Disegno #35

The Journal of Design #35 Spring 2023

This issue includes: Nifemi Marcus-Bello’s study of Lagos’s unauthored design; the energy crisis’s impact on archives’ climate control systems; Fabien Cappello and Guadalajara’s hojalata industry; New York’s plan to design out rats; Claude Dutson’s method to turn tech’s surveillance tools against Silicon Valley architecture; the landscape of Makrana marble, as seen by Studio Raw Material; Carmody Groarke, Kenoteq and Local Works Studio’s designs for waste bricks; and Front’s collection of Sweden’s forests.

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Introduction

BOCCI.COM

I Can Feel Your Anger Words Oli Stratford

At the risk of endorsing the worldviews of Emperor Palpatine, I think that more designers should give in to anger. I’d like to see chairs developed out of rage; interfaces driven by indignation; museums architected from raw pique. Maybe an electric toothbrush that draws heavily on spleen.

Bear with me. When penning his (adorably titled) The Book of Anger, Palpatine wrote about how he had learned “that Anger and Will, joined together, are the greatest Power”. Although we should probably discount this formulation of the idea given that Palpatine was a galactic space-fascist (and, admittedly, a Star Wars character), a connected perspective also finds expression in the work of philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who, to the best of my knowledge, has never tried to exterminate the Jedi. As such, we can likely give her a fair hearing.

In her 2023 book Justice for Animals, Nussbaum sets out the idea of transition-anger, a form of anger that is “free from retributive payback wishes”. It is an emotion that “turns to face forward, and its aim is to create a better future”. When we perceive injustice, a feeling of transition-anger directs us to future action “that is both oppositional – going up against the wrongful actors, Introduction

committed to stopping them[…] – and also constructive.

Let’s find a better way to do things.”

Nussbaum has in mind the development of constitutional and legal frameworks, but transition-anger would be a good motivator for all sorts of things. In developing any kind of new project or approach, for example, designers would do well to be driven by an evaluation of the world as it stands: a desire to make better, more efficient use of resources; to challenge preconceptions, enable new perspectives, or open the field up to different audiences; to create products, systems and ideas that help lives become easier, happier, more dignified. You probably catch my drift – you know, not just producing velvet sofas for the sake of it.

Many things can prompt this type of work, I’m sure, but transition-anger seems a strong motivator: a feeling that something is not right and so ought to be improved.

Not every design needs to be forged from fury (a new stacking chair does not have to be an outraged rebuttal of all previous stacking chairs) but a sense of discomfort with the present order, and a desire to effect positive change, is healthy. Otherwise, what’s the point?

As a powerful Sith Lord once said, “I can feel your anger.

It makes you stronger, gives you focus. Maybe apply that to patio furniture.”

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Contents 42

Opinion Learning From Failure Stephen Burks on what the design industry gets wrong

93

Objects in Review A Quiet Cut Monoware’s cutlery slices both ways

43

Distribution Terms of Address A pilot architecture scheme navigates the bureaucracy of homelessness

94

Collaboration Economies of Objects Guadalajara’s hojalata maestros shape Fabien Cappello’s tinplate creations for the home

53

Construction Aggregate: A Composite Account Converting construction waste into bricks

110

Objects in Review Never Break the Chain International design iteration with Hall Haus

Opinion Gutenberg Press Rhymes with Smartphones Ink-based revolution meets technology’s fake news

66

Material Marble dust in the air Studio Raw Material roams the otherworldly landscape of Makrana marble

111

Research Seeing Through the Walls of Silicon Valley The methodological limits of proprietary architecture

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Objects in Review Dedicated Musical Device The Sony Walkman grows up

80

Objects in Review Bowl of Shadows Danuta Kril preserves Ukraine’s smoked-ceramic craft

124

Feedback A View from the Magpie’s Nest The Boijmans Depot feels the heat from the climate crisis

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Development Copy Cow and Rocks of Foam Front sets out to collect and replicate the forest

132

Index Short stories from the creation of this issue

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Objects in Review Best Foot Forward Project 213A dips its toes into design

Disegno x ECAL (insert) U.F.O.G.O. Sixteen students propose new wind turbine designs for Fogo Island

136

Seen on Screen Let’s Get Physical Buns of steel sit on Terje Ekstrøm’s wiggly chair

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Introduction I Can Feel Your Anger

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Contents

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Contributors

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Masthead The people behind Disegno

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Philosophy Design is Happening Nifemi Marcus-Bello on the cultural context of unauthored West African design

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81

Objects in Review A Light Basket Taf and Artek look to the egg

82

Context Rat Wars The bins on the front line of New York’s rat battle

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MAXI SLIDING PANELS, SELF BOLD CABINET. DESIGN GIUSEPPE BAVUSO

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Contributors Rodrigo Alvarez is a photographer working and kind of living in Mexico City. p. 94 Ọlájídé Aye`̣ni is a media artist telling tales about the built environment and objects, and their relationship with people. p. 17 Svitlana Biedarieva is an art historian and artist. p. 80 Stephen Burks is thinking about how design can respond to global crises and, sometimes, a chair. p. 42

Ramak Fazel is an American engineer and photographer, and also a Brooklyn-based archivist. p. 111 Fabian Frinzel spent hours on YouTube watching camera reviews; was excited to get his new camera; but is now a bit disappointed because it’s not as good as he thought. p. 28, 41, 80, 81, 93 and 110 Hollie Fuller is an illustrator from Lincolnshire who is often influenced by the mundanities of everyday life. p. 124 Eshwarya Grover is currently curating raccoon memes. p. 66

Jareh Das is an independent curator, writer, researcher, and occasional florist based between West Africa and the UK. p. 17

George Kafka encourages Londonbased readers to give a shift for Streets Kitchen (streetskitchen.org). p. 43

Jasmine Deporta is a visual artist based in Lausanne.

U.F.O.G.O. (insert)

Anniina Koivu does almost everything in design *but* designing herself – with the exception of wool jumpers.

U.F.O.G.O. (insert)

Claude Dutson hasn’t been back to Silicon Valley since 1999, just before the dotcom bust that wiped out her job along with those of thousands of tech and new-media workers. p. 111

Tiiu Meiner admits that our lives are mostly composed of paradoxes and complexities. p. 124 Donald Milne makes pictures and films, and looks after two dogs. p. 53

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Philippe Morey is a senior R&D engineer at HEIG-VD. U.F.O.G.O. (insert) Tetsuo Mukai is an expert at tuping on the iPhonr. p. 26 Louise Pryke’s book, Wind: Nature and Culture, will be published by Reaktion Books on 1 June 2023.

U.F.O.G.O. (insert) Sha Ribeiro captures portraits and music subcultures, creating powerful visual narratives that carry a message about culture and society. p. 82 Leonard Rothmoser is looking for an Ekstrem chair by Terje Ekstrøm. p. 26, 42 and 136 Arthur Seguin is a graphic designer based in Lausanne.

U.F.O.G.O. (insert) Isabella Smith is trying to put her best foot forward. p. 41 Michael Snyder lives in Mexico City and writes (mostly) about architecture, design and food. p. 94

The Journal of Design #35 Editor-in-chief Oli Stratford oli@disegnojournal.com

Founder and director Johanna Agerman Ross

Publisher and commercial director Chris Jones chris@disegnojournal.com

Deputy editor India Block india@disegnojournal.com

Creative directors Florian Böhm Annahita Kamali akfb.com

Advertising representative – Italy Carlo Fiorucci carlo@fiorucci-international.com

Senior creative producer Evi Hall evi@disegnojournal.com

Designer Jonas Hirschmann info@akfb.com

Distribution and stockist enquiries MMS London info@mmslondon.co.uk

Creative assistant Lara Chapman lara@disegnojournal.com

Subeditor Ann Morgan

Contributors Rodrigo Alvarez, Ọlájídé Aye`̣ni, Svitlana Biedarieva, India Block, Stephen Burks, Lara Chapman, Jareh Das, Jasmine Deporta, Claude Dutson, Ramak Fazel, Fabian Frinzel, Hollie Fuller, Eshwarya Grover, Evi Hall, George Kafka, Anniina Koivu, Tiiu Meiner, Donald Milne, Philippe Morey, Tetsuo Mukai, Louise Pryke, Leonhard Rothmoser, Isabella Smith, Michael Snyder and Oli Stratford.

Thanks Many thanks to Maxwell Ashford, Camille Blin, Anthony Guex, Anniina Koivu, and all the team at ECAL for a fascinating collaboration; &Tradition for beautiful event in Antwerp; Sam Chapman for opening up Kenoteq Ltd’s factory to us; Fabien Cappello for getting everyone organised in Guadalajara; Fabian Frinzel for being so patient with deliveries; Stockholm Furniture Fair and Front for a fun commission; to Donald Milne for going above and beyond; and, lastly, Batch Baby for keeping us fully caffeinated.

Paper and print This issue of Disegno is printed by Park Communications on Edixion Offset 120gsm by Antalis. The insert is printed on Arena Smooth Extra White 120gsm

by Fedrigoni. The cover is printed on Arena Smooth Extra White 250gsm

by Fedrigoni.

Park Communications is a carbonneutral company, with this issue of Disegno printed on FSC certified paper, using 100 per cent offshorewind electricity sourced from UK wind, and vegetable oil-based inks.

We are very grateful to all our contributors, and for the help of everybody who has supported us and made Disegno #35 possible – not least to Bimini and Enzo, London’s leading cat-dog duo, for the scarcely believable levels of enthusiasm they summon up for greetings.

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

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

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Contact us Studio 4 The Rose Lipman Building 43 De Beauvoir Road London, N1 5SF disegnojournal.com Design Reviewed The team behind Disegno also produce a companion publication, Design Reviewed, which focuses on users’ engagement with design’s cultural, political and social entanglements.

The first issue of Design Reviewed has been in stores since December 2022; issue two will be released in July 2023.

The Crit You can keep up with Disegno and our work by listening to The Crit, a podcast focused on the design world and its impact on current affairs. disegnojournal.com/podcasts/the-crit Disegno Works Disegno also runs the creative agency Disegno Works. disegnoworks.com

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Design is Happening Introduction Jareh Das Photographs Ọlájídé Aye`̣ni

In their 2011 study of craft neighbourhoods in Istanbul, published in MIT Press’s Design Issues, Turkish designers Çiğdem Kaya and Burcu (Yançatarol) Yağiz observed how the “modes of production in informal economies are highly dependent on social relationships such as apprenticeship and vocational training.” Such encounters, the authors argued, between “designers and [craftspeople] can create a genuine blend of practice” that represents a new “‘designing’ typology”, and which speaks of empowerment and community learning. Design in this form is both useful and context-responsive, with urban centres providing limitless possibilities for inspiration and innovation.

Philosophy

Africa – A Designer’s Utopia, in which nmbello Studio has foregrounded design and manufacturing by anonymous makers in African cities, whose work will inform indigenous contemporary design solutions and products of the future. Additionally, the project explores the functionality, aesthetics and materials of a range of products, all of which have been broken down to allow each element to be analysed. For nmbello Studio, 21st-century design is a practice through which designers apply their focus to address the world’s major problems – poverty, conflict, environmental degradation, scarcity of resources, and access to decent housing and healthcare.

In the future, nmbello Studio will create contemporary design objects that draw inspiration from already existing indigenous products. The kwali is one example, the meruwa another – a cart made from reclaimed wood and bicycle tyres, which is used to transport gallons of water. This manually operated vehicle circumnavigates traffic challenges in urban areas and, like the kwali, is cost-effective and efficient.

An exhibition drawn from another project, Oríkì (Act I): Friction Ridge, recently opened at Marta, a gallery in Los Angeles, and showcases a series of bronze benches produced using the lost-wax technique in Benin City. The pieces bear the marks of their designer, makers, and the surrounding community’s fingerprints as an exploration of craft, belonging and identity. The show also features a soundscape of Marcus-Bello’s mother reading his oríkì, a form of spoken poetry praising the individual in the Yoruba language of West Africa which, according to Yoruba historian Samuel Johnson, expresses hopes for what a child will become.

As Marcus-Bello’s work demonstrates, and the conversation to follow explores, embodied design offers an examination of the “thinking” of design as a process of experience. One way to consider design is to focus on the nature of the thinking it involves.

What is a design? How does it work? What is it good for? nmbello Studio and its many collaborators show how design thinking, research and products can be strikingly effective in solving complex problems, especially those that require imagination, creativity and innovation.

Nifemi Marcus-Bello, a Lagos-based designer, works in the sort of creative space described by Kaya and Yağiz. The result is an embodied approach to design in which ideas about practice become concrete and emerge from a blend of interactions within Lagos’s non-Western framework. Marcus-Bello continually looks to his home city and the everyday encounters

One way to consider design is to focus on the thinking it involves. What is a design?

How does it work? What is it good for? therein as inspiration for his practice, nmbello Studio, and its championing of research-led and site-responsive design products.

Rather than adopt the role of passive observers in the city, Marcus-Bello and his team bear witness, probe, and engage in meaningful exchanges with a variety of collaborators. Often this process takes the form of daily encounters with individuals who may lack the formal title of “designer” but whose design solutions are found in many facets of the city’s life.

These individuals are innovators whose creations solve everyday problems in Lagos, responding to societal needs. Amongst the indigenous products of this kind that have become a focus for Marcus-Bello is the kwali (which translates to “box” in English from the Hausa language), a portable shop of sorts that sells gum, painkillers, cigarettes and snacks. A familiar sight weaving through Lagos traffic, the kwali is a shelving unit made from discarded cardboard and assembled with tape (yellow and black) – material choices that are affordable, sustainable, and functional enough to allow vendors to move through the streets easily, as well as being cost-effective to replace after wear and tear.

Though grounded in Lagos, Marcus-Bello’s investigation of the kwali and other designs of its ilk is now extending into learning from experiences he has had (or is soon to have) in three other cities across West Africa: Accra, Dakar and Abidjan. This approach is part of an ambitious ongoing research project,

Jareh Das When you sent me the brief for Africa –

A Designer’s Utopia, it mentioned specific cities you were responding to: Lagos, Accra, Abidjan and Dakar.

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Nifemi Marcus-Bello, photographed in his studio in Lagos. A kwali is shown propped up on a chair.

Philosophy

nmbello Studio’s The Introvert’s Chair, produced in Lagos with a steel form and raffia weave.

A fully-stocked kwali.

The bronze Friction Ridge Bench, produced in Benin City.

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Kwali image: image and copyright owned by nmbello Studio / Nifemi Marcus-Bello; lead photographer / art director - Logo “Logor” Oluwamuyiwa; photographer - Benson Ibeabuchi; assistant photographer - Henry Okwuabsi; and field project manager - Silas Mahanan.

You began from a place of observing Lagos, but what did it mean to take that research perspective to cities that are very different, and where designers are responding in different ways to their specific challenges? Why did you want to connect this research across West Africa?

Nifemi Marcus-Bello Like you mentioned, I started by observation, which is one of the reasons I’m trying to focus on West Africa, and not just Lagos. I visited three out of those four cities and realised that a lot of the objects that exist in Lagos also exist there, even if their materiality may be different, their use case may be different, and even how people interact with them – the names they’re called and their pathways of distribution – may be different. So I knew that for the research to be as cohesive as possible, I had to consider all of these cities. We’ve only done Lagos for now, but we’re pacing ourselves.

Jareh I’m also hearing something that speaks about a way of dismantling borders. When you move across West Africa, there are colonially-constructed borders that have separated things out. You have Francophone countries spliced in between ex-English colonies, and also resistance within those territories. Design thinking becomes a way to move across borders, like you said, where you’re finding similarities. What you think may be a Lagos-specific design, you can then go to somewhere like Accra and see, “Oh, people are innovating in the same way, because they’re faced with the same problems.” In a highly urbanised area where infrastructure is compromised, creative solutions come in to fill the gaps. It’s interesting to observe how a design process begins to move across borders – it can become a sort of unifying language and response outside of geopolitical constructs.

Nifemi I just got off a podcast with Alice [Rawsthorn] from Design Emergency [a podcast, Instagram page and book launched by Rawsthorn and curator Paola Antonelli, ed.] and she was asking me if it’s OK to generalise African design, or if West African design is [all] the same, or if Nigerian design is also separate from West African design. One thing that I mentioned to her, which I’ll mention again, is that the commonality from practising in West and East Africa which I see is that African design is very contextual to both material and people, and it is very considerate of people. One of the things that I’m looking forward to in the research is either justifying contextually this approach to materiality, or seeing that there’s been an evolution

that has happened within these products. I’ll give you an example from a preliminary observation in Accra, where they actually use the kwali, but it’s made out of plywood. In Lagos, the kwali has evolved from being made out of plywood in the 90s, to now being made out of cardboard and Styrofoam. This is heavily contextual to globalisation – it has happened where products have been brought into Lagos, the packaging has been thrown out, and people are taking that discarded packaging to create objects that are of use.

So I think you’re absolutely right – it’s only borders dividing us. I think it’s availability [of materials] that divides our design language, so to speak.

Jareh I’m thinking about the kwali – I didn’t know what it was called before our conversation, but I’ve bought chewing gum or Panadol from them. It’s something familiar, but which you may not have a name for because it’s just that thing somebody carries through traffic or the streets to sell goods from. I am curious as to how you go through this research process where you’re observing your environment and looking at certain things, then going on this explorative journey that leads you into a community of makers, of people selling, and an exchange system that also speaks about a community-led design process. You enter these communities and get into this question of the way that design travels through the city. What are the challenges?

Nifemi Before beginning the research, I started doing case studies of these objects. I sat down to ask myself, “Why?” Why am I spending so much time doing these case studies and documenting them? What’s the end goal? Who does it affect? Who are the beneficiaries?

What does the future hold for this type of research?

I realised very quickly that I was actually trying to figure out what “good design” was in Lagos. These were well-designed objects that people would walk past, not even noticing them, but which enhance their daily lives and enhance various stakeholders’ daily lives as well. Once I found that out, I started diving in. A lot of the participants and locals asked why I was documenting these things, and one of the things I had to do was sit down with some of the hawkers to educate them on why I was doing it. The people who create the kwali are contemporary craftspeople. Not to sound like a broken record, but there’s a cultural aspect of making, a cultural aspect of distribution, a cultural aspect of communicating ideas. For each kwali, it’s someone going to a maker to give them

Philosophy

Could you expand on looking at the historical, but being in a contemporary space? Is going back to historic ways of making something that you want to explore more in the future? While a lot of people are very familiar with certain things in history, I don’t know if there’s so much of a connection to actually understanding the making process. Could you tell me about that and also about how loaded bronze is as a material, especially given the debates around repatriation of the Benin Bronzes?

Nifemi As a designer, and I’ve been saying this for a couple of years, there are so many questions that I need answers to. Sometimes when I gravitate towards a certain production or manufacturing technique, or a material, it’s because I have questions around them and don’t know what’s going to come out of it. Bronze has become this sacred thing where some people are scared to even touch it or make it contemporary.

I understand why; I understand the politics around it.

But I want to take a stab at it, because this is something that we should still be celebrating. It’s important to look at the past. If we’re not careful, the past will just die, and we won’t be able to continue telling our stories.

As a Nigerian designer – or an African designer – I think it’s important to tap into these spaces to create objects. One of the things I found fascinating was the fear of interacting with this material. I actually had that too, because of the politics around it; I feel like colonisation did a number on me. But why should I be scared of using this material? Why has it become so heavily politicised? Why do these borders exist in our minds? There were a lot of mental barriers to break down. I remember meeting the artisans for the first time and speaking to them about what exactly I was trying to do. Even though these artisans still exist, they’re making products of the past and selling them to tourists. I wanted to figure out a way to introduce them, subtly, to design. I might not be the one to change a lot of things within their own practice, but I wanted to figure out how a knowledge exchange could happen.

I wanted to learn about the process and dive into it, and doing is one of the fastest, or best, ways to learn.

I hope that they were also learning from the exchange, to see what potential can come out of it. One of the aspects I always think about, even with this research and approaching these types of materials, is that it’s like an informal design-policy integration in the sense that contemporary design thinking is put into craftsmanship – that knowledge is put into that space.

a design specification, and that maker makes that product against the design specification.

Jareh You mentioned an end goal. Is there a sense that you’re acknowledging the design process and learning from it? Is there a sense that you want to improve things? Is there a social aspect to it?

Nifemi I don’t think I want to improve anything. I want to learn, selfishly, but one of the things I realised is that I can’t do that on my own. So how do you create an open-source methodology and figure out how to create an archive that we can actually benefit from, and have other designers dive into if they want to learn about this type of design that’s happening on the continent of Africa? Most importantly, I wanted to figure out how we can educate young designers – or designers and institutions on the continent – about the type of contemporary design or production that is being done. Because a lot of times when I have conversations with young designers at university in major cities in Africa, they always ask questions like, “Who’s doing good design on the continent? And is anything really happening?” or, “Can you see what’s happening in Europe? Why can’t we be that?”

I tell them that if they look around, there’s design happening. On every single doorstep someone’s creating something. It might not have the “design” label on it, but it’s going through the same design process that they would use to create an object. These objects already are, in my opinion, what good design is – or what good design should be – on the continent.

The end goal would be to make sure that lots of people are able to participate in this research, and not just in West Africa. There’s talk of doing one version in Congo for the Lubumbashi Biennale, and there’s a bunch of artists and designers who we’re speaking with to share our methodology so they can carry it out. It’s something I’m really excited about and it’s bigger than any one person. I wouldn’t even say there’s a social aspect – I think it might be a human aspect to get it done, if we can, as a unit.

Jareh For Oríkì (Act I): Friction Ridge, you went back into traditional craft and history, looking at the Benin Bronzes [a series of bronze plaques, reliefs and sculptures that were violently looted by British troops from the Kingdom of Benin in 1897, and which are the subject of calls for repatriation to Nigeria from the various European and American institutions in which they are currently held, ed.] and craftsmanship that has been passed down from generation to generation.

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Nifemi The mindset I had for most of late last year,

especially after designing the M2 Shelf [a piece referencing 19th-century Igbo wooden sculptures made out of West African mahogany, ed.], was that I really didn’t want to separate arts and design in the European sense with this project. I feel like it’s always been a mash-up in the society I was brought up in.

“If you look around, there’s design happening. On every doorstep someone’s creating something. It might not have the ‘design’ label on it, but it’s going through the same design process.” —Nifemi Marcus-Bello

If, for example, they’re then looking for work, they can say, “Hey, if we find a designer, we can probably create something new.” Or they can be designers themselves, because they are already designers in their own right.

I’m still learning. I’ve had to because of the mindsets through which I learned design, but it’s about breaking down those barriers to navigate those spaces differently.

Jareh Oríkì (Act I): Friction Ridge has different layers.

There’s a soundscape, for example, with your mother reading your oríkì. I imagine this very embodied experience of the work – you’re introducing sounds and the surfaces of the bronze bench are imprinted with the hand through the lost-wax casting process, referencing touch and mark-making. I’m somebody who is very much interested in performance and traces of the making process. I’m thinking of all of these elements creating an immersive performative object that becomes embodied, which is interesting because when you think of the Benin Bronzes, and the uses for these objects, they were very embodied.

They were animated and performative in the culture.

A bench that’s made in Abeokuta can probably look like an art piece you shouldn’t sit on, but if you do it’s comfortable. One of the reasons why I didn’t want to present the bench on its own was that I realised the combination of the two could tell a better story and enhance the object. With the handprints, the most important thing was to embed the craftsmen in the work, and figure out a way to sign off on our collaboration. The fingerprints on the benches are of me, of the craftsmen who made the mould in Lagos, of the guys who transported the mould, and of the people from the community who finished them off because we needed as many hands – or as many fingers – as possible. It was something where I realised, wow, the community, or at least the makers, will feel like they were part of this process. They will be well within their rights to see a bench and be like, “Oh, that’s my fingerprint.” With the soundscape, I was extremely nervous. During this project, the most important thing was that I needed comfort, so I used my mom’s voice – the comfort that I know. She speaks on the oríkì, on the words of affirmation I was brought up with, which were said to me every day. I felt like I wanted people who walked through the space and interacted with the benches to have that same feeling,

Philosophy

A meruwa photographed in Lagos. The design has become one of the focuses of Marcus-Bello’s ongoing research.

Fingerprints recorded in bronze, part of the Oríkì (Act I): Friction Ridge exhibition.

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Meruwa image: image and copyright owned by nmbello Studio / Nifemi Marcus-Bello; lead photographer / art director - Logo “Logor” Oluwamuyiwa; photographer - Benson Ibeabuchi; assistant photographer - Henry Okwuabsi; and field project manager - Silas Mahanan.

knowing full well that, because it’s a white-cube space, they can’t really touch it. It was important to give that comfort to people as they walk through the space.

Jareh I’m getting this sense that as you’re moving into these exhibition spaces, there’s resistance. The works are put on this pedestal where there’s a level of exclusivity, of elevation, of being precious objects, but you’re negotiating and bringing them back to understanding that they are functional as well, and also giving people access to them. When you’ve gone through a research and thinking process that is so close to a community, to the street, and when you’ve taken that inspiration and configured it into an object that enters into a white-cube framing, there seems to be a lot of tension in trying to keep the work true to its origin. Jumping forward to imagine doing exploratory case studies all across the different cities for Africa – A Designer’s Utopia, how do you amalgamate these learnings and present them? How do you imagine sharing this research in a way that involves everyone and is accessible to everyone?

Nifemi One of the things that I’m toying with is democratising the experience of what exhibitions should or can be. For example, with this research happening on the streets of Lagos, I think it’s important to share the analysis and outputs with the contributors before it goes anywhere. We need to figure out a way to show it across Lagos so that the stakeholders can also experience what the outputs mean and experience the learnings. It’s something I’m passionate about. That’s not to say that they won’t also be in a white-cube space, but democratisation, and the sharing of our experience and learnings, is extremely important. How do we merge an exhibition and installation experience so that it’s interactive and people are learning from it? I’m not scared to explore it as an art experiment, because one thing I’m learning to love, and leaning towards, is the emotional aspect that art plays within communities. I think the research can also have an interesting artistic output, which is engaging and sparks the imagination of the community around it as well.

Jareh I’m quite excited about these different ways in which this project is not just one thing in terms of its output; there are different levels of dissemination as well. There was a statement you’ve previously made that I thought was interesting: at the grassroots level, design is, in most instances, unconsciously practised.

Taking research back to the community that you’ve

engaged with and sharing it is, I think, useful in terms of democratising the design process. The fact that there isn’t a formal framing of something as design, but that it is design in terms of what it’s doing and its purpose, is an interesting point. Design can be an unconscious process in the everyday. This is a flattening of the more academic idea of design where you have to go to school, you have to be trained, you have to read certain things, you have to understand things through a certain lens, with this idea that it is also practically, maybe unintentionally, identifying a limitation and thinking of ways to overcome that.

Cities are highly urbanised areas – there are more people, more challenges – so people within them are responding in a certain way, but I don’t think that this idea is limited to cities. When you move out of major cities, you’re also identifying these vernacular designs, right?

Nifemi Yes, but I would say that I’m not as excited about those as I am about the ones I see in major cities – the reason being that I feel like a lot of the objects that exist in major cities are a juxtaposition of interacting with modern-day life and forcing themselves through those daily lives. For example, the kwali doesn’t have to exist, but it’s something that does exist and so people use it. That’s the aspect I find intriguing. When I go to Ijebu, water is being transported from one house to the other [by meruwa], which I find fascinating, but when I go to certain areas in Lagos the meruwa is transporting water from one hospital to the other. That hospital already has modernday technology, but it has to interact with the meruwa as well – and the meruwa does a good job of it. I find that interesting, which is one of the reasons why I’m trying to focus on urban areas, major cities, because I think that’s something that a lot of other cities in different continents don’t have that we do. One of the things with this research is that lots of these objects are already inspiring the work I do. I keep saying this, because I really want someone to give me the opportunity to carry it out, but if someone asked me to design a kiosk at Coachella, I would just design a kwali using the materials available and have someone strap it around their neck to walk around and sell stuff. For me, it’s that interaction that is intriguing. E N D

Philosophy

Gutenberg Rhymes with Smartphones

Words Tetsuo Mukai Illustration Leonhard Rothmoser Remember the CrackBerry? The nickname seemed appropriate in the early 2000s, when the BlackBerry smartphone quickly took over people’s lives. But from the vantage point of the 2020s, the BlackBerry appears more like a gateway device given how addicted to its descendants we’ve become.

Over the last two decades, the mobile phone (along with the systems that enable it) has developed from a glorified texting machine to something approaching a necessity. From this experience, we can empathise with how all-encompassing the change must have been when the printed word became widely available.

The Gutenberg press was a catalyst for the Renaissance and it altered our relationship to information forever. In the Middle Ages, systems for distributing information were sparse and unreliable, with writing and reading the preserve of the educated and wealthy. The printing press’s introduction changed all of this, however, eventually affording the general population the ability to enjoy reading at home.

But not everything was rosy. With the proliferation of printed matter came competing uses of the new medium.

The press was weaponised during the Protestant Reformation and used by both sides to disseminate propaganda – one of many examples of how the technology frequently influenced, rather than informed. As with the BlackBerry, it must have felt exhilarating to encounter this new way to communicate – no matter the content. Was the allure of this sexy new medium enough to convince readers that the information it contained was inherently trustworthy?

More than 500 years later, we are again seeing a new system that enables the distribution of information being hijacked for dubious purposes. From fake news through to pseudo-intellectual influencers, smartphones now provide access to the same manipulation seen in the early days of the printing press.

The ability to get information does not instantly grant you the privilege of accuracy, however, and critical thinking is often stifled by our attraction to new technologies – a situation exacerbated by the fact that the consumption of contemporary technology is typically

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a solitary activity and one that takes place privately.

Prior to the development of the printing press, information was often transmitted publicly – part of the innovation of the press was its capacity to transport us to private worlds through a medium that was portable and personal.

