Port Review of Design Issue 1

THE PORT REVIEW OF DESIGN

THE PORT REVIEW OF DESIGN

THE PORT REVIEW OF DESIGN

6 THINKING ABOUT DESIGN 8 CRAFTING IDENTITY Four designers weaving identity into their craft Ayla Angelos 14 NOT JUST RIGHT PLACE RIGHT TIME Talking to, and reflecting on, Peter Saville Deyan Sudjic 25 IF CLAES OLDENBURG MADE A CHAIR Cassina revive the Soriana sofa 28 A ROOM TO SIT DOWN IN Taking apart Herzog & de Meuron’s new chair 31 SOMEHOW INTERCONNECTED Michael Anastassiades and Fabio Cherstich’s collaboration for Flos 36 A SEAMLESS BLEND Minotti’s updated Yoko collection Ayla Angelos 38 NEW AGE, OLD TRICKS Elizabeth Goodspeed 41 SUPERMAX Discussing the Max sofa with Antonio Citterio Hannah Williams 42 SIT Eleven seating icons 54 AN AGITATOR OF MEN & MACHINES Meditating on the new Ferrari Roma Richard Williams 58 DESIGN RESEARCH UNIT Michelle Cotton 64 SLIGHTLY IMPOSSIBLE Sam Hecht & Kim Colin of Industrial Facility Deyan Sudjic 72 REYNER BANHAM Deyan Sudjic 74 YVES KLEIN Nils Leonard

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THE REVIEW DESIGN ThePORT PORT ReviewOF of Design CREDITS IN HERE OVER 2 LINES PLEASE AND THANKS

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THINKING ABOUT DESIGN

A long time ago, design used to be called ‘decorative art’, to distinguish it from what was then called ‘fine art’. At the beginning of the 20th century, Britain’s art schools taught their graphic design and product students ‘commercial art’, presumably in an attempt to further distinguish it from the real thing.

Many cultures have valued the useless above the useful, and few things are more technically useless than art – making contemporary artists the 21st-century version of a shaman, and art a new form of religion.

Design is more ambiguous than that simple duality. Since it first emerged – in its contemporary form – with the beginning of mass production, designers have been divided between those that understand what they do as primarily a cultural or social activity and those who are mainly motivated by selling more product.

That divide persists to this day. Extinction Rebellion has convinced many designers that their primary task is to stop working altogether on products that do little else but damage the planet. For some of them design can be understood as a critical activity, to be used to ask questions

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about the way that we live. Others do what they can to ameliorate the worst effects of a carbon-based economy. At the same time there are still many who are interested in exploring the mechanisms of consumption, and others who try to fill the gap left by the digital explosion that has made so many objects redundant.

This, the first issue of Port’s regular design review, explores the many routes to understanding the subject. The lines between art and design are still sharply policed by the gallery system, but in this issue we look at two very different kinds of design that have managed to transcend them. Art curator Michelle Cotton explores the legacy of the Design Research Unit, Britain’s first modern design consultancy, co-founded by the critic Herbert Read. DRU was funded by an advertising agency, but underpinned by the belief that it was possible to combine culture with commerce to create a more civilised public world. To that end, DRU commissioned the distinguished sculptor Naum Gabo to work on a plan for a car. Even though it came to nothing, that project is now in the archives of the Tate.

Half a century after DRU established itself in London, Peter Saville took on his first graphic design project in Manchester.

He gave a visual identity to an emerging wave of young musicians, and his work has also been acquired for the Tate’s archive. It is a suggestion of how the lines between cultural forms are blurring, how they play off each other. Saville’s work for New Order’s Power, Corruption & Lies used an image of a flower painting by the 19th-century artist, Henri Fantin-Latour, ‘A Basket of Roses’, a design that would later impact Raf Simons’ work as a fashion designer, who had originally studied furniture design.

Elsewhere in this issue, we visit the studio of Industrial Facility, designers who have learned lessons from DRU. Richard Williams looks at the heritage of Ferrari, and we meet four young practitioners who are making their mark. Michael Anastassiades discusses his collaboration with theatre designer Fabio Cherstich for Flos, and we look back at the impact of Reyner Banham as a design critic.

These pieces are all engaging with the same idea, in the end – that design is (like most art) a powerful way to understand the world around us. Deyan Sudjic

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CRAFTING IDENTITY

by Ayla Angelos.

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PHOTOGRAPHY: SEBASTIAN BRUNO

In an increasingly interconnected world, design has become a meaningful tool for self-expression

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Above: Bisila Noha Previous spread left: Rio Kobayashi Previous spread right: Subin Seol

Throughout history, design has unfurled as a vehicle for self-expression. Consider the ground-breaking designs of Eileen Gray, a pioneer of modernism in the early 20th century. Her E-1027 seaside villa – replete with shape-shifting furniture – was not merely a marvel of architecture but a defiance against gender norms, and a means of carving out space in a male-dominated industry. Or Emory Douglas, a graphic artist and Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party, whose revolutionary designs represented Black American oppression and helped define protest art at the height of the Civil Rights era. Otl Aicher – a designer most revered for his identity for the 1972 Summer Olympics in Germany – opposed the politics of Nazi-era

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Germany and believed that designers were responsible for building a better order. This led to the co-founding of education centre Ulmer Volkshochschule in 1946, accompanied by a graphic poster with the title ‘Wiederaufbau’, which translates to ‘the rebuilding’. Aicher played a pivotal role in reconstructing post-war Germany.

In the present day, where ideas dance freely amidst a mosaic of cultures, the importance of preserving and expressing one's individuality cannot be overstated. Design has proven to be an instrument for making sense of oneself and communicating it to the masses. It’s more than aesthetics; it’s a canvas where individuals can paint their innermost narratives through materials, processes and technology. This concept pulses vigorously through the veins of

many contemporary practitioners today, like Subin Seol, a London and Seoul-based designer who skilfully weaves her Korean heritage into her oeuvre. “Design is an intrinsic reflection of one’s identity and self,” she says. “I’m not just crafting objects; I’m translating my personal journey, challenges and joys into a tangible form.”

