture object sold by a living designer at £2.4m) can be used for reclining –

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however tentatively one might choose to do so.

So what exactly is The Shipping?

According to the auction’s page on Nifty Gateway, it is “a manifestation of a new hybrid reality” between the virtual and physical. The collection contains 10 pieces of furniture, five of which come with real-world counterparts, while all 10 “can be implemented digitally in any open-world” (an online platform or game that lets you integrate your own digital swag). Some of Reisinger’s designs are unique, while others have been issued in editions of two to five – it’s here that NFTs become crucial in authenticating the specific files, enabling the new owner the possibility of re-selling the work in the future.

Most of Reisinger’s designs suggest sitting or reclining, but there is also a drawer unit and a table. Many pieces are blob-like, sometimes inflatable, and often rendered in pastel pink or chrome. The most conventional pieces are the ABBA desk chair on castors and the Time Table – a wafer-thin sheet material forming a counter-levered tabletop, which is supported on a sphere akin to an exercise ball. The furniture is displayed (exists?) in artfully executed natural landscapes that feature rock formations or deserts, with the light suggesting perpetual dusk, just as the sun has set below the horizon. It’s a seductive, peaceful scene, where the surface of a body of water softly ripples or grass gently sways. To make up for the lack of physical interaction, the furniture performa continuous little dances such as inflating and deflating, gently wobbling,

or taking flight like helium-filled balloons.

It’s mesmerising to watch, but the real world counterparts might create some disappointment as a result. What do you mean this sofa doesn’t float?

A few weeks after The Shipping sale, another, non-NFT related sale was announced: the takeover of Dezeen by the Danish media company JP/Politiken

In the 15-year period since Dezeen’s launch, the rendering has moved from being mere representation to trading on its own artistic merit.

Media Group. After 15 years of building a successful online platform dedicated to covering design and architecture, Dezeen’s owners, Marcus Fairs and Rupinder Bhogal, accepted the offer of a buy-out. While the two events are not directly connected, it is tempting to see them in the context of one another.

Over the course of its history, Dezeen has usefully traced the narrative arc for how design renders have gone from being a tool in project development to finished products in themselves.

Founded in 2006, Dezeen began life with Fairs republishing the content of press releases about new design launches and events. Accompanying this content was a type of image that had previously been little utilised in design and architecture publishing – the digital render. At this time, renders had been enabled by new and improved digital image-making software, and they quickly became a popular and inexpensive tool for communicating how something not yet produced, and therefore not yet photographed, would look. Design journalists often received these renders ahead of large events such as Milan’s Salone del Mobile: a move that allowed manufacturers, working up to the last minute to produce furniture for the fair, to publicise and drum up interest in their new products before they actually existed. Real-world photographs of the design would appear weeks, sometimes months, after the physical events.

As anyone who has ever tried to photograph furniture in a studio knows,

it’s a logistical nightmare and a costly one at that. While social media channels such as Instagram and TikTok have allowed for leaner, on-the-go production of images, in 2006 it was largely down to renders to facilitate the fast communication and spread of new releases. And as Dezeen produced none of its own imagery, the digital render became a prominent feature on its site, with Dezeen’s reputation for fast designrelated news seeing audiences grow exponentially. According to its latest annual roundup, Dezeen counted 32.1 million unique users and 110m page views in 2020.

With a generation of aspiring designers and architects having grown up on the site’s fast design news, it’s worth considering how the rendered image has influenced their thinking and approach to design. In the 15-year period since Dezeen’s launch, the rendering has moved from being mere representation, to trading on its own artistic merit.

Many brands now use renders for their final marketing campaigns, for instance.

Kettal’s recently launched Pavilion O office system was publicised with animated renders created by Reisinger, while in 2020 Field Tiles launched a collection of its tiles with rendered interiors by CGI designer Stefano Giacomello. “Our products are made with respect to craft and heritage, adding a sense of depth and time to each space where they are installed,” explained the brand’s founder Alex Bertman, seemingly seeing no oddity in illustrating this ethos through entirely computer-generated spaces.

Meanwhile, a large number of brands have pushed ever further in their use of hyperreal renders to publicise news, meaning that a quick glance at Dezeen’s paid-for ‘Showroom’ pages can feel like a game of “Digital or physical?”

Playing with this ambiguity, some studios have worked on bringing the airbrushed aesthetic of the render into real life, as seen in Wang & Söderström’s collection of objects for Hay, which aspire to a computer-rendered bulbous aesthetic that “manifests the intersection of the digital and physical process”. New York-based studio Jumbo similarly trades on a digital aesthetic for physical forms, most recently with its Creature Comfort Collection which “[explores] the tension

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between the physical and the digital, the real and the surreal.”

Placing The Shipping collection within this wider storyline makes its sale less surprising: it’s a moment that has been in the making for close to two decades. Reisinger himself sees the development as a positive one for the individual artist, given that it cuts out middlemen such as brands or galleries. “[We] have replaced these institutions with code,” Reisinger told Dezeen after the sale, explaining the digital authentication enabled by NFTs. Another benefit with this system is that the originator of the work can continue to profit from future sales of the same work: the NFTs can be programmed such that a percentage of the profit from any sale will always

“I am the first to do it and I hope that it opens the doors to many other artists and designers. This is a new way, a complementary way to continue growing our careers and businesses.” —Andrés Reisinger

accrue to the artist in the form of royalties.

“I am the first to do it and I hope that it opens the doors to many other artists and designers,” Reisinger explained.

“This is a new way, a complementary way to continue growing our careers and businesses.”

In contrast to the hype, the huge environmental impact of this industry, resulting from the intense energy usage involved in mining cryptocurrencies, is in the process of being uncovered: estimates suggest that cryptocurrencies currently account for 0.5 per cent of the world’s total electricity usage. As crypto mining is the basis for all NFT exchanges, trading artworks as NFTs is inextricably entwined with this energy usage, and as a result some artists have even refused to engage with the NFT art market. Architect Chris Precht recently withdrew his work from a sale involving NFTs, stating on his Instagram account: “To [mint] one token through the blockchain equals the same amount of electricity I usually use in one month.” Science magazine Quartz offers a handy, illustrated guide to the

Images courtesy of Studio Reisinger.

A digital environment created by Andrés Resisinger as part of The Shipping.

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Moooi’s imagery shows the chair in the seductive CGI environment of a Roman ruin, but removed from this context it loses something of its appeal.

Without the breeze moving through the petals and that soft, otherworldly light enhancing its features, you are forced to engage with it as a piece of actual furniture fulfilling the task of seating.

As such the design seems less intriguing, its material choice impractical and

These works feature entirely de-populated worlds, coloured in saccharine tones, where the weather seems to never vary from a gentle breeze and hazy sunshine.

The Hortensia armchair, originally designed by Andrés Reisinger as a digital file, now also exists as a physical piece produced by Moooi.

environmental impact of selling artworks verified by NFTs, concluding that “over its lifecycle, the average NFT will accrue a stunning footprint of 211kg of CO2, equivalent to driving 513 [miles] in a typical US gasoline-powered car.”

These concerns aside, there is another troubling aspect inherent in the upswing in popularity of digitally rendered design landscapes. Despite the, literally, limitless possibilities available when physical constraints such as material choices and limits of manufacturing technology no longer have to be taken into consideration, these renders are all uncannily similar, to the point of looking interchangeable.

These works feature entirely de-populated worlds, coloured in saccharine tones, where the weather seems to never vary from a gentle breeze and hazy sunshine.

The term “AirSpace” was coined by the writer Kyle Chayka to describe the type of gentrified environments that have

grown out of an economy catering for global consumers looking for the same type of hotels, coffee shops and restaurants, whether they are in Tokyo, Sydney or San Francisco. “The connective emotional grid of social media platforms is what drives the impression of AirSpace,” he wrote. “If taste is globalized, then the logical endpoint is a world in which aesthetic diversity decreases.” It seems that the digital realm of designed environments suffers from the same homogeneity, which is somewhat disappointing considering the possibilities at hand.