Yet this privacy has become contested in the case of the smartphone. Given the efficiency with which personal data can be harvested, and the capacity for algorithms to specifically tailor content to individuals, the smartphone’s ability to push misinformation and propaganda towards a targeted audience is far greater than that of its distant predecessor.

Private consumption is rarely truly private, whatever the medium – we should always ask who is controlling the supply.

Teatro Zanat: The Art of Creation Teatro Litta Corso Magenta 24, Milan April, 18-23, 2023 Zanat will stage the theater of crafts and creation unveiling it’s new products in collaboration with some of the leading designers of our time , while also revealing the process of creation, telling the stories of people and materials, weaved into them. A story of perpetual interplay between man and nature.

For dealer information, please visit our website: www.zanat.org

Words Evi Hall

Image by Fabian Frinzel.

Dedicated Music Device,Even if you’ve never used a Walkman, you know them. There are enough movies expounding their exuberant teenage thrill: Faye Dolan gleefully shrieking down the street, one ear tethered to her boyfriend’s radio debut in That Thing You Do!; Ren McCormack and Willard bopping in single file, umbilically linked to a Walkman in Footloose; or Marty McFly in double denim, cassette player provocatively hitched to hip.

It’s less common, however, to see Walkmans playing a defining cultural role today. In recent decades, technology companies have striven to consolidate hardware and its roles into the single omnipotent smartphone. What’s it like, then, to return to the Walkman in 2023?

I put this to Mariko Watanabe at Sony’s Creative Center when researching the latest Sony Walkman, the NW-A306.

Watanabe acknowledges over email that multi-functional devices are convenient, but adds that “there are people who want to purely enjoy music. It can be considered a very minimalistic act.” Sony aims to provide this uncoupling through a device that “offers high sound quality that cannot be achieved with smartphones”. The NW-A306 retails at €399; its more premium sibling, the NW-ZX700, is double this.

These new Walkmans are minimalist insofar as they seek to reduce the clutter of information and data proffered by something like a smartphone. Yet the device is also a maximalist move – the luxury of buying an additional expensive (and resource-heavy) gadget. Luxury and purity, then, appear to be the philosophies that underpin the 2023 Walkman. Sony’s focus on sound, for

example, has acquired a digital dimension in the new iterations of the Walkman. The company’s R&D team has used deep neural-network algorithms within the NW-A306’s software to improve the sound quality of compressed audio files offered by streaming platforms or downloaded music.

The device’s aesthetic choices also echo these ideals.

The NW-A306 is a small, sleek black box, all flat touchscreen surface with discreet black-on-black play, pause, rewind and fast-forward buttons on the spine. The detailing is monastically restrained, with the most noticeable physical element being “a wave-shaped knurling to improve the rigidity of the body,” says Wanatabe, adding that “the materials chosen for the housing and the body [were] designed to suppress resonance from the circuit board,” which in turn improves sound quality.

This, then, is a grown-up Walkman for a grown-up user. Whilst the name Walkman carries a certain amount of nostalgia, the NW-A306 is intended for that intersection on the Venn diagram of collectors who covet hardware and earnest sound aficionados. This is a device for people who yearn after headphone jacks because they’ve invested in really good headphones – and will tell you about it. Less Marty McFly, more Patrick Bateman.

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Copy Cow and Rocks of Foam Words Lara Chapman Images Front

Development

Were you to have ventured into the British countryside between 1897 and 1903, you might have stumbled across a tweed-suited man carrying a stiff-as-can-be cow on his shoulder, its legs raised towards the sky, its horns pointing downward. A little over a century later, if you venture into Sweden’s forests, you may run into two women equipped with laptops and floodlights, pointing chunky gun-like equipment at the rocks and trees. What these scenarios have in common, peculiar as they may be, is their protagonists’ devotion to capturing the natural world.

As you may have twigged, the aforementioned cow was no ordinary cow. It was, in fact, a photography cubbyhole disguised as an ox, designed by Richard and Cherry Kearton to enable them to get close to their subjects: birds.

The Kearton brothers were pioneers of nature photography, pursuing this new discipline at the turn of the 19th century when cameras were starting to be more commercially available. They are credited with taking the first ever photographs of eggs in a bird’s nest and inspiring the likes of David Attenborough.

Their aptly named “Imitation Ox” consisted of a sturdy but light wooden frame, “rendering it strong enough to carry the weight of a man, and at the same time sufficiently light to be easily deported on the shoulder,” writes Richard Kearton in his book Wild Nature’s Ways (1909). The pair completed their Trojan cow apparatus by preserving and stretching the hide, head and legs of a cow over it. They took turns concealing themselves inside, entering through a slit in the underbelly, and waiting for hours for birds to grow comfortable enough to approach. Then, they’d snap the perfect picture using a camera whose lens peeped out from a small incision in the cow’s breast.

The second of the aforementioned scenarios may have brought to mind a forensic murder investigation or a scene from a spy movie. Actually, however, it describes Front, a Swedish design studio, caught in the act of 3D scanning the forest. Using 3D modelling, photography and rendering technologies, designers Sofia Lagerkvist and Anna Lindgren “collect” the contours, textures and forms of the wooded world as part of a much larger ongoing research project that the studio calls Design by Nature.

Front’s long-term research project is based on the seemingly simple premise of Lagerkvist and Lindgren visiting forests. The project began about six years ago and stems from a love of being in woodland, as well as fond memories of childhoods where the forest acted as an “extended living room”, says Lindgren. Observing that people’s behaviour and movements are more vibrant when in the forest, but that this vibrancy is lost in the interior spaces in which we spend most of our time, they were curious to understand why. “We thought the idea of the difference between the indoor environment and the wild forests was an interesting starting point for design,” says Lagerkvist.

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As such, Front started to “collect” the forest through drawings and photographs, before diversifying into 3D scanning, the study of research papers, collaborations with scientists, and the careful compilation of archival photographs. The studio’s repeated use of the word “collect” to describe its undertakings suggests that it

“We thought the idea of the difference between the indoor environment and the wild forests was an interesting starting point for design.” —Sofia Lagerkvist is approaching nature curatorially or anthropologically, and operating from a certain non-interventionist distance – letting nature do the designing. “At first, we didn’t think, ‘Oh, this will be a research project,’” explains Lindgren. However, over time, as the designers began to revel in the damp quietness of lichen-laden landscapes, noticing details such as the natural seats hollowed into a rock’s surface by millennia of weather, their explorations developed into a more deliberate and planned research venture, with a number of strands.

Front prioritised designing its research process over predicting any specific outcome. The studio decided to revisit and document specific areas of forests “over and over again, in different conditions, different times of the day, different times of the year, different weathers,” while deliberately leaning into a certain ambiguity. “We tried not to pinpoint at the beginning where it would end up,” says Lagerkvist. It is unusual to begin a design project without any goal or final design product in mind – with no brief, no financial backing, no client. Yet no commission comes without constraints. “We like the idea of working a bit like an artist’s studio or like when we were studying,” says Lindgren. “You find a topic and then you dive into it and see what will happen.” It takes confidence to stray from a more conventional design process. This project, says Front, is the studio’s “way of exploring what a designer can be or what design

can do.” It’s a nice idea that you can radically rethink design by simply committing to spending time amongst the trees.

Both the Keartons’ and Front’s process is based on mimicry of nature – although to different ends. The Keartons imitated nature to get close to it, while Front captures and collects nature to eventually imitate it.

The brother’s copy cow was just one of a number of disguise devices that they invented to avoid alarming birds and other creatures. “I have learnt some of the sweetest secrets of the sod by transfiguring myself into a graminivorous animal, rock, tree, or other equally innoxious object,” wrote Richard Kearton. Their sleuth repertoire included objects such as a life-like sheep (this time sitting to avoid the “fatal drawback” of the ox, which was prone to falling over in the wind); a “wooden mask” covered with bark; a lightweight, mobile, four-part flat-pack fake rock; and “chameleonlike” caps and jackets that were the colour of “dead grass brown on one side and living field green on the other”. While some of these disguises and smoke screens were inspired by the British military’s methods of concealment, John Bevis, author of The Keartons: Inventing Nature Photography, points out that the brothers’ use of camouflage clothing pre-empted the armed forces’ use of khaki by a few years. The pair were aware of the importance of their process, and took time to document their weird and wonderful designs through photographs and books, detailing how they succeeded in capturing challenging subjects.

Fake rocks also crop up in Design by Nature, in a format that reveals Front’s ideas. The studio’s research has led it to work with a number of brands to translate its collected nature into designed objects. One of these commercial outcomes is a wilderness furniture collection for Moroso (also called Design by Nature, somewhat confusingly), which hyper-realistically recreates mosscovered rocks, mounds and snowdrifts as footstools, sofas, and other objects. The natural forms are replicated through 3D scanning, foam milling and incredibly intricate, woven upholstery. Front explains that it was playing with the question of whether, through 3D scanning, “it would be possible to, more or less, just grab a piece of land” and recreate its “wilderness without abstracting it too far”. In other words, to copy the forest and paste it into the domestic sphere.

Development

What does it mean to copy and mimic nature? To collect it? To document it through skilful and deliberate processes? In design, copies are everywhere but they tend to be frowned upon, embroiled as the industry is in profit production, copyright laws and questions of authorship. But as technologies of reproduction such as 3D scanning swiftly develop, the copy is becoming ever more present, sophisticated and discussed.

When I look to other examples of designers engaging with 3D scanning, I am struck by how many of them are grappling with themes of loss. Colin Keays, a designer, writer and curator, has created an archive of 3D-scanned gay bars and queer spaces, in a project that he titled gaybar.archive. Writing in Failed Architecture Keays explains that his collection is “an attempt to document them before they disappear”. He notes that London has “lost half of its LGBTQ+ venues over the last decade,” and “San Francisco’s last remaining lesbian bar closed its doors in 2015.” On a larger scale, Iconem, a Parisbased technology start-up, uses drones and other technology to 3D scan heritage sites, with a particular focus on places that are “at risk”.1 For example, Iconem has worked with the Syrian Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums to document historically significant places facing threats due to the civil war, including sites such as the Saladin castle, the Citadel of Aleppo and the Umayyad Mosque. The citadel was, in part, destroyed in the devastating earthquake on 6 February 2023. One imagines that Iconem’s digital twin could now act as a guide for restoring it, or perhaps will serve as a historic document of something that will never be again.

Anaïs Aguerre and Brendan Cormier write in the introduction to the book Copy Culture: Sharing in the Age of Digital Reproduction that copies “play a significant role in stemming the tide of loss and depredations”. Aguerre and Cormier specifically refer to the loss of manmade artefacts – sculptures, buildings, monuments, archives. But, by applying this lens of loss to Front’s collection of nature, I begin to wonder if its research, which is now a living document of the Swedish forests, might one day transform into another archive of absence, given the current state of our world in climate collapse. Will the lichen that have lived in the woods for thousands of years fall victim to increased air pollution? Will the trees be cut down to meet humans’ insatiable desire for things? Will snow 1

no longer fall as temperatures continue to rise and rise?

Front did not set out to tackle the climate crisis overtly through Design by Nature, but the designers recognise their project’s entanglement with this broader context. “We’ve found lots of research about how people have become so disconnected from nature and green areas today,” says Lagerkvist. “There are studies, for example, that show that children who spend more time in nature are much more likely to have a stronger relationship with the idea of sustainability and various environmental questions, because they relate to it and understand that we are part of it – we are nature as human beings too.” Front’s research process, then, can be used as a blueprint for those hoping to reconfigure their relationship with the world around them and, by default, the loss of it – simply spend more time outside. Front’s more tangible outcomes of furniture, fabric and other products that mimic elements of the natural world also encourage a shift in perception.

By translating nature into design objects, Lingdren and Lagerkvist invite us to look more closely at things that are often taken for granted or overlooked – rocks and moss, bark and individual pine needles.

It is in the space between celebration and despair that the idea of a copy feels full of potential. Copying can be more than a back-up plan for loss: it is also a tool to focus our attention. To say, “Look how remarkable this thing is. How can you neglect it? Enjoy it! Celebrate it! Cherish it!” Copying something acknowledges its beauty, its importance, its need to be documented, and its value. As the saying goes, imitation is the highest form of flattery. If that is the case, then Design by Nature is an extensive and ongoing ode to the Swedish forests and nature more broadly. In revealing the extensive depth and breadth of work that designers (or photographers) undertake to develop a process for copying, it uncovers the depth and breadth of their ongoing care.

See ‘The Battle for Palmyra’ by Lemma Shehadi in Disegno #16.

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Words Isabella Smith

Image by Fabian Frinzel.

Best Foot Forward1When Jurgita Dileviciute moved into a new apartment during lockdown in 2020, three friends – who had met in London, but were now scattered across Europe – tried to help her furnish the flat. “But nothing we found seemed good enough,” Theresa Marx remembers. “We couldn’t find things we really liked.” To pass the time, the four began designing their dream pieces over video call. “We never thought we’d start a company – it was just the joy of Skyping together and creating things.”

When Marx found her work as a photographer drying up, a victim of the pandemic, she focused instead on these designs. The four convinced a furniture-maker to produce one of the pieces and Project 213A was born – named for the flat in which all four members of the group had lived at some stage. This one-time home appears as a graphic element in their logo – suitably domestic beginnings for a down-to-earth brand.

Not long after this came the Foot Stool. At a glance, it recalls a traditional three-legged milking stool – barring the addition of a jaunty foot. To make the piece, they approached a master craftsman based in northern Portugal (specialty: carved crucifixes for church organs). He was not impressed, says Marx. “He just looked at us like, ‘Are you for real? You see the work I do and you want me to make this?’” In the end, he relented, elevating the surrealist design through a mix of craftsmanship, a collaborative process, and the use of local materials: oiled chestnut and oak. Today, as orders flood in from stockists worldwide, he has apparently accepted the creation’s idiosyncrasies.

With its members’ backgrounds in cinema, finance, fashion and photography, Project 213A relies more on gut feeling than formal design expertise. “When I tell product designer friends how we do things, I can see panic in their eyes,” Marx says. “A lot happens by pure luck.” One fortunate accident occurred while designing a bench: lacking materials to make a scale mock-up, they boshed together a mini version.

They then realised that, if the bench was turned upside down, it worked better as a magazine rack.

Without furniture or product design backgrounds to draw on, the expertise of the artisans the company works with plays an important role. The cracks punctuating the brand’s Wooden Side Table – a JB Blunk-esque piece hewn from solid wood – were the result of advice from a maker.

The original design was crack-free, requiring holes for evaporation to be drilled; allowing cracks resulted in a far more interesting object.

“We want to be respected and taken seriously, but we don’t take ourselves very seriously,” says Marx. “The design industry can relax a bit.” With pieces like the Foot Stool, they remind us that, really, it’s nothing more serious than that: a foot stool. Albeit one that’s putting its best foot forward.

Objects in Review

Learning from Failure

Words Stephen Burks Illustration Leonhard Rothmoser Stephen Burks is the founder of Stephen Burks Man Made, a New York-based studio that is known for its collaborative, workshop-based practice that integrates craft techniques from around the world into contemporary products and systems.

Most designers have a false sense of what success is.

Our industry revolves around celebrity and the celebration of a handful of designers and brands. We see the same names dominating year after year, and a distracting, superficial gloss is layered over the discipline. For many aspiring designers, success is defined by trying to achieve what these designers have achieved, with the same companies they achieved it with, all the while seeking the social and press attention that leads to more of the same.

This cycle of “fame begets fortune” leaves people with the wrong idea of what design is.

Stephen Burks Man Made has been fortunate to gain a certain level of renown, but even today, after working 20 years in

the industry, we’re still struggling to make inroads into the world’s top design brands. By traditional metrics this suggests failure, but the lack of acceptance we’ve faced has forced us to examine other ways of working. The difficulties we have experienced have led us to think about craft production and take a broader worldview with regard to people and cultures designing and making outside the dominant European context. We’ve turned to other models of production to find alternative paths of acceptance.

However, it’s not enough to be an exception. I read our success as an indicator of the failure of the industry to welcome diversity, with statistically only a handful of “other” voices present at any one time. Why do we still fail to realise that difference adds depth and complexity, creating a more resilient system for all?

We, as an industry focused on luxury, often fail to acknowledge that design problems are much bigger than new tables and chairs. If you manage to make a commercial product with any brand, it’s easy to feel you’ve succeeded.

I don’t mean to belittle that – because

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it’s not easy to make a product – but design needs to be about more than this.

What are you making? Who is it for? And who benefits from it? These are some of the questions that need to be answered.

In this age of global crises, we should be striving to get products out there with meaning. A traditional design brief does not begin to address the everyday issues people are facing. How do we design for cynicism, nihilism, or fatalism? How do we consider gross inequality, injustice and grief? If we only engage with the commercial value of what we create, we miss the opportunity to imagine how design can also add meaning to people’s lives.

Rather than reflecting on personal failure, maybe our story of collective failure as an industry is worth exploring.

Perhaps we can begin to measure success by how much space is created for other voices to participate and be heard. If design is a form of communication, then what do we as a society want to say, and how is design a vehicle for more people to say it?

Terms of Address Words George Kafka1Photographs London Photo Project

What is an address? An address is a place. The location of your front door and the rooms behind it. Markers of addresses are visible on the surfaces of a city or town: signs declare the names of streets in graphic identities that distinguish between local authorities and local identities. Front doors frame the numbers they display as public declarations of fact. This is number 62; here is 16b; you are on Knatchbull Road. I’m fond of the crystallising moment when an address becomes a place – the result of a search on Google Maps, stepping off a bus or turning a corner to come face-to-face with, hopefully, the right location. Yes, this is the place: the Xi’an Impression restaurant or the Italian embassy or Jenny’s new flat.

Large Stick by Allisa Christie (2018).

to this process, particularly as postal systems became more accurate and efficient. In 1708, Prescot Street in Whitechapel was reported as one of the first roads in the city to have houses distinguished by number rather than sign. One hundred and fifty years later, London was first split into postal districts and, 100 years after that, in mid-century Norwich, the first postcodes were introduced on a trial basis. Today, in its official advice on checking someone’s identity, the UK government describes a “claimed identity” as “a combination of information (often a name, date of birth and address) that represents the attributes of whoever a person is claiming to be.” But if an address is an attribute central to an individual’s identity, what happens if you lose yours?

An address is also a code – that list of data that allowed you to get to Xi’an Impression to begin with. These locators care little about the font of the road sign, or the quality of the noodles, or the length of the queue outside. An address reveals near to nothing about a place’s architecture, the purpose of a building, or its symbolism. 1,600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Northwest, Washington, DC; 43 De Beauvoir Road, London, N1 5SF; 280 Boulevard Michelet, 13008 Marseille; Hauptstraße 155, 10827 Berlin. You can look these addresses up and read some social, political or architectural significance in them. Or you – and more importantly the bureaucratic systems they are ultimately designed for – can see them as data points on a database that need not refer to geographic location at all.

Because an address is, perhaps most importantly, an identity. Your address will likely be registered with your employer, bank, utility supplier, phone company, internet provider, insurance supplier, local library and many others, painting a fairly comprehensive picture of your life. Yet, more often than not, the address is used to verify that you are who you say you are, rather than where you say you are; it confirms your identity, rather than your location.

This is partly because correspondence between administrative services and individuals can be carried out digitally. However, this isn’t merely a modern phenomenon. Early uses of addresses also hint at the importance of identity over mere location. Deirdre Mask, author of The Address Book, notes the case of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, whose “description of souls” was ordered in 1753. This census involved one of the earliest examples of the numbering of homes; Maria Theresa’s aim, however, was not to catalogue the built environment but rather to conscript soldiers from across Habsburg dominions. As only some people were eligible to be soldiers, only some people received an address. “Lacking an address became a badge of inferiority,” Mask wrote in The New York Times, adding that the Empress “only cursorily considered Jews and women in her house numbering campaign; animals, so much more useful in war, received more attention.”

The Enlightenment and subsequent modernisation through the 19th and 20th centuries saw an ongoing process of rationalising and describing contemporary cities and societies, whereby individuals and objects came to be accounted for and understood within their complex ecosystems. Addresses continued to be central

Like the Tube map or a zipper, ProxyAddress is one of those rare design phenomena that appears so quietly effective that it doesn’t seem to have been “designed” at all – more discovered. As suggested by its name, ProxyAddress is a system that allows an address to be used as a stand-in or substitute for the real thing.

More specifically, ProxyAddress is designed to assist people experiencing homelessness and, with it, the loss of the social legibility that comes with having a fixed address. When the programme is running, an individual can apply for a ProxyAddress through

The adress is used to verify you are who you say you are, rather than where you say you are; it confirms identity rather than location. their local council and receive the address of a real, empty property (not the property itself).1 While it doesn’t immediately solve the problem of homelessness, a ProxyAddress gives the recipient the ability to use the address in all the ways they would if 1

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The addresses are provided by local authorities, private individuals and property developers. Properties that are reliably empty – such as those under construction or undergoing long-term refurbishment – are the best to use given that they are least likely to change ownership and threaten the stability of the ProxyAddress. One ambition for the project, for example, is to see policy support for developers donating long-term empty properties as ProxyAddresses through a council tax reduction.

The images accompanying this piece are taken from Café Art’s MyLondon project, an annual scheme that distributes 100 Fujifilm Quicksnap film cameras to people who have experienced homelessness to take photographs from around the city. These photographs are sold as calendars and greetings cards, with profits going to the artists. Café Art is now setting up a charity called MyWorld (myworldcreativeprojects.org) that supports other cities to establish similar schemes. Featured here is Perfect Light, Brixton by Peter Nathan (2019).

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Picnic, Crystal Palace by James Robson (2015).

Margaret, Islington by Alex Davies (2014).

St Paul’s Cathedral by Wes Pearcey (2018).

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Grand Union Canal by Keith Norris (2018).

48 Hands In, Liverpool Street by Amadeus Xavier Quadeer (2017).

they lived there: to receive post redirected to a PO Box, apply for a job, open a bank account, maintain a phone contract and access a range of social supports that can provide a route into permanent accommodation.

Of course, like the Tube map or a zip, the apparent simplicity of ProxyAddress belies a devilish complexity behind its creation. “I did have a notion of addresses being the problem going into the project,” explains Chris Hildrey, a trained architect and the founder of ProxyAddress. “I imagined it as a postal issue and there were some terrible ideas around that at the start.

But it’s less about post, it’s actually about identity.”

Hildrey graduated from the Bartlett School of Architecture in 2009, when the number of people sleeping rough in England was less than half of what it is today. His early career suggested a conventional route through the upper echelons of global starchitectled practices, with stints at Foster + Partners, Zaha Hadid Architects and OMA under Rem Koolhaas (“The only bonafide genius I’ve ever been in a room with”). An unlikely student design project for a smoking room at a private member’s club, however, hinted at a slightly different trajectory.

“The smoking ban had just come in and I was kind of fascinated with that,” says Hildrey. “There were all these grey areas within the legislation about how if a bus stop had three walls you couldn’t smoke in it, but if it had only two then you could,” he explains.

Hildrey’s design consisted of a woven structure based on a Menger sponge – a theoretical shape with infinite surface area but zero volume – that, crucially, would allow members to smoke indoors without breaking the new law. Hearing Hildrey explain it, his smokingroom project illustrates an early knack for applying architectural thinking to legislative problems, although he understands it differently: “The only reason I mention it, is that it started me looking at the ridiculous opulence that you sometimes come up against in architecture,” he says. “Then, as the credit crunch hit, you saw society really shift. You had libraries being closed down, parkland being sold off, public toilets shut down and, obviously, homelessness increasing. That was when it started to hit me that, as an architect, I wanted to be doing something to influence the built environment.”

The opportunity came in 2017 with a place as a Designer in Residence at London’s Design Museum.

The residency programme gives emerging designers funding, a studio space and time to pursue a self-

initiated project. Hildrey entered the programme with the intention of using his architectural skills to respond to the impacts of government austerity through outcomes other than buildings. He quickly settled on homelessness. “It was by far the most urgent issue,” he says. “I couldn’t, in good conscience, choose another.”

“Does what we’re doing change things for people who are living through homelessness?”—Chris Hildrey In the dozens of presentations that Hildrey has given on ProxyAddress since the residency, he often shows a graphic that looks like a diagram of a circuit board. Instead of diodes and transistors, the dizzying lines on the screen run between all the nodes of the social system that an address touches: birth certificate; employment; bank account; driving licence; marriage certificate; universal credit; and more. “The impact of the address snakes out to all these different sectors, and the sectors rarely talk to each other,” he explains.

In his research, Hildrey joined the dots between these nodes by speaking to “as many people as I could”, including those experiencing homelessness, reached through a shelter in Clapham, as well as frontline charity staff, policymakers, regulators, people working in finance, anti-fraud, and the Department for Work and Pensions. “I became a wanderer,” he says, “trying to find out as much about each little enclave of the world as I could.” Part of ProxyAddress’s USP is its ability to mask the interrelations of interdependent and often alienating bureaucracy behind the seeming straightforwardness of an address – a fact that reflects a clear-minded question at the heart of Hildrey’s work: “Does what we’re doing change things for people who are living through homelessness?”

The first to receive ProxyAddresses were a group of 49 people who took part in a trial with Lewisham Council starting in late-2020. The participants were chosen for their varied backgrounds and different experiences of homelessness: people who were about to be made homeless; people who had been living in a shelter for a year or so; care leavers; prison leavers; ex-armed forces; people escaping domestic violence;

Distribution

50 Past and Future, City of London by Ioanna Zakana (2015).

Fruit Cart, Warren Street by Paul Duffy (2013).

“We don’t want to develop something too quickly because we get seduced by the need for coverage or attention or awards.”

—Chris Hildrey

Shadow of Self by Goska Calik (2015).

out on top of pre-existing infrastructure. Instead, the system has to be closely integrated with the local authorities, which have a statutory duty to support those experiencing homelessness and will be the point of contact administering the ProxyAddress, rather than Hildrey himself. No two local councils run the same way, meaning establishing partnerships will be knotty and time-consuming. “What we don’t want to do is develop something too quickly because we’re trying to get it out there, or we get seduced by the need for coverage or attention or awards,” he says. “We can’t turn around in six months and say, ‘Actually, you can’t see a doctor in three weeks because we’ve got a bug in the system.’”3 Yet scale up it must. The national shame of homelessness levels in the UK cannot be overstated: research published by the homelessness charity Shelter earlier this year found that, on a given night in 2022, there will have been more than 271,000 people recorded as homeless in England (including adults and children living in hostels and other forms of temporary accommodation, as well as those sleeping on the streets). In 2021, Inside Housing reported that rough sleeping in England increased by 169 per cent between 2010, when the Conservative government took power, and 2017 when rough sleeping peaked in the UK. At the same time, government figures published in November 2022 show that there were 479,000 empty homes in England at the end of last year. ProxyAddress puts some of these homes – at least their addresses – to productive use, but with only a fraction of the impact that a real, secure home can offer.

ProxyAddress is set to be rolled out across a broader group of local authorities – including in Glasgow – later this year. Given the likely effect of the cost-of-living crisis, the timing is as urgent as ever. ProxyAddress cannot prevent the causes of homelessness – this will require political change that no architect can design on their own – but it is a vital new tool in the struggle towards dignity, safety and agency for the UK’s most vulnerable. E N D

and some people more entrenched in homelessness.

People with particularly complex needs, such as extreme substance abuse or mental health issues, were not considered.2 By the end of the trial, a series of staggered six-month periods that concluded in 2022, 47 of the 49 were no longer homeless.

The ProxyAddress pilot success came as a surprise even to Hildrey, who had hoped some 25-30 per cent of the participants might no longer be homeless by its conclusion. Beyond the impact implied in the trial’s quantitative data, individual cases revealed different ways a fixed address could benefit a person. “There was one guy who had been in a shelter for a couple of years and just couldn’t escape it applying for jobs using the care-of address,” says Hildrey. “He got a ProxyAddress, got a job, got a bank account and not only was he able to ultimately move into his own privately rented flat, but he got promoted twice. When I met him for his assessment he drove from his flat to come and meet me. He’s now a regional sales director of a company.”

Another participant in the trial who was escaping from domestic violence described the ProxyAddress as being like a “VPN in the real world”. In her case, the address not only provided a continuous method of contact in the progression from shelter, through monitored accommodation, to a privately rented home, but the separation of the ProxyAddress from a real location also provided the vital element of anonymity for a person at risk. As Hildrey explains, “If you’ve been through a situation where the one person you’re supposed to trust has abused you, then any level of trust is hard, even giving your address – your location – to a bank.” He continues: “that disassociation between the address and the location is a huge help for people who are afraid for their safety.”

Despite the clear impact of the trial – perhaps because of the impact of the trial – Hildrey is cautious about the future of ProxyAddress. He is keenly aware of the deep and highly sensitive responsibility that comes with providing a service for vulnerable people that, after the pilot, might appear something like a silver bullet for homelessness in the UK. The reality is, of course, more complex, due to the necessarily entangled relationship between addresses and social services. Unlike a new app or business such as Deliveroo or Uber, ProxyAddress cannot simply roll 2

3

For those with the most acute needs, medical attention would likely be a priority, rather than a ProxyAddress.

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Hildrey is deliberately withholding on the inner workings of the ProxyAddress system. This is predominantly for reasons of security (ensuring the personal details of vulnerable people cannot be accessed as a result of a cyber attack) and consistency (if parts of the system were copied and used by other well-meaning organisations, it may complicate for the end user what is currently a very simple system to navigate).

Aggregate: A Composite Account Words Oli Stratford Photographs Donald Milne

The following text details the production of bricks manufactured using construction waste. It has been written using fragments of quotes taken from original interviews with those involved in the practice. These quotes form the main body of the text, loosely bound together with short explanations and linking phrases.