Subin’s formative years were bathed in Korean history, stories and craftsmanship, forging the bedrock upon which she built her creative perspective – a juxtaposition between Korean tradition and a modern feel. Her Korean Art Deco collection, shown at Seoul Design Festival in 2020, stands as a magnum opus for its fusion of bold, geometric Art Deco style with traditional Korean art, the latter designed after natural forms. Meanwhile, her Remembrance project, unveiled this year, comprises a dining chair and coffee table derived from reclaimed timber handrails sourced from a brutalist landmark, the now-demolished Fawley Power Station, located in Hampshire. An “ode to architectural heritage”, the project invites viewers to honour its memory through the physical elements.

Even with the prevalence of British architectural features, her Korean heritage still reverberates within the Remembrance project – attained through the use of natural, repurposed materials and delicate composition. “Whether it’s the patterns, shapes or even the subtle gestures in my designs, my Korean heritage invariably shines through,” she says. “Every design choice, from material selection to the crafting technique, tells a story of where I’ve been, what I’ve learned and how I perceive the world. The transformation of ideas into three-dimensional objects serves as a testament to my evolving identity.”

This exploration of self resonates within the ethos of Bisila Noha, a London-based ceramic artist, researcher and writer of Spanish-Equatoguinean heritage. With clay as her muse, Noha was drawn to pottery for its affinity with tactility. “I love the fact that it is a direct conversation with the material,” she says. “The way my fingers are dealing with the clay and shaping it is very relaxing and meditative.” As time went on, a deeper fascination for the material’s history grew – specifically the way in which clay has been part of civilisation for thousands of years, and used to make bricks or vessels for storing food and water.

“It is such an integral part of our survival.”

At the start of her creative journey, Noha felt inclined to use her practice as a way of proving her Spanish-ness, employing traditional Spanish objects – like Mediterranean water containers crafted in hues of warmth and vitality – as an influence. Around three years ago, her parents brought back clay from Baney, a small town in Equatorial Guinea where her father is from. “Through the process of making with this clay, I’ve connected to my African side,” she explains. “It’s been an interesting but also very deep and transformational process.” When she returned to Baney in April,

Photography by Adrianna Glaviano

2097 Matte White

by Gino Sarfatti 2023 flos.com

Above: Darren Appiagyei

from the moment she arrived there was an irrefutable sense of homecoming – “for so many years I had been dealing with and touching the land.” So in a sense, Baney clay acted as a catalyst for her to open up about her heritage, resulting in her most personal project to date, Baney Clay: An Unearthed Identity, a collection made with mixtures of stoneware or porcelain and Baney clay. It also sparked her creative ethos to reclaim the history of women of colour in pottery, and to challenge Western views on art and craft.

Rio Kobayashi, a London-based designer of Japanese-Austrian heritage, also finds solace in the practice of his craft.

Raised in Japan by an artisan family, he imbibed the spirit of craftsmanship almost inherently. His parents are hippies – his

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dad a potter and mum a conservationist with pink hair – and they lived in an eccentric house with a large workshop and a mass of land. “Many people treated me as a special person,” says Kobayashi of his experiences growing up mixed-race in the countryside. Not only does he have a German accent in English, sometimes it’s Italian or Austrian Tyrolean; he’s also fluent in Japanese and German. “My existence was already confusing for many people.”

This melting pot of cultures went on to inform his outlook on design – that is, an aim to create anthropomorphic furniture pieces lavished in patterns, maximalist silhouettes and a reverence for creating unexpected outcomes. “I like the idea of mixing everything up, making it all ambiguous and confusing to people.”

This is evident across Kobayashi's entire portfolio, from a reconstructed three-legged table assembled in a “bat-like” hanging manner, to Shima Uma, a mixed-material dresser designed for Dolce & Gabbana that’s inspired by the ambiguity of a zebra’s blackand-white stripes. More recently, Kobayashi released a collaborative project Manus Manum Lavat, which translates to “One hand washes the other”. Made in conjunction with a group of friends who each work across textiles, graphics and art, he set out to recreate a living room of his life, filled with a medley of playful furniture pieces that you wouldn’t find anywhere else. A table with a tuna fish painted on the top; or hand-shaped soaps appearing like they’re reaching out to wash the palm of the other; the collection pivots away from a lone journey of self-discovery and instead shows us what happens when a group of like-minded individuals (and friends) come to ride on the same path. Three posters were commissioned for the exhibition, which provoked a welcomed response for Kobayashi; “My grandma didn’t understand the posters,” he says. “I was trying to get people to feel even more confused.”

Kobayashi is an apt example of how craft can allow designers to press their own imprint onto a tangible object. In a similar vein, UK-based wood artist, curator and public speaker Darren Appiagyei uses locally sourced wood from Shooters Hill, London, to create sculptures seeped in Ghanaian tradition. “As I grew older, I developed my identity and understood what it is to be from Ghana,” he says. From pottery and weaving to beadwork, masks and wood carving, Ghanaian art is strikingly textured and raw. Appiagyei applies these attributes to his own work, but instead of striving for a flawless finish, he seeks out imperfections from the wood, slowly carving out cracks and texture between the posts of a lathe. “I try to keep the authenticity of the wood and its origin key to my design.”

With each curve and contour, Appiagyei maps out the formation of wood and essentially opens up a dialogue between the history of the natural world as well as his own. A series of Pyrographic Vessels put this process to use through pyrography, a mark burning technique which, when applied, subtly exposes the grains and enhances the tones of the wood. “I never want to disturb the natural aspects or features that make the wood interesting,” he says. For him, it’s important to appreciate the material, be explorative and enjoy the journey. “It’s a very therapeutic process for me. I call it a labour of love.”

From remedial hand-play to the crossing of cultures, the stories of these designers underscore the profound role that design can play in understanding identity and heritage. As we continue to navigate the complexities of an interconnected world, their work demonstrates the enduring power of craftsmanship and the ability for design to transcend borders and time. It’s clear that design is a homage to the diverse cultures that make up our global community.

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NOT JUST RIGHT PLACE RIGHT TIME

by Deyan Sudjic.

Taking stock of Peter Saville as his work enters the nation’s art collection

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For the Tate to decide to acquire a selection of work by designer Peter Saville is not entirely without precedent. The museum took on the extensive archive of David King, the graphic designer who, among other things, designed the Electric Ladyland album cover for Jimi Hendrix, and The Who Sell Out for The Who. But powerful though these two designs undoubtedly were, along with King’s work as an art director for the Sunday Times, and his designs for a variety of left-leaning causes from the Anti-Nazi League to Rock Against Racism, it helped convince the Tate that they came with King’s unparalleled collection of Soviet photography from the heroic era, printed books and images of the victims of Stalin’s purges.