This became apparent when one of the pieces in The Shipping sale, the Hortensia armchair, recently launched as a physical product manufactured by the Dutch furniture brand Moooi.

The squat and boxy armchair is covered in a highly textured fabric made to look like thousands of pink flower petals – hence the name (hydrangea in English).

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unnecessarily frivolous. With rendering having come full-circle – from having served as a representation, to becoming the actual work, to inspiring the physical representation – it seems legitimate to ask how renders may meaningfully shape furniture design in the future. From the examples currently presented, it seems the answer is some way off.

The physical version of the Hortensia armchair is available from Moooi, price on request.

A Potpourri of Concrete Nation-Building Words Benjamin Bansal and Manuel Oka!Photographs Manuel Oka

Naypyidaw has been Myanmar’s capital since 2005, and seems the polar opposite of its predecessor, Yangon. Here, in the middle of Myanmar’s heartland, lies a capital created ex nihilo. By many counts, Naypyidaw is not even a city. It is a military creation inspired by fear, grandeur, and a skewed sense of national identity. It is “dictatorship by cartography, geometry”, as the journalist Siddharth Varadarajan put it, lacking the “urban cadences and unpredictable rhythms [of] city life in Rangoon or Mandalay.”

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Naypyidaw’s Wunna Theikdi Stadium, built for the 2013 Southeast Asian Games.

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The approach to Naypyidaw’s Uppatasanti Pagoda.

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We came to Naypyidaw in 2015 as part of the process of researching our book Yangon Architectural Guide, published with DOM in the same year. Yangon’s built environment, we thought, could only be understood in the context of the new capital to the north. Since the construction of Naypyidaw had begun in the early 2000s, official buildings in Yangon had been neglected, with public works spending instead focused on the new capital. Yangon’s recent history, particularly the 8888 Uprising of 1988 and the 2007 Saffron Revolution protests against Myanmar’s national military government, also provided clues about Naypyidaw’s urban experiment – a city designed on the drawing board by Myanmar’s paranoid military, the Tatmadaw.

Naypyidaw’s authoritarian roots are well-known, and most speculation involving its urban form connect with this narrative of a city built by generals hiding from their people. Back in 2015, we thought that the interesting question would be how the players in a newly democratising Myanmar – parties, political appointees, foreigners – would interact with this by-and-large military creation, how they would write history on such a seemingly ill-suiting canvas.

We left this question unanswered, careful to leave any mention of a “democratic opening” in quotation marks – its sustainability had always appeared suspect given the important role that the military had carved out for itself in the country’s nascent institutions, above all its Constitution.

The Burmese Army took power in a coup d’état in February 2021, thereby reversing several years

It is a city designed on the drawing board

by Myanmar’s paranoid military, the Tatmadaw. of democratic progress, however imperfect it may have been. In a strange and unfortunate twist of fate, it appears that Naypyidaw is now back on track to becoming a purpose-built capital, designed with the spatial isolation of the country’s rulers in mind.

Whether or not this will be the city’s abiding legacy is anyone’s guess.

The most recent images reaching us from Myanmar on social media bear a strong resemblance to those smuggled out of the country 14 years ago during the Saffron Revolution. Throngs of people walk the narrow and confined streets of Yangon and other urban centres such as Mandalay. They are joined by passersby and eyed by regime informers.

Impromptu barricades are erected and the police and military have resorted to their old playbook of brutal intimidation. It is a deadly, threatening atmosphere of fear versus defiance.

The images from Naypyidaw on the other hand are much sparser and more surreal. In the early morning hours of 1 February, aerobic trainer Khing Hnin Wai was filming her regular exercise video for Facebook, posing on a roundabout on Naypyidaw’s giant Yaza Htarni Road. While doing her routine, and with her back facing the 20-lane highway, a convoy of armoured cars rolls toward the parliament complex.

With the video soundtracked by the dance track ‘Ampun Bang Jago’, no ambient sound gives away the roaring vehicles, and Khing goes about her business seemingly unperturbed.

Khing’s video drew the world’s attention to this most unusual capital city, which puts our assumptions about urban space and its relations with political protest to the test. Naypyidaw is not an organically grown city – its vastness exists by design and runs counter to the city’s young age. As an idea, Naypyidaw was only conceived around the turn of the millennium, although nobody is quite sure given the secrecy the city is shrouded in. Several reasons for its construction are usually offered, most centring around security: the military junta feared its own people and needed a safe distance which Yangon could not offer; the same junta fantasised about foreign powers (perhaps a US-led UN force acting under vague Responsibility to Protect guise) invading Myanmar, with Yangon too exposed due to its proximity to the open sea.

The military may have thought that with a new capital completed, a gradual and managed opening of the country’s political sphere could be allowed to occur: this process, the idea perhaps ran, would be less likely to get out of control if masterminded from Naypyidaw instead of the disorderly former capital Yangon. This opening up of Myanmar began with the formally civilian presidency of Thein Sein, who was elected in 2011 as the leader of the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), the

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The Myanmar International Convention Center 2 looms at the end of a road.

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Naypyidaw’s Union Territory has an area of more than 7,000sqkm, more than 10 times that of Yangon.

A total of just 900,000 people are said to live here, compared to the more than five million of Yangon.

The territory comprises Naypyidaw proper, three old municipalities, and the Naypyidaw Control Center.

Naypyidaw’s population density is thus extremely low; there are clusters of buildings at most, often appearing at random and without any connection to their surroundings. On top of that, much of the city is off-limits and reserved for exclusive military use. Observers have struggled to put words to the sensation of visiting the city. “A deceptive vastness

newly-formed political vehicle of the junta. During the country’s 2015 elections, however, the USDP was overtaken by Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) as the strongest faction in parliament. Despite the NLD’s electoral success, however, the Constitution guaranteed military appointees a crucial 25 per cent of parliamentary seats. This ensured that constitutional provisions – including on presidential eligibility requirements, such as nationality of family members – could not be amended without military buy-in–, and thereby Aung San Suu Kyi, mother of two British children from her marriage to the historian Michael Aris, was effectively barred from ever becoming president herself.

Over the course of the 2010s, Naypyidaw’s parliament, the Pyidaungsu Hluttaw, became the scene of surprisingly lively debates and unpredictable voting, providing a semblance of a functioning democracy in the most unlikely of places. Yes, the NLD disappointed many outsiders with a lukewarm embrace of (Western-inspired) reforms and an inexcusable approach to the Rohingya crisis in the southwestern Rakhine state, where hundreds of thousands of Muslim Myanmar citizens were displaced to neighbouring Bangladesh. Nonetheless, a steady flow of international delegations, consultants, and the odd businessperson gave Naypyidaw a veneer of approachability. Then came the 2020 elections, the results of which the Tatmadaw disputed. Since February 2021, Myanmar has been caught up in violent clashes between the Civil Disobedience Movement and the heavily armed police and military. Hundreds of protestors have died.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but Naypyidaw’s photographs evoke silence above all. of emptiness and barriers” (a photographer) and “an almost frighteningly deep space” (a journalist) represent some of the better attempts to do so.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but Naypyidaw’s photographs evoke silence above all. They mirror the city’s strangely odourless, eerily quiet atmosphere, and make us reassess the meanings of “vastness” and “emptiness”, words we normally associate with freedom. These images instead convey suffocation. There is no public space here, no human interaction that could provide a context for the edifices scattered in this nothingness. Attempts to capture this on camera often fail. One thing is for sure: if ideas need density to spread, their transmission is suspended here. This authoritarian control over territory works also on the mind.

Naypyidaw proper’s urban layout follows a clear segregation of use, testament to the planner’s desire to separate inhabitants from the state’s institutions, and foreigners from the ordinary people. Economic, residential and even hotel zones are strictly delineated.

