INTRO
WHEN THE DESIGN Museum was still in the shadow of Tower Bridge, in a former banana ripening warehouse built in the 1950s and converted by Terence Conran into a monochrome evocation of the Bauhaus on the Thames, Jeremy Lee was the personification of its restaurant. A chef, but also the public face of the Blueprint Café, ready to greet guests, and to talk about food. Against a backdrop of portraits of designers ranging from Philippe Starck to Ettore Sottsass, and Shiro Kuramata to Otl Aicher, Lee produced delicious food, served in a beautiful space, on solid china with wellmade knives and forks. It was a reminder of the close connection between food and design. Food is more than fuel, just as design is about more than utility. How things look shapes how they taste. And food, like design, is part of a system from farm to plate, from raw material to manufacturer to user. Food, just like design, is an expression of identity and culture.
Lee took Port’s managing editor Samir Chadha to Yorkshire to see where that cutlery came from. The factory David Mellor built in Shefeld, designed by the architects Michael and Patty Hopkins, and now run by Mellor’s son Corin, is a special place. David Mellor was a craftsman, a designer, a manufacturer and a retailer. It’s a reminder that the simple tools we use in everyday life carry so much meaning, and can add so much to the way that we live. The Mellor workshops carry on Shefeld steel making traditions in a contemporary way.
We also explore the always shifting and sometimes uncomfortable edge between art and design. Ayla Angelos talks to Kirsty Carter and Emma Thomas, the founding directors of A Practice for Everyday Life, graphic designers who have worked closely with artists, galleries and museums to make beautiful books. Antonio Citterio, an architect and a designer, discusses his cinematic vision for Maxalto; his imagined alternative vision of the contemporary. Over 30 years he has continually added to a furniture collection designed to be part of a life in the same high-ceilinged Parisian apartment.
Hans Ulrich Obrist, the category-denying artistic director of the Serpentine in London, discusses the diferent approaches needed to put design in an art gallery and art in a museum of design. Obrist’s exhibition on the work of Enzo Mari opens in London, after opening in Milan, and showing in Belgium.
Mari has never had the public visibility of other Italian designers of his generation, such as Ettore Sottsass, Andrea Branzi and Alessandro Mendini. He did design furniture and objects of simple elegance, but it was his refusal to allow himself to be co-opted by the commercial aspects of the design system that has made his work of continuing relevance to so many younger designers. Mari worked as an artist, as a graphic designer. He made toys. He did not feel comfortable with consumerism, and over-consumption. There might not be a need to design a new chair or a table when people could make their own from the Autoprogettazione blueprints that he produced, in an early form of open-source making. But even Mari also produced the kind of cutlery that Jeremy Lee would appreciate. Essential and considered.
Céramique by Ronan Bouroullec 2023
Photography by Angèle Châtenet
THIS IS PAGE NO. 7
THE PORT REVIEW OF DESIGN
A Practice for Everyday Life reflects on their 21-year journey shaping the design landscape, from pioneering publications to advocating for diversity in the industry.
A LOT CAN happen in two decades. If you’re A Practice for Everyday Life – the London-based studio founded by Kirsty Carter and Emma Thomas – the past 21 years have been spent building a portfolio replete with books for the likes of David Hockney, Lucie Rie, Sheila Hicks and Rachel Whiteread as well as branding and exhibition design for The Hepworth, Barbican and Serpentine Galleries. Many of those projects have grown into long-term collaborations. So when APFEL dial in from a sunny corner of their studio in east London, I’m not in the least bit surprised that there’s a floor-to-ceiling storage unit covering the wall behind them, their archive of publications displayed like trophies.
Carter and Thomas met during a postgraduate Art and Design course at the Royal College of Art; Thomas hails from Yorkshire and studied graphic design at Camberwell College of Arts, and Carter, from Cambridge, studied at Brighton College of Art. With a shared love of contemporary art, they decided from the get-go that they would work together. “We really liked each other and had a lot of things in common,” says Carter. One of their first publications, Lef tover, explored
the processes (or better yet, the leftovers) of 11 artists. Produced in their first year at the RCA with second-year curating students at Goldsmiths, the book became the catalyst for many new avenues and opportunities after graduating. The Goldsmiths curators graduated a year earlier than they did and became some of their very first clients. Miria Swain, for instance, who became assistant curator at Modern Art Oxford, commissioned the studio to design invitations and leaflets for a three-year exhibition named ARRIVALS, run with the Turner Contemporary in Margate. This led to an identity project for Rob Tufnell, who left Turner Contemporary to found his gallery Ancient & Modern.
When APFEL ofcially launched in 2003, the design scene was notably very diferent to what it is now. There were minimal female-led studios operating, the Tate Modern had not long opened in London, and many blue chip galleries from the US, like Gagosian, were arriving in the UK. The art world was becoming more sophisticated and there was an uptick in printed matter. Trade magazines and catalogues for commercial galleries were the height of publishing, and their designs were simple and “soulless”, says Carter. Most have fizzled out, or at least only live on as digital content. It was amidst this somewhat stagnant ground that Carter and Thomas saw an opportunity to carve out their own niche. “At the time, publications with artists were
less collaborative and exciting,” says Carter. “We saw a lot of potential to push what was possible in the field.”
One of their most prominent early undertakings was the identity for The Hepworth Wakefield – a pivotal project which started in 2009 ahead of the launch of the museum in 2010, located in West Yorkshire and near the birthplace of sculptor Barbara Hepworth. Working across signage, wayfinding, website, printed material and exhibition graphics, the studio developed a bespoke typeface and identity that mirrored the angular forms of the museum’s building, designed by David Chipperfield Architects, as well as the shapes and textures of the artist’s sculptures, which were on display in the new gallery. “At the time, we weren’t so aware of how special or unusual it was to work on all aspects of that project,” says Thomas. “It was quite minimal but with a maximum impact.” To this day, the studio still collaborates with The Hepworth, and has created publications for a range of artists exhibiting at the space, such as a monograph for painter Christina Quarles, whose work was shown from late 2019 to early 2020.