The Tate’s interest in Saville is different. Saville’s brilliant work for Factory Records, and in particular Joy Division and its successor New Order, captured the imagination of a generation not just of British artists as adolescents, but also Americans such as Julian Schnabel and Robert Longo.

For five decades, since first starting to work with Anthony Wilson – Cambridge University graduate, BBC TV presenter, music world entrepreneur and co-founder

The Factory Poster, 1978

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of Manchester’s Hacienda Club – Saville has done as much as anyone to reshape the visual language of culture.

“I was in my last year as a student and heard that he was starting a club. I waited in the lobby of the studio, introduced myself to him, showed him my book of Jan Tschichold (the modernist German typographer who had died a couple of years earlier). I explained that it was the kind of thing that I would like to do.” The encounter led to a poster for the Hacienda’s predecessor, a regular club night. Six months later, Saville was in the room when Wilson and his friend Alan Erasmus began discussing the possibility of releasing records by some of the musicians playing at the club, and became the designer for Factory Records.

He has dissolved the category division between what was once described as high art and popular art, to the extent that he was played by Enzo Cilenti in Steve Coogan’s film 24 Hour Party People. Saville has worked with the Pace Gallery to release an artwork that combines sound and vision at this year’s Frieze, and could now be understood as having transcended the sharp edges between design and art.

Saville and his school friend Malcolm Garrett were responsible for triggering a late-flowering golden period for the not-

so-minor art form of album design. The album-art genre emerged in the 1940s, when Columbia Records employed Alex Steinweiss as its first art director. He transformed what had previously been utilitarian paper sleeves into colourful cardboard albums that mixed illustration, collage, and photography. Despite the tight restrictions of the format, the album cover transformed from humble packaging into an art form. Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Hamilton and Andy Warhol all conceived covers (respectively for Talking Heads, The Beatles and The Velvet Underground).

Wilson gathered around him a group of designers and musicians that took what they were doing seriously. What made Saville’s work stand out was an openness to a wider range of references and interests than his peers. Ben Kelly, the interior architect who designed the Hacienda, used an image derived from Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Coffee Grinder’ painting on his letter head and business card. One of Wilson’s bands called itself The Durutti Column. The name comes from Buenaventura Durruti, the anarchist who led a column of fighters from Barcelona to Zaragoza to fight fascism during the Spanish Civil War, by way of a strip cartoon made by a situationist group in the 1960s. Their

first album came in a sandpaper cover that threatened irreparable damage to any vinyl that it happened to come into contact with. The Hacienda itself was another reference to situationism. It comes from a text

by Ivan Chtcheglov, who plotted to blow up the Eiffel Tower and wrote ‘Formulaire pour un urbanisme nouveau’, one of the founding texts of situationism, aged 19.

“And you, forgotten, your memories ravaged by all the consternations of two hemispheres, stranded in the Red Cellars of Pali-Kao, without music and without geography, no longer setting out for the hacienda where the roots think of the child and where the wine is finished off with fables from an old almanac. That’s all over. You’ll never see the hacienda. It doesn’t exist.

The hacienda must be built.”

Saville always credits Garrett and Kelley for triggering his interest in using design to explore some of the less obvious resonances and nuances of contemporary art. “Through the conduit of my friend Malcom Garrett, but not my tutors, I had become interested in the canonical modes of art and the niche codes of pop culture tribes.”

Unknown Pleasures, Saville’s first album cover for Joy Division, came out in 1979. This was a year after he managed to graduate from Manchester Polytechnic,

with a less than enthusiastic response from his tutors, who did not see him as a suitable role model. He used a found diagram of a pulsar, a distant star blasting out rhythmic blasts of energy, from the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy. For Closer, Joy Division’s next album, he used a photograph taken a couple of years earlier by Bernard Pierre Wolff (the French photographer and art director), of a turn-of-the-century tomb sculpted by Demetrio Paernio for the Appiani family in the Monumental Cemetery of Staglieno in Genoa. The image and the use to which it was put could be understood on multiple levels.

Unsettlingly, Joy Division’s Ian Curtis took his own life shortly before the record was released. Saville had shown the group a collection of Wolff’s photographs and they had all accepted Saville’s idea. The design has been subject to a great deal of analysis. It could be interpreted as an evocation of the sombre melancholy of the music, or of taking its mood from Wolff’s photography – who would himself die prematurely. Was it the original sub-Canova sculpture that Saville was inviting us to consider, or his interpretation of it? Adding yet another layer, the New York artist Julian Schnabel refers to Saville’s design in his own painting, ‘Ornamental Despair’.

By then, Joy Division had become New Order, and its album Power, Corruption & Lies (1983) used a reproduction of ‘A Basket of Roses’, by the not-that-well-known French artist Henri Fantin-Latour.

It was an intriguing choice on several levels. Fantin-Latour was a contemporary of Degas, and a friend of Whistler, but his careful realism made his work seem quite conservative. He had not had a UK gallery exhibition in decades when Saville found the image. Saville saw the inescapably short-lived lush beauty of cut flowers as a representation of imminent corruption, and was using it as a response to just the title New Order gave him. “I never had the chance to interpret music while I was doing a cover,” says Saville. “If you went to a session, you might get to listen to four hours of drumming, or a demo tape, neither of which would bear much relation to the final recording.” Fantin-Latour in his own lifetime had been interested in music, with his lithographs and paintings inspired by Wagner and other composers.

Saville did not want to put type on the cover; instead he used a colour code to spell out the title and the band’s name. On the reverse, there was a colour wheel that provided the key to the code. He did something similar with Blue Monday, a 12-inch vi-

Unknown Pleasures by Joy Divison, 1979 Cover design Peter Saville from an image sourced by Bernard Sumner

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Drawings for the Ceremony cover art, including encoding text into the colours, recently acquired by Tate

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nyl single with a die-cut sleeve evoking a floppy disc, using the colour wheel code to spell out the name of the tracks. As Saville explained, “it reflected the hieroglyphic visual language of the machine world.”