The latter lies adjacent to the undeveloped diplomatic housing compound, with the ministry area 10km to the north. This city is neither compact nor accessible.

Most visitors on official business fly into the oversized international airport and then drive to their hotels,

Why is Naypyidaw where it is? Heinz Schuette, writing in his monograph on the city, cites the urban planner Kyaw Lat, who we also had the privilege of interviewing for our book. Kyaw suggests that Naypyidaw falls squarely in the tradition of the Burmese capital, which has changed place several times throughout history.

Naypyidaw is the residence of the nation’s rulers, lies at the interface of important trade routes, and has a strategic military position in the centre of the territory, both ideal for collecting taxes and for quelling unrest.

Yangon (formerly Rangoon) could never fulfil those criteria, being a by-and-large colonial creation, whose multiethnic heritage always sat at odds with a BamaBuddhist-centric national vision of the ruling military.

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Naypyidaw is not an organically grown city – its vastness exists by design and runs counter to the city’s young age.

A disguised mobile phone mast.

Naypyidaw is riddled with countless ornate roundabouts.

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A winding street connecting the bungalows of the Mount Pleasant Hotel.

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The ornate interior of the Uppatasanti Pagoda.

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and gardening tools.

distances are traversed by golf cart, with buildings strewn far apart. Even the rooms in most hotels are often located in separate buildings. Naypyidaw is a city without an easily discernible centre, which is by no means an accident. The symbols of power, above all the gigantic parliament building, are inaccessible and cut off from the outside by moats and iron bridges. There is no public space surrounding them, and therefore no place for a protesting public to congregate. The insurmountable power of sheer space, ingrained in so many squares in mainland China, finds a new definition here: Naypyidaw appears entirely devoid of urban space. This did not happen by chance, but was carefully planned.

and screening. A plethora of companies were enlisted in different parts and stages of the project.

Architecturally, Naypyidaw offers a potpourri of concrete nation-building – simple copying and faceless rendering. The nation-building attempt is perhaps most visible in the form of the Hluttaw building, whose roofs resemble old Burmese royal palaces. The vast complex’s 31 buildings are said to represent the 31 planes of existence in Buddhist cosmology – not unproblematic in an allegedly multi-confessional and multi-ethnic state. The Uppatasanti Pagoda, meanwhile, is a nigh-identical copy of Yangon’s iconic Shwedagon Pagoda (except for it being slightly shorter and hollow). Most ministry buildings and hotels possess a generic feel. The same applies to a host of sporting venues built for the Southeast Asian Games in 2013, including two identical stadium complexes 35km apart.

Ultimately, Naypyidaw’s principal aim is to exert control over its territory and the people living here and in the rest of the country. This control is achieved with the simplest of methods. Pedestrians are restricted to gated shopping and hotel complexes, as Naypyidaw is unwalkable due to its scattered buildings and large driveways connecting them to the main roads. Opulent roundabouts provide orientation points, but there are hardly any visual clues as to where roads may lead. Everywhere it is eerily quiet, the only noises coming from mopeds and gardening tools used for keeping the vegetation in check.

The main mode of transportation is motor vehicles, with wide multi-lane roads connecting the disparate parts of the city but hardly any traffic on them. Other

And still, Naypyidaw is not a place without a demos – the conventions of protest have just been reconfigured. Take the government employees who, at least initially, formed a major part of the Civil Disobedience Movement. Although there was no general strike, employees of several ministries were among the most outspoken protestors, posing in front of the signage of the various ministries, which is often displayed on manicured lawns in front of the building gates to be visible to those driving by. In a way, these crafted spaces provide a photogenic stage on which to protest for an audience requiring representative imagery. Hundreds of mopeds have also formed protest convoys, captured on Facebook and other social media while these services were still accessible – in February, Myanmar’s military ordered internet service providers to restrict access to these platforms.

Protests of this kind make the demonstrators very visible, especially in Naypyidaw. They cannot easily be submerged in the anonymity provided by a more urban space of the kind afforded by the former capital Yangon. Add to that the fact that a large number of government employees live in public housing compounds. Their livelihoods are thus completely reliant on the state providing them support. In fact, many have already been threatened, sacked, or imprisoned for their participation in the protests.

The same sense of total dependency on the regime applies to army members, many of whom live in a parallel universe of military compounds, where their schools and other amenities are sealed off from the “real” world.

This real world exists only some kilometres away, in Pyinmana, one of the “old” and more traditional

only to be picked up again to be driven to their appointments in one of the public buildings during the day.

Public works in the lead-up to the 2005 transfer were cordoned off from sight by huge barriers

Everywhere it is eerily quiet, the only noises coming from mopeds

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The Star World Hotel in the city’s hotel zone.

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A shanty town behind the Wunna Theikdi sports complex.

A tea shop next to the pool building of the Wunna Theikdi sports complex.

The old Yangon Manadalay highway.

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municipalities that are part of the Union Territory where normal Myanmar life unfolds on its streets and markets. Here, protests have continued like they have across most of the country, and the military have cracked down using live bullets against unarmed protestors. To this day, the will of the people remains unbroken, and the outcome of the current protests is all but certain: Myanmar risks becoming a “failed

Naypyidaw is likely going to dilapidate physically, parts of it being abandoned

a country more estranged from its political leadership than ever before. The physical isolation of Naypyidaw, and the generals’ retreat into their concrete fortress, will become even more entrenched.

We said at the outset that Naypyidaw was created ex nihilo, without the same weight of history as a city that has grown organically. We may now need to revisit this statement. Naypyidaw is young, and we had thought that Myanmar’s recent “opening up” might stand in defiance of its urban form. It too seemed a place whose history was yet to be written. Let us hope that this was not a pipe dream and that this same urban form will not now dictate the look and feel of Myanmar’s next chapter. E N D

or remaining unfinished.

Already a sense of decay is palpable. state”, returning to a state of civil war compounded by the economic problems it brings with it, such as shortages of goods, lack of (foreign) investment and possible international sanctions.

Naypyidaw cannot, by definition, see the kind of street fights that have been visible in Yangon, Mandalay or other cities across Myanmar. Naypyidaw’s urban layout may, however, lend itself to palace intrigues – politico-military factions breaking off, cordoned off, and spatially isolated. The ease with which the parliament building was taken during the coup suggests that it may just as easily be retaken, even by outsiders. The impending economic collapse and further international isolation bode ill not just for the country as a whole, but for Naypyidaw in particular. It is likely going to dilapidate physically, parts of it being abandoned or remaining unfinished.

Already, a sense of decay is palpable.

Going forward, it is hard to see the hegemonic role of the military sustained in any political settlement.

With the creators of this city hopefully abdicating, their physical legacy in tatters, Naypyidaw will stand as a cautionary reminder of military hubris and the primacy of politics over urban planning. If, on the other hand, the coup succeeds and the new junta remains in power, akin to the 1990s perhaps, then the army of Naypyidaw’s civil servants is set to govern

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A series of retail units under construction.

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Words Oli Stratford

Image by Choreo.

Za, Naoto Fukasawa for Emeco!

In the mid-2000s, the designers Naoto Fukusawa and Jasper Morrison began formulating their ideas around the notion of Super Normal – “a perfect summary of what design should be”.

A normal object like a paperclip or a Bic lighter, Fukasawa told Domus’s Fumiko Ito, is not showy or attentionstealing. “[These] things are those that have permeated daily life, things that we don’t find any element of design in,” he said. But normal, the pair explained, was too often being sacrificed on the altar of design. A Super Normal object would stand as a rebuttal to this, acting as an artificial form of “normal”. It was, Fukasawa explained, “a new design that takes the essence of something that everyone recognizes and perceives as normal. When people look at these things, their expectation of seeing something that has been designed is somewhat betrayed”.