Construction

So a brick is made from surrounds, of earth carved up and pressed into blocks, baked, which architect Andy Groarke describes as a building material having historically been really provisional, he says, of being a useful way of taking material from the local environment to make effortlessly vernacular architecture.1111111And yet this idea of vernacular bricks is essentially nostalgic, because we now we make 3tn bricks every year, says Groarke, although we should fact check that, he says, and the number online seems to be somewhere around 1.5tn bricks instead, of which 1.3tn are said to have been manufactured in Asia.1111111That leads Groarke to think about how bricks were once local things, he says, but now wonder how many of us as architects truly research the origins of the materials that we are specifying.1111111Groarke’s studio, Carmody Groarke, is based in the UK, a country that used 2.6bn bricks in 2019, of which 500m were imported due to a domestic shortfall, and this is a figure that corresponds with how bricks, globally, have undergone a transition from local craft object to industrial good, says James W.P. Campbell, whose 2003 Brick: A World History notes that the brick is a building material that has moved from being a simple clod of earth kneaded into a loaf-like mass by hand, it says, to the metric-sized precision-moulded factoryproduced object made today.1111111This is a story of mass-production that belies the structural and material complexity of bricks, however, because although a brick is a simple thing, says Sam Chapman, an engineer who co-founded Scottish brick manufacturer Kenoteq Ltd in 2015, it’s a thousands-of-years-old technology – one whose name, sig, in the Sumerian language of Mesopotamia, says Campbell, from whence moulded bricks are said to have originated in around 5000 BCE, was used to mean both a building and a city, he says.1111111And Sumerian’s linguistic presentation of bricks as the core to architecture and urbanism is neat, because a brick can be thought of as ordered earth, says Ben Bosence, co-founder of British architecture practice Local Works Studio, insofar as a brick is the rawest material you can get, he says, because it’s basically a human rectangulation of raw material.1111111Traditionally, this material has been clay-rich brickearth, which is fired in kilns at between about 900 and 1,150°C, says Campbell, for at least 8 to 15 hours if the clay is to gain the resilience of stone that is typical of a fired clay brick, he says, so I guess the hidden story about brick is that it’s extremely carbon intensive to produce, says Bosence, because although once it’s made it’s wonderful and you can potentially reuse it forever, there’s this really heavy initial carbon hit which you’ve got to take if you make a traditional ceramic brick.1111111Which gives us twin environmental problems of contemporary bricks – they’re shipped from all around the world, says Bosence, and they are made by obscenely high-polluting technologies and industries, but we’re just picking them off the shelf from a builder’s merchant, he says.1111111Because where materials are from is not well known, he says.1111111There are some immediate responses to this that may help improve the legibility of materials’ origins, such as manufacturers ensuring that bricks don’t travel very far, says Chapman, and also taking the raw materials that are in your area to reduce the carbon emissions of transport, adds Gabriela Medero, who is a civil engineer, a professor at Heriot-Watt University, and the other co-founder of Kenoteq, which would amount to a basic policy of keeping material movements to a minimum, they say.1111111But this approach would not touch the carbon costs of firing, with India alone producing 200bn bricks in 2011, almost all of which were fired in kilns that burned huge amounts of coal, reports the World Bank, and which emitted 76m tonnes of carbon dioxide, with this only being resolved if you reconsider the materials from which bricks are made, given that the energy for firing clay is all wrong, says Medero, who also rejects the alternative of cement bricks because 8 per cent of carbon emissions worldwide come from cement, she says.1111111 So, no cement, no fire, she says.1111111This dual prohibition prompted Medero’s development of the K-Briq, a new design for a brick that enters mass production for the UK market in spring 2023, and which is made from more than 90 per cent waste materials taken from construction and demolition, using sand, using gypsum, using pieces of ceramics, says Medero, all materials we have used for hundreds of years, she says, and which we know are not going to change – they are what they are.1111111Kenoteq was founded by Medero and Chapman to deliver the K-Briq as a commercial product, which began life as a research project at Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt several years earlier, and is now a brick with a material formula built up from old rubble, old stone, old concrete, old mortars, says Chapman, a lot of old brick, old gypsum from waste plasterboard that you don’t see from the outside, he says, but inside of which there’s all this history of construction waste.1111111Which is an exploration of waste streams that provides a broad material palette for architectural use, because construction and demolition accounts for more than a third of all waste generated in the EU, reports the European Commission, which hurts me when I see that demolition, says Medero, when I see historical buildings being pulled down without any consideration, she says.1111111There are various national and international guidelines in place that aim to limit the environmental impact of demolition, such as the EU’s 2008 Waste Framework Directive, which aimed for 70 per cent of all construction and demolition waste to be recycled by 2020 and that is now being reformulated, but if you ask the demolition industry what is happening to the waste materials, says Ward Massa, co-founder of Dutch architectural

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The images accompanying this text were taken by photographer Donald Milne and document the Kenoteq production facility on farmland to the east of Edinburgh. They show the facility as it gears up for the launch of Kenoteq’s K-Briq on the UK market in spring 2023, revealing the process through which the company’s waste-based bricks are manufactured.

Construction

materials company StoneCycling, they’ll say they are already doing a fantastic job recycling the waste, but if you zoom in on what recycling means to them, he says, the materials are just broken down and used as filler for roadbeds or the foundations of new buildings.1111111Which is really downcycling, says Massa, and this in spite of the fact that construction and demolition waste is by far the biggest waste stream that we have in the Netherlands, he says, and I believe in the UK it’s about 65m tonnes each year, which is 4.7m truckloads of debris.1111111So, I have this concept with K-Briq, says Medero, which is that we can take that waste from construction demolition, recycle it, and make a new material that could go back to a site, she says, and not end up as landfill or filler, but instead become an architectural material through the application of the really clever bit, says Chapman, which is a binder that we add to our aggregate, he says.1111111The K-Briq is, then, waste aggregate bound up such that it coheres as a brick, and the blended material from which it is formed looks like moist sand, for want of a better description, says Chapman, but is what we’d call a semi-dry mix that doesn’t flow, he says, but you can form it into moulds, so we just put it into presses under hydraulic pressure and then leave it to cure for 24 hours, he says, after which time it’s ready to go.1111111So it’s a simple thing, a beautiful thing, says Chapman, with a lot of complexity and innovation inside, but mimicking a very basic thing, and no cement, no fire, insofar as curing is a hardening process in which it’s the brick’s internal chemistry that does the bonding, he says, not high-energy fossil fuels.1111111Curing a brick is not a new idea, given that calcium silicate bricks are made by compressing a mixture of damp sand and lime and then curing the result with saturated steam in an autoclave, says Campbell, which was a process that was invented in Germany in the 1880s, he says, although those bricks are still extractive of raw materials, whereas the K-Briq is made from more unpredictable waste streams.1111111And so if you set out to design a waste brick, knowing how to cook is helpful, says Medero, because I never follow recipes – I have done dishes so many times that I now adapt to the ingredients, she says, and in the process of developing the K-Briq I realised that I similarly needed to understand material range, she says, the range within materials that was acceptable to ensure that the formula for the brick can cope with a composition that shifts between batches, she says, because waste is always going to have variation.1111111Kenoteq does not source its waste directly from demolition sites and doesn’t sort it in-house, but instead works with certified waste handlers who wash and screen it, says Chapman, which provides a degree of specification for the composition, but you’re still getting recycled aggregate from different suppliers, which has come from different origins, different buildings, he says, so you might have more brick in there than stone, you might have more concrete than brick, he says, which is the very nature of recycled materials because they’re not a nice homogenous thing.1111111This material complexity and tendency towards variation is one reason why the K-Briq has spent more than 10 years in development and why people think I’m going to be offended when they say that it just looks like a regular fired brick, says Medero, but the magic is that while there’s a lot of science and technology hidden in there, she says, it’s just a brick.1111111There are forebears to the K-Briq in the form of historical bricks also produced using waste, such as the yellow London stock bricks that provided the predominant building material of Georgian London, and which were formed from clay mixed with what has been variously known as Spanish, soil, town ash, or rough stuff, says Alan Cox in ‘A Vital Component: Stock Bricks in Georgian London’, that is, London’s domestic rubbish, which contained a large amount of ash and cinders, he says.1111111Which really latched onto my brain, says Bosence, whose practice has come to specialise in the local production of architectural materials, because I couldn’t think of another major city in the world that was made of its own waste, he says, and this idea also resonated with Groarke, who recently worked with Bosence and his partner, landscape architect Loretta Bosence, on developing an unfired brick of their own, with the idea that this could provide an interesting cultural conversation about technology, says Groarke, and the idea of balancing this notion of tradition and invention in architecture.1111111Like the K-Briq, Groake and Bosence’s brick is made from compressed construction waste, which is a little bit of a self-reflective process on how easy our choices as architects are, says Groarke, and about balancing this limitless freedom that we have as people putting the ingredients of buildings together, he says, because we should really be evaluating the modes of production that we make our buildings from.1111111But how many of us as architects truly research the origins of the materials that we’re specifying? he says.1111111Hence the Gent Waste Brick, developed as part of Carmody Groarke’s ongoing project to renovate Design Museum Gent, Belgium’s national design museum, which includes a heavy emphasis on adaptive reuse of the museum’s existing buildings, Groarke says, as well as a new extension.1111111In developing ideas for the museum’s extension, and understanding its relationship to the existing museum buildings that date back to 1577, if not earlier, there was always the implication that this was going to be a brick building, says Groarke, and this curiosity about brick architecture was further piqued by local collaborator TRANS Architectuur, who kept repeating a phrase that everyone in Gent is born with a brick in their belly, he says.1111111From early on in the development of the museum’s masterplan,

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the idea of Gentian architecture in brick seemed normal, says Groarke, while the suggestion of reusing existing construction materials alongside adapting existing buildings gained resonance, given that the enduring, representational buildings in Gent are made from a soft, white limestone, he says, like the tower of St. Bavo’s Cathedral, which has been built and unbuilt and rebuilt and unbuilt and rebuilt several times between the 13th and 16th centuries.1111111So this current notion of circularity and creative adaptive reuse in architecture isn’t an innovative idea of the 21st century, says Groarke, but was present in the pre-modern era where freedom and limitless ways of production and use of materials were not possible, he says, and so we’re just reapplying that, because the way we construct should meet the challenges of the modern world, he says, and what better location to communicate that than in a design museum?1111111We can, Groarke says, rethink every technology around how we build.1111111The new Gent Waste Brick is made from 63 per cent municipal waste, extracted from waste streams drawn from across the city of Gent that we’ve been really judicious in our use of, says Sian Ricketts, an architect with Carmody Groarke, because something like concrete has pozzolanic qualities, she says, which is what you get in volcanic stone and things like that, meaning that it’s got inherent binding properties that we can benefit from.1111111To complete the bricks, this mixture of construction waste is combined with sand, hydraulic lime and ground calcium carbonate on a brownfield site in Gent, resulting in a brick with one-third of the embodied carbon of a clay-fired brick, which is a great platform for saying that here’s an example of how we can cut 65 per cent or so of the carbon out of this unit of construction, says Groarke, which becomes a signpost for us to think a bit more critically about how we build.1111111Although only around 91,000 Gent Waste Bricks are being produced because I don’t think we’re interested in becoming brick manufacturers, says Ricketts, there is a heightened symbolic value to the project insofar as bricks are a symbol of architecture and something you can hold in your hand, she says, because bricks are used everywhere and are understood as a completely mutable scale of construction in almost every country in the world, adds Groarke, such that seeking to redesign the production process by which bricks are manufactured becomes a kind of existential question about construction.1111111Like the K-Briq, the Gent Waste Brick is cured rather than fired to lower its carbon costs, which is enabled by the fact that it uses lime as its primary binder, says Ricketts, and which results in a curing and drying process that, in total, takes around six to eight months, which is roughly similar to the timescale a clay brick would go through with firing and cooling, says Bosence, but the whole premise was that we didn’t want to have an initial expenditure of carbon, he says, so the design was all based around the fact that it would not go into a kiln.1111111And when a kiln is taken out of the equation, the need for transportation of materials is also reduced, because the beauty of all this is that it opens up fabrication, says Bosence – you’re just pressing these bricks on-site and letting them cure, rather than moving them elsewhere to a kiln, he says, and so we have also tried to design all of this around existing moulds and existing pressing machines that don’t need to be adapted, he says, because all this infrastructure exists and is already quite common.1111111In order for the brick to cohere correctly, however, the makeup of its various waste aggregates needs to be carefully considered, says Groarke, which means that the Gent Waste Brick is mostly concrete buildings that have been pulverised, he says, but it also contains elements of porcelain, and elements of glass.1111111The latter originally came from Belgian beer bottles, says Groarke, but the residue of sugars from the alcohol was still there even after washing again and again, and we washed it five times, says Ricketts, but there’s a combination of the glucose of the beer and the residue from the label which was incompatible with the chemical process of curing, she says, so we had to select different streams of glass, she says.1111111And car windscreens have been very good instead, says Groarke.1111111But while this selection of aggregates is chiefly functional, it has also been calibrated to generate a particular aesthetic, such that the Gent Waste Brick is a white-grey or dove-grey brick that is designed to match the city’s historic limestone or, as Bosence says, just a boring brick, just a pale brick, he says, not a wonderfully beautiful object, not a wonderfully refined object, he says, so people will not get wowed with the glitziness of it, but will instead focus on the narrative, which is to show people where materials are from.1111111To show people that you can make stuff from what’s around you, he says.1111111This approach towards local production intends to provide an alternative idea for the procurement of building materials moving forward, because we automatically think of mining as being of a raw material, says Ricketts, but there’s a lot of value in mining waste streams given that we’re going to meet a tipping point, she says, where waste is more than the raw material available out of the earth.1111111Because a brick is made of surrounds and we are all surrounded by waste, and our cities are actually very rich for material movement, says Bosence, which is happening everywhere, he says, but it’s so hard to keep hold of that material because there’s often no storage, no place to fabricate.1111111So to be able to make 91,000 bricks within the city of Gent, for the city of Gent is as strong a narrative as the materiality of it, he says.1111111The Gent Waste Brick is telling a hyperlocal story about making a building through the physical substance of the city, says Groake, but you can also

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Construction

write this brick as a design code that you can apply to a different part of the world with its own waste streams, says Bosence, where you will get a brick that looks different, he says, inasmuch as it would be the same size and shape, the same function, he says, but look completely different.111111This relationship between specificity and universality pivots around standards and legislation, insofar as the Gent Waste Brick has been cleared for use on Design Museum Gent, but only after lots of conversations with the Belgian Union for Technical Approval in Construction, says Ricketts, which were about being able to demonstrate that the brick was suitable for use and met various performance metrics, she says, but the brick has no wider authorisation for use in Belgium, let alone overseas, because the challenge is navigating standards and there is no standard for this brick, she says.1111111This is a problem for any waste brick, inasmuch as existing standards were developed for concrete bricks or for fired clay bricks, but our brick is not fired, says Ricketts, so it’s more of a living material in a way, which means it’s softer, perhaps a little softer, she says, and these slight differences in performance require careful adaptation of the way in which you design using the material.111111So it has been quite key, she says, that alongside developing the brick we have also been developing the detail of the building, and had the space and time to think about the interrelation of the two, she says, like the decision to incorporate an overhanging parapet on the museum’s facade that can help to protect the brick.1111111While these issues around usage have been challenging for the Gent Waste Brick, they represent a higher hurdle for the K-Briq, which is a commercial product intended for more straightforward specification in projects, which means that we needed to look at all the most extreme tests from all the standards of things that could be considered even close to us, says Medero, who has adopted a particular focus on the damage that can occur within bricks due to weather conditions, so I have been freezing and thawing bricks for more than a decade, she says.1111111For which living in Scotland has actually helped, she says, because if you make bricks that you have successfully exposed to the elements for five winters in Scotland, she says, then you feel OK about their future performance, even if the K-Briq is still subject to the British standards, the European norms, says Chapman, and those standards have come about over many years of development around traditional materials and products, he says, which fit very nicely for a concrete block or a clay-fired brick, but where there’s nothing to fit a brick made out of waste material that isn’t fired, he says.1111111Development routes for architectural materials vary dramatically from country to country, and some are more accommodating than others, so if you go to Germany there is a route, says Medero, and New Zealand has some nice standards too, but here in the UK there’s nothing, she says, which really stifles new things entering the market, says Chapman, because even for the K-Briq to not simply be classified as waste takes regulatory steps with the environmental agencies, he says.1111111Today, the K-Briq is in the final stages of its certification with the British Board of Agrément, which is looks at the standards and gives you a testing specification, says Chapman, but there’s been a lot of to and fro with the environment agencies, he says, which ultimately amounts to an extended timespan that has been frustrating for a project aimed at addressing environmental issues within construction, because time is pressing, he says, and what we’re doing now affects things well into the timeframe of the climate emergency.1111111So there is a need for greater regulatory speed, which is a theme picked up at StoneCycling by Ward Massa, because while developing an idea or a new material as a sample can be challenging enough, says Massa, transforming that into something that can be sold in a conservative industry is the real challenge, he says.1111111StoneCycling produces fired WasteBasedBricks, which are made from mostly mineral waste streams, and those can be ceramics, can be glass, can be post-industrial waste streams, says Massa, but also other types of polluted earth sources such as materials dredged out of harbours, he says, so that in total we have about 60 different waste streams that can be used, but not all 60 actually are used, he says, because legislation is often not up to speed with development.1111111Which is one reason why the WasteBasedBrick is made from at least 60 per cent waste, mixed with raw clay, because while on a laboratory level we can go up to 100 per cent waste, says Massa, if we don’t add clay, then it’s not a clay ceramic product anymore, he says, and you find yourself in a field where there are no regulations or test methods, which is not simply a matter of complying with legislation, but also to do with gaining market traction, he says, because a construction company is responsible for the quality of the building, which means that they want to work with proven methods and materials.1111111And that’s really a force that goes against innovation, he says, because doing something new means potential risks.1111111The WasteBasedBrick is the most established of the current generation of waste bricks, having initially been developed by Massa’s former partner, designer Tom van Soest, in 2009 as a graduate project at Design Academy Eindhoven, before finally launching in 2015 as a commercial product, during which time we have intentionally tried to become part of a system of already existing products, says Massa, because at least we have norms that we can use for testing and people understand what kind of material it is, he says.1111111Slowly, we can now start to increase our ambition because the market knows us, says Massa, but we always say that, for any step we can take in the laboratory, we should divide that

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by two for the market, he says, because a lot more is possible than what people will accept.1111111The corollary of this approach is that the WasteBasedBrick remains conventionally fired as opposed to cured, which has resulted in an in-between step of compensating the carbon footprint and changing the recipe to fire at a lower temperature, says Massa, while the next step is to switch to a hydrogen-fired production process that will give you the temperatures but no carbon emissions, he says, because in the end this needs to be 100 per cent waste-based, and it needs to be carbon neutral.1111111And alongside the environmental complications, a further result of the firing process is that the WasteBasedBrick is the most conventionally bricklike of the waste bricks, adopting the aesthetic of a clay-fired brick that is produced in a range of familiar, brickish tones, because aesthetics are super important, says Massa, and there’s a reason why everyone wants to live in a brick building, he says, whereas the K-Briq has leant into the provision of stronger, brighter colouration through the introduction of recycled pigments such as blue and chartreuse and pink and violet.1111111These colours are unorthodox, but aimed at helping the product cope with the vicissitudes of trends within the market, because we want to be flexible to our clients, says Medero, so if tomorrow they want yellow bricks, then the factory will produce yellow bricks, she says, and if orange is in fashion the day after, then we’ll do that.1111111Which is aesthetically unconventional, but not unheralded because most people think of bricks as being red, says Campbell, when in fact they have been produced in every colour under the sun, including the pale yellows of the desert, the bright green glazes of the Middle East, the purples and blacks of so-called Staffordshire Blues, he says.1111111Colour within bricks is often a tell as to material origin, insofar as historically bricks were vernacular and you got different colours wherever you travelled in the world, says Bosence, on account of the different brickearths from which they were made, alongside natural variations in their production, he says.1111111So where Local Works Studio is based in East Sussex, he says, the bricks are orange and red from the iron in the clay that oxidises during firing, but you also get these flashes from the kiln that deposit this lovely blue-y glaze.1111111Whereas here in Scotland, Medero says, they like the blacks and greys.1111111But if brickearth is removed from the mixture, colour can be left far more open, because a link between production and locale has been severed, so while we do want to mimic the more traditional colours, says Chapman, we also offer the more wacky colours too, which is part of a wider ambition to position K-Briq as not only a manufacturer, but also a brand.1111111Launching a brand is a familiar commercial ambition, but also unusual given that there aren’t really any brands in the brick world, says Chapman, because while a brick is just a brick, branding is also a statement of Kenoteq’s environmental position and of wanting people to get on board with the idea that we’re about something bigger than making a few bricks, he says, because if a house is built with these things, it means waste has been avoided.1111111To facilitate these ambitions, Kenoteq is opening a factory on farmland east of Edinburgh, which will take in the region’s waste and use it to mass-produce the K-Briq as a commercial product, because while a brick produced in the lab is great, says Chapman, there’s nothing commercially viable until it is produced in the numbers required by the construction industry, but the requirements of material development mean that any startup working to reach this scale faces considerable costs.1111111So we’ve needed public-sector grant funding and research funding, says Chapman, and then some fundraising through more traditional private equity, he says, because while you may have a good idea, and you’ve maybe got it to small-scale prototype, you still need a couple of years to really develop all the stuff around the commercial side, and none of that happens without that kind of support, says Massa, because there’s an enormous amount of time between somebody liking your product and a company actually buying your product – years and years and years, he says.1111111Kenoteq has now reached the end of a pilot programme producing 400 bricks a day, but 400 a day is not viable commercially, says Chapman, so the next step is 10,000 a day, which amounts to producing 3m bricks per year, says Medero, but in a UK market of 2.6bn bricks per year that is a drop in the ocean, that is small fry, says Chapman, because Persimmon Homes put in a new concrete brick-making plant a couple of years ago that’s doing 80m bricks a year, he says, and some on the continent will be 150 or 200m.1111111StoneCycling, meanwhile, produces 2m bricks a year, achieved in partnership with a production company that specialises in developing bricks for the renovation industry, which means they have to be able to remake historic brick recipes, says Massa, so their factory is super flexible, although there are now plans to move to a new, dedicated facility that will allow production to upscale to 25m bricks a year.1111111Yet an upturn in production numbers need not mean catering to market demands, because we think that the architectural market will change in the coming years, says Massa, from the situation we have at the moment where an architect gets an assignment, starts designing, and then looks for companies that can make the materials they need, he says, to a situation where there is a location that needs a building, the architect looks at the available materials, and then makes a building out of those, he says.1111111This has implications for production companies who may no longer say that I have this brick that you can buy now and you can also buy the same one in 10 years, says Massa, but who may be more like I have

Construction

500,000 of these bricks, who can do something with them? he says, while a similar idea has led Kenoteq to speculate about setting up a franchise or licensing model for its bricks, because we need to follow the materials, says Chapman, follow the resources.111111So if you want a load of bricks in New York State, he says, then why not make them there yourselves, which is the real future for all this because cities are our mines now that we’ve dug up everything, he says, so we need to be nimble and start replicating these sites elsewhere, he says, because if you’ve suddenly got five or six of them, all doing 10m bricks a year, that’s when we’ll start to see a real impact.1111111And animating all these ideas is the demand for architecture to adopt a greater responsiveness towards material availability, which is the overarching theme informing the practice of Local Works Studio, because as architects it’s really, really good to stop and reconsider everything, says Bosence, because we can’t carry on as we are.1111111So Local Works does not operate as a conventional studio, but has instead been desperately trying to get into projects early, says Bosence, earlier than architects being brought in to design a building for a site, but rather beginning during any prior demolition process in order to ring-fence materials before they’re labelled as waste or taken off site, he says, which has resulted in the use of an architectural process called a pre-deconstruction audit in which you go to a site and rather than just getting on with demolition, recycling, blah, blah, blah, he says, you do an audit of all the materials you have, which then becomes your palette for repurposing and reuse.1111111Because part of our role can be to open up architecture to show people how things are made, says Bosence, to show people the craft of it, to show people where materials are from, and that you can access materials locally and form buildings and landscapes from them, he says.1111111All of which stands in contrast to the status quo of architecture and development, Groake says, because this is a point less about the bricks themselves, he says, and more about focusing on and valuing the origins of ingredients, to which Bosence’s palette of on-site repurpose and reuse sets an admirably high bar, but which needn’t be impossible to achieve given that even something as simple as greater organisation of off-site waste storage centres would represent a considerable step along the way.1111111Belgian waste streams, for instance, are very beautifully organised, says Ricketts, with all the various materials separated, which makes them relatively easy to work with, she says, whereas I get the impression from looking into access to waste in the UK, she says, that there’s more red tape, so if we’re going to start utilising the resources available to us, she says, we really need to get better at organising them.1111111If any of this is to be successful, it will likely require legislation to ensure that the construction and demolition industries account for these matters, because the will from many architects is already present, says Chapman, and the waste handlers themselves get this because they see a value in everything, he says, so it’s just about getting the broader processes right.1111111Yet until this happens, more ecologically responsible materials will come with attached costs, because WasteBasedBricks are at the high end of bricks, says Massa, and we know that 90 per cent of the market is not our market, he says, which is the same situation as experienced at Kenoteq, who are not trying to compete on price yet, says Chapman, because we know that big house builders will go direct to companies who are cheaper.1111111Ultimately we are collecting materials that need to be sorted, says Massa, and there’s a lot of processes involved in that which drive up the cost, but if you look at the actual cost of a brick, he says, you should also take into account its environmental impact and the cost to the environment through its ongoing use.1111111To which there are construction solutions, because alternative material options are out there, says Chapman, but it’s about getting them known and getting the mentality right for specifiers and more traditional builders, he says, which is where architects can help, because a brick is a very normative unit of construction, says Groarke, and if we can inflect the thinking behind how we make these units, he says, then that’s very appealing.1111111Much of this is not new, because contemporary approaches often reconfigure scraps of past practice, which you can see encapsulated in the 1955 lecture ‘Art and Technology’, delivered at the Academy of Finland by the 20th-century Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, in which he explains how an ordinary brick is for all appearances a primitive product, but if it is made correctly, he says, properly processed from the country’s own raw materials, if it used in the right way and given its proper place in the whole, then it constitutes the basic element in mankind’s most valuable and visible monuments, he says, and is also the basic element in the environment that creates social wellbeing.111111So in working with waste in 21st-century construction, there is potential for social and environmental wellbeing to be reemphasised, because at another point in his life, Aalto recalls having been in Milwaukee together with my old friend Frank Lloyd Wright, who gave a lecture that began with: Ladies and gentlemen, do you know what a brick is?111111And in response to his own question: a brick, Wright says, is a small, worthless, ordinary thing that costs 11 cents but has a wonderful quality.1111111Give me a brick, Wright says, and it becomes worth its weight in gold.1111111Which was the first time I had heard an audience told so bluntly and expressively what architecture is, Aalto says, because architecture is the turning of a worthless stone into a nugget of gold.

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Construction

Marble Dust in the Air

Words Evi Hall Photographs Eshwarya Grover

ZZZ

“Makrana marble is so particular to India.

A friend asked us once: ‘How do you differentiate two marbles that might look very similar, but one is from the region and one is not?’”

“We thought, maybe it’s about the grain or size of the crystals or the shine—”

Priyanka Sharma and Dushyant Bansal are lively conversationalists, one often starting the next part of their story as the other is finishing. The origins of their work, however, are clear. They set up their design practice Studio Raw Material in 2016 in the northwestern state of Rajasthan, India, to facilitate “an ongoing exploration of geology in terms of material and processes”.

The pair are particularly interested in extraction, value and waste, with the genesis of their investigation centring on a particular vein of reverberant marble.

Makrana, in central Rajasthan, is home to a marble deposit noted for its bright, white, pristine stone – a material that is internationally recognised as a Global Heritage Stone Resource, alongside materials such as Cambrian Welsh slate

and Carrara marble. Makrana’s quarries are historic and their marble has been used in India (and further afield) for temple building, flooring, and, most famously, the luminous domes and pillars of the Taj Mahal. While lookalike marbles are available, these are less compact and, when tapped, produce a more hollow sound. Even working with Makrana marble is different.

The craftspeople who deal with the stone daily “do a lot of very local techniques, such as testing the sound or putting it in water to understand what the density and purity levels are like,” says Eshwarya Grover, a visual artist and friend of Studio Raw Material, who has been helping Sharma and Bansal document their work.

Makrana is inseparable from its marble. The city and surrounding tehsil

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“—but we went to Kamal, our studio manager, and he said, ‘It’s the sound.

The marble sounds like glass.’”

– a small administrative region – are made of it. “There’s this really barren, stark desert without much vegetation,” explains Bansal, “but there is also the micro-landscape of marble – the industry with its heavy machinery, which is further shaping it. It’s natural but with this microcosm of landscape cut by man.”

Bansal, who comes from a marbleindustry family, knows the area well and understands how quarrying has shaped Makrana. “Because there is so much [industrial] waste, there are these yards, which over the years have become a landscape of dumped marble,” he says.

“The moment you enter the vicinity of Makrana, you can see little heaps of marble and people tinkering and carving statues.” In this sense, Studio Raw Material oscillates between seeing the landscape as poetic and commercial.

Although Bansal and Sharma appreciate Makrana’s “otherworldly” character – “the materiality of the stone is pervasive; you can feel the texture just with your eyes and the air is different, it’s extremely dusty” – they are particularly interested in the impact of extraction. “[Makrana] is this big, industrial place where there is so much production,” says Bansal, “so the proportional wastage from that is quite drastic.”

Sharma, a trained product designer, and Bansal, who studied architecture, became increasingly interested in the area’s marble waste, and started to experiment with making small designs using cuboidal offcuts sourced from waste dumps. Although Makrana is best known for its white marble, pink marble also occurs locally as surface deposits.