As the years went by, not only did the studio start collaborating with people and brands outside of the art world, like Aesop, Birkenstock and Rapha, but they welcomed Daniel Grifths onboard. Joining in 2018, he became a director 18 months ago. The team
The partners with some of their publication work, including a monograph for Sheila Hicks
of 10 now put their minds towards books of all heights and scales, whether it’s a big collectors’ tome with Vitra or a publication for Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian in Lisbon (both of which they’re currently needling away at). They also launched a type foundry during Covid, after the founders realised how large their typeface archive was becoming. “We really love the balance,” says Thomas. Between all their diverse pursuits, though, is an afnity for working with people doing interesting things in their field. Even their name, which is inspired by French scholar Michel de Certeau’s book The Practice for Everyday Life, alludes to the desire to understand and connect with the masses. “We are interested in habits and how people interact with the city and the urban environment,” says Carter. “We’re trying to help other people communicate their message, and to get that out of people, you have to really learn about dialogue and have an understanding of collaboration. It’s about conversation.”
At first glance, APFEL’s designs could be perceived as pared back – some might even call them quiet. Yet the more you observe and revel in them, the more you start to see all these tiny details rise to the surface, similar to the way the Rubin Vase shows diferent interpretations of an image. “We enjoy the idea of a slow reveal,” says Carter. “When you pick up one of our books, it’s not shouting out loud. There’s a layered element to the design which you see when you start to interact with it.” One pertinent example, released in 2022, is the publication design for Prabhavathi Meppayil, an Indian artist whose work is cemented in materiality and traditional Bangalorean artisan techniques, like goldsmithing. Featured in the book is her series Untitled, which sees metal wire embedded with layers of gesso, which is then sanded down to show the metal lines underneath the surface. APFEL designed a suite of bespoke lettering that nods to the delicacy of the metal wiring, executed between layers of semi-opaque paper and printed on the front and back.
The same multi-layered approach was applied to an identity for On Foot, an exhibition of fashion label JW Anderson – helmed by designer and Loewe creative director Jonathan Anderson – at Ofer Waterman in 2023. APFEL developed the visual identity, exhibition graphics, campaign, bespoke typeface and accompanying publication, all of which were designed to reference Anderson’s recent collections, which were exhibited alongside sculptural works from contemporary British artists like Lucian Freud, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Magdalene Odundo. The identity’s elongated, organic lettering was inspired by the artworks, while the more tapered strokes were influenced by a walk through London, specifically the shop signs, newspaper kiosks and archival fashion campaigns you’d pass by on route. The book was bound together through layers of materials and the lettering was screen printed onto an acetate jacket, cocooned by a softback cloth cover – the cloth matches the same hand-dyed fabric that cascaded the walls of JW Anderson’s exhibition.
Like many of their client relationships, the collaboration with JW Anderson continued and they also designed the invitations for the
JW Anderson AW24 womenswear and menswear shows. The womenswear show identity was made from tweed fabric and featured silkscreen-printed text; while the menswear show was designed as a 3D lenticular print of Christiane Kubrick’s painting ‘Jack and the Computer’ (1997). Both are concealed in an envelope and embossed with the brand’s logo.
Perhaps their biggest project to date, though, is the identity the studio created in 2022 for the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Cecilia Alemani. Alongside the signet, identity, exhibition graphics and merchandise, the studio created an “enormous” 900-page book – the description is confirmed as Thomas holds it up high to the screen. A large pair of eyes features strikingly on the cover, while others appear across the rest of the identity, including the posters, banners and billboards. A unifying symbol, the eyes have been pulled as motifs from artworks by Belkis Ayón, Felipe Baeza,
Tatsuo Ikeda and Cecilia Vicuña. “We worked with the artists to hone in on particular details of their work,” says Carter. What’s more is that, in a historical first, more than 90 per cent of the 213 artists who participated in the exhibition are female or gender nonconforming. “We love this idea because we push the same agenda,” says Thomas. Since setting up shop over 20 years ago, Carter and Thomas have come to terms with their influence. Today, only 29 per cent of design companies are female-led, which is a staggering statistic considering that 63 per cent of graphic design students are women. More seats have indeed opened up at the table, but there’s still a great disparity. “Emma and I used to shy away from the question [of diversity] over the years, and we used to get quite upset at the end when people would ask, ‘how do you feel about being two women running a studio’? Whereas now, we see a sense of responsibility for telling our story.”
Assorted loose paper in the studio
PEOPLE HAVING GOOD DESIGN
WORDS SAMIR CHADHA
THIS IS PAGE NO. 11
THE PORT REVIEW OF DESIGN
Jeremy Lee visits David Mellor’s Hathersage factory, seeing their process up close
“We never used to sell to restaurants 20 years ago. Just the odd bit, like the Blueprint Café,” says Corin Mellor, David’s son, who took over from his father in 2006. The Blueprint Café, upstairs at the Design Museum’s original Shad Thames site, was an early home to our guest editor Jeremy Lee’s cooking – he spent 18 years there as head chef. During that time, they used David Mellor’s Odeon tableware. On the way to the David Mellor factory in Hathersage, our cab driver was pleased to hear there’s still a local cutlery industry. A plaque at the station marks Shefeld as the home of stainless steel, but local production has dwindled. After a drive through the Peak District, we’re dropped of right next to the bespoke Round Building that makes the site famous.