These ideas likely played heavily on Fukasawa’s mind when he began a partnership with Emeco, the US manufacturer behind the 1006 Navy Chair (1944). While it’s hardly my place to declare it as such, the Navy Chair seems a good candidate for a Super Normal object. It was designed towards the end of the Second World War as a durable chair for use on US naval vessels, and produced out of recycled aluminium because steel was in short supply. It is, in the best possible way, a very normal-looking chair. “There are only a few iconic chairs that have existed for a long time, like Thonet, Eames, and a few Scandinavian chairs,” says Fukasawa. “And for America, Emeco was an icon: a symbol of American culture. It was one of the reasons I wanted to work with Emeco: to make a Super Normal chair.”

Intending to design a sibling to the 1006, Fukasawa alighted on the idea of a stool. “My initial thought was that a round aluminium stool already existed as part of the Navy chair family,” says Fukasawa, who subsequently learned that no such design had ever been created. “I was lucky to find that idea.” Spurred on, he created Za, a spun aluminium seat atop four Navy legs.

Za is a jolly button of a stool, but one executed with a rigour and simplicity that recalls the 1006. The Za’s legs are the same extrusion as the 1006’s, with the aluminium sourced from recycled cans. “In the beginning, I didn’t know the recycled aluminium was made out of cans,” says Fukasawa.

“Now I feel that both products – the aluminium can and the stool – have things in common. When I hold the can, it is very light, and when I hold the Za stool, it is surprisingly light also. They share the same kind of feeling of using minimum material for maximum effect and strength.”

As Fukasawa himself found, it is somewhat surprising to learn that a stool like Za hasn’t been in the Emeco collection for years. Although new, it passes almost unnoticed because of a phantom familiarity. “Its distinctive ‘Emeconess’ makes it feel like a member of the original Emeco family from the 1940s,” notes the company’s CEO Gregg Buchbinder. Is this Super Normal? In this, I defer to Morrison, writing in 2006 about the principles of good design: “A certain lack of noticeability has become a requirement.”

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What Lies Beneath While growing up, I regularly visited a friend’s house whose parents owned a sofa I loved to eat.

Introduction Oli Stratford 130

Images courtesy of SCP, Another Country and Magis.

It was a mouldering old thing, sat fat and squat in the living room. The 1980s fabric had long since torn, leaving splits through which bulged a blubbery seam of foam. As a six-year-old, I used to rummage through those tears, winkling out curls of foam to pop in my mouth. It tasted very chemical, but was otherwise really quite good. A very pleasing mouthfeel. If my friend’s parents ever noticed, then they kept quiet about it. It was, admittedly, a horrible sofa; perhaps they were secretly pleased that I was slowly disposing of it. Given enough time and sufficient lubricating orange squash, I could have probably saved them a trip to the dump. “Shall we watch another episode of Brum?” my friend would ask, fast-forwarding the tape. Oh yes, I’d say, fingers already back rootling around. At least one more.

My memories of these golden days came back to me in late 2020, when I was contacted by the designer Daniel Schofield. Schofield had just begun a research project looking at polyurethane (PU) foam upholstery in the furniture industry. Schofield had grown curious about PU foams, interviewing experts from across the field, as well as delving into the various material options available to designers working with upholstery and the processes by which upholstery may be created and recycled.

While personally I found the work somewhat derivative of my own studies from 25 years previously, I was prepared to accept that the greater orthodoxy of Schofield’s method (as far as I know, he hasn’t eaten any foam) may render the work of more immediate use to the design profession. After all, the internal structure of furniture often goes unremarked upon – it’s time more was done to bring it to light.

The bulk of contemporary upholstery is produced using polyurethane (PU) foams, which bring numerous advantages over more traditional upholstery materials such as animal hair, hessians, grasses and coir (coconut fibre). PU foams are simpler and lighter than many alternatives, as well as allowing manufacturers to cut them into precise forms or else gently roll them around a radius: much of the form-making of contemporary upholstered furniture design has been made possible through the emergence of these materials. There are, however, downsides. PU foams are produced using petrochemicals (a mixture of polyols and diisocyanates); do not biodegrade; and, given the combustibility of the material, are often treated with potentially toxic fire retardants in order

to pass fire safety standards. As such, I may have just been lucky to have suffered no aftereffects from having eaten my friend’s sofa, but it’s hard to say with any certainty. It is often unclear (particularly in older furniture, produced under different regulations) as to what materials and chemicals are present in a given design. And, as a six-year-old, I wasn’t overly bothered to find out. I had Brum to watch, for goodness sake.

Despite these issues, PU foam is big business, with Europe (including Turkey and Russia), and Kazakhstan estimated to have produced 1.7m tonnes of flexible PU foams in 2018 alone. The material

The internal structure of furniture often goes unremarked upon – it’s time more was done to bring it to light. realities of this should be stark, particularly in terms of the impact upon sustainability targets. While PU foams can be largely recycled either chemically or mechanically, these processes are complicated by the composite nature of furniture. Before they can be processed, the foams in a furniture piece must be separated out – a difficult and expensive process given that they form a part of a whole that has been variously stitched, glued, and nailed together.

At present, a significant proportion of end-of-life upholstered furniture is either landfilled or incinerated.

Statistics vary from country to country, and part of the issue in tracking this clearly is the lack of well-defined systems at the end of a product’s lifespan. Who is responsible for recycling these products: consumers, their manufacturers, government? It is little surprise that many fall through the cracks and into landfill.

There are different strategies that may be taken in response to these issues to try and improve the situation. Some foam producers have sought to limit their use of non-renewable chemicals by adopting alternative raw materials, or else developing their recycling methods. Another approach is embodied by furniture brands such as Another Country and SCP, which have prioritised the use of natural upholsteries,

Roundtable

Country, ed.]. Since 2013, we’ve been trying to move away from petrochemicals with our clients. So we’ve been using naturally sourced products – although we don’t necessarily call them sustainable – such as coconut fibre, wool, latex and feathers. A lot of the materials that we have are actually backed with nylon, so you can’t fully eradicate petrochemicals, but it’s a step in the right direction. Obviously, there are some customers that we work with, like Another Country, who have already gone down that route.

Stefan Diez I head up a design studio of about eight people in Munich. I would say that we have a fairly traditional studio, but we have come to specialise in product development. With most of the pieces that we’ve done in the last 10 to 15 years, we have focused quite a bit on process, which has given us a much deeper influence on how our products are made. When we were asked to do Costume, a sofa with Magis, me and my colleague Dominik Hammer took it as an opportunity to rethink the way that a sofa is constructed. Our goal was to design a sofa that is 100 per cent circular: Costume should consist of as few components as possible to keep it flexible and relevant to the user for a long time, and the cover should be removable for repair and cleaning. All the components should be separable by the user, so that each material can be returned to a material cycle in the true sense of a circular economy. However, we still use a small amount of polyurethane foam in our studio, because it has proven to have some advantages compared to other alternatives, including latex. And we hope for chemical recycling in the near future, which is being worked on right now.

Michel Baumgartner I work for EUROPUR, which is the European Association of Producers of Polyurethane Foam, so I have a vested interest in encouraging people to use foam. Our industry is working towards a circular economy linked to foam, with raw materials improvement, which is why I’m glad to join the discussion today.

Stefan Michel, you’ll know this better than me, but hasn’t the European Union begun, along with some other countries, an effort to circularise PU foam?

Michel That EU legislation is for all waste, not just furniture, and seeks to push society away from landfilling. It’s a problem faced by most European countries. A lot of furniture still ends up in landfills at the end of its life, just because it’s the easiest way for countries which don’t have a lot of money for

designing their furniture around natural fibres and fillings including organic latex, coir and lambswool.