“As you go deeper, you find the white marble,” Bansal explains, “but [with Markrana] being an old and important market for stone, most businesses stock other colours for the ease of buyers.”

As such, marble colours of all kinds turn up in the region’s dump yards, with these varieties subject to material hierarchies.

Salmon-coloured marble is less popular than white, and stones that bear blemishes or markings are typically considered to be waste.

Against this backdrop, the studio produced a collection of side tables, bowls and lamps constructed using traditional joinery techniques, often combining pink, white and darker stones in one design.

“Everyone here is used to working with very clean, very white marble,” says Sharma, and this preference is difficult to shake – even amongst the craftspeople with whom Studio Raw Material works.

“They would [see a piece of blemished marble] and say ‘Oh, this looks like kachara!’ which means ‘trash’, but really bad trash, the kind you absolutely wouldn’t touch!” Sharma laughs. “It’s not even worth throwing away!”

It is this desire for marble to be singular, solid and pristine that Studio Raw Material wants to push against, designing objects that are purposefully fragmentary and which celebrate the waste and scraps they use – “pieces that are actually much more beautiful for me,” Sharma explains, “because of all the fissures and markings.” Their Khokhar table, which featured in Danish brand &Tradition’s 2022 Studies of a Table

exhibition in Copenhagen, derives its jigsaw-like construction from its constituent waste elements. “The industry here is predominantly for flooring, so when they dress the big blocks [of marble] they put them into a slicing machine,” explains Sharma.

“The blocks aren’t completely cuboid, so you get a lot of unusable slices or they break in transport. We collect them from construction sites, or the suppliers will often have a big pile of broken slices.”

The studio’s treatment of marble waste is intended to reflect its day-to-day use in Makrana. This is most visible in a series of outdoor structures that have sprung up out of the landscape of the tehsil and its quarries. These shaded shelters, tea stalls and benches are efficiently and simply constructed from scrap marble, and offer spaces for rest and socialising during the working day.

“They’re these massive pieces of rock, which nobody is using,” says Grover.

“The structures are so graphic in nature – it feels like they are deliberately made from that landscape.” Although built for practical rather than aesthetic reasons, these objects’ construction methods merit inspection. “They’re all made according to convenience [and] there’s a certain hierarchy to how the stones are placed, which makes it into a proper shelter that’s stable on the ground,” she reflects. “They use small stones in between [the larger pieces] as joinery.”

This vernacular usage, she adds, creates an interesting tension between the marble and the landscape from which it originates. “This is a material that’s used to make luxury products, but [people from Makrana] see it as an essential building unit.”

This interplay between marble as utility and marble as ornament can be seen most explicitly in Studio Raw Material’s Thar house, which stands just outside the Makrana tehsil. The project epitomises the practice’s ethos and work – a marble home/studio space designed to accommodate pieces from their collection.

“Most houses [in the area] are traditionally built using stone instead of brick, because there’s so much material around, which is then plastered over,” explains Bansal, referring to Thar house’s dry-stone walls made from tiny fragments of marble. “[But] we left [the walls] exposed, which

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everyone could agree looks beautiful.”

The result is that Thar house “feels like a modern piece of art,” Grover observes, “but it’s actually made with very simple, local techniques – it’s just that the presentation is slightly different.”

This hints at the light touch that Studio Raw Material aims for in its work.

Sharma and Bansal are interested in presenting the marble of Makrana as it is found – not lavishly carved or selected for pristine uniformity, but rather touching on its vernacular usage and offering this up as a contemporary treatment of the material. “Every time we find something, we collect it,” says Sharma. “We don’t design pieces in marble where we know we’re not going to be able to get [the required material].” Their real aim, then, is to “be immersed in this one singular landscape,” says Bansal. “We want to make work from that landscape, from that region, and not look at anything else.

We want to work with that constraint.”

Objects and material explorations in Studio Raw Material’s Makrana workshop.

The studio finding new marble pieces to work with in a dump yard close to a quarry.

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Material

Clockwise from left: Priyanka Sharma and Dushyant Bansal assembling parts of an object in their workshop; an element of the Khokar table, photographed among marble offcuts; the living room of Thar house.

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Clockwise from top left: Thar house; the workshop team assembling a table; offcuts stacked in the workshop; marble blocks excavated from a quarry, set against native khejri trees.

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Clockwise from left: A quarry site, with a cross section of soil layers made visible through excavation; the studio’s Nawa console being assembled by the team; the Khokar table.

Material

Words Svitlana Biedarieva

Image by Fabian Frinzel.

Bowl of Shadows,Combining a 19thcentury process of smoking ceramics developed in Havarechyna, a village in western Ukraine, with a contemporary approach to shape and form, Danuta Kril has created a series of objects that speak to the region’s past and present.

Havarechyna was famous for its black-smoked ceramics a hundred years ago, but the craft declined during the Soviet period. “For many, Havaretsk ceramics were unknown,” explains Kril, a Lviv-based designer who hopes to revive the technique, which involves burning logs at high temperatures to achieve a unique, glazeless, metallic effect. “I realised that the process needs to be rescued and reinterpreted in a new context,” she says. “It gives an opportunity to work with a minimalist shape within an original process of smoking that produces splendid black and smooth finishing.”

Kril’s Myska #2 Guculia.Tini bowl is part of a wider ceramic series made with the potter Mykola Bida. It merges Havarechyna’s traditional technology with modernist references, manifesting a new way of looking at Ukrainian cultural heritage. These ceramics show how contemporary expression can revive older craft techniques, demonstrating the ongoing relevance of traditional technologies.

The designer points to the cultural richness of Hutsulshchyna, a region in Ukraine’s picturesque Carpathian Mountains, as her main inspiration for the series. The word “tini” is Ukrainian for “shadows”, a reference to the famous film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by Sergey Parajanov.

Released in 1965, Parajanov’s film became an iconic representation of Ukrainian culture that displayed

the spirit of Hutsulshchyna and the profound symbolism embedded in its traditions. Kril’s work uses local solar and mountain archetypal forms – made famous by the film – to invoke a fundamental rootedness in nature and heritage.

She emphasises this through the shape and material of the bowl, highlighting a connection with what she perceives as ancestral modes of simple, everyday living.

The production of Kril’s ceramics has been threatened

by Russia’s war against Ukraine. The clay she uses originates in Slovyansk, a city in the east of Ukraine that has found itself at the epicentre of military action since the beginning of the invasion. Kril managed to rescue a tonne of clay before hostilities began, and the ceramics have become a symbol of creation in opposition to the destruction caused by the war. Myska #2 Guculia.Tini serves as a powerful reminder of the importance of preserving and celebrating cultural heritage, even amid crisis. This message of hope and resilience is particularly powerful in the context of the war in Ukraine.

It speaks to the ability of art and design to inspire and uplift even in the darkest of times.

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U.F.O.G.O.

Guest editors Anniina Koivu anniina.koivu@ecal.ch Camille Blin camille.blin@ecal.ch Editorial assistant Maxwell Ashford maxwell.ashford@ecal.ch Editor-in-chief Oli Stratford oli@disegnojournal.com Deputy editor India Block india@disegnojournal.com Senior creative producer Evi Hall evi@disegnojournal.com Creative assistant Lara Chapman lara@disegnojournal.com Subeditor Ann Morgan Creative directors Florian Böhm Annahita Kamali akfb.com Designer Jonas Hirschmann info@akfb.com Publisher and commercial director Chris Jones chris@disegnojournal.com

The Integrated Wind Turbines research project was initiated and supported by ECAL / University of Art and Design Lausanne ecal.ch HEIG-VD / The School of Engineering and Management Vaud heig-vd.ch HES-SO / University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland hes-so.ch Supported by Shorefast Foundation shorefast.org Project tutors Camille Blin Anthony Guex Anniina Koivu Project assistant Maxwell Ashford Consulting Engineers (HEIG-VD) Marc Pellerin Philippe Morey Marco Viviani Photographer ECAL / Jasmine Deporta CGI ECAL / Arthur Seguin Master Product Design Students Marcus Angerer, Jule Bols, Fleur Federica Chiarito, Matteo Dal Lago, Sebastiano Gallizia, Maxine Granzin, Sophia Götz, Lucas Hosteing, Paula Mühlena, Cedric Oder, Oscar RainbirdChill, Yohanna Rieckhoff, Luis Rodriguez, Donghwan Song, Chiara Torterolo and Luca Vernieri.

Contributors Maxwell Ashford, Camille Blin, India Block, Zita Cobb, Pete Decker, Jasmine Deporta, Anthony Guex, Anniina Koivu, Amanda Lim, Philippe Morey, Louise Pryke, Arthur Seguin and Oli Stratford.

ECAL Alexis Georgacopoulos (Director) Davide Fornari (Head of R&D) Camille Blin (Head of Master Product Design) Anniina Koivu (Head of Theory Masters) Anthony Guex (Artistic Deputy) Maxwell Ashford (Teaching Assistant) Special thanks to Zita Cobb and the entire community of Fogo Island; Margo Clavier; Roxana Faundez; and Christine Pirinoli.

This publication was produced with the support of ECAL / University of Art and Design Lausanne HEIG-VD / The School of Engineering and Management Vaud HES-SO / University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland Contact us Disegno Studio 4, the Rose Lipman Building 43 De Beauvoir Road London N1 5SF disegnojournal.com — ECAL / University of Art and Design Lausanne Av. du Temple 5 CH-1020 Renens ecal.ch

U.F.O.G.O. In May 2022, the International Energy Agency set out the case for societies to migrate to renewable energy supplies with renewed fervour.

“The current global energy crisis”, the agency wrote in its ‘Renewable Energy Market Update’, “has added new urgency to accelerate clean energy transitions and, once again, highlighted the key role of renewable energy.”

With countries the world over facing energysupply issues and increased fossil-fuel prices, a situation driven by economic challenges and exacerbated by Russia’s war in Ukraine, societies urgently need alternatives if they are to stave off the threat of energy insecurity. In this context, wind power has once again been presented as a promising avenue for regions seeking to transition to renewable energy. The technology has advanced rapidly and costs have been falling, with the price of onshore- and offshore-wind energy having dropped by 56 per cent and 48 per cent respectively between 2010 and 2020. Nevertheless, concerns over the technology’s social and environmental impact remain. For many, the visual intrusion of wind turbines in natural landscapes is still prohibitive.

Switzerland’s ECAL / University of Art and Design Lausanne disagrees with this position.

For ECAL, the problems facing wind power are not insurmountable; rather, they simply highlight the need for greater consideration around how we give form to these technologies, and how we integrate them into the environment and our lives. As such, in collaboration with the HEIG-VD / The School of Engineering and Management Vaud, ECAL has set out to explore how wind turbines can fit into natural landscapes not only sensitively, but beautifully – if we focus on their design. To demonstrate this, 16 students from ECAL’s Master Product Design programme left Lausanne in October 2022 and

set off for Fogo Island, a remote community off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada.

Described locally as “this rock in the battering Northern Sea”, Fogo Island is blessed with natural beauty and an abundance of wind. Its climate and geography make it perfect for wind turbines, and therefore open up debates around the logistics of their construction, and their environmental and social integration. The island is also home to Shorefast, a non-profit organisation building a sustainable, renewable economy for Fogo’s roughly 2,500 inhabitants. At the invitation of Shorefast, the visiting students immersed themselves in the landscape and community, setting out to create new proposals for wind turbine designs that could occupy specific locations on the island, and meet new social, environmental, and economic needs.

The result is U.F.O.G.O., eight speculative models for wind turbines that have been realised under the guidance of ECAL tutors Camille Blin, Anthony Guex, and Anniina Koivu, and shaped through consultation with engineers from HEIG-VD. The proposals push wind turbines in new design directions that could be further explored in future.

Each tackles different ideas that may aid the technology’s wider adoption, but all also respond to technical demands, and the dual restrictions of engineering feasibility and government legislation.

U.F.O.G.O. is a sustainability project that remains grounded in reality, but is not limited by what already is.

Through this process of context-specific design development, the eight turbines propose unique directions through which we may begin to answer a key question for wind-power technology: how can turbines gain greater social acceptance through design?

U.F.O.G.O.

Fogo Island: A Design Context Introduction Anniina Koivu

On the evening of Friday, 14 October 2022, accompanied by ECAL’s teaching staff, 16 students of the Master Product Design course reached Fogo Island.

Like many before us, we were glad to arrive after a long journey – in this case, one that had started in Lausanne the day before. Now, we had a week ahead of us, dedicated to exploration of and immersion in the local community and landscape. The group’s task? To conceptualise ways to harvest the famed local winds in the form of green energy, without negatively impacting the island’s raw natural beauty. Thus, we would rethink the design of wind turbines. Context was crucial.

Anniina Koivu Why choose wind turbines as a project for MA students in product design? At first glance, it is not the most obvious choice.

Camille Blin Well, first of all we had the unique possibility of travelling to Fogo Island to work, paired with the opportunity to develop a research project within the sustainability realm and in collaboration with the School of Engineering and Management (HEIG-VD). So, the idea of working with wind energy felt like the most natural solution: it is a meaningful topic that is both highly contemporary and site specific.

Anniina At ECAL, it is important to stay realistic, and not embark on innovation for innovation’s sake. In this sense, U.F.O.G.O. was a design-driven project from the very beginning.

Camille Wind turbines haven’t really been addressed by product designers, probably because they are such highly technical objects. It makes you wonder what a designer could contribute.

Maxwell Ashford In fact, that was also the students’ first reaction: “What can we really do?”

Camille We took the students out of their natural comfort zone. But once they understood the constraints that

they needed to work within – things like structure, safety, transportation, set-up, maintenance, etc – great freedom for new ideas opened up.

Anthony Guex Obviously, none of the students worked on the highly engineered blades or the mechanical aspects of a turbine. They concentrated on the turbine’s pole, the positioning, and integration of the turbines into a specific, physical context. Any project of such dimensions needs to be considered within the specific context.

Maxwell The week on Fogo was used to try to understand the context. They explored the island and its marvellous landscape and communities in order to pinpoint a specific location for their turbine. The type of wind turbine, its dimensions and necessary power-outlet were the results of these first decisions.

Anthony For example, a 100m turbine will provide energy for the entire 2,500 population of the island, whereas smaller turbines could be considered for more local, community-based use. This is a scale that is approachable and easy to work with for students. It also allows us to experiment with custom-made solutions. Finally, some results from the case study on Fogo could be applied elsewhere, too.

Anniina Wind turbines have generated quite a lot of polarised discussion. Those who see the benefits of this natural energy source are confronted with strong counterarguments that turbines have negative impacts on microclimates.

Camille Remember, design is a tool to change the perception of these giants.

They should become acceptable – even appreciated. Think of other objects of similar dimensions and impact, like the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of Liberty. They have great symbolic value and attract people, rather than repel them.

Anniina The project was developed in collaboration with engineers too.

They presented the students with an

U.F.O.G.O.

introduction to wind turbines and then also accompanied them throughout their projects.

Camille Yes. During their introduction, for example, the students learned about the massive amount of concrete that is poured into the ground to support such large structures. Truckloads of concrete represent a serious issue, especially on an island that has a particular geological formation.

Anniina Fogo is one of a few places in the world where hundreds of millions of years of geologic history are exposed.

The island’s traditional houses had no foundations. Instead, they were wooden constructions, built on stilts. Such lightweight structures allowed entire buildings to be moved without leaving any footprint on the original site.

Camille The designers of the Cliffhanger project used exactly this information to rethink the wind turbine’s structure. They decided to replace the massive concrete base with a more lightweight structure that allows the turbine to “hang” between two cliffs.

Maxwell This originally felt rather utopian, but it was backed up by the engineers and structural experts who were consulted.

Anniina Others chose a specific, even symbolic, location for the turbine.

Anthony Fogo Flags are two wind turbines that form a kind of gate for people arriving by ferry to Fogo Island.

Camille Think of the work of Marcel Duchamp: placing a urinal in a public toilet means one thing, placing it in a museum has a completely different meaning. You don’t always have to change people’s perception through a change in design, but rather a change in context.

Anniina The designers of Flo found a way to integrate a wind turbine into its setting by almost letting it disappear.

They applied a graphic pattern to the pole of the turbine, which offers a

ECAL students during their research trip to Fogo Island.

different colour palette when seen from the ground, without disturbing the visibility for passing aircrafts.

Anthony Then, there are projects that work with existing structures and try to reuse local materials. The designers of RR Reuse discovered that the biggest existing concrete foundation on the island was that of an old fish plant abandoned in Deep Bay. They decided to take the measurements of the base as a starting point for a smaller-scale wind turbine, and made use of the original wooden panelling of the former plant.

Camille Others tackled the project very pragmatically: Pyre is one large, 100m-high wind turbine placed next to the local power station, away from the

shoreline and residential areas. In order to avoid the transportation of heavy prefabricated elements, the turbine uses 3D concrete printing on site.

Anniina Unlike typical design briefs that address a larger, often more open, group of users, this project had to consider very local and specific community needs.

Anthony Pneuma is a great example of how specific a turbine can be. The turbine’s pole includes a hydroponic greenhouse for local farmers to be able to produce vegetables all-year round.

The structure was inspired by a metal lattice reminiscent of the Crystal Palace in 19th-century London. Meanwhile, WindSeed combines wind energy with seaweed farming and powers new

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micro-factories that will process and freeze-dry the harvest.

Maxwell Also, the designers of Evind rethought the iconic architecture of petrol stations and proposed a series of charging stations for electric cars right where power is being produced.

Anniina What are the lessons learned from this project?

Camille Consider haute couture versus prêt-à-porter. One is free exploration, the other practical realism, practised within restraints. These proposals lay out ideas that can help rethink existing concepts, open up new potentials and change people’s overall perception of wind turbines. That’s the true power of design.

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Wind Shapes Culture Words by Louise Pryke

Since prehistoric times, wind has guided the course of human history. Wind is invisible to the naked eye, meaning its central role in shaping the world around us can – at times – pass unnoticed. While wind may go unseen, however, it is tangible and its effects reveal its power: the dynamic force of wind is reflected in its role in shaping solar systems, terraforming, and contributing to a habitable and fertile biosphere on Earth. Wind carries the warmth of the Sun to our planet, and, by distributing this heat, has allowed for the emergence and continuation of life.

Wind’s shaping role ranges from macrocosmic to microcosmic. Winds blowing through the cosmos are thought to influence the formation and distribution of stars. At the microcosmic level, tiny fluctuations in wind speed can disrupt the pollinating activity of bees, yet enhance the hunting of aerial predators such as eagles and falcons.

It is not only non-humans whose behaviour is shaped by wind. For millennia, people have recognised its impact on moods and health. These ancient observations are reflected in recent scientific research. Studies have shown that differences in wind speed influence the behaviour of investors in the international stock market, as well as having an effect on the incidences of certain types of crime.

In addition to recognising the element’s dangerous and destructive potential, many ancient cultures revered the creative capacity of wind. In Greek myth, romances between wind and plant deities mirror the role of the wind in spreading seeds and pollination. Similarly, in myths from West Africa and South America, wind deities share an association with breath, storms and fertility. These myths offer a cultural representation of the role of wind in bringing rains and assisting in the production of new life. In many ancient cultures, religious practitioners were believed capable of summoning the wind and manipulating its power.

While wind has been a ubiquitous presence throughout history, humans have long recognised the distinctive qualities of different winds. The cardinal winds, for example, were conceived as being deities in cultures that were separated by vast geographical and temporal space – from ancient Egypt, to First

Nations peoples in North America, to the indigenous Māori of New Zealand.

Wind, technology and science have influenced one another over thousands of years. Since the Upper Palaeolithic period, people have used wind-born aerofoils for many purposes including hunting, with the first-known boomerang dated at around 23,000-yearsold. Wind lifted the sails of early boats in Mesopotamia more than 6,000 years ago, allowing for longer sea voyages, trade and cultural exchanges. In China, as well as parts of the Middle East, windmills were used to pump water, grind grain and irrigate crops hundreds of years before the industrial revolution.

In modern times, wind has played a significant role in technological change and scientific discovery. Wind was a crucial element in the discovery and development of electrical power in the 18th and 19th centuries, and was instrumental in the rapid development of the fields of aeronautical science and space exploration during the 20th century.

In the 21st century, the growth of the wind-farm industry has increased the visibility of the ancient power of wind. This increased visibility is found in the design of turbines, and in the continuing public discourse about what role wind can play in the search for sustainable and reliable energy, and the management of Earth’s natural resources.

Recognising the shaping role of wind on civilisation, nature and culture, provides an important context for viewing modern endeavours in wind technology as an evolving aspect of a timeless connection between humans and the environment. Wind, as changeable as it is enduring, has companioned and shaped human technology for millennia. The challenges presented by the climate crisis make the current moment particularly appropriate for reflecting on the relationship of humanity to wind in the past, present and future.

Louise Pryke is an honorary associate in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the Univesity of Sydney.

She is the author of Wind: Nature and Culture, published

by Reaktion Books on 1 June, 2023.

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FOGO FLAGS

by Chiara Torterolo and Luca Vernieri

Despite having a clear community identity, Fogo Island has no official flag. There has previously been no graphic element to represent the island, its interests, and place in the world.

Fogo Flags rectifies this omission through the introduction of two wind turbines that form a monumental gateway to the Fogo Island Ferry Terminal: the transition point between the Atlantic Ocean and the shoreline, marking the portal at which people both enter and leave the island. The turbines generate enough power to make the island self-sufficient, but also serve as flagpoles that carry a new graphic identity for the place.

The Fogo Island flag is a white textile rectangle, with a single circle cut into it.

This simple design reinterprets the circles that are painted on the fronts of fishing stages around the island, which were originally used by fishermen to help guide them home at night and during bad weather conditions. Now, those same circles serve to welcome visitors, as well as represent a future in which Fogo Island can rely on the weather for its energy needs.

To accommodate the flags, the structure of the wind turbines has been adjusted accordingly. The turbine heads themselves have been adapted so that the flags can be safely wrapped and secured in the event of a storm, while an automatic winch system controls their orientation in accordance with the direction of the wind.

In Fogo Flags, the wind turbine is not simply the means by which Fogo Island can generate sustainable power to achieve self-sufficiency, but also a confident expression of the island’s identity – and its prevailing social and environmental values.

ENGINEERING REVIEW At more than 100m tall, the turbines would be visible from surrounding islands and serve as a navigation marker. However, the designers must check whether placing a turbine in such close vicinity to a port is in accordance with maritime rules.

The chosen location has already been heavily altered by human presence, so social acceptance of the turbines could be facilitated. However, the nearest significant consumers are more than 1km away. It would have to be assessed on site if the current grid infrastructure is sufficiently strong to support the power injection.

Fogo Flags’ structure follows the classic cantilever beam design that is well-understood by structural engineers. The primary concern is the mechanism embedded at the base of the structure, which may impact the overall design.

Nevertheless, modern technologies can be employed to manage this issue. The selection of appropriate materials and the construction of a sturdy foundation may present challenges that need to be addressed.

Coordinates: 49°34’17.6”N 54°18’04.5”W, (49.571541, -54.301258), Canada Height: 98m Blade diameter: 71m Yearly intended energy creation: 8.6-16.4GWh (combined turbines) Intended energy application: Fogo Island’s total energy needs of 11,250MWh

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FLO

by Lucas Hosteing and Donghwan Song Why are wind turbines always white?

The International Civil Aviation Organisation restricts the colours of wind turbines to a palette of five shades from the RAL colour standard, ranging from pure white to off-white. This decision has been taken for safety reasons, ensuring that the large structures stand out from the surrounding landscape and are easily visible from the air. Yet it is this purposeful obtrusiveness that puts many people off the technology.

As such, Flo, plays with these colour restrictions, utilising a graphic pattern that ensures the wind turbine remains white and visible to passing aircraft, while offering a shifting vista of colour when it is viewed from the ground. Applying a 3D texture to the shaft makes it possible to paint the top of the ridges present within the pattern white, while the undersides are coloured to form graphics reminiscent of the shifting horizons observable on Fogo Island.

Flo is located to the north of the community at Joe Batt’s Arm, next to the Long Studio artists’ studio designed by architect Todd Saunders. Just as Long Studio serves as a point of contemporary design, sensitively inserted into the landscape, Flo is a demonstration of how wind turbines can be better integrated into their environment, while still complying with safety standards. Flo’s colourful profile turns it into a landmark for Fogo Island – one that rebuffs the colour clichés of pre-existing renewable resources.

ENGINEERING REVIEW From an energy standpoint, a wind turbine with a 62.5m diameter would have a nominal power in the range of 1-2MW. Given the wind data available, the yearly production would be in the order of 3.5-5.5GWh. The chosen location is approximately 1km from the nearest settlements, which limits the social impact. However, given the rocky nature of the terrain, connecting the turbine to the power mains will be environmentally impactful on the site as well as costly.

Coordinates: 49°44’27.7”N 54°08’52.8”W,(49.741021, -54.147993), Canada Height: 95.6m Blade diameter: 62.5m Yearly intended energy creation: 3.5-5.5GWh Intended energy application: Electricity for the north part of Fogo Island, along with enough power to make the turbine self-sustaining

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PYRE

by Marcus Angerer and Sebastiano Gallizia In terms of its geography and climate, Fogo Island is well suited to wind power, but this neglects the logistical challenges of implementing the turbines themselves.

Fogo Island’s port is small and its roads are narrow – the import and transportation of large construction modules is extremely difficult.

Pyre offers a solution to these issues through the use of cutting-edge 3D-printing technology – a methodology that is being launched by General Electric in 2023 to rapidly construct concrete wind turbine towers. Developed with COBOD, the market leader in large-scale concrete printing, this technology allows raw construction materials to be transported in their most compact form, before being printed directly on-site.

Pyre’s design extracts the full potential of this new technology. Drawing on research conducted by ETH Zurich, the turbine features prestressed internal cables that prevent delamination. These are held in place by metal plates that distribute the force evenly throughout the tower. Meanwhile, the turbine’s printed concrete layers have been compressed to increase strength – proof that sophisticated construction techniques can be brought to even the most remote locations.

These advances work hand-in-hand with cultural and environmental sensitivity.

Pyre has been sited away from Fogo Island’s pristine shorelines and residential areas.

Instead, it stands in close proximity to its power station – a move that provides direct access to the grid, as well as use of the plant’s maintenance area during the construction process. This is a utilitarian choice that serves to respect both the island’s landscape and infrastructure.

This interplay between technology and Fogo Island’s natural and human landscape also informs Pyre’s structure, which has been printed as a series of splayed interlocking elements – a design that recalls the traditional wooden stilts used in the construction of fishing stages on the island. This also increases the turbine’s footprint so as to decrease the depth of its concrete foundations.

ENGINEERING REVIEW Pyre’s creators have considered socio-economic criteria in choosing the location of their turbine and imagined novel solutions to reduce its impact. The site is next to an existing grid distribution node, which therefore makes it ideal from a technical standpoint to inject production into the grid. The location is also more than 500m away from the nearest settlements, which limits the social impact.

However, close proximity to an aerodrome could be a problem.

Pyre is a fascinating example of integrating innovative technologies with classic structural engineering principles. The primary concern is determining the most practical method of manufacturing the final structure. The foundations will present a challenge, particularly in regard to the soil or rock composition of the area. The use of heavy equipment may be necessary, but due to the area’s remoteness, transportation could be complex and costly. Nevertheless, this challenge is surmountable, and the project can be successfully executed with careful planning and implementation.

Coordinates: 9°40’14.1”N 54°13’44.3”W,(49.670569, -54.228973), Canada Height: 100m Blade diameter: 90m Yearly intended energy creation: 6-11GWh Intended energy application: 3,200kWh of energy per person for Fogo Island’s 2,500 residents

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PNEUMA

by Jule Bols and Sophia Götz In Greek, “pneuma” means wind or breath; in the terminology of architecture, “pneu” refers to a construction element that only achieves stability through the pressure of an enclosed air volume.

Situated in a bay close to the community at Joe Batt’s Arm, Pneuma is a hybrid construction: a hydroponic greenhouse powered entirely by the wind turbine that grows out of it. If communities are to live in proximity to wind turbines, how can their benefits – and energy production – be made more tangible? A space that facilitates year-round food production is one answer to this question.

The Pneuma greenhouse is constructed using a series of pneus produced from ETFE foil: a lightweight, recyclable material that offers insulation to the plants it shelters, and is visually sympathetic to its surrounding landscape. Its modular construction owes a debt to Joseph Paxton’s design for the Crystal Palace pavilion at London’s 1851 Great Exhibition: an architecture that prioritised simple and efficient construction methods to facilitate fast manufacturing and assembly.

As the Crystal Palace was a showcase for new technologies, so Pneuma aims to highlight the benefits of wind power to its community. Fogo Island experiences harsh weather conditions and its location in the Atlantic Ocean renders it isolated. Pneuma’s implementation, with its focus on both food and energy production, is supportive of the self-sufficiency that has characterised the island’s community for centuries.

ENGINEERING REVIEW Wind-wise, the entire island seems to be suitable for turbines. As such, the criteria to choose a location are social and economic.

The impact of noise must be considered carefully: usually, turbines are not installed any closer than 500m from homes. The economic impact, meanwhile, is the cost to build in a remote location, access to the grid, and the ability of the grid to absorb the power produced. The chosen location of Pneuma is close to settlements, which is good from the standpoint of accessing the grid, but the strength of the grid must also be assessed.

Considering a 1MW turbine with a wind speed of 10m/s, the lateral force acting on the turbine axle is in the order of 100kN (10 tonnes). The weight of the nacelle is also in the order of 100 tonnes.