Early on in our time there, Corin Mellor tells us it wasn’t initially planned as a public attraction. “What would happen was architects would come along and they would come to look at the Round Building, so we had a little table in the factory. So they could go into the factory, and we had a few knives and forks, occasionally, once a week someone would buy something. So that’s how it all started.”
Now, the site includes the original Round Building as well as two more traditionally shaped ones, redesigned from their old purpose as part of a gasworks. They’re joined by a bespoke central structure. Corin and his wife Helen live above the ofces, overlooking the factory. After Corin walks us through historic Mellor designs, he says we should “do the factory... I think that’s the key”.
As we walk into the Round Building – shaped as described, with a central skylight, Jeremy says: “Oh, wow, golly, this is a long-cherished dream.”
There’s a strong smell of something. I ask Corin if it’s steel: “Yeah. Cutting, grinding.” Corin shows us a rotating display, walking visitors through the cutlery production process.
“So this, this actually I made for the David Mellor Design Museum exhibition, and then it’s all glued on with our Araldite. And it’s been on ever since!”
Sheets of steel arrive in the factory, and then they’re blanked – cutlery outlines are punched out of them. Factory manager Andrew walks us through it. He started as an apprentice at 16, and now runs the factory. They tend to do a batch every couple of months, but we’ve caught them at a good time. The sheet goes through once and then back again, and once nothing else can be punched out of it, it’s melted back down into new sheets. The blanks fall out of the machine, warm to the touch. The machines have been going since the 70s.
Next is the forming tools – they look like moulds, and they’re used to shape cutlery later in the process. Corin tells us they’re handfiled by a man called Terry. Those go into a coining press – “actually the most powerful of the three presses we’ve got”, at 180 tonnes per square inch.
Next stop is the rolling pin – Andrew passes fruit spoon blanks between rollers, you hear a hammering noise, and the proto-spoon comes out flatter. Each flattening drags slightly, so as he passes the spoon through, he’s twirling it constantly between his fingers – “If you didn’t,
One of the dies used to form the steel cutlery
you’d end up with half a spoon.” It’s hard on the steel, so between stages, the steel leaves the factory to be annealed. In a break from the noise of the roller, Jeremy asks, “Each one is individually done? I mean, it’s jaw-dropping.”
They’re changing how they make Odeon’s non-metal parts, with a new injection moulding tool. James Lawless (who manages trade sales and communications) points us towards a pair of knife grinding machines. “They’re twins basically, one side is done with that machine, the other in that machine.” Corin shows us a commission in progress, noting the filing between fork tines hasn’t yet been done. We see rivets going in, and catch up to Andrew, now polishing a silver teaspoon. Once the cutlery has been through the degreasing tank, the last stage is the application of the David Mellor name, currently being rolled onto a knife blade. David designed the machine that does
it, and it was made in Shefeld. A little like an old label-maker, it uses physical pressure, from a foot, to press; Corin tells us, “If you get the pressure wrong, you end up with no D or no R. It’s a bit like when something’s burned in the oven.”
The second time Jeremy encountered Mellor cutlery was more recent. He tells us:
“Leila McAlister, who’s got Leila’s Shop in Calvert Avenue, at Arnold Circus – possibly the most beautiful grocery shop in London, and one of my favourites – she’s got a very good eye for good things, and so there’s a whole lovely collection of old bowls and pots and troughs and all sorts of things. I said, ‘That’s a very lovely spoon,’ and she said, ‘Oh, yeah, I thought you might notice that. No, it’s not for sale. It’s Thrift, made for Her Majesty’s Prisoners.’” Thrift was one of a series of commissions Mellor did for the government – his most fa-
Another of the dies
mous being the UK’s trafc light system and pedestrian crossing boxes. Corin tells us a bit more: “it was post-war, and these young designers were taken quite seriously by the government, amazingly.” Jeremy notes: “That’s the great thing with your legacy, is it’s all part of the infrastructure of daily life.” Thrift is all swooping curves; the knife is especially distinctive, with no ridge in the middle and a curve that goes out at both the handle and the end. It was used in all sorts of public institutions: prisons, hospitals and also on British Rail. Corin explains – “It didn’t need to be any more expensive, from a production point of view, than a bad design. It doesn’t cost any more.”
There are a few diferent stories wrapped up into David Mellor – there’s the story of a Britain that made things, one that valued well-trained craftspeople. There’s one of a government that made an efort to foster those things. There’s also the family itself. A lot of businesses start out family owned and artisanal, but eventually bow to milking a name for its brand value and cheapening the way they do things. I put this thought to Corin, and he tells me he’s “not really that interested in profit. We’re a little firm, and we’re a family
firm, and we have lots of super-loyal employees, like James. The main thing we’re bothered about is doing good design, and people having good design.”
He goes on: “You can sort of blow something. If you keep quite small, you keep control, and you’ve got control of your market and your customers, and you look after them and do a nice job, you can keep going. Whereas if you expand something, as often happens, you lose the way. The specialness has gone, and then the whole thing’s gone.”
After the factory visit, before we need to leave for the train, we sit down. Jeremy says, “The thing that strikes me, that’s so fascinating, is that at each... the level of detail, I’m now appreciating at long last. Which, of course, I knew, but seeing it...” Corin explains, “Obviously, with some people, all the little bits of work does sort of add up to a whole when you look at something. Obviously, they’re not going, ‘Oh, look at that bit. It’s been perfectly polished.’ But I think as a whole, you know, people do get it, luckily.”
Helen, Corin’s wife, points out one motivation that hasn’t come up yet – Corin’s still doing all of this because he’s “enjoying doing
it”. Corin agrees – “I like designing things!”
Hand-forged silver commissions still go to a local firm; they’re done with a hammer rather than dies, so need quite close attention. There are four people who can do the work, and when we’re visiting, one is unwell. Doing things this way is more complicated, and often riskier. It’s not as if you can ramp up production, though Corin doesn’t seem to want to. “I suppose I’m not really interested in having 40 David Mellors around the world. I like to be on the shop floor, and to meet the customers. It’s too personal for that.”