Others, including the designer Stefan Diez with his Costume sofa for Italian brand Magis, have steered towards furniture projects that are rooted in design

“Our goal was to design a sofa that is 100 per cent circular.” —Stefan Diez for disassembly, such that individual upholstery components can be easily separated out, recycled or replaced. Schofield’s research project seeks to examine the various advantages and disadvantages of all of these methods, mapping the current status of the industry and exploring possible routes forward that may not always be visible to those working within the field.

In this spirit, Schofield partnered with Disegno on a roundtable discussion that could bring together people from across design, manufacture and the foam industry to share their experiences and ideas for the future. The resulting discussion, an edited version of which follows below, throws light onto an area of furniture design that is essential to the discipline, but which remains little-discussed: hidden beneath so many layers of obscuring leather or textile. The discussion may provide no easy answers as how design ought to treat upholstery moving forward, but it does offer substantial food for thought.

Daniel Schofield I’m a designer based in London and my work looks at simplicity, materiality and purpose.

What led me down this rabbit hole of upholstery was my work with SCP and Another Country [two Londonbased furniture retailers, ed.], both of whom now work predominantly with natural upholstery materials.

Through them, I was doing lots of research into foam, and replacing foam with natural materials, and I began looking at what is actually on the market, the problems that are involved, and the solutions available.

Tim Cox I’m the managing director of Coakley & Cox, an upholstery company based up in Norfolk that produces mostly one-offs as well as small batch production runs [Coakley & Cox produces for both SCP and Another

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The images accompanying this article document the upholstery process at the Coakley & Cox workshop.

Roundtable

waste management to get rid of stuff. EU legislation also prescribes that in a couple of years’ time – by 2030 – the incineration of waste for energy will only be allowed for things that cannot be recycled. So you will only be allowed to incinerate products that are too contaminated, too dirty, or for which there is no recycling option. The rest should be recycled.

In the case of furniture: foam, textiles, wood – all these things need to be taken care of. So we are working on the challenge of foam recycling. Until now, most of the foam used in furniture follows the same route as the furniture itself, which means it goes to waste-to-energy plants in most of Europe.

Stefan And 60 per cent or so goes in landfill?

Michel That was true a couple of years ago, but we are probably at 40 per cent landfill now. That, of course, depends on the country. In Denmark, they heat and power their cities with waste, importing a lot of waste from the UK, for example. So they burn a lot of furniture. In Germany, Belgium, and the UK, there’s also a lot of incineration going on, but it’s not the direction the world needs to take – we have to find ways to recycle materials. And we are, as foam producers, looking at how you can handle foam from that point of view.

Stefan Do you know of a project called URBANREC? Michel Yes, it’s an EU-funded project looking at recycling of what they call “bulk waste”, which is basically furniture and mattresses. Part of that project is looking into how best to chemically recycle foam, in which it’s really the first project of its kind. In the meantime, things are evolving quite quickly and we have chemical recycling plants being built right now in France, Holland, Spain, and Germany. And that’s only in the past five months.

Stefan Whether you look at chemical or mechanical recycling, it still makes sense to separate the waste and not have foam mixed in with other plastic waste.

The more mixed waste is, the more expensive it is to recycle it because you have to separate, first mechanically, and then chemically. And of course that’s energy-intensive. So with Costume, what we tried in our design approach was to make every component separable and as clean as possible.

Catherine Aitken That is an important design consideration. I’m the design director of Another Country and most of the pieces that we make have component parts that are quite easily separated.

In terms of thinking about the afterlife of a piece

of furniture, it’s a complicated thing. One scenario is that the manufacturer or the company that’s selling a product ultimately takes responsibility for it at the end of its life, and takes it back for recycling. In saying this I’m very aware that when we put a product out there, it goes to a retail client, for example, and we don’t really know where it ends up at the end of its

“We put a product out and we don’t really know where it ends up at the end of its life.” —Catherine Aitken life five, ten or twenty years down the line. Everyone needs to know how to deal with the products they bring into their lives, and that’s a difficult thing.

Then there’s scale. For example, Ikea is now selling secondhand furniture, taking things back for recycling, and so on. But for smaller manufacturers that’s not necessarily viable at this time. I guess it’s a question I always have when it comes to these topics. Even if something is made from fully recyclable materials and those elements can be separated, the global system necessary for recycling each element is not in place, or at least not always clear and easily accessible.

Stefan If you look at the amount of materials that Ikea uses in a year, it’s scary. The sheer number of products Ikea has to source materials for is astonishing, and realising that made me aware that it may not always be best to go for natural materials. They sell so many pillows and mattresses, for instance, that even if you could make them all from latex, it would lead to such an enormous amount of land use in monocultures that it cannot possibly be a sustainable solution.

Tim I contradict myself quite a lot in terms of the use of foams and sustainable materials, because you’re exactly right, Stefan. If all the manufacturers move over to using coconut fibre and latex, we’re going to destroy the entire globe’s rainforests to grow rubber trees and coconut farms. And that really is not sustainable. What is sustainable is potentially using fewer petrochemicals and trying to develop foams that use fewer TDIs [toluene diisocyanates are aromatic petrochemicals used in the production of PU foams, ed.], which I understand a couple

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of manufacturers are trying to do. Vitafoam [a large British foam producer, ed.], for example, is currently working to produce a range of foams called Origin that uses natural seed oils. This has less reliance on petrochemicals, and is therefore a step in the right direction to a truly sustainable foam filling.

Michel As with most materials, you also have certification schemes for foam. So if you want a mattress for €25 you can always find one. But if you are willing to pay a little bit more, you can buy a mattress made with certified materials, including foam, textiles, and the rest of it.

So, like any product, it’s what you pay for.

Stefan I think what we have to do as designers, together with industry, is to write a set of rules that we all follow. There are no rules at present. Nobody tells us how cheaply we are allowed to produce our products. We need to create a sort of a minimum standard that has to get much higher in the next few years. If that means making the product a bit more expensive, then that’s okay. I think that’s fair – we know we have too much of everything.

Catherine With regards to the cost question, you also have to take into consideration the lifespan of something. This is something that sadly, at the moment, the average consumer is probably not considering. But if you buy a sofa and it’s going to last 25 years, even if you’re paying more at the beginning, in the end you’re paying far less.

Obviously there’s plenty of people who do think like this, but not everyone.

Tim In terms of longevity, natural materials have been around a hell of a lot longer than PU foams. We’ve made horsehair-stuffed cushions since the 1800s, if not before that. And even coconut fibre has been used as stuffing historically – only the technique of how it is applied has changed. Traditionally, it’s hand-stuffed, so you roll up the pieces of coconut fibre or horse hair and you stitch it into a hessian bag. But you don’t have much comfort – it’ll be a rock-hard piece of furniture.

That’s where PU foams came along and revolutionised the industry, because suddenly you could create these amazing shapes with just a single layer of foam.

Daniel I recently designed a sofa for SCP, but the design leant itself to being made of foam; we weren’t sure if they were going to be able to create the right feeling with natural upholstery alternatives.

Tim We’ve got some products we cannot convert to natural materials, because the natural materials

don’t perform the way that PU foams do. One of my upholsters used to say, “Well, that’s why they invented foam!” Because you can do what you like with it. The latex and coconut fibre we use today is a mixture of coconut husk and latex blended together into 50mm sheets. It’s a little stiff, and kind of creases – you can’t roll that around a nice radius or anything like that.

We’ve only been using natural materials for eight or nine years, so I don’t yet know what lifespan those materials are going to have in products. But because these materials have existed for centuries, I think it’s safe to assume they will last a long time. One of our very first sofas that we made in natural materials came back to be recovered only a couple of weeks ago, and the filling in it was as good as the day we delivered it.

Over time, PU foams do crumble – the air bubbles within the foam burst. But then again, if you buy a cheap foam it’s more likely to do that, and if you buy a high-resilience foam, it’s less likely to. It can last 25 years, if not longer.