Britain was particularly fertile ground for designers specialising in album covers. Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell established art design group Hipgnosis, and produced their first cover in 1968 for Pink Floyd’s A Saucerful of Secrets. This was the start of an approach that was supplanted by the punk explosion, with Jamie Reid’s work for the Sex Pistols or Barney Bubbles’ design for Elvis Costello and the Attractions’ Get Happy!! Album art’s last flowering before the digital explosion swept it away was the creative abstraction of Peter Saville’s colour wheel design for New Order’s Power, Corruption & Lies, and Malcolm Garrett’s work for The Buzzcocks’ A Different Kind of Tension.

Saville however, has not limited himself to music. He has had as much impact in the last decade on fashion, a much more well-organised and well-funded industry.

He is not, in Saville's own words, particularly interested in the mechanics of graphic design, though he is most often described as a graphic designer. He is not running a conventional design studio –

he has tried that twice. First, on his own account, when he lost so much money that he faced insolvency. Then again, when he joined Pentagram as a partner in 1990.

That didn’t work out either. He was moving from the music world with very limited budgets (despite the high-profile nature of the work) to become part of a group that relies on generous corporate creative budgets.

Against expectations, he was able to bill clients enough not to cost the collectively owned partnership anything, but he was asked to leave after two years nonetheless.

It was a long time ago and the wounds have healed. Saville was asked to speak at a dinner last year to celebrate Pentagram’s foundation in 1972. “I think,” he recalls, smoking a cigarette on the outdoor terrace of the restaurant in which we are having lunch, “that I was guilty of a profound error. When I joined, I had the impression that the existing partners had invited me to become part of Pentagram because they recognised that the original idea of the firm was in need of a little updating.”

Pentagram’s official history suggests that the younger members were thrilled but the old guard failed to come to terms with Saville’s star status within the design world. That is not entirely the way that Saville sees it. “The kind of work they

Burberry identity, 2018. Creative direction Peter Saville for Riccardo Tisci. Typography Paul Hetherington

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were doing was based on visual puns. The studio entrance had a brick wall covered in the architect Theo Crosby’s collection of African masks; I would have taken them down, though my grown-up self today probably wouldn’t. What I quickly realised was that I was quite wrong. My partners, or some of them at least – Alan Fletcher and I were always able to playfully taunt each other – thought that because I had agreed to join, I was endorsing them, proving that they had been right all along. I was acknowledging that my work, so different from their approach, had been in error.

I was the opposite of the New York 1960s school of visual wit and puns. It was a powerful visual style that appealed to 90 per cent of the population and over time, I’ve come to understand it. But back then I was interested in something different. So I was actually speaking to the other 10 per cent of the population.”

Despite Peter Saville’s misapprehension about Pentagram’s ambitions, he would have brought something significant to the studio. He has a finely tuned ability to sense exactly where the world is going. Not in the manner of charlatan trend-forecasting consultancies that babble on about the “phygital”. Saville has had the ability to shape creative weather, not only

for the music world, but more recently for the fashion and luxury market. The artists and fashion designers that were students in the 1980s grew up with New Order on playlists; Robert Longo got to know him in the 1980s, Peter Doig sold badges designed

by Saville. Raf Simons acknowledged Saville’s archive as the point of departure for two of his collections.

It’s not just being in the right place at the right time, nor being in the right generation. Though being at art school in Manchester in the 1970s and taking part in shaping Factory Records and the Hacienda certainly helped. Saville is closely connected with the revitalisation of Manchester; he had the title of the city’s consultant creative director from 2004 to 2011, and is still closely involved with its ambitious new cultural centre – known, until Aviva had to step in and fill a funding gap, as Factory International. He moved to London shortly after graduating.

He was certainly in the right place hanging out in Plaza, a shop on Chelsea’s King’s Road that sold suits designed by Antony Price. They were shown flat on boards, as if in a quartermaster’s store. The window display was a slide projector. The message was definitely hostile, and designed to deter those who were unlikely to find the clothes

inside appealing. Price was responsible for creating Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music’s distinctive look, and came into the shop one day with two albums that he had bought “not because of the music but for the covers”. They were Saville designs, and led to a commission for Ferry’s Flesh and Blood.

When Paul McCartney was rehearsing for a worldwide tour, this portfolio persuaded him to fly Saville to San Francisco, to talk about what the live album might look like. “He played ‘Hey Jude’ during the sound check, and it felt like he was playing for me.

I suggested that it would be good to use documentary photography as if it was a Beatles tour,” remembers Saville. The result was the Tripping the Light Fantastic cover.

When music moved on, so did Saville.

He has pivoted toward the world of fashion, a shift that began with a commission from a young photographer called Nick Knight for a business card and poster. “I did something very rational, and Nick told me that he was profoundly disappointed, he wanted something more like Ceremony.

I was working with Brett Wickens and he said, ‘He wants a coat of arms. Let’s give him one’. He was delighted.”

Soon after, Knight came back with a project that he was working on for Yohji Yamamoto and the fashion art director

Marc Ascoli. Knight persuaded them that they needed a graphic designer. Saville’s work with Yamamoto was the beginning of a new approach to fashion communication, as his record projects were for music. He would go on to work for Ferragamo, Calvin Klein, and most visibly for Burberry. “I was with Riccardo Tisci in an office at Burberry, surrounded by archival references. He told me, ‘Choosing the right logo for a trench coat is easy, but to use that same logo on a chiffon blouse, that is my problem.’”

It is a field that both fascinates him and bemuses him. “It’s a handicap or the failing of my vanity. I only want to do things I can personally relate to. What would I do if it were me? What if I was Calvin Klein – it’s an entirely subjective approach to communication in a world that is objective.

I understand about ‘merch’, I am still getting regular payments for work I did for music that is driving the merchandise business. What I am doing for fashion is not so different. I am designing signifiers.

I was sitting in a café the other day, and I saw a gauche looking kid walk past with his parents, and he was wearing a Burberry sweatshirt that retails for £700, with my logo printed across it. I know what it costs to make, and I couldn’t help wondering what it was that made him want it.”