Jeremy says, as we’re getting ready to leave, that with “all these things, they need the heart”. There’s a lot of parallels between cooking and this sort of design, he points out – a lot of work to make something efortless that might go unnoticed at the other end.
David Mellor’s most engaged-with work is almost definitely the UK’s trafc lights, and the legacy Corin’s continuing in cutlery seems focused on detail rather than scale – most things are still made the same way, the slow way. Wherever he can, he’ll design by hand in the factory itself, working from sketches and filing down prototypes.
LV
Atelier Oï discuss one of their Objets Nomades commissions for Louis Vuitton – a stool that was part of the inaugural collection in 2012, and given new colours in this year’s release
How did the idea for the stool come about? Could you tell us a little more about the thinking behind it?
Inspired by the world of travel and the great expeditions of the late 19th century, we decided to reinterpret a travel classic: the folding stool. It is the fruit of the close observation of the principles of fine leatherwork, expressing craftsmanship and savoir faire through an interpretation of origami. In the process of materialising the art of folding, we transposed ancestral malletier techniques, such as the use of a rigid membrane wrapped in a soft skin, into modern materials. Thus was created a light and thin leather satchel that can be put into volume and transformed into a seat in a single movement, thus allowing a break in a journey.
What’s the most surprising influence on your work?
Nature is our primary source of inspiration. We let ourselves be surprised by its natural and physical efects. Based on our observations of the environment, we want to transcribe these natural efects and features into our creations, and then surprise visitors and take them on a journey. We capture nature’s ever-changing movements and integrate them into our installations. Nature then brings the objects to life. Our approach to design revolves around a deep respect for materials. We understand that each material has its own unique characteristics and capabilities, and we strive to work in harmony with these qualities. We engage in a dialogue with them, carefully observing and studying their properties. That’s why we often collaborate with artisans, tapping into their expertise to achieve the perfect use and expression of the materials.
Is there something you’d love to work on that you haven’t yet?
Given our transdisciplinary team, the ideal project would be to create a full-service project. A global project at the crossroads of disciplines, where architecture meets interior architecture, from design to olfactory design, ofering a 360-degree immersive experience in a single project. All guided by a holistic vision for future generations. Inspired by our House of Culture & Music humanitarian architecture project in Cambodia, we are redefining priorities and shaping the future of humanitarianism.
ICONIC DESIGNS FOR THE HOME WORDS DEYAN SUDJIC
PHOTOGRAPHY BLOMMERS & SCHUMM
THIS IS PAGE
THE PORT REVIEW OF DESIGN
Left to Right
Musa armchair, 2006
Manufacturer Maxalto, Italy
Designer Antonio Citterio b. 1950, Meda, Italy
One of two armchairs in this series from Maxalto’s 30-yearlong association with Antonio Citterio, each element of which is part of a carefully imagined world.
Spindle chair, 2000
Manufacturer Porro, Italy
Designer Piero Lissoni b. 1956, Seregno, Italy
Piero Lissoni’s stackable chair combines a chrome-plated steel structure with a moulded plywood seat and back.
Doris SH chair, 2022
Manufacturer Flexform, Italy
Designer Antonio Citterio b. 1950, Meda, Italy
Citterio’s Doris chair, made from solid ash, echoes the simple directness of late 19th-century English Arts and Crafts furniture.
.03 chair, 1998
Manufacturer Vitra, Switzerland
Designer Maarten Van Severen b. 1956, Antwerp, Belgium
The inventive and highly original Belgian designer Maarten Van Severen’s career was cut short. He saw design as a matter of reducing objects to their essentials, and made furniture in small numbers. Rolf Fehlbaum of Vitra was fascinated, and by the time of Van Severen’s sadly early death in 2005 had begun to produce his work on an industrial scale.
Left to Right
Smithfield Suspension lamp 2009
Manufacturer Flos, Italy
Designer Jasper Morrison b. 1959, London, UK
Jasper Morrison has the ability to give apparently simple objects, from chairs to lamps, a resonance that gives them what he calls “atmosphere”.
Klasen stool, 2006
Manufacturer Minotti, Italy
Designer Gordon Guillaumier b. 1966, Malta
Minotti, like many manufacturers, has adapted many of its products originally designed for outdoor use, including the Klasen stool.
Musa armchair, 2006
Manufacturer Maxalto, Italy
Designer Antonio Citterio b. 1950, Meda, Italy
The second of two armchairs in this series from Maxalto’s 30-year-long association with Antonio Citterio, each element of which is part of a carefully imagined world.
Left to Right
Ginger armchair, 2011
Manufacturer Poltrona Frau, Italy
Designer Roberto Lazzeroni b. 1950, Pisa, Italy
Designed both as a fixed or a swivel seat, the Ginger armchair balances a graphical look with comfort.
Arc table, 2009
Manufacturer Molteni, Italy
Designer Norman Foster b. 1935, Reddish, UK
Norman Foster has added a team of industrial designers to his architectural practice. His first project for Molteni, the Arc table, has since been followed by a series of products.
Bulbul kettle
Designed 1995, produced 2021
Manufacturer Alessi, Italy
Designer Achille Castiglioni b. 1918, Milan, Italy
Achille Castiglioni took the form of a curling stone as the shape for his kettle for Alessi, one in a sequence that began with designs by Michael Graves, Richard Sapper and Philippe Starck. Like Graves, Castiglioni gave the spout a whistling bird.
Left to Right
Mondrian tables, 2020
Manufacturer Poliform, Italy
Designer
Jean-Marie Massaud b. 1966, Toulouse, France
Jean-Marie Massaud used the same structural form at a variety of scales – for a low table, or a higher dining version.