Coordinates: 49°43’59.8”N 54°09’19.5”W, (49.733290, -54.155421), Canada Height: 80m Blade diameter: 62.5m Energy: On grid Cultivation area: 30m2 Yearly intended energy creation: 4-6GWh Intended energy application: An autonomous hydroponic system

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WINDSEED

by Yohanna Rieckhoff and Luis Rodriguez Cod fishing was the reason behind Fogo Island’s settlement 300 years ago and the trade has served as the islanders’ main livelihood throughout the community’s existence. But when bigger commercial fishing boats arrived in the middle of the last century, Fogo Island’s jobs – and the fish – all but disappeared.

How could the island’s knowledge of harvesting marine life be repurposed and redirected? One suggestion is seaweed farming, a burgeoning industry being trialled in three locations on Fogo Island. Tilting is one such location, where WindSeed – an off-shore wind-turbine system – can assist the harvesting and processing of this new crop.

Rich in nutrients, kelp is used in the cosmetics industry as well as by agriculture, where it serves as fertiliser or cattle feed. Growing kelp itself, however, doesn’t require any fertiliser or produce waste – instead, the crop absorbs carbon from the atmosphere, improves the biodiversity of the marine environment, and mitigates ocean acidification.

WindSeed is an independent ecosystem that comprises a turbine connected to kelp-growing ropes and a small, floating processing facility. The design uses a verticalaxis wind turbine, which is connected to a sub-sea structure formed from a floating element and a keel to increase stability. One WindSeed turbine, equipped with 1km of rope, can produce up to 4 tonnes of kelp annually.

The electricity generated by the turbine is enough to power the system’s operation.

This includes the farm itself, the boat that oversees its maintenance and transportation of the kelp back to land, and a micro-factory that can process the harvest, making WindSeed entirely self-sustaining. As well as supporting the trial of growing a sustainable marine crop in Tilting, WindSeed is designed to be replicable at other locations.

ENGINEERING REVIEW WindSeed is the only project to consider vertical-axis turbines. These kinds of turbines can resist hurricane-force winds but are less efficient than equally sized horizontal-axis turbines.

From an energy standpoint, a wind turbine with a surface area of 100m2 would have a nominal power in the range of 12-24kW. Given the wind data available, the yearly production of three turbines would be in the order of 40-80MWh. The chosen location is approximately 150m from the nearest settlements, so noise levels would need to be carefully assessed. Furthermore, the bearings of the axis are close to seawater, which could accelerate their degradation due to corrosion.

Coordinates: 49°42’43.3”N 54°04’34.2”W, (49.712025, -54.076162), Canada Height: 13m above sea level / 18m below sea level Blade diameter: 10m Yearly intended energy creation: 0.04-0.08GWh Intended energy application: Kelp farming, including powering the farm’s processing boat and associated manufacturing processes

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RR REUSE

by Fleur Federica Chiarito and Matteo Dal Lago An abandoned fish-processing unit stands empty in the village of Deep Bay. This facility’s material resources, bound up in its architecture, have been dormant, but they hold the potential for a new approach to wind power on Fogo Island.

Located on the northwest side of the island, Deep Bay comprises 50 houses, and its residents are committed to preserving the area’s cultural and environmental heritage.

One way of doing this is to adapt the materials from the old fish-processing unit. With its wide concrete foundations and dense structure of wooden beams, the facility’s existing materials can be reassembled to form a wind turbine that would double the village’s annual power supply.

The processing unit’s 20m by 30m concrete base will become the foundation for the new structure, while its abundance of wooden beams will be re-purposed to form four modular grid-like walls that create a new, 40m-high tower for the turbine. Bespoke additions are purposefully limited, including a steel pole to support the rotor and additional steel rods to add flexible support to the wooden tower. Rather than a new build, RR Reuse is an act of creative reuse.

The turbine’s quayside location makes it well suited to capturing onshore wind and, by keeping to the original architectural footprint and committing to onsite construction, the environmental impact of the turbine is minimised. Repurposing the site’s existing concrete and timber is a strong example of sourcing materials locally, and demonstrates the potential for a sustainable and ecologically sound route towards generating energy for a remote community.

ENGINEERING REVIEW From an energy standpoint, a wind turbine with a 19.2m diameter would have a nominal power in the range of 60-160kW. Given the wind data available, the yearly production would be in the order of 210-550MWh. Considering a 100kW turbine producing at a wind speed of 10m/s, the lateral force it would experience would be in the order of 10kN. However, given the complex shape of the structure, the wind load could be much higher.

This project utilises a truss-like structure made of recycled wood obtained from a nearby building. Steel strands will be incorporated into parts that will experience tension, and prevent excess compression on the wood elements of the structure. The project also places emphasis on two other aspects: the ability to easily connect its elements and ease of maintenance.

Coordinates: 49°40’10.2”N 54°16’50.0”W, (49.669501, -54.280567), Canada Height: 40m Rotor diameter: 19.2m Yearly intended energy creation: 0.2-0.5GWh Intended energy application: 300kWh per house, per month, for the village of Deep Bay’s 50 homes

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EVIND

by Maxine Granzin and Paula Mühlena Last year, the Canadian government decreed that all new vehicle sales will be electric by 2035. This provides a unique challenge – and opportunity – for Fogo Island to harness its wind to provide electric vehicle charging points.

Evind is a 50m-high turbine and electric vehicle charging point, stationed at the three-way crossroad between the Fogo Island Inn and the main road connecting the island’s villages. The shaft and charging point are unified into a single volume, with a simple cut-out that forms a roof to shelter the charging point. A discrete door for maintenance is located in the structure, with the main electronics placed behind a concrete wall to keep the facade clean and minimal.

Evind is a replicable system, intended to be positioned at several locations around the island. The turbines have been designed to utilise fast-charging technology, which allows users to charge their vehicles within 15 minutes, thereby providing a community resource for the island’s residents and tourists. The energy generated by the turbine brings an immediate, tangible benefit to those on the island, while any surplus energy is fed back into the grid.

Constructed from concrete, Evind’s shaft is cast onsite using a combination of local resources and materials that are easy to transport from the mainland – a design choice that supports the addition of further units as required.

With its singular shape, the turbine stands in the landscape as a symbol of how the shift to electric vehicles can exist in harmony with the use of renewable resources, encapsulating Fogo Island’s commitment to self-sufficiency and sustainability.

ENGINEERING REVIEW Evind combines a 50m-high, 30m-diameter wind turbine with an electric vehicle charging station. A turbine of this size would have a nominal power in the range of 200-400kW. Given the wind data available, the yearly production would be in the order of 0.8-1.2GWh. The chosen location is less than 100m from the nearest settlements. This is a problem if these are houses, given that wind turbines are normally installed more than 500m from homes. Nevertheless, because of the turbine’s proximity to many settlements, in addition to its relatively limited power, access to the grid is facilitated.

Coordinates: 49°43’44.3”N 54°10’35.2”W, (49.728971, -54.176445), Canada Height: 50m Blade diameter: 30m Yearly intended energy creation: 0.8-1.2GWh Intended energy application: Fast charging for electric vehicles, with surplus energy for the grid

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CLIFFHANGER

by Cedric Oder and Oscar Rainbird-Chill A traditional wind turbine stands in stark contrast to the vernacular architecture of Fogo Island – the two enact diametrically opposed ideas of how architecture should sit upon the earth.

Across Fogo Island, traditional fishing stages and homes were never built with concrete foundations, but rather raised on stilts. This enabled them to sit at the water’s edge, but also allowed for easy movement of the structure as and when required by internal migration. By contrast, a wind turbine needs deep concrete foundations, which are difficult to remove at the end of the structure’s lifespan and cause significant environmental issues.

Cliffhanger is a wind turbine that seeks to ground the typology in a form that is more sensitive to – and learns from – Fogo Island’s traditional architecture. In place of a concrete foundation, the new design is anchored to a cliffside, tethered by eight connection poles and a maintenance bridge that allows access to the structure.

Overlooking the town of Fogo Island, Cliffhanger recasts the infrastructure of wind power as a form that can sit more lightly on the landscape, carrying the technology’s promise of sustainable power into its construction methodology. The design is also a reflection upon Fogo Island itself, holding up a mirror to its historical architecture, while simultaneously serving as a landmark. It represents the community’s tenacity, resourcefulness and close relationship with its natural surroundings.

ENGINEERING REVIEW A wind turbine with a 44m-diameter rotor would have a nominal power in the range of 500kW-1MW. The turbine mast protrudes 40m above the summit of the cliff, but a Venturi effect can be expected if the dominant wind direction is favourable. The anticipated yearly production of electricity would be in the order of 2-4GWh. The chosen location is approximately 200m from the nearest settlements, so noise could be an issue. Nevertheless, the presence of more settlements nearby suggests that the power need in this region is significant enough to justify a turbine of this size, and that the electrical grid would be strong enough to support it.

From a structural standpoint, the Cliffhanger project is sound. It involves anchoring a conventional structure to a rocky surface and incorporating additional support to reduce its free length. However, the practical means of anchoring the structure to the cliff need to be carefully examined given the difficulties of obtaining certain heavy equipment on the island.

Coordinates: 49°43’21.5”N 54°15’58.2”W, (49.722651, -54.266152), Canada Height: 90m Height above cliff:40m Blade diameter: 44m Yearly intended energy creation: 2-4GWh Intended energy application: Self-sufficiency for Fogo Island

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Engineering Review Fogo Island Wind Map

Words Philippe Morey, HEIG VD Locations of each project

1

5

Fogo Island Wind Map

7 6

(Locations of each project)

8

4 2

1

Cliffhanger

2

RR Reuse

3

Fogo Flags

4

Pyre

5

Evind

6

Pneuma

7

Flo

8

Windseed

10+

3

1 CLIFFHANGER

0

5 EVIND

Fogo Island, located off the6 PNEUMA northeast 2 RR REUSE 3 FOGO FLAGS 7 FLO coast of Newfoundland in Canada, holds 4 PYRE 8 WINDSEED significant potential for wind energy due to its exposure to strong and consistent winds. Other parts of Newfoundland and Labrador have already harnessed wind power, and Fogo Island has the scope to become an important contributor to the region’s renewable energy goals.

Canada’s yearly average electric energy consumption per capita is one of the highest in the world: 15MWh in 2019.

Fogo Island is home to some 2,500 people, so the island’s energy needs is estimated at being between 20 and 40GWh per year.

Currently, electrical demand on Fogo Island appears to be met through an underwater connection to the continent, running from the southwest side of the island, via Change Island, to the northeast point above Port Albert. Fogo Island’s critical infrastructure is backed-up with diesel generators, which can be costly and are also high maintenance.

m/s

Wind turbines have the potential to provide a significant amount of clean and renewable energy to Fogo Island, reducing the reliance on diesel generators and lowering greenhouse-gas emissions. The exact percentage of the population’s total energy demand that could be covered by turbines depends on several factors, including the size and number of turbines, their efficiency, local wind conditions, and the system’s impact on the stability of the local grid. It is worth noting that wind energy is an intermittent source of power, meaning that it is dependent on weather conditions and will not always be available. As has been set out in the island’s renewable energy plan, it would be necessary to integrate other sources, such as solar, and facilitate storage to ensure a reliable, consistent and independent supply of electricity to the island.

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49.6649° N, 54.2224° W Introduction Anniina Koivu

In the northern Atlantic, off the coast of Newfoundland, lies Fogo Island. Roughly the size of Elba, Brooklyn or Amsterdam, the island is home to some 2,500 people.

For centuries, Fogo Island has been a fishing outport, populated by settlers from England and Ireland who began arriving in the 1700s. These people sustained themselves with what the sea could offer, and traded their catches for basic goods such as flour and tools. But from the 1960s, with the arrival of overseas fishing armadas and the subsequent collapse of cod stocks in Newfoundland’s waters, the local fishing industry declined drastically. Fogo Island, like so many of the remote places around the mainland of Newfoundland, was threatened with the loss of its livelihood and inhabitants.

Facing the impending threat of government resettlement, Fogo islanders had to band together to work through the loss of their traditional fishery and hold onto their home. A fishing co-op was formed, which is a mainstay of the local economy to this day.

The next change began some 15 years ago. Zita Cobb, a daughter of Fogo Island, returned home after a successful career in the tech industry. She initiated a series of projects on the island, intended to help turn the tide for the better. First, she created Shorefast, a social entreprise to help stimulate the economy of this unique rural island. Next came an artist-in-residence programme (Fogo Island Arts), followed by the creation of the award-winning, 29-suite Fogo Island Inn. In addition, several innovative social businesses were launched, including the Fogo Island Workshops, and a series of environmental initiatives that include a seaweed pilot project.

The island of Fogo is the perfect place for experimental and forward-thinking ventures – a microcosm that can project onto a grander scale. To discuss this further, I joined Cobb, former fisherman Pete Decker, and Amanda Lim, who is stewarding Shorefast’s most recent environmental projects, via Zoom. We spoke about self-reliance, progress, wind energy – and the weather.

Anniina Koivu It is 20 February 2023.

How’s the weather today?

Amanda Lim High of +2°C, low of -11°C. Wind is 23km/h N with gusts of 95km/h N. No rain. The barometer is at 29.92Hg pressure, falling slowly.

Anniina You got that from the weather station that was set up on the northwest side of the island last autumn, right?

Amanda Yes, the station collects the local weather data in the community of Fogo, and shares it with the public via a website [fogoislandweatherstation.com].

But actually, the station is an art project

by Liam Gillick, too [titled A Variability Quantifier (The Fogo Island Red Weather Station), ed]. Part of the World Weather Network, it shares the local weather with 26 other stations set up by artists, writers and communities from around the world.

Zita Cobb We share globally what we have learned locally. In fact, the weather is not only local, it’s micro-local. On Fogo Island, the weather at Waterman Brook’s Trail is going to be very different from what’s happening in Oliver’s Cove, which is not even 15km to the east. People who are going out on the ocean, especially the fishermen, are not going to rely on a weather forecast from the mainland.

Pete Decker Or the so-called weather balloons currently flying all about…

Anniina Did the weather shape people differently in different parts of the island?

Zita Anyone who grew up in the south of the island has a very different experience of weather (much more sheltered) than someone who grew up on the north side – whether Fogo, Shoal Bay, Joe Batt’s or Tilting – where the island is super exposed.

Amanda Luckily, we have many harbours – one for every storm.

Zita The big northerly is always on our minds, as those winds are usually powerful and come as storms. My father used to tell us children: “You have to make friends of the wind. If not, you are going to live a life of terror.”

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Pete That’s true about the northerly, but don’t forget what our fathers used to remind us: the northerly is never in debt to the southerly.

Anniina Is a particular wind best for going out fishing?

Pete For sure. Westerly is really good.

You tail on the shoals, which means you go up ahead of a shoal [used here to denote a rock, ed], drop your anchor, and come back to fish in front. You could fish with a northerly wind, too. Then, you’d come in the other way. Southerly does not make for a good fishing day.

Zita When the wind is in the north, the skilled fisher goes not forth / When the wind is in the east, it’s not fit for man nor beast…

Pete …When the wind is in the south, it blows the bait in the fishes’ mouth / When the wind is in the west, it is the very best. Look in a cod’s mouth with southern wind and you’ll see it is cladded with its stomach all the way to its throat.

Anniina Do you also have the old saying: “Red sky in the morning is a sailor’s warning. Red sky at night is a sailor’s delight?”

Pete True. At dawn you’d decide whether to go out to the sea or not. “Daylight is breaking” is what the old folks called it.

If dawn was coming slow, they’d say, “This morning was slow daylight; it will become a good day.” If daylight cleared very fast, it meant wind. You wouldn’t go out with a boat.

Zita The ones that went out, maybe got back, maybe didn’t. Loss and death were always right there. Everything we took from the ocean came at a cost.

Pete The only additional tool we had was the barometer. You’d get up in the morning, go knock on the barometer on the wall. With falling pressure, you’d go out on the sea. When it stops, you better stop. When pressure starts to go up, that’s when the wind starts chopping at 40-50km/h out in the open sea. Once out in the ocean, you keep an eye at the sky.

You see dark clouds passing over, they get darker, get lower, soon the wind will pick up and you’d better get going.

Zita If you are in the open ocean, wind behaves differently, more consistently.

You can pick up small shifts. The wind actually tells you where it is going. It takes an experienced eye and a cultural memory to navigate in local winds.

All this is embodied knowledge.

Anniina The island is a perfect ground for experimental, forward-thinking projects. Zita, you immediately said yes when we proposed bringing 16 design students from ECAL to conceptualise wind turbines for Fogo.

Zita We are lucky that most of our energy currently comes from hydroelectric sources, but we are witnessing change: rivers cannot be relied on anymore, which makes hydro-electric power sources unreliable. This is paired with more and more extreme weather, so that even the most updated systems break down. Every year, we experience a couple of days of blackout. So, because Fogo is an island, it is the right context for thinking about the way we live in a holistic, closed system. This includes thinking about how we can generate our own energy, or build a back-up micro-grid for storing it.

Anniina You are speaking about energy production and storage on the local level.

Zita I am thinking of NRStor, a Canadian company, which is developing smallscale battery facilities to store energy generated from sustainable sources, such as local wind energy. There is something really lovely in thinking about energy on the level of the neighbourhood, or even a single house. That’s why this conceptualising of what might be was of interest to us.

Anniina Would a wind turbine face a strong headwind from the islanders?

Pete People would love it. Of course, there are always a few naysayers, but they’ll move on.

Anniina In fact, contrary to expectations, Fogo islanders have proven resilient, very progressive and forward thinking. You’ve established a fishing cooperative, and were among the first to ban plastic bags in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. You are also trying to find new ways to give more value to fish by turning offcuts into delicacies.

Zita Islanders have always thought from first principles. No question, you’d have to be dead not to hear all the controversy about new projects such as a wind turbine.

But people here have strong minds and soft hearts. They will always look at it in a very practical way.

Anniina Fogo Islanders are also known for being subversively anarchistic.

Pete We like to do things our own way.

Zita You have to remember that we didn’t have formal government until the 1980s. People not from here often don’t understand how we got along without municipal law. We just figured out how to live together.

Pete We did pretty good.

Zita Rather than “resilient”, I like to think of Fogo islanders as antifragile – as in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Antifragile book.

People and systems that are antifragile don’t mind volatility. Local economies and micro grids are parts of how you make a less fragile world. We have finally seen the limitations of over-reliance on globalised systems, be they economic or health or energy systems. By virtue of European settlement of Fogo Island, we have been part of a global system for centuries. We understood globalisation before they even knew how to spell it.

Anniina How far along is your pilot project for seaweed farming?

Amanda We are getting ready to deploy our test lines into Cobb’s Cove, where the water is fairly shallow. The exact date depends on the presence of Arctic ice pushing to shore, which is influenced by how much wind we get. By July we’ll hopefully have enough seaweed grown

U.F.O.G.O.

and harvested to get a good understanding of how much we can reasonably grow.

Zita At the grandest level, we are trying to find economic models that support behaviours that are more responsible towards the environment and the people.

What are we willing to pay? Are we willing to pay a little bit more as a community, a province, a country, in order to have practices that support dignity for people, fish and the environment?

Anniina Wind turbines are an enormous investment. Is this something that could be funded locally?

Zita We don’t have the answer to that, but one of the priorities of the Canadian government is to boost the economy with ecological projects. The challenge is to get the scale right. Canada is a country of 6,000 communities of small or medium size. Getting economies working on that scale demands large capital investment.

All of us – government and policy makers, private operators, communities – will have to play their role.

Anniina For centuries Fogo Island has been self-reliant. This made the people extraordinary problem solvers.

Pete Imagine: years ago my brother made his own windmill charger. He made the blades himself and put them on a pole for the wind to turn, and power a generator. People came from all over to see what he had rigged up on his shed.

And then they started to bring their car batteries to him to charge.

Zita Some people were more mad-cap scientists than others. But I think everyone on the island invented things. You couldn’t just buy things off the shelf. We only got electricity in the mid-70s. You had to figure things out. Pete’s brother invented wind energy all by himself.

A Light Basket1A well-known proverb warns us not to put all our eggs in one basket. Have a back-up plan! Diversify!

Keep your options open! Don’t concentrate all your resources and dreams into one thing, lest disaster strike!

But what if we flip this advice on its head? Commissioned

by Finnish design brand Artek, designers Gabriella Lenke and Mattias Ståhlbom of Taf Studio have developed a new lighting range called Kori – the Finnish word for basket. The collection comprises three pendant lights, a table lamp and a floor lamp that all revolve around a single, identical basket component.

“We tried to be quite pragmatic,” says Ståhlbom.

Kori’s die-cast aluminium basket is the result of a three-part brief developed to honour the legacy of Artek’s lighting collection, which was mostly designed by Alvar and Aino Aalto from the 1930s through to the 50s. Marianne Goebel, Artek’s managing director, explains that they asked for a “sculptural presence”, as well as the use of a “combination of direct and indirect light” – something the Aaltos excelled in. The final instruction, Goebel adds, was “E27 forever”.

If you picture a lightbulb, you’re likely imagining an E27: a globe that tapers into a screw-in, metal base. The E27 has been used by Artek for years – hence “E27 forever” – and has the virtue of being both long-lasting and easy to replace. By

contrast, Ståhlbom explains, many contemporary lamps glue their light source in place, making the entire object obsolete when this single element fails. As such, “E27 forever” is not just nostalgic – it makes sense looking forward, too. No irreparable eggs in this basket, please.

The lightbulb’s 27mm screw threads, after which the bulb is named, helped guide the design because “the size of the socket became our starting point,” says Lenke. The studio subsequently played with curved shapes that could cradle the E27, cocooning it to mitigate the glare of the exposed bulb while also redirecting and diffusing its light. From these experiments, Kori’s recycled-aluminium basket was born and everything else followed: the lights’ components attach to them without screws or glues; the pendants’ lampshades hang from their rims.

Meanwhile, Taf “switched the basket upside down” for the standing lamps, allowing their bases to slot snugly into its rim. This bottom-up basket gives the Kori table light the presence of a miniature lighthouse. It’s easy to imagine its small, sturdy form beaming out from a bedside table.

The Kori collection is powdercoated in a “super matte” white – the colour that most effectively reflects, and therefore directs, light from the basket, but which was also chosen because Ståhlbom and Lenke like eggs.

Or, more specifically, they like how an egg’s curves catch the light. As such, they asked Artek to source a white coating “that would remind them of an egg in texture”. It recurs across all the Kori designs. The only exception, perhaps heeding the proverbial advice that it’s better to diversify, are the floor and table lamps. These also come in yolk yellow.

Image by Fabian Frinzel.

Words Lara Chapman

Objects in Review

Rat Wars Words India Block Photographs Sha Ribeiro

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In the long-running guerrilla war of rats versus New York City, the rats appear to be winning. Recent salvos from the city government late last year were bellicose.

“The rats are absolutely going to hate this announcement,” said sanitation commissioner Jessica Tisch at a press conference in October. “But the rats don’t run this city – we do.” “We are taking the fight to the rats,” added council member Shaun Abreu. “This is not Ratatouille.

Rats are not our friends.” New York Mayor Eric Adams nailed his colours to the mast: “We’re going to kill rats.”

The city administration subsequently posted an advert for a director of rodent mitigation, offering a salary of up to $170,000 for someone “highly motivated and somewhat bloodthirsty” who was able to prove their commitment to “wholesale slaughter”.

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If the rats got the message, they clearly weren’t intimidated. Since then, rats have continued to run amok. In November 2022, researchers discovered rats living in Brooklyn that tested positive for Covid-19, prompting fears of a zoonotic spillover event. A mild January – the second warmest since records began – kicked off 2023, prompting fears that rats will have more food and more opportunities to mate (their reproductive cycles usually slow in cold weather).

In February, viral video footage showed a rat scurrying playfully across the prone body of an unlucky man who risked napping on the subway. Perhaps most humiliating of all, that same month, Mayor Adams was dinged with a $300 fine for failing to control a rat problem in a Brooklyn rowhouse of which he is the landlord. So far, the only one to get the drop on rats has been Flaco, the Eurasian eagle owl who escaped from Central Park Zoo in early February and appears to be surviving on the lam via a diet of New York rodent.

To be fair to the mayor, it is fiendishly tricky to get rid of rats.1 You can try to trap them, but they are notoriously neophobic – extremely distrustful of anything new in their environment – so exterminators have to leave traps out for days before returning to bait them (some professionals swear by the allure of bacon grease). You can try and bump them off with bait boxes laced with an anticoagulant such as Warfarin; however, not only is that an extremely cruel and protracted way to kill a rat, but it is also becoming ineffective, as the animals are developing resistance to these poisons.2 You can try and block up their rat holes, one at a time, but they can chew through pretty much anything – desperate pest controllers have resorted to a mix of concrete and glass. Meanwhile, extermination service Rentokil has started investing in high-tech solutions with the acquisition of Israeli pest-control firm Eitan Amichai IPM, bringing artificial intelligence to the rat

wars. Its new surveillance service promises to utilise facial recognition to identify problem rodents.

Rentokil chief executive Adam Ransom was quoted in the Financial Times saying he was confident his business would thrive, even in a recession. “The pest control industry is biblical in nature,” he said. “The rats don’t read the FT.” Rats are a headache for urban design. They can run faster than a human, jump up to 20 times their own height, shimmy up drainpipes and easily climb any vertical surface that gives them enough grip.

No architect could design a totally rat-proof building.

Evolved to burrow, their tubular, flexible bodies can squeeze through gaps smaller than an inch. They live underground – in burrows, in old tunnels, in the sewers – and come out to eat at night, guided by sense memory. In the 1920s, scientists pitched the concept of constructing a wall around New York’s harbour front to keep the rats out, but the idea was abandoned for its impracticality. The construction industry is hard pressed to foil a determined rat. Their teeth score 5.5 on Mohr’s scale of hardness, making them tougher than iron. Their cartoonish yellow incisors grow at a rate of five inches a year and they have muscular jaws that give them a bite force of 6,000 psi (pounds per

The construction industry is hard pressed to foil a determined rat. Their teeth score 5.5 on Mohr’s scale of hardness, making them tougher than iron.

1

Rat populations are huge in the popular imagination thanks to an oft-repeated but wildly exaggerated statistic that there are 8m rats in New York, almost one for every person. A 2014 study by statistician Jonathan Auerbach took up the challenge of a rat census. “Animals are terrible survey respondents,” writes Auerbach, while a capture-recapture methodology wouldn’t appeal to government authorities who were “unlikely to approve a large-scale rat-releasing experiment (I know, because I asked)”.

By charting lots with repeat reported rat sightings, Auerbach came up with the estimate that there are 2m rats in the city.

2 Also, if a poisoned rat staggers back to your house and dies in the walls or under the floorboards, the smell is ungodly and the ensuing fly infestation will have you calling for an exorcism rather than an exterminator. Trust me.

square inch), around twice that of a crocodile. Rats are myomorphs, which means they have evolved to both chew and gnaw. Their teeth spread as they bite, and a handy flap of skin plugs their throat as they gnaw to prevent them from swallowing debris. As such, an inexhaustive list of things rats can chew through includes wood, bricks, concrete, drywall, and rusted metal.

Pest-control experts and rodentologists agree: the only way to control a population of rats is to remove 84

their food source. You must design rats out of the system of the city through rat-proofing and exclusion.

For all the sabre-rattling at New York’s October press conference, commissioner Tisch spoke some sense when she declared that “the biggest swing that you can take in cleaning up our streets is to shut down the all-night, all-you-can-eat rat buffet.” This wasn’t just an empty threat: the mayor’s office followed it up with legislation stipulating that, from 1 April 2023, homes and businesses can’t put their rubbish bags out on the curb until 8 o’clock in the evening.3 The New York Department of Sanitation (DSNY) can also insist that a business put its refuse in rat-proof bins if it gets more than two rat complaints.

Which begs the question: why isn’t New York using rat-proof bins in the first place? As a design solution, it seems obvious. A futuristic, pneumatic-tube trash system has been operating on Roosevelt Island since 1975,4 sucking waste away at 30mph, but the rest of the city’s trash collection is open air. The public litter bins are currently green metal mesh cans that are basically a climbing frame for rats.5 While residences in New York are technically required by the City to put their trash in a trashcan with a fitted lid, you can also simply toss it onto the curb in a heavy-duty black plastic bag for DSNY sanitation workers to collect.

According to government information hub NYC311: “There is no limit to the number of bags you can put out for collection.”

A plastic bag is but an appetiser to a concretechomping rat, and once the bags are out and the sun has set, the nocturnal rats are free to chow down.

Commercial businesses, which are not served by the DSNY but must rather contract private trash hauliers, can also simply set their bagged-up non-recyclable waste on the curb. Paris – home to Remy, Ratatouille’s protagonist – introduced waste containerisation in 1884 when the lawyer Eugène-René Poubelle, Prefect

3 4

5

Previously it was 4 o’clock. So that’s four less hours at the all-you-can-eat rat buffet, but hardly starvation rations.

Built by Swedish company Envac back in the 1970s and recently upgraded in 2019 to the tune of $1.7m, the Automated Vacuum Assisted Compacting (AVAC) system is one of just two in the US. The other is located underneath Walt Disney World in Florida.

This could be about to change. Design studio Group Project won the BetterBin competition held by the Department of Sanitation in 2019 to redesign the city’s mesh bins. Its lightweight, modular bins, which feature sanitation-worker friendly ergonomic handles, are currently in production, but are yet to hit the streets at the time of writing.

of the Seine, legislated that every building owner must provide their residents with three covered boxes for sorting and storing their refuse. Although landlords grumbled at the cost, the concept persisted and became so widespread that the French word for bin is “poubelle”. Almost 140 years later, New York City is now trialling its own waste-containerisation scheme.

The Citibin is the new weapon in the arsenal of the Clean Curbs programme, first heralded by the DSNY

“They don’t hang around for days trying to get into something. They figure out pretty quickly it’s no longer a food source.”

— Liz Picarazzi

in 2020 as a plan to “get the clutter of garbage bags off city sidewalks and away from hungry rodents”.

Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) and CommunityBased Development Organisations (CBDOs) can apply for a $20,000 grant to purchase and maintain a sealed container that can sit on City property – that is, the street. Each Citibin has been designed as an anti-rat fortress. “It was about creating an aluminium box that rats couldn’t get into and making it look good,” Liz Picarazzi, the founder of Citibin, tells me over Zoom from her Brooklyn home. “Everything is welded and bent so that no rats can get in.” The lockable containers do have ventilation holes – to prevent the overwhelming stink of bin juice building up inside – but they are small enough that no rat shall pass.

Technically a rat could take on aluminium, given enough time, but the idea is that a Citibin would not be worth the effort. “They don’t hang around there for days and days trying to get into something. They figure out pretty quickly that this is no longer a food source, and they leave,” says Picarazzi. A phalanx of Citibins were installed in April 2022 as part of a year-long pilot programme for the Times Square Alliance BID at the intersections of 43rd Street and Eighth Avenue, and 41st Street and Seventh Avenue.

“New Yorkers, you want clean streets; you want trash

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off our sidewalks,” said Mayor Adams at the grand unveiling of the bins. “You’re tired of the rodents, you’re tired of the smell, you’re tired of seeing food, waste and spillage.” A subsequent residential pilot installation of six CitiBins has been added on 45th Street. It’s an exciting moment for Picarazzi. “Times Square was our very first [municipal] installation, which for a still somewhat young or small company was a huge deal,” she explains. “It really put us on the map.”

Citibin did not start out as the premier siege weapon in the rat war. Instead, its design grew out of more domestic desires. “We had a lot of clients in New York City who had trash cans in front of their otherwise very lovely homes,” says Picarazzi, whose first business, Checklist Home Services, is a handyman company. “Not a good look when you have people coming in as real estate agents for showings to sell the house or apartment. It really came out of a need to basically contain and hide an eyesore.” With a supply of handymen on tap, she began in 2012 making stylish containers that could disguise unsightly trash receptacles and even double as planters. Not only did homes become more marketable, Picarazzi realised that their bins could double up as package storage for the never-ending stream of online shopping deliveries.

But when Covid-19 shut down the city, the residential bins took on a new purpose. “Business really picked up after the pandemic started,” says Picarazzi. “It had to do with the decreased trash pickup and collection by the Department of Sanitation, which then created a buffet for rats.” As restaurants closed during lockdown, the rats’ usual supply ran out. “They became desperate rats,” she says. People stayed at home, cooking and ordering in food, and there was a resultant rodent migration. “The rats moved from primarily public areas with lots of restaurants, to residential places that may not have had rats before.” With more and more requests for rat-proof bins, she began to notice the sheer scale of New York City’s symbiotic trash-and-rat issue. “It’s astounding that as New Yorkers, we don’t even see that as a big deal,” she says. “But then tourists come in and think, ‘I’m not gonna go to that restaurant, they’ve got 80 bags of trash right next to the outdoor dining area’.”

When the DSNY let out its Clean Curb hue and cry, Picarazzi pounced like a rat on a binbag. “I zeroed in on that like no one else would have, because I knew that’s what I do for a living,” she says. “Like, hello, I’m Brooklyn based, I’m a woman, I’ve been doing this

for years. There is, quite frankly, no one better qualified to containerise the trash than Citibin, because we’ve been doing it all over New York City.” So, in a reverse of the hungry pandemic rats’ journey, Citibin moved to the centre. “Moving from residential to municipalities is a huge jump for us,” says Picarazzi. “It creates new design needs. Because the user is not a residential home owner, the user is a New York City sanitation worker, who is really strong and is trying to move as fast as they can.” Citibin has had to adapt to the vast and complex system that is the DSNY. “It’s kind of exciting, but it’s also a little terrifying,” says Picarazzi.

“Because it’s no longer someone’s home. It’s a city, and not only any city, it’s the city of New York.”

Founded in 1881, the DSNY is the largest sanitation department in the world. More than 7,000 of its sanitation workers6 hold back the tide of detritus that would otherwise clog the city. They clean the streets, shovel the snow, collect the recycling – and take out the trash. Their motto – “New York’s Strongest” – isn’t

“The user is a New York City sanitation worker, who is really strong.”

—Liz Picarazzi

an empty brag: each sanitation worker picks up an estimated five tonnes of garbage to throw into their trucks every shift. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, this is one of the most dangerous jobs in the US. While Citibins may keep the rats at bay, for a sanitation worker they are an added layer of difficulty in an already difficult job, so Picarazzi feels the pressure to get it right. “Every bit of hardware and fastening, the siding, the cladding that we use, we are adjusting,” she says. It’s the kind of R&D department most industrial designers could only dream of. “We get real-time feedback from them while they’re using the product.

We haven’t had a test kitchen in the same way that we’re getting with this. It’s enabled us to innovate very quickly.”

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John DeLury, president of the Uniformed Sanitationmen’s Association and leader of the infamous 1968 strike that saw 100,000 tonnes of rubbish pile up on New York’s streets, insisted on the more respectful title of sanitation worker for his comrades. “If you want to get me mad, call us ‘garbage men’,” he told The Harvard Crimson in 1972.

Between April and September 2009, photographer Sha Ribeiro patiently laid in wait with his Rolleiflex camera in the alleyways of downtown Manhattan, tempting his subjects with baked goods. The result is Greed, a series of photographs that frame rats as a metaphor for hunger, money and power in New York.

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The biggest design hurdle is the Citibin’s lock system. To put the bins on the streets, the DSNY stipulated that the containers need to be lockable, so Citibin has been trialling four types of lock to see which suits the sanitation workers best: a three-button digital combination padlock; a keyed padlock; a keyed T-latch lock (the kind used for utility vehicles and boats); and an electronic solution requiring a battery that’s still in development. “The lock needs for residential are pretty much non-existent unless someone really wants to lock their trash,” says Picarazzi. “In the city, it’s an absolute necessity to have a lock for a lot of safety reasons.” Bins are an arson magnet; someone has already tried to set fire to one of the Times Square Citibins, but the fire department put it out quickly.

On a darker note, the locks are there to keep people experiencing homelessness out. New York is the richest city in the world thanks to the 345,600 millionaires who call it home, yet more than 68,800 of its citizens slept in its homeless shelters on any given night in December 2022.7 The lack of affordable housing in the city is considered one of the primary reasons for this.8 That a square metal box with a roof would be an attractive place to shelter is a far more damning indictment of the city’s governance than its rat issue.

At war with rats, we are really at war with ourselves.

“I think of rats as our mirror species,” writes Robert Sullivan in his book Rats: A Year with New York’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants. We walk the streets while they tunnel beneath it. We eat and procreate and create mounds of garbage so rats can eat and procreate and create problems for us. They have grown with us so symbiotically that they now prefer our effluvia to any other food source. “It is written in the rat literature that a rat would starve in an alley surrounded by raw vegetables,” reports Sullivan. They eschew potato peelings, raw carrots and apples, but go wild for scrambled egg, macaroni and cheese, and fried chicken. Rats sleep in soft nests lined with our discarded, shredded-up plastic bags. They also easily rival human fertility – top shaggers that can copulate up to 20 times a day and are able to conceive as soon as they have given birth. “When they arrive as immigrants to a

newfound land, rats push out the creatures that have proceeded them,” Sullivan writes. Rattus norvegicus9 arrived on America’s shores, likely through New York’s ports, in the first year of the Revolutionary War and by 1926 they were in every state: a “manifest infestation”.

Mayor Adams is the latest in a long line of politicians, media barons and activists who have taken up the banner of the crusade against rats.

They are the bogeyman that serves a multitude of goals to unite people against a furry other. In 1946, Mayor William O’Dwyer appointed a citywide rat specialist, announcing: “Something must be done”.

Harlem tenant organiser Jesse Gray used rats to great effect in 1963 for a rent strike, instructing aggrieved tenants to “bring a rat to court!” Residents complied with gusto, bringing rats both alive and dead to lay at the feet of the judges of the New York City Court.

The Daily News declared “ALL OUT WAR ON RATS” in 1965, paying teenagers to train in rat extermination and handing out bait boxes at “rat stations”. The front pages blared: “THIS IS IT! WE PASS AMMO TO TROOPS OF THE ANTI-RAT WAR. WAR IS ON!” In 1967, Gray took a leaf out of his own book and brought a rat to Congress as his supporters chanted “Rats cause riots”. President Richard Nixon tried to cut federal rat-control funding in 1972, but quickly U-turned after vocal criticism. In 1997, Mayor Rudolph Guiliani employed his own rat tsar in response to a protest against rat infestations held at City Hall – and a rat sighting on the porch of his official residence. People chanted “One rat, two rat, three rats, four. Everywhere I look there’s more and more”, as Guiliani assured his citizens: “We make unprecedented efforts to kill rats.”

War and death cast a long shadow over Rats. Much of Sullivan’s ratting field research was conducted in the spring of 2001, in an alleyway a couple of blocks from the World Trade Center. A few months later, terrorists flew two hijacked planes into the Twin Towers. As rescue workers picked through the toxic rubble, the Department of Health moved in to clear food from abandoned restaurants within the exclusion zone lest the rats discovered a new source of food before the dust had settled. The city’s rodent-control department lined the perimeter of the disaster with poison bait 9

7 8

According to New York’s Department for Housing (DHS) daily census reports.

According to a 2019 report from the Institute for Children, Poverty and Homelessness (ICPH).

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The Latin name, which means Norway rat, is a misnomer.

John Berkenhout christened the brown rat in 1769 in his text Outlines of the Natural History of Great Britain, but while rats reached British shores in 1728, they didn’t get to Norway until 1768. They probably came over to the UK from Denmark.

boxes. A crew of exterminators was employed full-time to safeguard at least one empty office block near Ground Zero. Published in 2004, Sullivan’s book came out in an America that had just invaded Iraq. Conflict, rats and patriotism are braided together as tightly as the tails of the legendary rat king;10 it’s hard to see where one begins and the other ends.

It was an earlier global conflict that instigated the work of David E. Davis, described by Sullivan as the “founding father of modern rat studies”. During the Second World War, the US government founded the Rodent Ecology Project, which employed Davis, out of fears that Nazi Germany would weaponise rats.

“Officials feared that enemies of the USA would wage germ warfare by using rats as vectors to spread the plague,” writes Christine Keiner in her paper ‘Wartime rat control, rodent ecology, and the rise and fall of chemical rodenticides’. Little was known about rat biology at the time, and blockades had stymied the import of biological pesticides, prompting the US Office of Scientific Research and Development to fund research into chemical alternatives. While initially effective, these new poisons didn’t work in the long term. “As the rat population resurged, it became clear that controlling rats required much more than exposing them to toxic chemicals,” explains Keiner.

“Experience has demonstrated that it is futile to endeavor to eliminate rats by poisoning alone,” admits a paper titled ‘Rodent Control Requires Widespread Understanding and Participation’ published in Baltimore Health News in 1947. “An alteration of the rat’s environment so he will have no place to eat or live is the first essential step in effective control measures.”

slow. “I couldn’t have been a profitable business if I stayed in the US,” says Picarazzi. Reluctantly, she began to explore options with Chinese factories. “I went over there. I toured with a bunch of factories. I was very impressed with their engineering capabilities. My work with China has been very collaborative. Even though we don’t speak the same language, when I go over

Conflict, rats and patriotism are braided together; it’s hard to see where one begins and the other ends. there, we will stand around the product for hours, talking through options and different hardware.”

It was markedly different from her experience with US factories. “It was never like that [here]. I would give my requirements to the factory, we’d have a little bit of conversation, then they would produce it. Oftentimes, it would cost more and it would take longer. When I was shipping from China, I could get those goods faster than when I trucked it from Connecticut, which is a state that is completely touching New York.” Still, Picarazzi felt guilty for not patronising domestic firms, so in 2021 she tried again, sending out requests for proposals to factories all over the US. But the costs were 67 per cent higher and completely unfeasible.

The American Dream of a successful product-design business reluctantly requires an international effort.

“I have found that I have been able to iterate and innovate faster with my Chinese factory than I ever was able to do in the US,” she says. “As an American, I hate that.”

Iteration and innovation will be key to the success of the Citibin scheme. Maintenance is crucial, and each container gets swept out by cleaning contractors three times a week, and power-washed several times a month.

Still, the switch from residential to commercial rubbish took its toll on the composite panels of bamboo and recycled plastic that clad the aluminium sides. Intended as an aesthetic addition (and as another layer of rat deterrent), the original cladding proved no match for

The Citibin pilot is one such environmental alteration; the best offence in the New York City rat wars is a good defence. But patriotism can only go so far – delivering waste containerisation on this scale requires a globalised economy. At first, Citibins were made in factories in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and New York State. The expense was crippling, design collaboration was lacking, and transporting the finished product was painfully 10 A rat king is a group of rats whose tails have become entangled together. Typically, purported discoveries of alleged rat kings are the purview of cryptozoologists, while zoologists remain skeptical as to whether they are a real phenomenon, and instead view them as a creepy hoax. The idea of a mass of conjoined rats has been fertile ground for horror writers, at least.

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bin juice. “Overfull, leaky Times Square trash bins grossing out locals and tourists alike,” blared a headline in the New York Post from July 2022. Times Square Alliance acknowledged it had overfilled the bins and promised to up collection times. Picarazzi vowed to take the feedback on board, drawing up plans for a drainage system, while the panels were swapped out for darker tones. A couple of panels also needed replacing after the arson attack.

Picarazzi is now considering updating the dimensions of the bins, not just so they can hold more waste (they can currently hold 180 of the 600 or so bags of rubbish produced in the Times Square vicinity every day) but also to placate New York City’s notoriously agitated drivers. “One public complaint is the Citibin has taken parking spots,” says Picarazzi.

“People here are very protective of parking. And, for instance, on 45th Street, the pilot takes up six parking spots, which is a pretty big deal.” It’s one of the many benefits of the year-long pilot programme says Picarazzi, that they can take this kind of feedback into account.

“If they were to roll this out [citywide], we would develop a different size. It’s a learning.”

Parking gripes and the stinky summer incident aside, the feedback from the public has been glowing.

“We were there a couple of weeks ago, and someone walking their dog said, ‘I never used to walk my dog on 45th Street. And now I come here on purpose,’” enthuses Picarazzi. While the hounds of Manhattan may be sad that their smelly curbside snack trays are gone, the grateful owners are delighted. By taking piles of bags off the curb, the Citibins have also improved the accessibility of the area’s streets. “Strollers and wheelchairs cannot get through sidewalks that have bags on them like that,” says Picarazzi. “So we see now that there are strollers going up and down, there are school kids walking from their school to the playground, without trash all around them.”

As for feedback from the rats? Picarazzi will have to wait and see, as rodents are somewhat harder to voxpop. The DSNY has been monitoring the pilot site, checking for rats and their droppings, and will produce a report at the end of the programme. “[One] reason the city picked that block is that it had a horrible rat infestation – it’s designated as rat danger zone on their heat maps,” says Picarazzi. “In the 10 years we’ve been installing Citibins, we’ve never even once heard of a rat problem. So I’m hoping that the measurements [from the pilot] are going to show the same.” Whatever New

York City decides, the Citibin is spreading its wings.

Picarazzi is already rolling out the product in Boston and Philadelphia, and is in talks with the city of Chicago.

But while Citibins may win the battle, the rats will continue to win the war if human behaviour doesn’t fundamentally change. New York City produces 14m tonnes of waste every year, the vast majority of it heading to landfill or incineration. According to the Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice, one-third of this is food waste, yet only 3.3 million of the city’s 8.5 million human population is served by its curbside organics recycling scheme. If rats are our mirror species, thriving on our consumption, the portrait they reflect back isn’t pretty. The design challenge posed by the required behavioural and systematic change towers higher than any pile of garbage bags. E N D

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Image by Fabian Frinzel.

A Quiet Cut1When Daniel Baer received his new set of cutlery, created for the design brand Monoware that he launched in 2020, it took some getting used to. “We switched all the old cutlery out straight away, but it was quite a few days before the new ones felt normal,” he explains. “We’d had the previous set for 10 years and your hands get used to the specific weight and shape.”

This, of course, is no criticism of the new cutlery.

Developed by London-based designer Felix de Pass, the Monoware design is lovely – elegant, informal cutlery that avoids both fussiness and gimmickry. The forks and spoons have handles that bow through shallow S-shaped curves, offering a soft flick of stainless steel that sits light and poised in the hand. The knife’s fuller handle, meanwhile, has a flattened top that lets your thumb apply comfortable pressure to the blade as it cuts. “We were searching for the balance between having character and setting a tone, but not overcooking it,” says de Pass. “In cutlery, you don’t want something too loud.”

But even quiet cutlery requires acclimatisation: these are objects that are hard to put into words. The Monoware knife, for example, feels right, but explaining why is fiddly.

“There’s a transition from the end, which is tear shaped, into something more oval in cross section,” says de Pass, before trailing off – technical description pales compared to physical experience. “It’s just kind of the right weight and balance that feels good in the hand,” he offers as an alternative explanation. In cutlery, it’s ultimately the hand that knows whether something works or not.

This notion lies at the core of Baer’s experience with the cutlery.

“Something we talked about a lot during the development,” Baer notes, “was the idea of traditional Japanese hand tools.” Cutlery has to sit easily in the hand and perform a clear function – with time, its specific weight and dimensions should become familiar and natural. “Hand tools are a good reference because, like cutlery, they have a contrast between the area you hold and the head,” de Pass adds.

“The handle has requirements of ergonomics, length, balance and feel, which is a complete contrast to the other end, which is interacting with food and your mouth. The transitional area between those two areas became a focus for us.”

In the Monoware cutlery, this point of transition between handle and head manifests as a tear-drop hollow, where light pools before spilling onto the stainless steel when the implement moves. Although the collection’s knife is formed from a bar of steel, its spoons and forks are produced from flat sheet metal that is variously stamped, rolled and pressed into three-dimensional form. It is this transition from two-dimensional shape to three-dimensional tool that lies at the root of the collection, and which makes the cutlery difficult to parse in any form other than day-to-day use.

“It’s intuitive,” Baer notes, with de Pass going on to make the same point even more directly: “There’s nothing like having it in your hands.”

Words Oli Stratford

Objects in Review

Economies of Objects Words Michael Snyder Photographs Rodrigo Alvarez

It’s a bright February afternoon in the Mexican city of Guadalajara and the sun-blitzed streets of Analco, a working-class district just east of the city centre, have gone quiet, not so much abandoned as asleep, like the central thoroughfare of a rural town settling into the slow rhythms of a fading day. The industrial designer Fabien Cappello, based in Guadalajara since early 2020, taps on a whitewashed metal grate. A few seconds later, it opens onto a steep, narrow stairwell that rises through claustral darkness to a bustling home-studio where the family of María Guadalupe Gil Orihuela and Arturo Vega Vargas fashion utilitarian objects from sheets of galvanised steel and tinplate, or hojalata. Sunlight filters through a west-facing window, illuminating the time-dimmed stencils hanging on the apartment’s back wall and exacerbating the heat thrown by an open brazier where three of the couple’s four adolescent children solder seams on a new order of cylindrical milk jugs. Slipped onto a plastic cord, the finished pieces clang together like wind chimes and pile up like loot. If they didn’t glint so brightly under the exposed overhead lights, the jugs could have been made a century ago.

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A regadera, or watering can, from Fabien Cappello’s Objetos de Hojalata para el Hogar collection.

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Fabien Cappello.

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Vega, 42, has worked with hojalata since his childhood in Toluca, an industrial city in central Mexico some 420km southeast of Guadalajara. Moving between workshops run by uncles, cousins and family friends, Vega would mark out geometric shapes on metal sheets and cut them loose with massive shears. All but indistinguishable from the sprawl of the Mexican capital to the east, Toluca and other peripheral districts of Mexico City were replete with hojalata workshops turning out colanders, baking trays, gelatine moulds, cheese graters, rat traps and cookie cutters to be sold in the hundreds of permanent and itinerant markets that dot the metro area, home today to more than 22 million people. The workshop where Vega frequently worked as a teenager also sold to vendors in Guadalajara, which was until recently Mexico’s second-largest city and has a population of more than 5 million. When the workshop’s maestro (literally “master” or “teacher”) decided to move his business there, seeking out a market with less competition, he brought Vega with him. A year later, Gil followed.

In the last two decades, Gil and Vega have come to specialise in customisation. Rather than dedicate their workshop to serialised production of a single object – like Vega’s brother, for instance, also based in Guadalajara, who uses moulds to produce wiremesh colanders by the hundred – Vega and Gil craft their products almost entirely by hand and sell the vast majority of them within a 10-block radius of their home and studio. Working from two-dimensional designs, they cut the pieces from flat sheets, like a tailor cutting yokes and lapels from a length of fabric.

Using little more than a small, hand-cranked roller press clamped to a work table, they clip, fold and seal the joints that make their objects functional. (Quietly iconoclastic, with long black hair pulled into a pony tail and fingernails painted black, Vega also has a smaller side business fashioning spiked chokers and wire crosses for metal bands, and tinplate armour for medieval reenactors.) It’s slower work, Vega says, but allows a degree of flexibility that other workshops don’t have. “Before, everyone wanted cake moulds with the same capacity, but now they want them a little smaller, a little shorter, a little narrower – you know, like candy bars, which just keep getting smaller,” he told me on the day I visited, Guns N’ Roses and Iron Maiden murmuring over the speakers of a flatscreen TV. “I’ll still take the risk of making a design that someone brings me.”

Which is how, beginning in August 2021, Vega and Gil started working with Cappello. Born in the suburbs of Paris in 1984 and based in Mexico since 2016, Cappello first became interested in hojalata while living a few blocks from a sprawling market district in Mexico City.

“Hojalata is the exact scale of industry I like to work with,” says Cappello, who ran his practice in London for more than five years before moving to Latin America.

“It’s principally urban, it’s not an ancestral form and it produces utilitarian objects that aren’t luxurious at all.” In the capital, workshops were scattered at the city’s edges, but in Guadalajara, Cappello soon noticed workshops within walking distance of his studio and home in the historic centre. Initially, he developed designs with a mid-size studio named, mysteriously, Taller Acrilico, or Acrylic Workshop. “It was very, very, very difficult to make prototypes,” Cappello recalls.

The maestro, who worked with a handful of machines to produce a narrow repertoire of objects (pails and pans and watering cans), “couldn’t grasp why you would use so much time and material to test something without selling it.” Before too long, the maestro had politely suggested that Cappello take his business elsewhere, specifically to Vega and Gil, who, for years, had worked for Taller Acrilico filling specialised orders in exchange for raw materials.

In no time, Vega and Gil had proposed a model to charge for product development. Cappello would come to the workshop with carefully plotted twodimensional plans for his designs – totem-like candle holders; crimped, conoid lamp shades; flower pots that resemble disaggregated machinery; and watering cans stretched tall like El Grecos or ballooned out like Boteros – which were pieces that tweaked and distorted, rather than replaced, hojalata’s classic forms and functions. Vega and Gil would translate those designs into three dimensions, making millimetric adjustments to accommodate pleats and folds, and suggesting the best joints and unions to make the objects work. In those initial stages, they would charge by the hour, switching to a per-piece arrangement once they had a clear sense of how much time and material each design would take to produce. “Arturo and María think like industrial designers,” says Cappello. His own task, he adds, is always “first to understand the technique and understand the place, only then do you start making objects”.

From the beginning of his career, Cappello has been as interested in the economies of objects – the

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A frutero, or fruit bowl.

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These images of Hojalata were taken in the Guadalajara home of photographer Rodrigo Alvarez’s abuelo, Guadalupe.

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ones that shape them and the ones they shape – as he is in objects themselves. Hojalata caught his attention, in part, he says, because of its specificity – “those precise limitations on what you can do are the best frame to work within,” he says. At least as important, though, was the neighbourhood-based infrastructure that the objects preserved. In its most quotidian expression, hojalata resists the romantic associations of earthenware, textiles, wood-carving and masonry – Mexican crafts of extraordinary beauty and refinement that have, over the last century, become fetish objects for foreigners and local elites alike. Hojalata is, instead, an essential part of Mexico’s palimpsestic urban landscapes, situated at the boundary of artisanship and industry, a modest oficio – the term for a skilled trade or vocation – slipped uncomfortably into the ever-narrowing gap between a globalised economic order and local systems of production built on circularity and family ties. Where much of the global north has long since either eradicated artisanal processes or relegated them to the realm of luxury – as in the case of British tailors or Florentine leatherworkers – here, cottage industries continue to support neighbourhoods as singular and specific as the handmade objects that circulate within them. “In Mexico, the process of homogenisation through globalisation has certainly begun,” Cappello says, “but it isn’t finished yet.”

in poorer Catholic missions, as is still the case in some parts of Mexico. Then, beginning around 1870, as tinplate factories in the United States supplanted English fabricators, easing access to the material in Mexico, hojalata started to creep into households throughout the country in the form of candlesticks and picture frames, as well as plates, cups, spoons and sieves. From its earliest use in Mexico, Giffords writes, “tinplate was regarded as a poor man’s silver.”

Throughout the colonial period, powerful guilds controlled the production of precious metals in Mexico, restricting their use to Spanish-born artisans. Hojalata, as far as the best scholarship has shown, had no such infrastructure. Still, as an imported material, hojalata was largely associated with mestizo populations in urban centres. In the initial centuries of Spanish domination, says Octavio Murillo, director of archives at Mexico’s National Institute of Indigenous Peoples, “forms dominated by women, like pottery and backstraploom textiles, were left in the hands of indigenous people, but guilds were associated with ‘masculine’ work.’” Such trades “were the industries of their time,” says Murillo, “and they might have been important as antecedents to oficios.”

Even today, cities like Guanajuato, Mexico City and Oaxaca (throughout its history the most important centre for the mestizo population in an otherwise indigenous-majority state) tend to dominate production of hojalata, though, as Vega points out, “each place has its speciality.” Many of Oaxaca’s hojalateros work in an ornamental language of repoussage picture frames that they sell to tourists; they also make Sacred Hearts and crosses for indigenous communities who have no hojalateros of their own. (Vega and Gil, for their part, sell to vendors in the industrial boomtown of Monterrey, which produces galvanised steel in its mammoth factories, but is also, Vega says, home to relatively few hojalateros.) The city of Guanajuato’s hojalateros tend to specialise in the manufacture of toys, many of them die-cut and pressed with moulds.

In San Miguel de Allende, a popular destination for American retirees in the state of Guanajuato, craftspeople use hojalata to make perforated, Moroccan-style lanterns, a technique introduced by movie idol José Mojica in the 1920s, as Martha Egan writes in her essay ‘Tenacity of a Trade’, also from Artes de México. The craftsman that Mojica worked with, Egan writes, had “until then limited himself to producing milk cans and other utilitarian

It is, on some level, ironic to think of hojalata in terms of the local economy it supports when its origins in Mexico are fundamentally global. Prior to the 16thcentury Spanish invasion, the great civilisations of Mesoamerica used lost-wax casting to fashion gold, silver and copper into ornamental and ritual objects like chest plates, earrings and ankle rattles. Tin, the essential element for the production of hojalata, was also known by pre-Hispanic metallurgists and was used for bronze alloys shaped into axes, chisels, needles and fishhooks. But tinplate, which consists of covering iron or steel in a thin layer of tin, was a colonial product, imported from England, France and Germany, sometimes crossing the Atlantic as ballast on ships. Even as late as the 18th century, as historian and conservator Gloria Fraser Giffords notes in her 1999 essay ‘A Noble Metal’, published in Artes de México, “tinplate objects were either of such scarcity or such aesthetic insignificance that they escaped notice by authors concentrating in the ‘high arts.’” Well into the 19th century, hojalata was probably used principally for religious paraphernalia 100

A maceta, or flowerpot.

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An assortment of candelabros, or candle holders.

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María Guadalupe Gil Orihuela and Arturo Vega Vargas.

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goods”. Here, hojalata became part of a larger economic development model that began in the 1920s, following Mexico’s decade-long revolution, “designed to turn communities from production for internal use into producers of merchandise for external consumption,” explains Murillo. “‘Folk art’ became a way to ‘take home a piece of Mexico.’”

As practised by Vega and Gil, the oficio of hojalatería is neither an aspirational “modern” industry like steel or cement, nor a “craft”, valued as an expression of tradition (even when, at times, those crafts are recent inventions sponsored by the state). Hojalata, despite its origins in industry, became a peculiar kind of relic, a relatively new material reproduced via systems that the 20th-century economic paradigm of growth and globalisation would not, or could not, include.

The central feature of that structure – one carried over from the time of colonial guilds – is the organisation of modern-day oficios around family and neighbourhood units. Vega and Gil maintain personal ties with at least half a dozen families who work with hojalata, all of them either their own relatives or kin to the producer who brought them to Guadalajara in the late 1990s.

Galvanised steel, purchased by the kilo, comes from local intermediaries who buy from factories, while tinplate often comes as cast-offs from large corporations such as Nestlé, which reject sheets that show even minor imperfections, such as scratches or slightly uneven surfaces that their massive machinery can’t process. (Sometimes, Gil says, the material comes already stamped with Nestlé’s branding.) The small local shops that purchase the bulk of Vega and Gil’s products often double as workshops, trading the goods that they produce for those made by other workshop/stores nearby to round out their inventory.

“It’s a network of networks where everyone knows each other,” says Luis Manuel Ochoa, founder of the interdisciplinary design studio Barrio Arquitectura Ciudad (Neighborhood Architecture City) based between Guadalajara and Bilbao, Spain. “There’s also been a process of disappearance, which has to do with the transformation the city has experienced in the 20th century” – that of a small, semi-industrialised trading hub growing into a large regional centre for commerce and industry.

As Guadalajara has expanded, many networks of trade and exchange have died off. The tanning industry, for instance, once concentrated in the neighbourhood

of El Retiro, a short distance north of Analco, has moved away from Guadalajara entirely. Shoe-making is mostly gone, too, though a small handful of factories remain.