Burberry identity, 2018. Creative direction Peter Saville for Riccardo Tisci. Typography Paul Hetherington Ferragamo identity, 2022. Creative direction Peter Saville Calvin Klein identity, 2017. Creative direction Peter Saville for Raf Simons. Typography Paul Hetherington

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IF CLAES OLDENBURG MADE A CHAIR The insides and outsides of Cassina’s revived Soriana sofa

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It’s not hard to see why Tobia and Afra Scarpa choose Soriana as the name for the curvaceous and highly strokable – almost feline – sofa that they designed for Cassina more than half a century ago. Soriana is the Italian word for a tabby. Only in production in its original form for 11 years, it is now back in the firm’s catalogue, albeit using new materials. It won Italy’s best-known design prize, the Compasso d’Oro in 1970.

The judges were impressed by the simplicity of its construction: a sculpted foam block, wrapped in a single piece of leather or textile, given shape by a chromed steel tube.

Tobia Scarpa, now aged 88, and his late partner Afra played an essential part in the development of contemporary Italian design. Tobia, only son of the celebrated architect Carlo Scarpa, designed his first chair when he was still a student. It was shown at the Milan Triennale in 1959. Tobia and Afra worked for most of the family-owned businesses that were turning Italy into the world’s leading centre of modern design.

They did chairs for Dino Gavina, lamps for the newly founded Flos and furniture for Molteni. Above all they designed for Cesare Cassina and Piero Busnelli, two entrepreneurs who worked together as co-owners of C&B for a while, and then went their own way when C&B became B&B Italia.

In the 1960s they designed Cassina’s showroom in Meda and a factory for B&B Italia. They began a long relationship with the Benetton family, building their first

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factory in 1964 and designing the template for the company’s worldwide chain of fashion shops.

Cassina was one of the first manufacturers to make landmark pieces of modern design an essential part of its output. The masters programme – iMaestri, as it was branded in Italian – brought back into production the iconic range designed not only

by Le Corbusier, but also by Pierre Jeanneret and Charlotte Perriand. Cassina also makes Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Gerrit Rietveld designs. It put Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin armchair into series production for the first time, something that had never been the case during the architect’s lifetime.

Cesare Cassina commissioned the Neapolitan design historian Filippo Alison to oversee the Maestri programme at the end of the 1960s. Marco Sammicheli, director of the Museo del Design Italiano and curator of the design, fashion and crafts sector at the Milan Triennale, described the rigour of Alison’s approach. “It was necessary to find a manufacturing method that used the techniques of our own time, in accordance with principles the designer himself would have approved of. The objects reproduced in this way are neither fakes nor copies.”

The Soriana range, made up of a sofa and armchair, was originally commissioned by Cesare Cassina in 1969, and manufactured until 1980. Since then, surviving vintage pieces have enjoyed a second life with collectors. More recently, Soriana became part of the fascination for what has come to be

known as mid-century modern; it started cropping up in Architectural Digest photoshoots. Partly, its appeal was its exotic status as a lesser-known piece by two major designers. But it was also a reflection of the optimism of its time. “It’s like if Claes Oldenburg made a chair; or a beanbag with more structure,” says Rodman Primack, the former executive director of Art Basel, Design Miami.

That second life as a vintage piece is what led Cassina – no longer the family-run business that it was in 1969, but part of American-owned Haworth – to reissue Soriana. The original piece was one of the early examples of a sofa using polyurethane foam in place of conventional upholstery’s horsehair and metal springs. Now that polyurethane is seen as less than benign, the new Soriana is based on recycled plastics.

The seat is padded with 100 per cent recycled blown fibre made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET) recovered from the not-for-profit enterprise Plastic Bank.

The original design pushed the surface as well as the filling of the sofa, as Tobia explained. “At the beginning, the workers did not understand that the leather covering was not supposed to be taut… but to appear like a soft, creased fabric curled around this soft mass and held together by a sort of giant metal spring.”

This new design is part of the research carried out by Cassina LAB to promote wellbeing and circular design, and is available in a range of upholsteries and leather.

PHOTOGRAPHER GAËTAN BERNÈDE STYLING GEORGIA THOMPSON MODEL GABRIEL AT W MGMT

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A ROOM TO SIT DOWN IN Deconstructing Herzog & de Meuron’s new chair

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The Porta Volta chair takes its name from the Herzog & de Meuron redevelopment of one of Milan’s inner suburbs, but it has its inaugural installation in another H&dM building later this year. The reading room of Israel’s new National Library in Jerusalem, a dynamic, light-filled circular space, will have a specially tailored version.

It’s a chair that is designed to have a relevance beyond a single building, even one as significant as a national library. While the office has been responsible for items of furniture and lighting in the past, Jacques Herzog suggests that they have been spontaneous and intuitive responses to specific projects.

This chair, based on robust geometry and solid craftsmanship, has a different quality.

“The Porta Volta chair is an exception.

I wanted to design a chair with an armrest because there are hardly any that I like. I wanted it to be comfortable, welcoming, and commodious. Like a room to sit down in, rather than just sitting down on something.” It suggests a project that is a piece of furniture design, rather than something designed as an extension of an architectural idea.

The project is rooted in H&dM’s working relationship with Unifor, the Italian company which fitted out the interiors of the Porta Volta building, and took on responsibility for fitting out the reading room. Unifor has a history of collaborating with leading architects from Aldo Rossi to Jean Nouvel, resulting in the realisation of a series of memorable designs. It is unusual for Unifor’s sister company, Molteni, to take on a product that is the outcome of an architectural project and make it part of its wider catalogue, but that is what has happened with the Porta Volta.

There are historical precedents for both reading rooms, and library chairs. The circular library has its roots in the baroque period, represented by such designs as James Gibb’s Radcliffe Camera, in Oxford. The typology was given a boost when the British Museum’s first librarian, the Italian-born Sir Anthony Panizzi, built a circular reading room designed by Sydney Smirke – topped by a cast iron dome and surrounded by iron stacks on which to store books. A circular reading room became a signifier for many libraries, much as a forest of steel trees holding up a soaring roof has become the sign of an airport.

Herzog and de Meuron are fully aware of the precedents for circular reading rooms, but this is not designed as a quotation or a reconstruction. For them it is an important element in connecting the surface levels of a library with the extensive underground layers that a modern library (using the storage techniques of an Amazon warehouse) depends on. Equally, the chair – in its form and materials – has the seriousness to live up to its role in supporting scholars, physically and also psychologically.