Glossy Outdoor table, 2019
Manufacturer Kartell, Italy
Designer Antonio Citterio b. 1950, Meda, Italy with Glen Oliver Löw b. 1959 Leverkusen, Germany
Antonio Citterio’s long-term relationship with Kartell began with a wheeled trolley. The Glossy table reflects his work to reshape the identity of the company’s products.
Doge Laguna table, Designed 1968, produced 2023
Manufacturer Cassina, Italy
Designer Carlo Scarpa b. 1906, Venice, Italy
Carlo Scarpa was one of Italy’s most respected architects of the second half of the 20th century. Cassina’s table has both the refinement of his architectural work, and its presence.
A NEW KIND OF CONTEMPORARY WORDS DEYAN SUDJIC
THIS IS PAGE NO. 33 THE PORT REVIEW OF DESIGN
Antonio Citterio’s imagined worlds for Maxalto
IN THE WORLD of furniture, there is nothing else quite like Antonio Citterio and his 30-year relationship with Maxalto. What began as a casual conversation with Giorgio, the son of B&B Italia’s founder, Piero Ambrogio Busnelli, about reviving the company’s defunct artisan timber range has become a significant brand in its own right. Each piece of furniture made for Maxalto is designed by Citterio. But over 30 years, time has seemingly stood still. In every catalogue it is never quite clear which pieces are new, and which were designed in 1995. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that it is not so much that time has stood still, but that a new generation has caught up with an idea that took shape in Citterio’s mind a long time ago. When he started on Maxalto, Citterio had an instinctive sense that there might be a moment when a new generation would become more interested in a way of living that was more formal than his own, and which he had begun by designing for.
Maxalto – which had a false start in the 1970s and came back to life in the 1990s – now has a unique identity. The architects Tobia and Afra Scarpa, who were from Venice, came up with the name; Venetian dialect for ‘of the highest quality’. They designed some exquisite craftsman-made chairs that were impressive in themselves but did not present a broader point of view.
Citterio has turned Maxalto into a complete and convincingly imagined world. If Ralph Lauren conceived a world of WASP privilege and made the clothes that brought it to life, Citterio has made the furniture for a way of life inspired by progressive, cultured, bourgeois Parisians. For Citterio it’s not nostalgia, but an alternative form of the contemporary. You can imagine the invisible occupants of the rooms portrayed in successive Maxalto catalogues reading Sartre and Les Cahiers du Cinema, listening to jazz, collecting African art and waiting anxiously for their teenage children to come home unscathed from the Boulevard Saint-Michel, protesting against the colonial war in Algeria.
The first idea had been to produce a few pieces of furniture using oak or wenge wood, and see what happened. The design language would be contemporary, but as Citterio puts it, with perhaps with a warmer atmosphere than the work that Citterio himself, and many other designers, from Gaetano Pesce to Mario Bellini, were producing for B&B Italia at the time.
In fact, what Citterio had in mind was to follow the example set by Jean-Michel Frank, the gifted French designer who died in New York during World War II aged just 46. Frank belonged to the same generation as Le Corbusier but did not feel the need to make his furniture look like a piece of mechanical equipment. Citterio has never replicated specific pieces of other designers’ work, but for those who share his encyclopaedic knowledge of the evolution of 20th-century furniture from
Charles and Ray Eames to Jean Prouvé, the quotations and references are part of what gives Maxalto its character.
“The beginning was casual. It was not totally clear what it would be. OK, some wood, a little bit traditional, but it was not yet a total concept, or a new brand. Certainly it was not yet the possibility to create a complete 160 piece collection. In 1995 Maxalto was just five products,” Citterio says. “It was modern, not traditional. Traditional is when you design scenery. I am doing something for real people.”
His thinking began to crystallise after he rented a classic Parisian apartment for a three-week shoot for the first Maxalto catalogue.
Filling a real apartment with chairs and tables got Citterio focussing on the lives of the people who would be using them. “After two or three years we understood it would be the real idea of the scenography. We had a family in mind.” He continues to use the same apartment for catalogue shoots to this day.
Furniture exists in the context of an architectural framework. Citterio came to see Maxalto’s essential character as rooted in the concept of equipping individual rooms. He characterises B&B’s furniture as designed for “contemporary space, which is to say, a series of fluid spaces, with no separations between one and another. You don’t distinguish where you eat from where you relax.” In clear contrast, Maxalto furniture is designed for distinct rooms, each with a defined, formal character. “Maxalto has a dining room, with a table, it has walls and cabinets that are all arranged symmetrically in space.”
Citterio has always seen that the best way to design furniture was to think about the people who would be using it, and their way of life. In his early days, he used himself as his own model. “To do a new sofa you must imagine somebody. For B&B’s Sity sofa, I imagined myself, partying. I thought what are all the things I can I do on this sofa, and I tried to imagine all the diferent things that can happen on a sofa. The new generation of my son is more formal than I was, they invite people home. You are served with a perfectly arranged plate, not just some salami, red wine and a bit of gorgonzola the way I did it. Now they like a little formality. They like Maxalto, they like the ritual that it implies, and the symmetry.” Maxalto gave him the chance to think about other lives. In making each successive catalogue, he saw himself as working like a film director, evoking life through spaces, images and objects. The photographs showed the way that Citterio expected his pieces would be used, but he was also beginning to design for the specific spaces evoked in the Maxalto catalogues.