(According to one vendor, workshops that make tin dustpans, common around the city, use empty cans of shoe glue; Cappello, for his part, has seen at least a couple of such workshops in the district dedicated to shoe repairs and cobblers.) So far, hojalata maintains a comparatively robust presence, but like all cottage industries in the 21st century, it faces its share of threats.

In the kitchen and houseware shops that line the market streets a few blocks from Gil and Vega’s studio, bouquets of locally made colanders dangle alongside clusters of Chinese imports, which often sell for less than half the price. In San Andrés, a district in the city’s far east, a maestro hojalatero named Alejandro Pérez told me that apprentices cut patterns imprecisely, solder shoddily, and slice up their fingers, making them a greater liability than benefit. Clients, meanwhile, primed to view hojalata as cheap and easy to produce, gripe over marginal price hikes, even when the costs of materials skyrocket. At the height of the pandemic, Gil recalls, the price of a sheet of hojalata measuring 3m by 90cm nearly doubled, rising in increments of 30 or 40 pesos ($1.60-2.15) per week. “When this happened, it’s not like we suddenly raised the price by 30 pesos.

We raised it by maybe 50 cents, and even that – no no, they got mad about it.”

“Artisanal production has always been seen as a precarious kind of labour,” says Ochoa. This makes it difficult for people like Gil and Vega to demand fair compensation and renders such work unattractive to young people. Many who remain in the field have, in the last few decades, migrated their skills to other oficios. Some now do car repairs. Others make stainlesssteel stoves and flattops for restaurant kitchens and taco stalls. Of course, such transformations are nothing new. Pérez, the maestro in San Andrés, recalls that his own father made tinplate plumbing and even coffins. Pérez does neither of these things, a fact he seems neither to regret nor view as a loss. Hojalata is, after all, an essentially urban practice and cities are engines fuelled by constant change. If hojalata resists romanticisation, it resists nostalgia, too.

On the afternoon I visited Gil and Vega’s studio, I’d gone with Cappello to check on the first prototypes for a new series of side tables and stools, his most significant departure thus far from hojalata’s quotidian

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A lampara, or lamp.

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uses (save for an early experiment with a toilet paper holder that he has yet to put into production). Formally elemental, with their round tops and bases shaped like cylinders or frusta, the pieces were still a few rounds of tests away from functioning as Cappello, Gil and Vega hoped. Galvanised steel sheets are not typically used to bear weight, but all three had ideas for how to make the pieces work. Maybe a cross could traverse the hollow interior of the stool or maybe the base could extend upward through the top to keep the weight-bearing surface of the stool from warping.

Meanwhile, the tabletops, Cappello suggested, could be simplified into trays, with the top circle of steel removed to make the object lighter and easier to produce. Vega and especially Gil both seemed excited to continue the experiment, eager to apply their expertise to new and unexpected uses.

The next morning, Cappello and I sat down to talk in his studio, a vibrant collage of primary colours nearly as crowded with objects as the market shops in Analco.

Some of those objects had been designed by Cappello, but at least as many were collected from shops and stalls in Guadalajara and Mexico City. Hojalata is, after all, just part of Mexico’s vast material culture and only one component of Cappello’s own design practice. Through the years, he has worked with fibreglass and wool, made plates from off-cuts of coloured glass and sconces that resemble TV antennae fashioned from wooden broomsticks. But hojalata, Cappello says, “is really specific and really lovely in its utility.” Wood and blown glass offer similarly exciting possibilities, “but those materials are always going to be more expensive, more fragile. They require us to create moulds or they involve heavier machinery.

Hojalata is such a ‘light’ technique. The distance from the notebook to a three-dimensional object is so much shorter.”

The nature of the material has allowed Cappello to create what are by far the most accessible objects in his wider collection: pieces that he sells from his studio for prices that range from 350 to 500 pesos ($19-27), a markup over production cost comparable to that used by vendors in Guadalajara’s markets. Sold abroad, in places as far afield as Taiwan, New Zealand, Denmark and Spain, the pieces retail for far more, due to the exorbitant cost of shipping. This problem, says Cappello, demands creative logistical solutions – perhaps transporting pieces in much larger orders to single distribution points. Production processes

could also be altered to help reduce costs – for example, by designing a simplified piece to make at a larger scale that could be sold through a single retailer abroad.

In the coming years, Cappello hopes to develop proprietary dies for Vega and Gil’s roller press, an adaptation not only of forms but of the machinery used to produce them. He’s imagined recasting some of the hojalata objects in more luxurious materials like turned wood or stainless steel, and returning to typologies first developed with his previous collaborators to see where he, Vega and Gil might take those objects together. In the longer term, he would like to build a compendium of hojalata designs in the form of a book: a two-dimensional taxonomy of possible forms that translate, in their own small ways, to possible futures.

“I’m really interested in doing as little as possible to adjust what’s already there,” he says. “It’s important to remember that, in these designs, there were a lot of adaptations, there was a lot of innovation. Today, in 2023, we look for innovation in totally different spaces. We don’t consider that, in Guadalajara, we could all have a colander made locally from hojalata because we prefer to go to Costco and get one made from plastic.”

For Cappello, the goal is neither to replace nor transform a system that already exists and still, to a large extent, functions. As Gil told me on the day we met, “with this oficio you always sell, whether its cake trays around Christmas or watering cans in the spring – maybe not in huge quantities, but you sell all year long.” Cappello is more interested in understanding and reinforcing the neighbourhood dynamics that have sustained this practice. The designer, in this schema, is just another participant in an urban micro-economy as it reshapes itself to meet new needs. “These are things that we’re about to lose but that still have value for a city, for a society,” says Cappello. “We all have our role to play.” E N D

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Words India Block

Image by Fabian Frinzel.

Never Break the Chain,For French design collective Hall Haus, it’s not a case of simply producing one design, then throwing everything out and starting on the next. Instead, each piece links together, iterating and reworking like links in a chain.

Despite being a relatively young studio – it was founded in 2020 by Abdoulaye Niang, Sammy Bernoussi, Teddy Sanches and Zakari Boukhari, two of whom are still finishing their studies – Hall Haus’s main themes of multicultural collaboration, street style, and a melding of high and low culture are evident across its rapidly expanding oeuvre. Shapes and motifs created for one piece often recur later in another guise. The Transition necklace and bracelet, for example, did not start out as jewellery, but as a chair.

One of Hall Haus’s first pieces, the Curry Mango chair, grew out of a 2020 artist’s residency at Lafayettes Anticipations in Paris. As part of their mission to make traditional design more approachable, the collective based the Curry Mango on a ubiquitous folding camping chair from outdoors brand Quechua, remixing it by way of Marcel Breuer’s steel and leather Wassily chair. Designed in 1925, and itself inspired by the frame of a bicycle, the Wassily chair can retail today for more than £3,500. As such, Hall Haus’s adaptation in turmeric-yellow leather and wood, filtered through a £14.99 picnic chair, offers a cheeky take on design history.

Curry Mango proved too tricky to put into mass production, but the studio has re-used elements of the chair, such as the distinctive junction of its feet caused by the angle of its crossed legs, in other designs. “I tried to make a vase in this shape,” says Bernoussi. “Then I thought it would look very beautiful in jewellery, so I made it as jewellery.”

Bernoussi wanted to 3D-print jewellery moulds for lost-wax casting

in the shape of the chair’s feet for each chain link, so he turned to the internet where he found bespoke jewellery makers MDCT, led by Alex Hans from his workshop in China.

“I met him on Instagram,” shrugs Bernoussi. “He’s the only guy I could find who can do this. I tried to make it in France and no-one could.”

Hans usually makes custom engagement rings using conflict-free stones, but he applied his 20 years of jewellerymaking experience to weld the delicate chain links together.

Hall Haus emailed over its digital models, which were 3D-printed in wax and cast in silver, before being finished by hand. “All the 3D-printing was done in China,” explains Bernoussi. “It’s much cheaper there and it’s better than sending things back and forth.”

Bernoussi is keen to stress that this international collaboration demonstrates the top flight craftsmanship designers can find in China, despite an attitude of general snobbery that has crept in towards design manufactured there. “People sometimes criticise things that are made in China, but they forget that the Chinese invented ceramics, paper and firearms,” he says. Hall Haus has no time for snootiness when it could instead be building a chain of collaboration that stretches around the globe.

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Seeing Through the Walls of Silicon Valley Words, illustrations and renders Claude Dutson Photographs Ramak Fazel

It’s January and while my feet are in London, my head and hands are in California, hovering like a drone above the I-280. This is the Junipero Serra Freeway, one of three arteries that cut through the 30-mile linear sprawl within the Santa Clara Valley, stretching from Santa Theresa in the south up to Redwood City in the northeast, a region described by architecture historian Gwendolyn Wright in the Journal of Architectural Education as a “seemingly endless pattern of flat, prosaic surfaces: Spanish-tile roofs, mirrored-glass walls, and cardboard classical colonnades attached to concrete panels, each building surrounded by a ubiquitous sea of lawn and parking lots.”

The photographs accompanying this essay are taken from Ramak Fazel’s 2021 visual essay

Silicon Valley No_Code Life, commissioned by leather brand Tod’s and publishied by Rizzoli.

The project saw Fazel document the Valley in ways that avoid the tropes of official images provided by the tech giants, instead focusing on more everyday aspects of life in the region.

Research

buildings illustrate the two prevailing architectural styles in Silicon Valley: one without Steve Jobs’s influence (Infinite Loop was built during his hiatus from Apple) and one with. During Jobs’s tenure, Apple began experimenting with architecture through its first Apple Stores, opened in 2001. Apple Park – and similar starchitecture designs for Google and Meta – hold much of the focus on Silicon Valley architecture, but less well-known is the volume of other properties in the Apple property portfolio: clusters of bland two- to three-storey tilt-ups that pattern both Cupertino and Sunnyvale to the north. Sunnyvale also hosts a large number of Alphabet-Google2 leased properties and purpose-built projects, including the in-construction Google Caribbean office blocks that have been designed

by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and which are surrounded

by Lockheed Martin aerospace factories and offices.

On the other side of Moffett Federal Airfield, home to the Nasa Ames Research Center, the giant glinting canopies of Google Bay View and Google Charleston East – both designed by BIG and Heatherwick Studio – come into view.

Heading due west, I hit the infamous Page Mill Road and Stanford Research Park, where generations of Stanford University spin-outs and start-up hopefuls had their first offices, such as Hewlett-Packard, Varian and the ill-fated Theranos. I drift north, crossing grids of suburban housing until I come to the Frank Gehrydesigned Meta campus in Menlo Park: three linked buildings that stretch for almost a mile alongside the wetlands and salt evaporation ponds that edge the San Francisco Bay. From London, I load up the 3D model of the vast Meta MPK 20 (Menlo Park Building 20) that I’ve been creating in the gaming engine Unity (San Francisco) and manoeuvre my way around its Aeron desk chairs, past its meeting pods plastered with posters and the helium-filled mylar balloon numbers that bob above some of the desks, before coming to pass underneath a black drone with a 42m wingspan suspended above a group of desks – a prototype of Meta’s solar-powered Aquila plane, a now cancelled “moonshot project” to bring internet to remote regions. All of these are rendered replicas of what exists in the real campus.

My head is tethered by an Oculus Rift (owned by Meta Platforms, Inc. located in Menlo Park) virtual-reality headset to a NUC 11 computer made by Intel (founded in Mountain View, 1968), while an Nvidia (Santa Clara) GeForce graphics processing unit renders Google (Mountain View) Earth VR below my feet and a high dynamic range California sky above me. As the critic Reyner Banham wrote in his 1981 essay ‘Silicon style’ for The Architectural Review, “Silicon Valley is not simply a geographical location but a kind of heightened industrial consciousness based on the endless market for[…] gadgetry derived from the silicon chip microprocessor.”

This industrial consciousness is now a globalised state of mind. The phrase Silicon Valley conjures up an idyllic setting for libertarian capitalism under the California sun: Googlers riding primary-coloured bicycles around Sunnyvale, Apple employees ambling through the orchards at Apple Park, MacBook under one arm, a latte in the other. Or a “brogrammer” on a company-leased bus equipped with Wi-Fi, shuttled door-to-door from his hip Oakland neighbourhood to the green-roofed Meta (Facebook)1 campus. What is less frequently noted is the densely interwoven military-industrial-academic complex, underwritten

by Cold-War federal funding, that transformed this valley from apricot orchards into the world’s foremost technology region in the middle of the 20th century.

Lacking a cohesive masterplan, the collection of regional cities that make up the Santa Clara Valley evolved a sophisticated network of venture capital, federal development funds, aerospace- and defencemanufacturing facilities, machine shops, semiconductor and camera-equipment laboratories, universities and research institutions. The density of these interconnected activities, termed the “Regional Advantage” by sociologist AnnaLee Saxenian in her book of the same name, incubated one of the world’s pre-eminent technology regions.

With my disembodied drone’s-eye view of the freeway below me, I can see Apple Park, designed

by Foster + Partners, constructed on a parcel of land previously owned by Hewlett-Packard. To the left is the original Apple headquarters, Infinite Loop (built by the Sobrato Organization in 1993). The two

2 1

Facebook, Inc. was renamed Meta Platforms, Inc. in 2021.

Meta owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. In this article, I will use Meta.

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Alphabet Inc. is the parent company of Google LLC, and a number of other subsidiary companies. Alphabet itself does not deliver products or services and, as such, I’ll be using Google. YouTube sits in the Google division.

A figure-ground diagram of Silicon Valley showing properties leased or owned by Apple, Google and Meta (satellite image: Google Maps).

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Apple Park (2015): 3,000 desks per floor.

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Google Charleston East (2023): 2,700 desks.

Meta MPK 20 (2015): 2,800 desks.

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I arrive at Mark Zuckerberg’s desk in the centre of the room, identical to the other 2,799 desks but for a buck-toothed whale called “Munko” that has been spray-painted across the white table-top. Munko is the signature of David Choe, a graffiti artist invited

by Sean Parker (the Napster billionaire who fronted Facebook in 2004) to tag the then start-up Facebook’s office in Palo Alto with explicit murals. Choe was paid in Facebook stocks worth $60,000 in 2005 and became a multimillionaire upon Facebook’s initial public offering (IPO) in 2012.

From my desk in London, I have been observing, drawing and documenting the development of the Silicon Valley campuses for five years, exploring the new buildings constructed by Apple, Google and Meta using the very same technologies and platforms that these companies produce. Because it is the world within which I work, it is important to situate this research within the contemporary labour conditions of higher education, where academic teaching loads are increasing, research time is diminished, and very few funding opportunities to support this kind of research exist. With little to enable it, research takes place during fragments of time before or after teaching, or during the weekend – and yet these restrictions have yielded a methodology consistent with the topic.

I’ve used the publicly available City Council planning portals of Menlo Park, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Cupertino, and San Jose to monitor the progress of proposals by the big three companies, redrawing the floor-plans of each new campus: Apple Park (Foster + Partners), Google Bay View and Charleston East (BIG and Heatherwick Studio), and Meta MPK 20, 21 and 22 (Gehry Partners).

I have scoured the arrogated news content from Buzzfeed, TechCrunch, and Curbed for leaks and leads on new land acquisitions by Apple and Google; used an Israeli crowdsourced transit-data platform called Moovit to get the addresses of every individual building occupied by the two companies, which are listed on the platform by Valley-based tech workers thanks to the dire state of public transport in Silicon Valley. I cross-reference this information with virtual drive-bys in Google Street View to keep an up-to-date inventory of all the properties leased or owned by each company: Apple Hermosa 2, Maude 3, Mathilda 6, Kifer 4, Google Crittenden, Shorebird, Caribbean.3 Translated into a series of figure-ground drawings, this data makes visible the considerable economic,

spatial and civic impact of the companies on each city – in 2016, the commercial real-estate platform CoStar reported that Apple occupied 67 per cent of office space in Cupertino.

Using Instagram, I’ve hunted through scores of photographs of the interior of MPK 20 for images of the digital wayfinder screens that workers in the campus use to navigate the vast space, compositing these together into a single map to reverse-engineer a floorplan that itemises each of the 2,800 desks. From Zuckerberg’s own Facebook page, rewatching his inaugural “Facebook live” stream of MPK 20 several times, I’ve been able to determine the exact location of his desk, paying attention to ambient audio and nearby objects: noise from a coffee machine frother tells me one of the three cafés in the building is in the vicinity; a pair of glass-walled meeting rooms – one for Zuckerberg, one for former COO Sheryl Sandberg – confirms that the location is in the centre of the building; a folding Lumio Book Lamp I’ve spotted in photographs narrows it down to a cluster of six desks.

Starting with MPK 20, I am reconstructing 3D models of these spaces from the 2D plans, making navigable, virtual-reality environments that interrogate the spatial relations between architectural elements and interiors, media, objects and management culture.

I am frequently asked, “Have you been there?”

– meaning the real Silicon Valley, meaning inside the buildings I’m investigating. Behind this lurks the question: “How do you know that this information is accurate?” Such is the belief in ethnography as an objective record that an architectural study of an existing building warrants a site-visit. I, however, want to challenge the idea that a “truthful” sense of a building can be gained solely through wandering inside it, observing first-hand the workers going about their day.

In the case of the tech-campuses of Apple, Google and Meta, the buildings are actively constitutive of the companies’ management styles, and offer a full spatial and media immersion into their narratives, myths, and values – some critical and geographical distance is helpful. Would my position as an academic make me more immune to the effects of immersion than 3

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Hermosa 2, Maude 3, Mathilda 6 and Kifer 4 are just four buildings in Apple’s extensive list of properties in Cupertino and Sunnyvale. Crittenden, Shorebird and Caribbean are Google campus and building names in Mountain View and Sunnyvale.

YouTube sits in the Google division.

exists but cannot be accessed? Drawing offers a way of seeing through the walls of proprietary architecture that physically excludes the general public, restricts or curates the view of visitors, and also aims to keep information about the company inside. Much of this is to contain leaks about the proprietary technologies its owner produces.

an employee? Are the employees just as cynical as architectural researchers when they see a poster reading, “WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF YOU WEREN’T AFRAID?” inside Meta’s campus?

The question of who gets to see inside these spaces, and what can be revealed through either photography or writing, is about both privilege and control, governed by subjectivity on the side of the visitor and non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) on the side of the corporation. What trades take place and what legitimacy is earned for research – or lent to the companies themselves – in engaging in this game?

If I sought physical access to these campuses, would I disclose the criticality of my research – and would that limit what I was allowed to see? Or would it be used by the company to demonstrate that they are open to critique?4 Would it be relevant to reveal that I am both queer and a feminist? Would this determine who was chosen to be my tour guide – the face of the company who greeted me and became my companion (and watchful eye) for the duration of my visit?

In addition, whenever visitor or public access to architecture is either limited or restricted entirely, or curated by company representatives, is what we experience in person any less a media construction than the images of these campuses circulating online?

While I likely could gain legitimate access, being an academic researcher affiliated with a university, I have chosen not to as a methodological limit for dealing with what I call “proprietary architecture”, after the term “proprietary technologies”, which relates to software, tools and systems developed for sole use within a company, or locked to a proprietary device (such as Apple iOS). I have designated as “proprietary information” that which can only be acquired by special permission, or is owned by companies or institutions – in contrast to publicly accessible information in libraries, open-access archives and internet media.

If architects draw what doesn’t yet exist, what is illuminated by drawing that which exists but cannot be accessed?

There is an extraordinary volume of written and visual information available on this architecture within the digital public realm: much of it produced by the companies themselves in the creation of their corporate culture and purpose-built campuses. Investor pages and official company documentation from Apple, Google, and Meta’s corporate web presence provide some of this, along with an additional stream of images and videos distributed through their own (and one another’s) media platforms, such as Apple Podcasts and Apple TV, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

There is also a considerable amount of visual content created by employees, visitors and “fans”.

All three corporations have unofficial mediators of their company culture: MacRumors and 9to5Mac aggregate gossip, leaks and syndicated news articles about Apple Park, while influencers use Instagram and YouTube to document campus visits to MPK 20, 21 and Google Bay View.5 Videos created about the Meta and Google campuses are often formulaic, featuring the company sign and other corporate perks – free lunches, video games and pinball machines, ice-cream and snacks, and vending machines dispensing IT kit including keyboards, mice, dongles and cables. Further video content created by tech-workers such as ‘First Day in the New Office’, ‘Day in the Life of a Google Engineer’, and ‘How to get an interview at Meta’, are semi-endorsed.6

Critical Drawing – Evidencing, Fictions, Errors If architects draw what doesn’t yet exist, and historians draw what once existed (and often cannot be visited any more), what is illuminated by drawing that which

4

See Fred Turner’s 2015 essay ‘The Arts at Facebook: An Aesthetic Infrastructure for Surveillance Capitalism’ for further discussion of this issue.

5

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Google Charleston East, adjacent to the Googleplex, is yet to open.

Information extracted from these images and videos about the buildings is arranged, through drawings and 3D computer models, into new forms to produce an equivalent knowledge of the buildings – or perhaps an even more detailed one – than that which I would witness on a site visit.

In my research, temporally and spatially diverse media that offer glimpses into separate parts of the campus architecture can be drawn into a sequential narrative, in which written and textual information in the public realm can be located in a plan and given spatial meaning. This method is closely related to the practice of Forensic Architecture,7 which investigates institutions, governments and entities that operate out of public sight. I use the devices and conventions of architectural production – computer-aided design software, the floorplan, the figure-ground drawing, and the map – as investigative tools and objects.

This practice draws on a lineage of artists and film-makers using documentary materials in the public realm as their source materials – such as Mark Lombardi, Mike Kelley, Hito Steyerl and Harun Farocki – and who use the tools of image-making to construct powerful new narratives including drawing, physical and digital model-making, and film-making. Within contemporary architecture, the aforementioned Forensic Architecture is an important reference, as is terminology such as “research architecture” and “critical spatial practice”. The latter is a term coined

by Jane Rendell to describe an interdisciplinary form of research that sits between architecture, critical theory, critical geography and art practice.

Research architecture, meanwhile, is an emerging term defined by architectural historian Kazys Varnelis as the processes “of information gathering, analysis, and synthesis that an architect undertakes in the early phases of design,” yet rather than this synthesis taking the form of a building, a more analytical output can result in formats such as exhibitions or books. In these forms of practice, architectural tools are used for critical speculation, response or provocation.

In each of these practices, information is synthesised, and arranged with a clear critical, 6

7

Semi-endorsed insofar as they are not made by Google or Meta, but are generally allowed by the companies unless they contain controversial material.

A multidisciplinary research group based at Goldsmiths, University of London.

editorial and curatorial interpretation – unlike “data visualisation”, which aims to translate existing data into visuals whose data points are generated through so-called objective or automated data sets. Instead, data points are hand-gathered, often subjective, and subject to error, misremembering, and incompleteness.

Mike Kelley’s Educational Complex (1995) is a recreation – in the form of a 5 x 2.5m architectural model – of every educational building he experienced from childhood through to university, including his own childhood home. Kelley sketched out the classrooms, sports halls, corridors and lecture halls from memory, but struggled to make sense of the spatial relationships between these spaces. Realising that he would be unable to recreate 3D models from these distortions, Kelley instead turned to blueprints and photos of the buildings, extensively researching them to reconstruct architectural models, into which he would place his own remembered architecture, with gaps in his memory depicted as filled-in solids.

Kelley’s aim was to use the sharp contrast between the architectural details drawn from research and the incompleteness of the interior to visualise institutional violence – where all sites of blankness and memory loss evidenced trauma. Kelley, however, found that around 80 per cent of the spaces in which he spent every day, for up to four years, were either misremembered or could not be recalled at all.

While Kelley’s memory distortions are clearly attributable to time – the work was tracing 40 years of memory, after all – his colleague and critic John Miller noted that Kelley’s work reveals the “contextual nature of space itself” and how we experience it, rather than “memorising every last detail”. In a monograph on Educational Complex, Miller proposes that “one feels the way as one goes along, guided by familiar reference points.” Kelley’s work exposes the great difficulty in recalling buildings as spatially accurate configurations, and that the logic of recollection often distorts spatial relations. “The apprehension of space is an ongoing endeavour,” Miller writes, “not a final aggregate – even if the apparent fixity of architecture suggests otherwise.”

This, in turn, provokes critical questions about the reliability of a site-visit and accessing a building in-person, as well as the process of witnessing in real time and space, and then recalling later. While we often valorise first-hand observational accounts, Kelley’s work highlights two distinct operations

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of time and manpower. The drawings I create are an assemblage of publicly available data, images and personal accounts that are brought together into what Varnelis calls a “cohesive whole”. Snapshots of a building taken at different moments are collected into a single image with information overwrites, meaning that drawings are repeatedly patched and updated like software. This is a means of rendering visible the interior of spaces that are difficult or impossible to access.

These drawings are different from the architectural plans published by design magazines and the publicaccess records held by the city planning departments, which often precede a building’s completion and are without furniture, décor and temporary objects. My drawings document the current inhabitation and use of each building, recording temporary architectural features and furniture; amenities and event spaces; and the location of the CEO’s desk, specific teams of workers, and objects and motifs that relate to meaning making within the company.

Some drawings are taken further into 3D-rendered models for viewing as artworks or installations. The Model Worker (2019), exhibited at Watermans arts centre in September 2019, is a VR model of Meta’s MPK 20 that documents the use of printed media and artworks displayed on the campus walls, which have been produced or commissioned by the company to narrate its myths, values and mission.

The architecture of Silicon Valley is, on-the-whole, inaccessible to the general public. Apple, for instance, keeps visitors to its flagship campus at the periphery of the site. In the visitors’ centre they can view a large white model animated by an augmented reality iPad app or they can buy a coffee at Caffè Macs, which repeats architectural details used in the main campus.

At Google, the open courtyard of its Googleplex corporate headquarters will soon be contained by palisades connecting the four buildings, with the public route through Charleston East that was promised at planning stages now in the process of being withdrawn.

The workings of corporate power are similarly opaque, yet these companies are central protagonists in contemporary debates about governance and surveillance, and their technologies are pervasive.

In an investor letter in 2012, Zuckerberg wrote that “Facebook was not originally created to be a company.

It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make

between observation and recollection – particularly within a context where photography is often prohibited or restricted, and where vision is obscured by the mechanisms of a sanctioned tour – an experience in which a critical eye is mediated by representatives of the company and attention is distracted by the signing-in procedure. In this way, through examining media produced about a building, the pulling together of drawings and photographic records from multiple sources equates to a legitimate spatial narrative.

Forensic Architecture also explicitly works with errors of memory. Rather than discounting them as unreliable, the practice instead uses them to reveal asymmetries of power in the ability to tell a cohesive story. Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture’s founder, highlights how states and corporations have access to higher resolution tools and technologies than indiviudal citizens, and, therefore, greater means of documenting evidence. “Aesthetic investigations,” Weizman writes in Investigative Aesthetics (2021), co-authored with Matthew Fuller, “have a double aim: they are at the same time investigations of the world and enquiries into the means of knowing it. They deal with the production of evidence while questioning and interrogating the notion of evidence, and with it the cultures of knowledge production or truth claims that it relies upon.”

Corporate actors are powerful because they look at us, and make money from capturing an extensive volume of data from the traces of our behaviours, desires and networks in what we search for, purchase and communicate between our friends and followers.

As Shoshana Zuboff writes in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Google, Meta, and other tech companies, trade in “behavioural futures”, offering tools that facilitate our social and personal lives, work and leisure.

Apple, while not depending on the sale of users’ data, provides the hardware that enables this data to be trackable in the physical world, and platforms Google’s search engine as the default browser on iOS devices, reportedly receiving a fee each year from the company for doing so. Zuboff details the great asymmetries of power in this transaction and how each company’s business is not serving us – “we are not the client”.

Rather, our data is the product extracted from us and then sold on to other corporations, states and institutions.

It is possible to return this surveillant gaze, albeit at far lower resolution – and at greater cost in resources

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A composite of interior renders of Apple and Google’s campuses, amalgamated to suggest a generic Silicon Valley campus.

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the world more open and connected,” simultaneously disavowing its corporate vision while claiming a top spot on the Nasdaq. Zuckerberg’s words coincided with the period in which Cambridge Analytica was collecting data from up to 87 million Facebook users’ profiles without their consent.

The amount of information and media produced by the companies themselves evidences an intentional intertwining of architecture and media: as each campus was opened, previews and access were managed with acute media and brand awareness. When Meta’s MPK 20 opened in March 2015, for instance, 15 Bay Areabased Instagrammers were invited to document the opening as part of an event led by Jeffrey Gerson, Instagram’s community product lead. Under the hashtag #MPK20firstlook, they recorded their tour utilising the tropes of the app – spotlighting vibrant art created by Meta’s artist-in-residence, high-contrast shots of Gehry’s geometric and material flair, and sunshine-occluded outdoor photographs taken from the roof-garden. Any photographs of the workspaces themselves were reportedly removed – the architecture on-record is largely defined by various lobbies and circulation spaces, colour-pop soft furnishings and gardens. Needless to say, these are not the main spatial operators of the campus.

Google, on the other hand, created its own content of its Bayview Campus, distributed on YouTube, featuring the engineering highlights of the building. This short film included the campus’s architects Bjarke Ingels and Thomas Heatherwick, architect Michelle Kaufman who heads up Google’s R+D lab for the built environment, and Google’s in-house estates team. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, was not featured. For print and web media, Google also commissioned architectural photographer Iwan Baan to take official photos of the campus.

In the case of Apple, Wired magazine was offered the official preview of Apple Park as part of a story penned by editor at large Steven Levy, and shot by Dan Winters – a photographer famed for atmospheric celebrity portraiture, and documentary photography around his own interests in the aerospace and shuttle programme. The campus’s architect Norman Foster was name-checked, but not the centre of the discussion – instead it was Jony Ive, Apple’s then head of design, who gave the tour and fielded much of the discussion that followed Apple Park’s launch.8

The architecture of Apple Park has also taken on a distinctive narrative role in the company’s product launches, replacing the auditorium-based presentation format that was established by former CEO Steve Jobs.