Daniel Is there a big price difference between natural upholstery and foam?

Tim Because of the recent price increase in foams, the difference is getting smaller. In the last year, we had six price increases for PU foam. And we literally had another one two weeks ago. I used to say that natural materials cost about 12 per cent more than foam, but I think it’s almost even now. My worry is that if more companies start using natural materials, the price is going to start going up on those because of demand.

Daniel Why has the price of foam risen so rapidly?

Michel Most of Europe was closed for business for a good part of 2020 and everybody anticipated that there would be a slowdown of the economy. When shops reopened, people started shopping like crazy, especially for furniture. So we have been faced with unprecedented demand while, at the same time, a lot of chemicals suppliers had scheduled maintenance on a number of plants. So we had fewer raw materials and more demand. In addition to that, in the autumn of last year we had a series of storms that struck the Gulf of Texas, forcing companies there to go into safe mode. Add to that the fact that we buy chemicals, colorants and additives from China, and there is a backlog of those things slowly making their way to Europe. Making foam is like making a cake. You mix a number of things and get a certain type of foam, and if you want to make another type of foam, you

Roundtable

Above: Daniel Schofield’s Another sofa for Another County.

Right: Stefan Diez’s Costume sofa for Magis.

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use other ingredients, some in relatively small quantities. But if your containers are stuck in China, you might just lack one additive, but it means you can’t make the foam you want. That is what happens.

So yeah, there we have the recipe for a perfect distortion of supply chains.

Daniel If it stays at that price, does that make it more valuable for it to be mined as a raw material at the end of its life to then become part of a circular economy?

One of the problems with foam, as I understand it, is that it’s such a cheap material that it’s almost not worth companies taking a lot of time and effort to get to it in older pieces – it’s really hard to get foam to recycle and reuse. In lots of upholstery it’s all glued, nailed and stitched together anyway, so in some cases it’s almost impossible to separate. I was wondering if the price went up, would that make it a more valuable commodity for a circular economy?

Michel I am not sure that it would work that way, but there can be an influence of foam prices on recyclates.

Higher prices of virgin foam may encourage the use of foam from mechanical recycling. We see that nowadays with high foam prices: some manufacturers also use bonded foam [foam produced from the polyurethane scraps that result from the mechanical recycling process, ed.] in some products. As for chemical recycling, the economic model is more complex.

Let’s say you recycle post-consumer foams from Europe into new chemical raw materials, and you have the resources to do that within Europe. Your cost structure will be relatively stable – you have incoming streams, and you have your output.

Compare that to petrochemicals, where the prices fluctuate a lot. When the price of recyclates is lower than the price of petrochemicals, it will be very easy for you to sell recyclates on the market. If all of a sudden they are 30 per cent higher, because the price of oil-derived raw materials is extremely low, then you may lose a number of customers. That’s why we have to find a balance to guarantee that people who invest in recycling technologies can find a sustainable economic model.

Catherine At Another Country, we’ve chosen to go down the natural materials route because it has worked for us up until this point. But whether a manmade material is actually preferable, in terms of a circular economy, is a question we ask regularly. It’s not that we’ve completely ruled out ever working with foam, it’s just that at the minute it doesn’t feel like it offers

the kind of solution that works for us and meets our customers’ expectations.

Tim From my point of view, if I knew that the foam in post-consumer sofas and chairs would be recycled each and every time, then that would potentially make me consider foams much more. But I don’t have a good understanding of how it is recycled. If I recycle my foams, they get collected and chipped. But I’m not allowed to mix foam from different suppliers, because one supplier won’t have a chain of custody in terms of all of the raw materials that have gone into another supplier’s foam. But if the chemicals could be recycled, I would consider that sustainable.

Stefan I think that raw natural materials are sometimes much more precious than we tend to think. There’s relatively little on this planet that is really available, and I think this is the great potential of artificial or manmade materials. We just have to make sure that they are recyclable, and that the recyling is integrated into already-existing processes.

Michel Chemical recycling of foam has existed for quite a few years now, but for production waste, rather than post-consumer waste. Within that context, it is relatively easy: you’ve just made the foam and cut it to shape, so you have leftover cutoffs that you can dissolve. You know exactly what’s in the foam because you just made it. With post-consumer foam, you get a mix of different types of foam of different ages, and sometimes mixed with other materials like latex. So researching that has taken a couple of years, which was actually the scope of the URBANREC project that Stefan mentioned. But it’s moved forward quite a lot.

We have the first plant designed to deal with this going on stream in a couple of weeks in France. It’s on an industrial scale – not a pilot plant. And the Vita Group, which is behind Vitafoam, has committed for its French factories to buy recycled chemical raw materials from that French plant. So give them a couple of months, and you’ll be able to buy foam made out of recycled raw materials. There is also a recycling company linked to Ikea that is currently building a plant in the Netherlands. And Ikea is thinking of going 60, 80 or sometimes 100 per cent foam made with recycled chemicals in its mattresses.

Catherine What do you lose in terms of quality in that process of creating foams from recyled chemicals?

Stefan Nothing.

Michel You have to compromise on the colour, that’s the one thing. I don’t know why, but a lot of people

Roundtable

is making sure that we can separate the components of all our products. Then we make sure that these components can be replaced by the end consumer.

I believe that when we come up with good examples, they are probably going to inspire others and even be improved upon.

Daniel How about something like certification?

Are certification schemes at all helpful in building consumer confidence?

Stefan I don’t go for certificates at the moment because we would be unlikely to get certified. With Costume, for instance, there are parts that are not yet circular. The cover, for instance, is made from Kvadrat fabrics, which are currently very difficult to recycle.

You can reuse them in needle felt or something like that, but you cannot make the same product out of them. So instead of not doing anything, we think okay, let’s make at least 80 per cent of the sofa better, and then continue working on a compostable cover.

Maybe we can manage this in the next two or three years. With any communication we try to be 100 per cent transparent and honest. Because this industry is very vulnerable to greenwashing.

Tim Definitely.

Catherine Sometimes it is about doing what you can every step of the way. Because if you try to solve all of these problems in one go, it can hold you back from making any changes.

Daniel It seems there are lots of solutions, but for almost every solution there’s always a slight downside.

For example the foam recycling Michel mentioned earlier and the small amount of waste and virgin material needed. There’s no clear answer yet, and the more you dig the more problems seem to arise. I think it’s just a case of always trying to take a step in the right direction and picking the lesser evil, in a sense.

Like with most things, the trade-off is never going to be completely perfect, but if you’re not at least trying to make a change then it’s not good enough, is it?

Catherine Being transparent about that is really important, as Stefan said. We’ve looked at a lot of different things, like the Declare Label [a certification scheme for building materials, ed.] for example, and other forms of certification. They’re incredibly expensive and they’re almost unattainable for a lot of companies. But the core of this is about being transparent and explaining exactly what you’re using and where it’s coming from. I think it will start to become commonplace that when you purchase

insist on having white foams, which doesn’t make sense because you don’t see the foam when it’s in a piece of furniture. Foam made out of recycled foam can be yellowish. The other thing you will have to accept is that chances are it will not be made with 100 per cent recycled materials. Right now, there will always have to be some mix of virgin.

Daniel Is there any byproduct when foam is recycled?

Michel You get a small proportion of brownish slurry, a sort of thick paste. As mentioned, in the reactor you also have to mix a small amount of virgin material

“It’s not easy to understand where our materials come from, especially with upholstery.”—Tim Cox to keep everything liquid. So it’s not a zero waste process, but the waste is, I would say, marginal compared to the output.

Daniel The fact that you can’t know the precise chemical or material makeup of a product seems to be one of the biggest challenges for recycling.

Michel Yes, but it is not something that can’t be overcome. The foams that come back today as postconsumer material were sometimes made 10, 15, 20 or 25 years ago. Chemical legislation may have evolved, meaning that some substances that were perfectly legal at the time cannot be in products anymore.