The still photography for the catalogue has been brought to life in a series of short videos that reflect Citterio’s cinematic ambitions. One of them opens with the camera confronting the elaborate double doors of a Parisian apartment building. Twin cast iron lion’s heads holding brass rings in their jaws fill the screen. The camera pulls back sud-
denly and cuts to show a French hero on top of a column in the middle of some nameless square in a fashionable bourgeois quartier of Paris. There is a jerky tilt up to the sky, revealing the facades of a couple of Haussmann’s boulevards. Then you are back inside the building in a glass elevator rising in the stairwell, glimpsing stained glass. The door to the apartment opens, and you find a sequence of enfilade rooms, parquet floors, panelled plaster walls and a ceiling that is ornate, but not too ornate. In the background is a pair of double windows, each one reaching down almost to the floor. Cast iron fireplaces sit within marble surrounds. On the console table is a polished Cambodian head looking out over the cast iron balcony towards what is not the Seine or the Eifel Tower, but the presence of both is implied. The head shares the console with Anton Corbijn‘s book, The Living and the Dead, and a heavy slab of an Eileen Gray monograph. The camera lingers on the stitched leather of a sofa, the grain of a solid oak table, the texture of the wool upholstery of the sofa. Later, a glimpse of the railings on the Rue de Rivoli next to the gardens of the Jeu de Paume hint at its actual location.
We briefly see a writing desk. The urge to look inside what, in itself, is a highly suggestive piece of furniture – given that most people have given up handwriting – to learn more about occupants temporarily in another room, is all but irresistible.
Inside the desk there is a diary and clutch of pencils, but no computer. In fact, nowhere in the apartment is there a television, or a music system, or any other piece of technology, not even a telephone. There is an Art Basel catalogue, but no newspapers. There are suggestions of a meal on the table, but young people aren’t much in evidence, not even seenbut-not-heard children. There are no toys to be seen, but you can spot a Bauhaus teapot, what seems to be a constellation of Fornasetti plates on the wall, Tom Dixon candlesticks and Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni’s Taccia table lamp, to suggest occupants with eclectic tastes.
Citterio has maintained the Maxalto idea with a remarkable singlemindedness. On occasion he was ready to abandon the project, rather than compromise it. “I believe in it. In the muddle of 30 years, it’s not always easy to keep the direction, and there have been diferent owners. Over the years I have been asked ‘why is it always black and white, why is it always the same approach, why can’t you change?’ I always said ‘no, I can stop if you want.’ Now they understand. If I tried a colour, or changed the house, or did other kinds of furniture, it would destroy the idea of the movie.”
Where can Maxalto go next? “I still think that I am a contemporary architect,” he replies. “But in designing furniture there is a lot of memory involved. Maxalto is another version of contemporary. If I ever did another Maxalto, I would need to find another house. In the future it’s going to be virtual, but I could imagine an indoor-outdoor house in Brazil.”
I SUGGEST YOU LOOK OUTSIDE THE WINDOW INTERVIEW DEYAN SUDJIC
THE PORT REVIEW OF DESIGN
HANS ULRICH OBRIST, artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries since 2006, is arguably the art world’s busiest curator. This year, however, his most intriguing show is at The Design Museum – a retrospective on Enzo Mari, a designer, artist and teacher who continues to resist categorisation. Here Deyan Sudjic and Hans Ulrich discuss Mari, his work, and the particular challenges of a show as ambitious as this
How did you come to have the idea of working on an exhibition with Enzo Mari?
In a way, it began when I met him. The late 90s were a really interesting moment at the Iuav [Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia], the Venice architecture school. They invited Olafur Eliasson, Stefano Boeri who later became the editor of Domus and me to do a series of seminars. Basically we said, you know, let’s not divide architecture and
I did with Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier. It began 30 years ago and it’s still going on. We thought that it would be nice to do an exhibition based on instructions and how-to-do-it manuals. I was in the art world, so I knew the history, from Duchamp to Moholy-Nagy, conceptual art, and Fluxus. But it’s only through Do It’s endless tour that I started to learn about what role instruction art plays in Asia, in Tropicalía and Brazilian art history, and what role it plays in African art history. People started to say, “You should also look into other disciplines.” Initially I was only looking at art, and then I started to research architecture, design and music.
And design is a set of instructions.
Exactly, and I came across Mari. Even before I met him in the 90s, we invited him for Do It. Autoprogettazione [Mari’s programme of self-assembly instructions for simple furni-
Equipment for research on colour and volume relations. 1952. Photo attributed to Paolo Monti
art in the Vasari way. Lives of the Artists, Lives of the Architects – we combined our seminars, which was kind of a thing, but it actually worked. It was before I moved to London, I was a curator at the Musée d’Arte Moderne in Paris at the time. Every second week I took the night train to Venice on a Thursday. I would arrive in the morning, teach on Friday, and then go for the weekend to Milan to work with Stefano on Domus. Then there would always be these dinners at Stefano’s home in via Donizetti. They were extraordinary, Vico Magistretti would be there, Nanda Vigo would be there, very often on the same evening. Achille Castiglioni was still alive, Ettore Sottsass would come. There would be Stefano’s mother [architect and designer] Cini Boeri and Enzo Mari.
Even before that, a key thing in my encountering Mari was a show called Do It, that
ture] was always, I think, very, very popular. I was kind of amazed by Mari. There was a book of his which I came across. [The Function of Aesthetic Research, published in 1970] It’s an incredible masterpiece, which he designed himself. It was his first retrospective when he was around 40. He made the graphic design. I think it’s genius, and so I’ll always carry it with me.
He was fascinating because he brought all these disciplines together. Industrial design, design, science, visual art. He was part of Arte Programmata [the 1962 kinetic art exhibition curated by Bruno Munari and supported by Olivetti]. I started to have deeper conversations with him. I would go and visit him and make recordings of our conversations. I realised that the complexity of his world was almost irreducible. Each time we met, we could cover another ground. For example, we
did one session just on book design. He had an amazing practice. He not only designed his own books, but also did books for Antonio Negri [the Italian political philosopher sentenced in absentia to 30 years in prison for his alleged association with terrorism].