Its design reflects the practice’s architecture: characterful and purposeful without being obvious. It has the presence to make itself felt amidst the cultural resonance of the National Library. But no, it is neither nostalgic, nor based on a historical precedent.

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SOMEHOW INTERCONNECTED Tracking Flos’s latest collaboration with Michael Anastassiades

CREDITS IN HERE OVER 2 LINES PLEASE AND THANKS

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My Circuit is the outcome of Michael Anastassiades’ long-term relationship with Flos. He is a designer with an unusually wide range of interests, from handmade bamboo and poured pewter artefacts to industrially produced office furniture. It reflects an eclectic background.

He trained as a civil engineer at Imperial College in London but got more out of the Royal College of Art where he worked with Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby on a series of conceptual designs that treated the discipline more as a means of asking questions than of providing functional solutions.

Flos is the company responsible for many of the most memorable lights of the last 60 years, from the Castiglioni brothers’ Arco floor lamp to Konstantin Grcic’s Mayday work lamp.

Anastassiades’ work is always beautifully conceived, technically resolved and with a poetic aspect. He is fascinated by the way people use light in the domestic context to define the spaces in which they live. My Circuit is a striking departure from the insistent linear geometry and technocratic image of conventional track lighting – Anastassiades wanted to find a way to introduce a freer-flowing geometry while still allowing lighting schemes to be easily reconfigured.

The first version of My Circuit was based on pre-formed rigid elements, some curved, others straight, that could be configured together to achieve a range of layouts. It was an idea that came from Anastassiades’ adolescent memories of building Scalextric racing car circuits from a kit of prefabricated plastic parts with inset metal channels carrying electricity. He based the current version on a fully flexible track that allows users to draw fluid lines on the ceiling, positioning light fittings at any point along them. Anastassiades was as interested in My Circuit’s practical offering to users as he was in its quality as an object.

“We moved on to use a flexible tracking which is made out of a white rubber extrusion. The power comes from the wires on the side. Certain elements are installed on the ceiling as small sections and then the tracking clips between them. You can create a kind of drawing that eventually connects the different points where you would like lights to hang from.”

Paradoxically the effect is to make the track both more visible than a conventional rectilinear system, but also less intrusive.

My Circuit is like a memory of the florid plaster cornices of baroque ceilings. “Like all the ideas that I’ve done, it started with a very long process of trying to understand how light works within the domestic setting and how people improvise to arrive at a result that they’re really happy with.”

Barbara Corti, now Flos’s Chief Creative Officer, asked Anastassiades to design an

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installation based on My Circuit for Milan’s design week this year. It would convey the culture of the brand, while reflecting the essence of My Circuit and its potential.

She introduced him to Fabio Cherstich, the Italian theatre and opera director with a reputation for innovative productions. Six Acts – My Circuit, an installation staged at Flos’s Professional Space in Milan, was the result, the product of a creative dialogue between the three of them.

“Michael and I talked a lot about the right way to show My Circuit. The idea to work with different configurations was the starting point of our conversation, and how we could create a series of everyday interactions, between light and the track that is an important part of the product, and between light and people,” Corti explained.

Cherstich had not worked with either Corti or Anastassiades before, though he was a close observer of his work, and of the design world in general. “It is always a challenge working with somebody for the first time,” he says. “It was clear from the beginning what we shouldn’t do, not be too narrative, and not be too theatrical. We knew that time and rhythm would be important.”

Cherstich is accustomed to designing performance spaces, such as opera sets, himself but in this case he deferred to Anastassiades. “That was the most interesting thing for me,” he says. “I had the chance to play with the space designed by Michael, to get inspiration from it, and to enter into a dialogue with him. Everything I do is focused on the space of the stage. Not just as a character, in this case it’s the main character, the performance would not exist without Michael and his space.”

Corti worked to make the most of the collaboration: “Michael’s poetics are about purity. His work is about subtraction in order to keep the concept pure. For this project we put a lot of things on the table, the performers, a photographer that shot each configuration that changed everyday.

We worked with additions rather than by subtraction; it was complex to manage, but the feedback for the final experience was very positive. I saw a lot of people coming back on successive nights.”

Anastassiades designed the setting for a performance choreographed by Cherstich.

It was a backdrop for six performances that involved a set designed to evoke a domestic interior in semi-abstract terms, and a group of actors. Each evening the set was reconfigured to suggest a different sequence of activities, with lighting adjusted to reflect them. “Every day, we made sure that the settings were distinctly different. It was not just a matter of the simple movement of one or other light. One day it was a dining room, the next it was a combination of a workplace and bedroom together with a desk or a table, but quite abstract at the

same time. The furniture was not really about defining the function, but it was suggesting the activities that could take place around them.”

During the day, Anastassiades’ sets occupying Flos’s spaces were a sculptural presence. Each evening they were occupied by a group of actors, animated by a metronome, carrying out a set of routines that reflected the different activities implied by the configuration of furniture and light.

“I didn’t want it to be seen as a formal performance. Fabio and I discussed ensuring an element of surprise. There would be no formal beginning, no curtain being opened, nobody announcing, ‘Now we have started.’

We envisaged people in the environment occupied by pieces of furniture, and lights hanging above it, with people curiously exploring it, and then suddenly, somebody who has been sitting there, who happens to be, of course, an actor, starts doing something.”

Anastassiades created something between a stage, a set and an installation, or “habitat” as Cherstich describes it. “Habitat is a word that suggests it is taking care of humans, that this is a space for humans, even if they are not there,” he says. “There is another layer, which is how this habitat fits inside another habitat. The relationship with the outside was really very strong, even without the performers being present.”

“The floor is not the floor of the space, it’s the floor that Michael designed, and that was very helpful for me; it created a tiny gap. I gave the performers some dogmas to follow. The only way for them to use words would be by singing, adding to the already completely surreal effect. The way to express feelings was to transmit them in an anti-naturalistic way. It creates a very interesting game between performers looking at each other, doing actions together or alone, looking at the audience, who are looking at them from inside the space, but also from outside through the window to the street.

We chose to have performers all dressed in the same very simple monochromatic genderless way, to give a specific twist. It was suggesting the idea of a community, it removed the idea of style, or of casual or not casual. There was no makeup, and the performers worked in their own hair styles.