Transitions in the presentations are now spatialised using a mixture of real, fictional and virtual spaces connected by drone flythroughs and CGI trickery, giving each new product a new location. The main and ancillary buildings are connected in Bond-like narratives – the special projects lab is depicted as hidden underground beneath the pond in the centre of Apple Park, whereas, in reality, it is in a pair of sleek but low-key, two-storey buildings on Tantau Avenue – tucked behind bushes alongside the visitors’ centre.

Spatialised Cultures Silicon Valley has become a relevant topic of inquiry within the architectural profession. This is less for the architecture itself – which has not drawn favourable reviews – and more for what it demonstrates: power, permanence, and the profound influence of digital companies on work, life and cities. This analysis attempts to deal with the contradictions of companies that aim to “make the world a better place”. While each company maintains that they are merely a technology or platform, they are nevertheless contributing to a regional economy that, were it an independent country, would have a GDP second only to the state of Qatar according to World Bank estimates.

Details and insights mined from the extraordinary volume of images, video and text circulating online about these companies can be used to reconstruct each case study building in order to tell an architectural story that is about more than form, tectonics and programme. Apple Park is not a panopticon, for example – the open-plan drawings circulated in the press give a misleading sense of visibility. In reality – although this is rarely drawn on a plan – each floorplate is divided into eight segments, subdivided further into 80 discrete sections within which teams work, replicating the compartmentalisation of the company. As Philip Steadman explains in his 2015 Nexus Network Journal study of “architectural doughnuts”, buildings such as Apple Park are rings where there is no single point from where you can 8

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Ive later countered criticism of Apple Park’s architecture in an interview with Fast Company, saying, “It’s not for you, it’s for us.”

A still from The Model Worker (2019), showing a virtual reality recreation of the Meta MPK20 campus.

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get an overview of workers, apart from, in Apple Park’s case, the triple-storey canteen that accommodates up to 4,000 employees at a time. The view is instead an endless curved corridor, with partitions perpendicular to the corridor, inside which glass-walled offices are tucked behind custom, maple-timber veneer panels.

The architectural story told through drawings of these buildings is a parallel development to – but quite different from – the architectural history of the office, and of corporate architecture and power.9 The tech giants’ campuses are a suburban typology. The lineage of the Apple, Google and Meta campuses can be found in companies established in mid-20th century Silicon Valley – Intel, Hewlett-Packard and Xerox – aerospace and defence contractors such as Lockheed Martin, and Stanford University. As such, this lineage prompts us to update narratives of architecture modelled on Michel Foucault’s writing about discipline and punishment, where a building’s form was emblematic of its power, and control was orchestrated through panoptic visibility encoded in the arrangement of walls, floor layout and locations for observation.10 The campuses of Apple, Google and Meta do not represent power – they enact power and organise it through spatialised management protocols such as the “all-hands meeting” at Meta and Google, or “code-red sprints”, 11 and through meaningful objects that codify belonging and bring meaning to the work of code-reviewing and debugging.

Apple, Google, and Meta all celebrate having risen to corporate power as if by accident, valorising tales of “the hustle”, and of humble company origins in garages and dorm-rooms. Meanwhile, the sheer volume of land leased, bought and developed by them continues to transform Silicon Valley. Each company owes its success, however, to California’s military-industrial-academic complex – a landscape

in which the pervasive biases of algorithmic decisionmaking and corporate power, defence infrastructures, and technological objects and platforms are enmeshed in a globalised flow of data and logistics. Designed in California, assembled in China – so runs the famous Apple epitaph engraved on every iPhone. It is a symbol of a corporate infrastructure that has leached beyond its physical boundaries to become, in the words of Banham, a “globalised consciousness”. However, by working in the shadow of the technologies these companies use to reach into us, we may be able to look back into them through alternative modes of architectural research practices: reconstructing what has been designed and constructed in Silicon Valley, and re-assembling it in virtual space. E N D

9

For further reading on this parallel history of architecture, see Stuart W. Leslie’s The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford and Reinhold Martin’s Knowledge Worlds – Media, Materiality, and the Making of the Modern University.

10 Foucault’s own writing on discipline and institutional control is superseded by his later writing on neoliberalism – no longer exerted upon an individual directly by management from the outside, but rather a process of alignment of the inner desires of employees with the company objective.

11 Both these protocols derive from factory processes pioneered

by Toyota. For further discussion on management performances, and how performance has come to replace discipline in the workplace, see Jon McKenzie’s Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance.

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A View from the Magpie’s Nest Words Tiiu Meiner Illustrations Hollie Fuller

“Is the silver an aesthetic choice?”

I ask. “Not in here, but in the general area with the visitors it’s grey and that is an aesthetic choice,” replies Tim van der Spoel, head of facilities at the Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. We are standing next to the temperature system in the museum’s climate-control room.

Installed in 2019, the equipment fills the concrete space with silver piping and monochrome machinery the size of three large trucks.

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Designed by architects MVRDV, the Boijmans Depot is a reflective bowl of a building in Rotterdam’s Museumpark, whose curving, mirrored, glass-covered facade owes its shape to Blanda, the classic silver Ikea salad bowl – at least according to urban legend. But considering its internal maze of floating stairs, metallic tubing and sliding doors, a sci-fi spaceship might be a more appropriate visual comparison. Any visions of takeoff are misguided, however, given that the Depot is intended to stay strongly rooted in Rotterdam’s cultural life for decades to come – it is, after all, the world’s first publicly accessible art-storage facility, connected to the city’s Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, an art museum that currently holds some 151,000 objects.

Prior to the Depot’s opening in late 2021, only 8 per cent of the museum’s collection could be publicly displayed. Through the new building, the entire collection is now held in one publicly accessible facility. In this sense, the Depot is a steward of Dutch heritage and its future.

But what happens when that future comes under threat? In October 2021, a report was published by the Netherlands Museums Association titled ‘Museums can’t just put a warm sweater on’, which raised concerns from 470 Dutch museums that are struggling with the country’s sharp rise in energy costs – a growing crisis echoed across Europe. Some Dutch museums are seeing a rise of up to 300 per cent in their bills, and

are reporting that, as a result, they expect to have 37 per cent less money to finance cultural projects for the future. Warning that “impoverishment of the museum landscape is imminent”, the report’s authors note that some museums will have “significantly less budget for exhibitions to attract visitors”.1 While all of Europe has been limiting energy use to combat high energy prices, a situation that has been exacerbated by the war in Ukraine, museums do not have the option of cutting back. Owing to artpreservation policies, museums have to maintain precise climate controls in their visitor halls and archive spaces. “Lowering the temperature is not a solution for museums,” the report states. “If you turn down the heating, you have to compensate by removing more moisture from the air, which in turn costs energy.” The past, or future, of Dutch cultural heritage is being challenged by the price of energy.

As such, the museums in the report have asked for tailored financial support from the Dutch government, arguing that there is little that they can do themselves to remedy the situation. “Institutions cannot,” they noted, “simply absorb cost increases on this scale.”

At the time of writing, the Dutch parliament is discussing solutions to this issue. While some financial support, outlined in a public memorandum, is expected 1

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Quotes translated from the original Dutch.

for the educational and cultural sector over the coming year, the response has also stated that “organisations themselves remain responsible for keeping energy costs manageable, for example by using less energy.”

This represents a pivotal moment for museums and archives, with calls for energy efficiency driven by financial strain having unexpectedly aligned with environmentalist endeavours. Environmentalism and sustainability have been popular topics at museums for years, but the infrastructural sustainability of their sites has rarely been confronted. To date, the cultural sector has seemed better equipped to tackle these issues in their conceptual, theoretical and social forms. While exhibitions such as The Energy Show (2022) at Het Nieuwe Instituut and It’s Our F***ing Back Yard (2022) at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam reveal that curatorial engagement with these topics is at an all-time high, the actual infrastructure, architecture and design of museums and archives remains far behind.

This dilemma confronts the concept underpinning such institutions. Since their establishment as cultural sites, they have been considered (or like to consider themselves) forebears of wider cultural progress,2 and with the climate emergency threatening our very existence, it makes sense that the issue of sustainability should be attended to through artworks, curatorial programmes and discourse. But is that really enough?

Transferring curatorial good intentions into quantitative change involving infrastructural design lies beyond the traditional scope of the museological field, yet it is necessary. For now, Dutch governmental agencies have no common policy in place for investigating or demanding sustainable goals for museums.

Sustainability and energy efficiency are strongly linked in the case of archives, with pressure mounting from all sides. Unlike most spaces, which are awaiting a warm summer so they can lower their thermostats and save energy, museums do not only regulate temperature, but humidity as well. Relative humidity – the ratio of how much water vapour is in the air and how much water vapour the air could potentially contain at a certain 2

The 2022 definition of “museum” by the International Council of Museums states that “A museum is a not-for-profit, permanent institution in the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage.

Open to the public, accessible and inclusive, museums foster diversity and sustainability. They operate and communicate ethically, professionally and with the participation of communities, offering varied experiences for education, enjoyment, reflection and knowledge sharing.”

temperature – complicates things. It varies according to the temperature of the air: colder air holds less vapour, hot air, more. Changing the temperature can therefore affect the relative humidity, making climate regulation more difficult in summer than in winter.

Back in the Boijmans Depot, van der Spoel speculates that the facility’s highest energy bills will come in the summer, when the climate-control systems have to work harder to lower the temperature, as well as removing the water vapour in the air. “We have an unusual system with only three regulators,” he explains. “In my opinion, we should have had five systems, with a regulatory system per floor.” Instead, the museum has a single central system that connects with different spaces through air ducts. This “takes up less space,” notes van der Spoel, but “it’s not necessarily energy efficient. With the high energy prices, we may have to rethink that.”

The Boijmans Depot’s climate-control installation is uncommon in the world of art preservation because, as van der Spoel explains, it centralises the way it processes air. It sucks in air from outside, which it then processes into three forms: cold and wet, dry, and warm. These airs are then transported through ducts to each zone, where they are mixed in the ratio each area requires. “It allows us to do this with just one main system,” says van der Spoel. “If we were to do this in a more traditional system, much more space would be needed.” As such, it seems that design and engineering considerations, rather than sustainability or energy efficiency, drove the decision to use a more complicated system.

Nonetheless, the building has been hailed in many quarters as exceptional, on account of it being the first art depot where visitors can gain year-round access to rooms housing private and corporate collections.3 Artworks are segregated by materials and preservation requirements, and the Depot has been celebrated as a means for audiences to gain access to art outside the confines of traditional museological display. Yet allowing audiences into the archive is unusual for multiple reasons. “We are doing a totally new concept,” explains Sandra Kisters, the Boijmans Museum’s director of collections. “We are now receiving visitors in our storerooms, so in our evaluation of the concept of 3

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A model that is to be employed in the planned V&A East Storehouse, a new outpost of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London that is scheduled to open in spring 2024.

the Depot it’s of course interesting to see if more damage is done by inviting the audience in. But it is the first year that we have been open and there have been no real incidents.”

The risk of damage to artworks because of reckless visitor behaviour is not the only reason archives may choose to exclude the public from their collection rooms. Letting people into climate-controlled spaces means doors opening and closing more often, as well as the presence of bodies and breath that raise temperatures and humidity. This puts pressure on energy efficiency, particularly given that power is now more expensive.

Experimentation and innovation on the preservation front have stalled for a long time, in large part because there was little monetary incentive to prioritise them – there was no perceived need to change operating procedures when energy was cheap. With financial pressure, however, careful testing of new, more energy-efficient alternatives has become permissible.

“The thing we are looking into now is that the climate zones’ fluctuation [has been] set very tight,” Kisters explains. “I think [we allow] only 2 per cent fluctuation.”

Back in the silver climate-control room, the machines are buzzing and I can’t help but feel that this is the sound of energy being guzzled all around me. “The system uses a lot of energy because it produces a climate zone by pumping cold air, then hot air, then cold, then hot, into a space,” says van der Spoel. This results in a very jittery fluctuation, and the aim is to smooth this jitteriness out. “To solve this problem completely, however, we would have to take this system out,” van der Spoel explains. “But that means taking out an installation that was built just a year ago, and that’s not possible. What is being talked about, however, is that we accept that we could allow a bigger margin for the permitted climate.” This idea aligns with new developments in conservation studies,4 which have demonstrated that artworks can handle larger climatic fluctuations than previously thought, provided they are neither too sudden, nor too extreme.

Experimentation with archival climate zones is a nuanced task, given that collections and their material requirements vary greatly. Knowledge is not always transferable and each archive has to conduct its own 4

experiments. Van der Spoel takes me into the Depot’s colour photography collection space – it is, he explains, still too warm for storage. The photographs have to stay in a colder space, otherwise their chemicals would be at risk of denaturing – a process in which molecular bonds begin breaking down. Consequently, the area is filled with empty metal grid walls, onto which staff will mount the photographs once the room’s climate has been perfected. A year and a half into this process, the difficulty of the task is obvious.

Yet again, the museum’s climate system seems to be to blame. “If we knew the exact problem, we would have solved it by now,” says van der Spoel, “but we suspect the way the control technology is configured is the problem.” The current system is based around relative humidity, whereas van der Spoel wonders whether “many of the problems would be solved if we controlled based on absolute humidity.” The problems, he explains, are “not exactly normal in a traditional system”, with the complexity of the Boijman’s set-up

“The climate zones’ fluctuation has been set very high. I think we allow only 2 per cent.”

—Sandra Kisters

making them “difficult to solve” – as it stands, they hope to have the issues resolved by June 2023. The engineering of the Depot’s climate-control system was done by the Royal HaskoningDHV (RHDHV), an engineering-consultancy firm, and while its system is innovative in its precision and compact, its centralised design makes its energy consumption harder to master, placing sustainability on the back-burner.

That the Depot seems not to have considered sustainability as being an overarching priority in its construction reveals the imbalance between heritage, energy costs and sustainability in the cultural field.

“We made a programme of demands for the building for the Depot in 2012, and I don’t think sustainability or energy efficiency were as big issues then as they are now,” explains Kisters. “When you have a building project, it takes so much time that maybe we would’ve changed some demands if we were to do it now,” she continues. “It’s been a long time since the plans began,

The International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art (CIMAM) states that “continued scientific research has shown that it is completely possible for museums to continue to preserve and protect their collections without rigid climate control.”

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so the type of climate-control installation was, I think, mainly chosen to have this excellent climate system with five different climate zones for the collection.”

Bureaucratic decision-making that works to disperse accountability can make sustainability a low priority.

Facilities staff do what the collection directors tell them, while collection directors do what is expected by project leaders, and permitted in conservation and insurance policies. As such, unless a clear written directive comes down from above, the discussion around sustainability is likely to keep ping-ponging around on a bureaucratic level.

“Next year, we have to write our new four-year programme because we have a subsidy system where every four years you write a plan and then you get funding from the Rotterdam municipality,” explains Kisters, adding that this funding covers around half of the museum’s total expenditure. Yet these subsidies come with conditions. “We haven’t seen requirements for [the new] plan from the municipality yet,” says Kisters, “but in the last term, the focus was on inclusivity and diversity, cooperation with other parties in the city,

and stimulating smaller initiatives. I would imagine they will now also ask for sustainability goals.”

A fundamental transformation of collecting practices may be needed in the long term. The Museum of 21st Century Design (M21D) is an international organisation launched in 2020, which has adopted a new approach to serving the public. Instead of having a permanent building, M21D seeks to initiate publications, online collections, and physical exhibitions in a variety of locations. William Myers, founding director of M21D, explains that “one way to look at it is that museums are a typology in flux.” Changing cultural and social norms, along with the climate crisis, he says, are forcing institutions to shift their goals and offerings.

“Somewhat similar to a library, or university, or even a church, they are always reinventing themselves and developing. It seems to me that museums are undergoing some of the biggest changes. They’re finding new ways to serve the public.”

M21D has focused on digital collecting, which is not uncommon at a time when many art institutions have an ongoing digitisation programme. While data 130

servers also use energy to preserve these collections, the goal is to create more accessible archives given that storage and transportation of the works takes on a different form, with slightly smaller carbon footprints.

“When it comes to material heritage such as painting or sculpture, human civilisation ought to invest in the energy, time and space to keep it forever and to protect it,” says Myers. “I believe that. But I distinguish that from works of design that are mass produced. While there may be artistry to [this], it represents a series of manufacturing transactions that should be collected, but not in the same way.” Rather than building an archive of unique objects, for instance, Myers plans to focus the design archive of M21D on collecting research, design processes and social narratives about objects – information that is easier and more appropriate to store in digital archives.

Myers’ point, then, is not that we should digitise all art collections, but rather re-think future ones.

Kisters, for example, has also been considering what and how to collect differently. “I really love complex artworks that you can construct,” she explains. “We have a work by Olafur Eliasson in the Depot [Notion motion (2005)] that, in storage, consists of several HMI lamps, tripods, stainless steel, a sponge and a motor. When we build it, we use these materials, as well as wood, nylon and a projection screen, follow the artist’s instructions, and it becomes a huge installation. In collecting, you can think about what you collect and what this means for your storage.”

While it won’t solve the issue of needing more environmentally friendly archive storage designs, the focus on works that are easy to store can put a stopper on archives that would otherwise need to expand, and use more space and energy. It also means that there may be a domino effect on art practices, with modular works potentially gaining value for collectors. While we are a long way from sustainability over-shadowing artistic expression, the pressure that collectors and institutions such as the Depot feel is a sign that times are changing, and that we all have to bear the burden.

It’s cold and grey outside as I leave the Depot. Its mirror-clad facade sparkles amongst its surroundings – a physical reminder of the cultural treasures within.

But will its lustre remain as limitations on resources are rapidly shifting society’s needs and possibilities?

The longer I look at the Depot, the more the silver bowl begins to resemble a magpie’s nest, and I spot myself reflected on its surface. Insignificant amongst

the looming towers of Rotterdam, I understand how small I am within the monumental effort that society must make if we are to fundamentally change our behaviour in light of climate collapse. Business decisions, engineering ingenuity and cultural concepts all need to come together in the battle for survival. A tight budget may incentivise that union, but will it be enough, and will the new relationship be a happy one? I tear my eyes away from the shimmering beauty, and imagine how strangely it may shine in a landscape that may soon turn vengeful if we do not better care for it. E N D

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Writer’s note: While its impact is undeniable, we don’t have much information about how Gutenberg’s press worked. It inspired many printing machines in years to come, but physical descriptions remain scarce. In some records it was described as “a faster writing machine”.

Although it’s funny to imagine people regarding printing as a form of writing, it also feels nice to know that people started personifying machines a long time ago.

—Tetsuo Mukai

OPINION: GUTENBERG PRESS RHYMES WITH SMARTPHONES p. 26

Marta – marta.la nmbello Studio – nmbello.com

Photographer’s Note: Nigeria was to have its presidential elections the day before the shoot. There’s usually tension and fear of widespread violence if the elections do not go peacefully, so people were shopping for extra supplies in Lagos, amongst other things, as if the nation was preparing for war. As such, we had to settle for a location around Nifemi’s studio, because we could no longer visit some other places known for local production. —Ọlájídé Aye`̣ni

PHILOSOPHY: DESIGN IS HAPPENING pp. 17-25

Photographer’s note: One thing I took away from the factory was the fact that the bricks’ colouring comes from recycled printer-ink toner cartridges – hence they’re predominantly cyan, magenta and yellow (CMYK) at the moment. But, as Sam pointed out to

CONSTRUCTION: AGGREGATE: A COMPOSITE ACCOUNT pp. 53-65

ProxyAddress – proxyaddress.co.uk

Writer’s note: Throughout our conversation, Chris Hildrey would speak of the “we” and “us” developing and running ProxyAddress. There are, of course, multiple partners to the project, but when I asked him to clarify who the “we” actually is, it quickly became clear that it’s just him.

Impressive stuff. —George Kafka

DISTRIBUTION: TERMS OF ADDRESS pp. 43-52

Stephen Burks Man Made – stephenburksmanmade.com

Writer’s note: For a deeper dive into the ways design can add meaning to people’s lives, read my conversation with the late cultural critic bell hooks in Stephen Burks: Shelter In Place, the accompanying publication to our studio’s solo exhibition, which opens at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in November 2023. —Stephen Burks

OPINION: LEARNING FROM FAILURE p. 42

Project 123A – project123a.com

Photographer’s note: As I was unpacking the things for my product shoot and lining everything up nicely (on an 8-Pack side table by Konstantin Grcic), my friend Ayzit from the studio next door came in. She immediately spotted the Foot Stool by Project 123A. She loved it immediately. Now it’s hers. —Fabian Frinzel

OBJECTS IN REVIEW: BEST FOOT FORWARD p. 41

Editor’s note: The world continues to argue about the pluses and minuses of wind energy. Designers can change people’s overall perception of wind turbines. That’s the true power of design.

—Anniina Koivu

U.F.O.G.O Insert

Gallery Sana Moreau – maino-design.com/gallery-sana-moreau/

me think of an entire range of overlooked Ukrainian crafts and folk-art practices – something that came into dialogue with my own fascination with collecting and restoring Ukrainian 19th- and early 20th-century folk icons. —Svitlana Biedarieva

Index

Front – frontdesign.se

Writer’s note: Here are a few fun lichen facts I found while researching this story: Lichens can live to be more than 1,000-years-old. They are one of the sturdiest and earliest examples of life on earth – they can even survive in space. In 2005 the European Space Agency launched two lichen species into orbit and released them into the vacuum of space for 15 days, exposing them to extreme variations in temperature and cosmic radiation. The lichens returned in tip-top health. —Lara Chapman

DEVELOPMENT: COPY COW AND ROCKS OF FOAM pp. 29-40

Sony – sony.com

Carmody Groarke – carmodygroarke.com Design Museum Gent – designmuseumgent.be Kenoteq – kenoteq.com StoneCycling – stonecycling.com

Writer’s note: One charming addition to Sony’s recent Walkmans is a digital display styled as a cassette. This cassette rewinds, fast forwards and pauses as you use the associated buttons on the device; it even changes to different cassette designs depending on the quality of the digital track you’re listening to. —Evi Hall

Writers note: Talking with Danuta Kril about rescuing half-forgotten ceramic techniques made

OBJECTS IN REVIEW: BOWL OF SHADOWS p. 80

Studio Raw Material – studiorawmaterial.com

Photographer’s note: When I originally imagined photographing Makrana, I thought of long hours of bright, harsh sun. When I arrived, however, I found the light to be unusually soft and gloomy. Airborn marble dust filtered the sun, adding texture to the landscape. It looked and felt surreal, with large marble slabs reflecting light the way snow does. —Eshwarya Grover

MATERIAL: MARBLE DUST IN THE AIR pp. 66-79

me, this means that they could be blended to produce any colour. —Donald Milne

OBJECTS IN REVIEW: DESIGNATED SOUND DEVICE p. 28

Felix de Pass – felixdepass.com Monoware – monoware.com

Writer’s note: I have abandoned the standard Monoware fork and now enjoy using the smaller cake fork for every meal. It makes me feel like Marie Antoinette, having it large with a bowl of pesto pasta. —Oli Stratford

OBJECTS IN REVIEW: A QUIET CUT p. 93

Citibin – citibin.com

Writer’s note: I first encountered Sha Ribeiro’s rat portraiture at the Royal Academy of Arts’s Summer Exhibition 2022. I was delighted by the curious rats emerging from the darkness to snack on a white-frosted cake, and luckily snapped a photo of the print (to send to a friend with the caption “it u”). When I reached out to Sha, he explained that spending long nights with the rats had led him to a strange understanding of their quirks and habits. —India Block

CONTEXT: RAT WARS pp. 82-92

Artek – artek.fi TAF Studio – tafstudio.se

Writers note: This piece was almost called ‘Eggy Feels’ and I still can’t tell if this turn of phrase repulses me or makes me feel warm and cosy like the gooey insides of a gently soft-boiled egg. —Lara Chapman

OBJECTS IN REVIEW: A LIGHT BASKET p. 81

ECAL – ecal.ch HES–SO – hes-so.ch Shorefast – shorefast.org

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Hall Haus – hall.haus

Writer’s note: Design writing always comes with a risk of increased covetousness, but this time I really need/want the Hall Haus jewellery. They won’t all be made available to purchase, however; Sammy made an extra-large neck chain that he plans to keep just for himself. —India Block

OBJECTS IN REVIEW: NEVER BREAK THE CHAIN p. 110

Artes de México – artesdemexico.com Fabien Capello – fabiencapello.com National Institute of Indigenous Peoples – gob.mx/inpi

Photographer’s note: During this shoot, Fabien and I had to hide from the metro guards, but the shots came out great! Then we went to eat tacos de barbacoa, one of my favourite dishes ever. —Rodrigo Alvarez

COLLABORATION: ECONOMIES OF OBJECTS pp. 94-109

Writers note: This story originally started as research for a science fiction narrative about an archive shooting off

FEEDBACK: A VIEW FROM THE MAGPIE’S NEST pp. 124-131

Apple – apple.com Forensic Architecture – forensic-architecture.org Google – google.com Meta – meta.com Mike Kelley – mikekelleyfoundation.org

Writer’s Note: I’ve spent so many hours listening to Laurie Anderson while drawing Silicon Valley campuses or roaming around VR models of these spaces that it’s now the soundtrack to my memory palace of these buildings.

‘O Superman’ triggers a hallucination I can inhabit and move around, filled with jagged Google Earth polygons, Instagram snaps, and high-speed YouTube point-of-view vlogs, lit by shards of real and rendered California sunlight.

Written in 1981, the song hauntingly interweaves our desire for connection and our dependence upon technology, communication and logistics, facilitated by military defence and petrodollars. It holds up a mirror to the military-industrial complex of the Valley.

I had hoped to use lyrics from the song throughout my text, but I learned that song lyrics are copyrighted and extremely expensive to get the rights to.

—Claude Dutson

RESEARCH: SEEING THROUGH THE WALLS OF SILICON VALLEY pp. 111-123

Alcova – alcova.xyz inside back cover Bene – bene.com p. 16 Bocci – bocci.com p. 6 Brunner – brunner-uk.com pp. 4-5 Carl Hansen – carlhansen.com p. 1, inside front cover Ege Carpets – egecarpets.com pp. 2-3 Maharam – maharam.com p. 9 Moooi – moooi.com p. 15 Poliform – poliform.it p. 13 Rimadesio – rimadesio.it p. 11 Vitra Design Museum – design-museum.de outside back cover Zanat – zanat.org p. 27

ADVERTISERS

Physical 100 – netflix.com Varier – varierfurniture.com

Imagining that I am a Physical 100 contestant is what gets me through my gym classes now. —India Block

OPINION: SEEN ON SCREEN p. 136

Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen – boijmans.nl Museum of 21st Century Design – m21d.org

into space. The further from Earth the archive flew, the more the cultural values of the objects inside the archive morphed, until they fell inside a black hole and only matter mattered. —Tiiu Meiner

The Journal of Design

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Seen on Screen

Words India Block Illustration Leonhard Rothmoser What is the perfect form? For Physical 100, the optimum human physique is quantifiable through a series of highly produced athletic challenges.

This new South Korean gameshow takes 100 burly participants and puts them through a series of gruellingly creative physical challenges. The contestants are drawn from different exercise tribes, with Olympic athletes rubbing toned shoulders with YouTube fitness influencers, soldiers sweating next to cheerleaders, and beefy car dealers competing alongside prize fighters. Only one can reign supreme and claim the 300m KRW (£192,000) prize. It’s an addictive show that will have workout-haters researching gym memberships.

Discerning the ultimate form for a chair is trickier. Like human bodies, they generally have a set number of legs, a back and a seat,1 but almost infinite 1

Yes, I know there are many exceptions to this. Please don’t come for me, chair nerds.

variations on the themes of shape and strength. But gathering 100 of design’s most lauded chairs into a room for a sitting marathon would not make gripping television.

Body and chair do, however, collide in the opening of Physical 100’s fourth episode, ‘The Underdogs’, as the 50 remaining contestants enter a swanky lounge to mingle and avail themselves of the facilities. Highlights include a fancy open gym setup and a floor-to-ceiling wall display of all the backlit protein supplements, powders and snacks a gym-rat could desire. But peeking out from a corner of the camera-filled space is a chair contender: Ekstrem

by Norwegian designer Terje Ekstrøm.

Debuting in 1984, Ekstrem’s wiggly geometry made it one of Norway’s first postmodern designs. Like the cast of Physical 100, it has a core of steel – although here, quite literally. A foam layer provides comfortable padding, with a colourful woollen cover that is knitted into a tube and pulled over this like a sock.

Aside from its arresting visual appearance, Ekstrem’s appeal lies in the multiplicity of seating styles it affords.

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Along with the traditional (and some might say, staid) mode of upright back, forward facing, two feet on the ground, you can sit sideways with your legs together or hooked over an arm rest, or turn around to face the other way with the backrest as an armrest.

Ekstrem, with its one form containing a multitude of functions, offers a nice thematic mirror to Physical 100. Our bodies may follow a general blueprint, but there are many ways they can be used. The programme’s first challenge invited contestants to hang from a bar over a pool, demonstrating that more muscle does not always guarantee prowess. As bodybuilders and the overly hench splashed down, a cross-fitter, gymnast, drill sergeant, firefighter and ice-climbing mountain rescuer prevailed. And sometimes vintage is better, as demonstrated by 47-year-old mixed martial artist Choo Sung-hoon, who vows to demonstrate the power of the middle-aged. There are as many ways to sit as there are to be strong.

ALCOVA/23 17 - 23 APRIL

EX-MACELLO VIALE MOLISE, 62 MILANO

Garden Futures Designing with Nature 25.03.2023 – 03.10.2023

#VDMGardenFutures #vitradesignmuseum www.design-museum.de