We did another interview about Arte Progamata with Nanda Vigo. It was quite a short period when Mari really was a visual artist. Then we did another one on environmental questions.
I was always saying to Stefano Boeri, you know, I dream one day that we can do a big show about Mari. Each of those conversations would be a chapter. One could do an extraordinary, big show about Mari, that had never happened before.
Boeri said we needed to do this show one day, but we didn’t really know exactly where. It wasn’t completely right to do it in an art museum. The Musée d’Arte Moderne in Paris, where I was at the time, wouldn’t feel completely right. Even if he had a period as a visual artist, he needed to be contextualised as a designer. So it was a project which didn’t have a home for years. Then Boeri was appointed as the president of the Triennale [in 2018]. Literally the hour he got appointed, he rang me, and he said, “we have the venue”.
Mari was always positive about this? Because he did need quite careful handling. He could become quite abrasive in the wrong circumstances, but he was always positive about the idea?
You and I met through the jury for the Kiesler Prize that went to Cedric Price. In that respect Mari is quite similar. Both Cedric Price and Mari had a quite strong antagonism to their field. I mean to their main field – I would say Mari’s main field is design – and he had an extreme antagonism, particularly to the commercial side of it. In a similar way to Cedric Price, who had a very big resistance to architecture.
But paradoxically he would also work for Hermès. And make objects for Danesi?
Exactly. And he would also design shows for Cartier. He did do that. But he did have a resistance... I don’t think it was so much the idea of working with brands he was against, because he did it himself. But he was really against the idea that things would be done and wouldn’t last. When we went to see design shows, he would always say “this will not last”. But also, I had the feeling that because of my not coming from the design world, it was kind of easier, maybe.
You weren’t part of a tribe.
In a way. Maybe I was more neutral.
And did he have any involvement in the way that the exhibition shaped itself?
He had a very strong involvement. I went to see him with Boeri multiple times. There was actually an exhibition in Turin in 2008, part of the Torino World Design Capital, which I went to visit. That was, of course, before we could start on the exhibition, we just went
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from curiosity to see the show. It’s the last show he designed during his lifetime. He was very, very involved in that. He supervised the exhibition design and grouped the whole oeuvre of thousands of works according to diferent themes and groupings. He also developed a plinth for the display.
When I started on the exhibition, he was already quite frail. It was the last two or three years of his life. He couldn’t attend the opening of the show. It was a complete tragedy. He died the day after the opening, and Lea Vergine [his wife, a critic and curator] the day after him.
That last show of his was a departure point. I have always found it interesting to see how one can restage exhibitions and exhibition designs. From there he was comfortable for us to let it evolve. Lea Virgine was very involved. We had many conversations with
her. Both Mari and Virgine loved my suggestion that we should invite artists and a few of his designer friends – Nanda Vigo was the foremost, to do homages. He loved this idea. He was very interdisciplinary. It went from Dozie Kanu, who is a young artist, to Virgil Abloh, who was obsessed by Mari, and they all did tributes to him.
Do you think people understand what he really was? Perhaps that is a ridiculous question. He was so many things, he was the kind of designer that you can take what you want from.
I think that’s the idea of the show, that everyone can find their own thing in it. There seems to be an ever-increasing interest in Mari by younger generations. And I was wondering, what’s the reason? We started to do
design shows at the Serpentine where we give carte blanche to a designer; Konstantin Grcic, FormaFantasma and then Martino Gamper. All roads always led to Mari. When I asked them, “Who are the designers who inspire you?” they all said Mari. Martino Gamper even included Mari in his show at the Serpentine.
I think it’s also Mari’s environmentalist approach and his idea of never doing anything which is not needed that interests an even younger generation, like FormaFantasma. I was looking again at an interview with Mari. He told me, “I suggest you look outside the window, if you like what you see, there’s no reason for new projects. If, on the other hand, there are things that fill you with horror to the point of making you want to kill those responsible, then there are good reasons for your project.” That has to be a very Mari sentence.
Enzo Mari. Photo by Ramak Fazel
spread: The Nature Series. No. 2/ the pear with Elio Mari. 1961. Photo Danese Milano
So transformation comes from need in a way.
A couple of times during the Salone [del Mobile Milano], I would ring him up, and say, “Do you want to go and see some shows?” And he obviously wouldn’t really do that usually, but then he found it amusing. I remember once he stopped and began to scream: “This is not going to last!” A crowd of people started to gather, it was a whole scene.
I don’t know the notion in design… in fashion it’s fast fashion. Maybe a word is needed to describe it in design. FormaFantasma, in their exhibition at the Serpentine, analysed that an IKEA chair would have to last several generations in order for the resources to be justified, And I think that’s how they explained to me why Mari is so relevant for them. But then every generation will find something else in him, no?
What is the story about his donation – to the Triennale – of his archive, with the proviso that it’s not shown again for 30 years?
That was also quite an extraordinary moment. It was the last time we recorded him – about a year before the opening. Stefano Boeri and I went to see him. At the moment when it all seemed to be falling into place, the retrospective would be happening, all of a sudden, in his last interview (which we then published in La Repubblica because he asked us to make it public) he announced, in
a very determined way, that though he does want to give the work to Milan, he does not want the work to be shown again for 30 years.
What was in his head when he said, af ter 30 years?
I just think it’s this act of resistance.
Was he just trying to be difcult?
An act of resistance, but also, no, he did say in this interview that he just feels that the state of design today is such that he feels it needs a pause.
He wants to wait for better times?
Yes, wait for better times. And then I explained to him that maybe actually for people to see his work might make the situation better. It was a whole thing, you know.
Making an exhibition about design, is that entirely a diferent activity from making an exhibition about art?