Somebody is reading a book or playing chess, or dancing, but everything was a bit slower than reality, to create a dreamy atmosphere.

The metronome gave them the rhythm. But when it stops, the silence is even more powerful. And every 45 minutes a performer enters with a triangle, to look at the light as if were a constellation of stars in the sky.”

For Corti the most powerful aspect of the project was in the way that it built up a space without conflict. “It’s a quality that people attending recognised. It encouraged them to stay, to appreciate it. They wanted to feel part of it.”

GROUP PORTRAIT: PHOTOGRAPHY RICCARDO SVELTO HAIR AND MAKEUP GIUSI MERTOLI ALL OTHER IMAGERY: PHOTOGRAPHY MATTIA GREGHI

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A SEAMLESS BLEND

by Ayla Angelos.

Minotti’s updated Yoko collection, inspired by Japanese & Scandinavian roots

Not only is Minotti characterised by sleek, contemporary furniture stamped with “Made in Italy” excellence, it’s also heralded as a true purveyor of collaboration. After Alberto Minotti established the company in 1948, the small-scale workshop evolved into a globally recognised brand. Over the years, Minotti has built a reputation for delivering modern craftsmanship that fuses artisan methods with technological advances. It’s also released a plethora of collections made in partnership with the likes of nendo, Marcio Kogan of Studio Mk27, GamFratesi and Inoda+Sveje.

Minotti first met Inoda+Sveje, a designer duo consisting of Kyoko Inoda and Nils Sveje, in 2021. In the following year, the Japanese-Danish duo released their debut collection, headed by the signature Yoko armchair, Lars sofa and Sendai seats

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– all of which encapsulated the designers’ affinity with organic shapes, natural materials and subtle aesthetics emerging from their Japanese and Scandinavian heritage.

This year, the pair have expanded their Sendai seat family with Minotti, featuring a new sofa, swivel armchair and footrest, plus an update of the Sendai Cord Outdoor collection, designed with cord in an earthy palette of ecru, burgundy and dark brown.

With clean lines and functionality underscoring the design, the collection strives to seamlessly enter the living space like a soft, gentle caress. Below, we unlock the key influences behind the collection, how it’s pieced together, and why it’s rooted in the meeting of two cultures.

Japanese-Danish cultures. Can you tell us about the main sources of inspiration behind this collection?

The intention behind the Yoko collection was indeed to showcase the craftsmanship, especially in collaboration with Minotti, focusing on the expertise in upholstery to explore the interplay between upholstery and the perception of cushions. In our woodworking, the emphasis has always been on finding beauty in basic forms and processes, leading to a sensibly aesthetic outcome.

Importantly, our approach involves a trust in our cultural heritage to be inherently expressed in our work, rather than forcing it. We hope the resulting designs reflect a seamless blend of cultures.

The Yoko collection appears to blend contemporary and timeless design elements seamlessly, with a fusion of two

The process of creating a new collection can be quite intricate. Could you walk us through your creative process for the col-

lection, from inception to final product?

In summary, the process begins with dialogues with Minotti, emphasising shared values in the broader context of use, materials and processes. Within these dialogues, certain aspects resonate and form the basis of our design brief. This is the start of a more structured design process. Initially, we explore concepts collaboratively, we assess feasibility and technical approaches before transitioning to the detailed drawing phase. Throughout this process, we have frequent, constructive meetings and consultations with the Minotti family and specialists.

What materials have you chosen for this collection, and why were those specific materials selected?

An important part of our design is the tactile reward of natural elements. Wood, PHOTOGRAPHER GAËTAN BERNÈDE STYLING GEORGIA THOMPSON MODEL GABRIEL AT W MGMT

carefully shaped and finished, invites a sensory experience. This tactile intimacy extends to our choice of leather and textile upholstery. The aim is to create a relaxing moment for both the body and the mind.

Every detail, from the curves to the surface, is crafted to be caressed.

The visual aesthetic of the collection is undeniably striking, each individual piece is smooth and sleek with a modern elegance. Could you elaborate on the design elements and principles that you’ve incorporated into the pieces?

Simplicity and functionality are core principles. Each component is crafted with clean lines and organic shapes, fulfilling a specific purpose while harmonising with the entire piece. This approach allows the pristine materials and exquisite craftsmanship to come to the front.

Functionality is key when it comes to furniture. How do you balance the aesthetic appeal of the Yoko collection with its practicality for everyday use?

We work from practicality towards aesthetic expression, believing that the inherent beauty of the processes involved in working with natural materials enhances the aesthetics when done correctly. In our view, appeal should complement, not hinder, practicality.

As designers, what are your hopes and goals for how people will integrate the Yoko collection into living or working spaces?

We hope our chairs will become cherished favourites, maybe caressing them now and then or sharing a kind word about them. Our aim is not to dominate your living space but to harmoniously blend in, providing comfort with subtle elegance.

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NEW AGE, OLD TRICKS

by Elizabeth Goodspeed.

The commercial rebirth of counterculture In the late 1960s, artist and futurist Stewart Brand introduced a unique publication: the Whole Earth Catalog. At a time when information was neither as universally accessible nor abundant, the Whole Earth Catalog was a groundbreaking resource – a manual for holistic living before wellness was a hashtag. While the catalogue indeed operated as a grassroots marketplace, it far transcended that primary function, offering encyclopaedic “access to tools” through products, explanatory charts, step-by-step guides, and more. Items listed were required to be either high quality or low cost, useful as a tool, relevant to education, or easily available by mail. For those seeking alternative lifestyles, the Whole Earth Catalog became an indispensable bridge between innovative ideas and actionable practice, defining both a philosophy and a recipe for living a life more attuned to nature and a spiritual power higher than oneself.