So recyclers have to make sure that they don’t put so-called legacy substances on the market: they have to identify them and find a way to get them out of the supply chain. But we’ve been working on that and pending sufficient testing it is feasible.

Stefan What we are doing in our studio is trying to promote a very pragmatic approach. I’m not willing to wait for others to take action – for the European Union to create new laws. You would probably be waiting another 100 years for something to change that way. But what designers can do is to get really informed, look at the direction that EU legislation is moving in, understand the ways in which consumers are being more open, and try to improve our offers based on that. What we’re trying to do at the moment

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a product or go into a shop and see an item of furniture, you will have more of a sense of what’s actually gone into it. But whether there’s a way for that to happen through self-certification rather than always going through these larger organisations where you pay a lot of money for that process, I’m not sure.

Daniel Some of the brands and material suppliers I’ve been speaking to complain about certification because it’s often set up to fail for certain materials.

For example, I was speaking to a guy from a company which makes a coconut fibre matting, who was trying to get the certification for his material to be classed as biodegradable. To do that, you have to put it on a tray with holes in it, and then leave it at room temperature with a certain amount of light – if enough of the material falls through the holes, it’s classified as biodegradable. But because coconut fibre is a strand material, it won’t really fall through – so it doesn’t get that certification. Certification schemes are often set up by companies to suit their own materials –

it’s a big grey area, where I don’t think there’s a level playing field a lot of the time.

Tim It’s about understanding who the backers of those companies are, and what their vested interests are.

And it’s very difficult to find out these things out – as you say, it’s not transparent and there aren’t enough hours in the day to research and investigate it. Yes, using coconut fibre might be natural, but what’s the carbon footprint of bringing it over from Sri Lanka or India? It’s not easy for us to understand where our materials come from, especially with upholstery.

I know where the timber comes from in my frames; I know the steel in the springs comes from either India or China; the feathers are French feathers; most of the wool products we use are from Scotland and Cumbria.

But when it comes to the upholstery, there’s lots of little bits in there that I just don’t know. E N D

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PHOTOESSAY: SOMETIMES FRIVOLOUS, SOMETIMES PHILOSOPHICAL pp. 18-23

Lex Pott – lexpott.nl

Writer’s note: Ra-ra-Rasputin! The research for this story required a dive into the world of TikTok, and I came out of it with Boney M’s 1978 ‘Rasputin’ stuck forever in my head. Great. —Kristina Rapacki

OBSERVATION: TWIST CANDLE p. 17

Writer’s note: I’m looking forward to a future where publishing is infested with sick and disabled writers, editors, and agents. —Jesse Rice-Evans

Aldi – aldi.co.uk Amazon – amazon.com Aram Store – aram.co.uk Fenty – fentybeauty.com Google – abc.xyz Herman Miller – hermanmiller.com Het Nieuwe Instituut – hetnieuweinstituut.nl Knoll – knoll.com Lacaton & Vassal – lacatonvassal.com LG – lg.com LVMH – lvmh.com Marks & Spencer – marksandspencer.com NASA – nasa.gov Nike – nike.com Oracle – oracle.com Pritzker Prize – pritzkerprize.com Serpentine Galleries – serpentinegalleries.org V&A – vam.ac.uk

Honext – honextmaterial.com

Writer’s note: I know that I shouldn’t, but I’d really like to strip off and swim about in the primary sludge.

—Oli Stratford

OBSERVATION: HONEXT p. 49

Adidas – adidas.com Kram/Weisshaar – kramweisshaar.com OMA – oma.eu Prada – prada.com

Writer’s note: Much good stuff from my conversations with Clemens Weisshaar didn’t make it into the article, and for good reason, no doubt: speculation about the ontological nature of numbers and objects designed by algorithms; the question of authorship and Quentin Tarantino; my unwarranted coveting of K/W hoodies; cigarettes; and Prada vomit. —Michael David Mitchell

PROCESS: TWO LINES OF THE SAME HIGHWAY pp. 36-48

Riverhead – riverheadbooks.com

REVIEW: NOTHING ABOUT US WITHOUT US pp. 32-35

TIMELINE pp. 13-16

LA Bureau of Engineering – eng.lacity.org Lehrer Architects – lehrerarchitects.com

Writer’s note: During my interview with the architect Michael Lehrer, we got on a tangent about West Coast artists Wayne Thiebaud and Richard Diebenkorn, whose canvases influenced the use of paint at Chandler Tiny House Village. Of the latter, Lehrer said: “He paints the street going straight up the picture plane and captures joy in composition and colour.” —Mimi Zeiger

PROJECT: SO LITTLE pp. 78-96

eToro – etoro.com Robinhood – robinhood.com

Writer’s note: When I started researching retail investment, I had to learn a whole new lingo to understand what the people on Reddit were talking about when they say “DD” or use “diamond hands” emoji. The vocabulary gets so specific that there is even a small dictionary that explains the most common terms. Finding this has made writing much easier: wallstreetbets.shop/blogs/news/dissecting-the-uniquelingo-and-terminology-used-in-the-subreddit-rwallstreetbets. —Anna Rohmann

REVIEW: ARE WE ALL INVESTORS? pp. 74-77

Index

Design Museum – designmuseum.org Design Museum Holon – dmh.org.il MoMA – moma.org Tate Modern – tate.org.uk V&A – vam.ac.uk

Writer’s note: I was really stuck on this piece until watching Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, which (though not his best work) opened up a whole new approach for me to the topic of chronology. A little while ago, Bladerunner helped me get a grip on the slippery topic of postmodernism. My most recent book on craft owes a surprising amount to Buster Keaton. So hooray for Hollywood! —Glenn Adamson

ANATOMY: CHRONOLOGY AND ITS DISCONTENTS pp. 25-31

Supernovas – supernovas.world Odd Matter – oddmatterstudio.com

Writer’s note: Getting a standardised look while working with waste plastic isn’t as straightforward as you might think. “You are almost dealing with a seasonality to the material,” Els Woldhek told me. “Come Christmas time, there’s going to be a lot more red because people end up buying a lot of red plastic.” I get the sense Odd Matter actually enjoy this variability. “It’s quite beautiful because you don’t want to completely escape what it is or where it’s come from,” the studio’s co-founder Georgi Manassiev told me. Laudable, sure, but the concept of harvesting “seasonal plastic” also gave me the chills.

—Evi Hall

OBSERVATION: AFTERLIFE p. 24

19 Chairs – 19chairs.co.uk

Writer’s note: If I was designing a chair for an older person, I’d include built-in speakers in the backrest so the user could enjoy listening to music or podcasts.

—Jeremy Myerson

Design Museum Helsinki – designmuseum.fi Iittala – iittala.com Phaidon – phaidon.com

Writers’ note: Along the shore of the lake, directly next to the Iittala glass factory, there is an actual “glass island” made from the discarded material that has been thrown out and accumulated over the course of many years.

This island remains a village secret. —Florencia Colombo and Ville Kokkonen

PHOTOESSAY: GLASS, MAGIC AND REALISM pp. 64-73

Writer’s note: A pair of Le Corbusier’s round Bonnet eyeglasses – largely responsible for the lasting trend, among architects, of wearing circular specs – are apparently stored at the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris, like the relics of a saint. —Kay Sunden

Writer’s note: While writing this article, I spent a long time admiring pictures of the mechanical, repetitive pattern of the Dominican convent’s vaulted ceiling, which seemed too modern for a 19th-century building.

I fantasised that early manifestations of Art Deco could have originated in Mesopotamia. Eventually, I learned that the tiles were in fact added in the 1990s, as part of a renovation that also includes hidden, esoteric symbols devised by the priest and architect. Suddenly, the same tiles appeared garish. There’s surely a lesson in there somewhere about aesthetic judgement and taste.