It’s diferent. I clearly come from the art world. I’m a curator who learned to do exhibitions in the art context. But then I always felt that it’s important to kind of connect. And that’s also why the interest in Mari, to connect art to design, to architecture, to science, to music, and to have a very interdisciplinary kind of
curation. I think exhibitions are a great way of bringing all these fields together. I found it interesting to bring designers and architects into my shows in the 90s. When we did Cities on the Move, Toyo Ito, and Isozaki and Sejima would send maquettes, and then they came to see our show, and they realised, “wow, actually, artists are doing experiences, so for your next iteration, we’re going to send you something else.”
But then, of course, at a certain moment, after having done for many years this idea of bringing designers and architects into the art world, I started to be invited into the design and architecture world, every now and then. It doesn’t happen that often, but it happens every now and then.
Maybe you can shoot this down, but I’ve always had in my mind this idea that design needs more help when it is being exhibited.
It needs more scenography, possibly, and that is somehow seen as being inappropriate in an art context. Every so often I read Remy Zaugg’s book The Art Museum of My Dreams... and I find him excoriating everything I’ve ever tried in an architecture exhibition.
I’m aware I haven’t answered your question. I was sort of circling around it because it’s a really interesting and complex question. I think with architecture – which is the reason why we’re doing pavilions here at the Serpentine – that the best way to solve the conundrum is basically just build it. In the sense that I think maquettes of architecture are really difcult for an audience who isn’t so familiar with architecture. That doesn’t mean only to do pavilions, it can also be very interesting with architecture that architects come up with a display feature or an experience inside, like Norman Foster’s brilliant Pompidou show (2023). But then with designers, to come back to your question, it’s not that one shows maquettes, they are the actual work. So it’s a less big conundrum.
I worked in the Barragán house [in Mexico City] I curated a show there. And then I also did one in the Lina Bo Bardi house [in Sao Paolo]. That’s another connection to design and architecture – I curate these shows in these houses, and then it’s almost like one lives in these houses for the time one curates the show. Inhabiting and keeping it in your life.
I will never forget we were in the Barragán house, with Cerith Wyn Evans and with Philippe Parreno and Roni Horn, and various other artists were there. All of a sudden, the record player worked again, because he had a record player in every room. And Cerith started to put records on, and then we were looking at some videos with Barragán’s voice. The house suddenly came alive.
With Mari, it’s diferent, of course, because the exhibition is not in his house. Sadly, that’s my biggest regret.
That is something which society is missing out on. These important apartments and ofces, which are like Gesamtkunstwerk, where visionary artists or designers work for their entire life. They should be kept so people can visit them in the future. With Mari, sadly, it couldn’t be preserved. But in any case, we are obviously not in the house. I do
Two Timer for Established and Sons. Design Sam Hecht and Kim Colin, Industrial Facility. Photo by Peter Guenzel
believe that it makes a huge diference in an exhibition to have videos in which he talks. In a one-to-one situation people can sit in front of the monitor, put the headphones on, and almost meet him. We met him, but the majority of the people who see the show will never have met him.
I hope that the Mari show can give people diferent entry points and experiences, more than just the objects.
I loved his of f ice and his f iling system, two piles marked ‘Importante’ and ‘Meno Importante’.
That’s why I think his ofce should have been preserved, that would be magical. The idea was always that we wanted people to visit the Triennale and then, in small groups, the ofce. That was my kind of premise, you know, so that the exhibition would be in both places. I then was having a sleepless night, and Stefano called me and said, “This is not possible.” And that kind of – undermined is a bit of a strong word – it sort of weakened the curatorial premise of the show in Milan, because I had this idea of having these two places, you know. And then I came up the next morning with this idea that we could ring the great Mimmo Jodice. Who is now, I
mean, he’s very old. and one of the greatest photographers of his generation, he’s based in Napoli. And who also knew Mari since the 60s. We would get Mimmo Jodice to absolutely, mimetically photographically document the now no-longer-existing studio. So at least we would have that for posterity as a sort of photography thing. The photos then became part of the show.
There’s a diferent time scale, strangely, for furniture and for technology. Furniture can still be relevant 100 years af ter it was designed.
Mari has that total timelessness. It’s also not a design show only, because there are all these other dimensions to his work. So in the exhibition, at certain moments you are in an art show, because you have his Arte Programmata period, then you’re at certain moments in an industrial design show. Then you’re in a furniture show, and then at a certain moment, you know, you’re in a... you have his whole educational thing, you know, these are the lessons.
Is curating changing? You might be described as the successor of Harald Szeemann, and one could say, of the creative use
of what curating can be, are we now moving into a more collective period?
I have always thought of curating as a collective process. I worked with Kasper König, [founder of the Portikus gallery in Frankfurt and former director of the Ludwig Museum in Cologne] who was my mentor. But I did interview Szeemann. I studied his work and I met him as a teenager growing up in Switzerland in the 1980s. So it was certainly important just to be aware at such an early age that the idea of curator, and the kind of role they can play in society, existed as a profession. He was important in that way, but from the beginning I never followed the model of signature exhibitions. For me it’s always a collaboration, it’s always a collaborative practice,
[The Mari exhibition is] a hugely collaborative practice. It’s a collaborative practice with the designer, with all the artists who are involved, with Francesca Giacomelli, who is the scholar, and a great expert on Mari. It’s a collaborative practice with Stefano Boeri, because this has clearly been developed with him, you know, from the beginning. It’s a collaborative practice in many diferent ways. I would say all my shows have been the collaborative kind of endeavours. I never really curated a show on my own, or very rarely.
Lo zoo di Enzo by Nanda Vigo. 2020. © Triennale Milano.Photo by Gianluca Di Ioia
Design operates with more formal constraints than most creative disciplines. The designers and makers below all come from the photographic world, so were all asked about that transition – from the limitless to the tangible and finite