—Lemma Shehadi

Photographer’s note: After I was done shooting, it was around lunchtime and I ordered a sandwich at a busy sandwich bar I came across. I sat on the bench outside the shop to eat, when I noticed that everybody after me was ordering a different sandwich: the Broodje Zeedijk, which is named after the street the shop is on.

I eventually mentioned to a stranger that I must have ordered the “wrong” sandwich and asked what was

INTERVIEW: SOLAR CULTURE CLUB pp. 98-106

Gamfratesi – gamfratesi.com Minä Perhonen – mina-perhonen.jp Ørgreen Optics – orgreenoptics.com

OBSERVATION: INVISIBLE LINES p. 97

HISTORY: THE CLOCK AND THE HUNCHBACK pp. 50-63

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Writer’s note: There is an adorable story about the Za that I couldn’t fit in the final piece, so I’m happy

OBSERVATION: ZA p. 129

Writers’ note: If ideas need density to spread, their transmission is suspended in the vast expanse called Naypyidaw. A golf cart was needed to get from the hotel reception to our rooms. —Benjamin Bansal and Manuel Oka

GALLERY: A POTPOURRI OF CONCRETE NATION-BUILDING pp. 111-128

Andrés Reisinger – reisinger.studio Dezeen – dezeen.com Moooi – moooi.com

Editor’s note: NFTs = Nearly Fictional Tables.

—Oli Stratford

REVIEW: TAKE AN E-SEAT pp. 107-110

Marjan van Aubel – marjanvanaubel.com

so good about the Broodje Zeedijk. He was stunned that I had never tasted this signature sandwich, so went into the shop, came back out, and revealed that he had bought me the sandwich to try! —Renée de Groot

AHEC Europe – americanhardwood.org, p. 12 Associative Design – associativedesign.com, p. 11 Bocci – bocci.com, p. 2 Carl Hansen & Søn – carlhansen.com, inside front cover, p. 1 Laufen – laufen.com, p. 7 Maharam – maharam.com, p. 5 Sunspel – sunspel.com, p. 9 Vitra Design Museum – design-museum.de, outside back cover Zanat – zanat.org, inside back cover

ADVERTISERS

Link Arkitektur – linkarkitektur.com 3XN Architects – 3xn.com Zentropa – zentropa.dk

Writer’s note: When Riget first aired, Danish audiences were instantly smitten with the character of Dr Helmer (Ernst-Hugo Järegård). Helmer, a Swede, harbours an irrepressible hatred of Denmark, which becomes a running joke in the series. Delivered atop Rigshospitalet, his panegyric to the now-decommissioned Barsebäck nuclear power plant (which sits on the Swedish side across the Øresund strait) is one of the funniest things I have seen on television. “Thank you, O Swedish watchtowers,” he begins solemnly, peering at the chimneys through his binoculars. “With plutonium we’ll force the Dane to his knee.” He pauses. “Here is Denmark, excreted from water and chalk. There, Sweden: hewn from granite.” The expletive that closes the monologue – “Danskjävlar!!” – is untranslatable.

It’s a slur, technically – something like “Danish scum” – but say it to a Dane and they will most likely chuckle, shake their head and say, “Oh, Helmer.”

—Kristina Rapacki

SEEN ON SCREEN: RIGET p. 144

Index

Another Country – anothercountry.com Catherine Aitken – catherineaitkenstudio.co.uk Coakley & Cox – coakleyandcox.co.uk Diez Office – diezoffice.com Daniel Schofield – danielschofield.co.uk EUROPUR – europur.org Magis – magisdesign.com SCP – scp.co.uk

Moderator’s note: For me, one of the most illuminating aspects of this discussion was learning of the market’s insistence on whiter-than-white virgin foam, rather than the more variable colour of recycled foam. It seems so utterly bizarre – like worrying about what colour the petrol tank is when buying a car, or having a strong aesthetic preference as to what shape your computer’s microchips should be.—Oli Stratford

ROUNDTABLE: WHAT LIES BENEATH pp. 130-139

Emeco – emeco.net Naoto Fukasawa – naotofukasawa.com

to share it here. The craftspeople at Emeco actually made a special, one-off version of the stool. They took a single Za and polished the aluminium until it shone like a mirror. Then, they each etched their names on it, before sending the result to Fukasawa as a present. “It made me very happy,” he said. “I appreciate this great team that came up with new solutions for Za, fully supported the product, and made the most effort to make it happen.”

Just lovely. —Oli Stratford

Riget

Copenhagen’s largest hospital, Rigshospitalet, has a new wing and it’s lovely. Designed by local architects Link Arkitektur and 3XN, it is humanely proportioned, clad in pale natural stone, and brimming with abstract art and light-infused interiors. It couldn’t be further, architecturally, from the hospital’s main wing, which rises behind it like a concrete bogeyman.

This hulking monolith, designed

by Jørgen Stærmose and Kay BoeckHansen in the late 1960s, radiates a malevolence that cannot be extenuated even by a flattering press shot.

Or so it seems to me. I lived in Copenhagen in the 1990s, and watched Lars von Trier’s TV series Riget (199497) at an impressionable age. “Riget” means “the realm” or “the kingdom” in Danish (the show is known as The Kingdom internationally) but it is also a shorthand for Rigshospitalet, where the drama takes place. It’s a hospital show like no other, viewed through a sickening sepia filter and populated by grotesque characters, including

Dr Helmer, a narcissistic Swedish neurosurgeon, and Mrs Drusse, a patient and self-proclaimed medium who senses sinister goings-on. The hospital turns out to be haunted, not only by ghosts, but by deeper, chthonic forces, suppressed for too long by a haughty medical establishment enamoured with its own scientific rationality.

Stærmose and Boeck-Hansen’s building does a lot of work in Riget.

It comes to represent – no, actually embody – the oppressive rigidity of the doctors’ attitudes to death, so that when the demonic reckoning arrives it is from under and within the building, erupting forth through cracks in the concrete. “Tiny signs of fatigue have begun to show in the seemingly solid, modern edifice,” a mysterious narrator warns in the opening credits of each episode. Aerial shots of Rigshospitalet also come up repeatedly – the shaky proto-Dogme 95 camerawork suggesting a sense of imminent collapse. Reason and scientific progress are built on diabolical deeds, the building seems to say. This all sounds dreadful and

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a bit moralising, but Riget redeems itself through sheer silliness: relaying the wider thematics is a plot that encompasses exorcisms, demonic pregnancies, attempts at voodoo, and a doctor obsessed with the density of his own poo. Since airing, the show has achieved cult status far beyond its native Denmark.

In December 2020, a third season of Riget, titled Riget Exodus, was announced. Written by von Trier and Niels Vørsel (the original screenwriters), the season will start filming in 2021, and I can’t imagine they will utilise the new wing. It’s just so pristine!

Or perhaps it’s the perfect setting for a 21st-century reboot, generating a new form of AirSpace uncanny.

Imagine the wards blindingly bright, the mid-century-inspired furniture cracking, the suspended Olafur Eliasson mobile inexplicably crashing to the ground. Hit me up Lars! I’ve got this bold new scenography all figured out.

Image courtesy of Adam Mørk/3XN.

Words Kristina Rapacki

Unity Side Table / Stool

by Monica Förster

The artistic idea behind the stool’s design was to portray inseparable links that connect humanity as a whole, a notion made clear to us throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. The designer and artist, Monica Förster, has masterfully managed to translate her abstract humanistic idea into a functional object of artistic beauty.

For dealer information, please visit our website: www.zanat.org

German Design 1949–1989 Two Countries, One History

An exhibition by the Vitra Design Museum, the Kunstgewerbemuseum, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, and the Wüstenrot Foundation

#VDMGermanDesign #VitraDesignMuseum www.design-museum.de

Supported by

20.03.2021 – 05.09.2021

Vitra Design Museum