The appearance of the Whole Earth Catalog reflected this radical content. Besides the iconic cover, which featured stark photography of the planet – a direct result of founder Brand’s own 1966 campaign to have

NASA release a photo of the “whole earth” – the imagery used within the catalogue itself was notably eclectic, the result of a system where every listing was provided by individual contributors unrestricted by guidelines. A single spread might include an off-kilter mix of botanical illustrations, high-contrast black-and-white photography,

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and hand-drawn diagrams. Brand actively rejected design norms of balance and breathing room in layouts for the Whole Earth Catalog, saying, “Glamorous white space has no value in a catalog except as occasional eye rest. I figure the reader can

close his eyes when he’s tired.” The publication embraced unconventional typographic and compositional approaches as well: a simple type system made up of the utilitarian Univers and the psychedelic mainstay Windsor (itself a resurgence of a typeface designed during another anti-establishment artistic period, the Arts and Crafts movement) peppered irregular, densely populated pages – occasionally deviating into unexpected typesetting approaches like diagonal or circular text. Together, these deliberately informal design cues accentuated the publication’s core philosophies of practical utility and separation from mass production.

But the design and content of the Whole Earth Catalog, as well as other associated countercultural publications of the time like Ram Dass’s Be Here Now, often connected two seemingly disparate domains: science and spirituality. During the ’60s and ’70s, these realms were not always distinct; at this moment in time marked by tremendous social and political upheaval, there existed a unique intersection between the empirical world and the esoteric one. This confluence was, in part, a reaction to rapid technological advancements like space exploration, which prompted individuals to contemplate

their place within the universe. While science sought to unravel the mysteries of the cosmos, quantum mechanics, and the very fabric of reality, many began to see parallels between these cutting-edge theories and ancient spiritual teachings. Spirituality during this era, especially within the New Age movement, embraced academic vocabulary and concepts, with terms like “energy”, “vibration”, and “frequency”, typically reserved for scientific discourse, now used to describe occult phenomena instead.

Similarly, the exploration of consciousness, whether through meditation, psychedelics, or other means, was likened to scientific experimentation – a journey of discovery into the inner workings of the mind.

It’s no surprise, then, that formal visual tools previously used to illustrate real-world phenomena soon transcended into the metaphysical; diagrams and gradients in particular became a key component of the

New Age visual lexicon. Diagrams served a dual purpose: they provided a semblance of empirical validation to arcane concepts, making them more palatable to a generation raised on science and reason, and they visually represented abstract spiritual ideas, making them more accessible and comprehensible. Gradients too toed the line of the objective and the subjective, speaking literally to concepts like the aura while also reflecting a sense of order and mathematical precision. Peek back further into the 20th century and you’ll find echoes of this blend between celestial visuals and the

corporeal realm in the works of spiritualist artists like Hilma af Klint as well; her gradient-filled abstractions were a response to the dual pull of mysticism and the era’s groundbreaking discoveries like X-rays and electrons. Her works, and others by artists throughout the 20th century like Anna Cassel, Wassily Kandinsky, and Peter Halley, serve as a testament to humanity’s age-old quest to bridge the rational with the ethereal – often relying on visual cues pulled from the scientific community to do so.

This phenomenon isn’t just a relic of the past. Today, amidst rapid technological advancements like AI and a fractured landscape of cultural ideologies, we find ourselves at a similar philosophical and visual crossroads. The influence of organised religion and community organisations on daily life has lessened for many, leaving a vacuum filled increasingly by consumerism.

Metaphysical modernism, misinfographics, neo-spiritualism, or pharmacore – whatever you call it, esoteric nostalgia is vibrating wavelengths everywhere, especially on the Instagram pages of contemporary wellness brands. Companies hawking everything from yoga mats to skincare have embraced the aesthetics of the Whole Earth Catalog, enticing consumers into a commercialised nirvana. Spend enough time scrolling and you’ll come across squares of grainy multicolour backdrops punctuated by delicate linework, each tile offering a roadmap to navigating emotions, introspective tools, or guiding affirmations. Meanwhile, on the feed of a probiotic brand, overlapping diagrammatic rings frame a list of connected systems, from body to community to universe, while interlocking circles provide the blueprint to a “balanced smoothie”. The original intent behind these repurposed formal motifs – to weave together the logical and the mystical, challenge societal norms, and encourage profound personal transformation – feels increasingly overshadowed by a simpler, more marketable message: buy this product and be better.

Earthly possessions are no longer a barrier to enlightenment; they’re the keys.

A pivotal tension unfolds within the wellness sector: its intimate relationship to our bodies requires a genuine, human touch, echoing time-honoured remedies passed down through generations. Yet, to gain the

trust of the modern, discerning consumer, it equally demands an aura of scientific rigour, dispelling any shade of mere pseudoscience.

Brands astutely navigate this dual demand via an equal balance of countercultural and clinical touchpoints. By intermingling illustrations that feel pulled from the pages of a DIY zine with the streamlined precision of charts and graphs, commercial wellness endorses their efficacy and authenticity simultaneously. This balancing act is a calculated strategy to resonate with a consumer who reveres both the wisdom of the past and the validation of modern science.

At best, spirituality provides a comforting veneer for companies peddling high-tech, VC-backed self-care products; at worst, scientific aesthetics serve as a smokescreen for an overpriced placebo. This marriage between spirituality and science isn’t always benign. As wellness brands and influencers mix and match aesthetics and ideologies from different eras, consumers can easily fall prey to misinformation; age-old scepticism of Western medicine easily tips into conspiratorial beliefs about microchips in vaccines. Wellness advocates with large audiences are increasingly pushing untested and potentially harmful therapies, pills, and essential oils, or even promoting a rejection of medical treatments in favour of ‘natural’ cures – all set against soft gradient backdrops and personal mantras.

The insidiousness of this elevation of arcane solutions for physical ailments lies in the illusion of empowerment – believing that with the right herbs, essential oils, or meditation practices, one can bypass conventional medicine.

In the period surrounding the Whole Earth Catalog, wellness and self-improve-

ment were inextricably linked to communal bonding and breaking free of capitalist expectations. Wellness practices were seen as acts of resistance: tools for personal and societal transformation that rebelled against the grind of productivity for productivity’s sake. There were, of course, more insidious aspects to the resistance-oriented spirit the Whole Earth Catalog represented – the paranoid preppers and survivalists or the eco-terrorists, to name a few – but these offshoots, however unsettling, were still driven by more radical ideologies that placed themselves in contrast to the mainstream

ORIGINAL ILLUSTRATIONS ELIZABETH GOODSPEED

culture. The wellness industry today, on the other hand, while still echoing sentiments of personal enlightenment, often does so through a different lens: optimising oneself for greater efficiency within the very system past movements resisted. Modern self-care, especially as marketed by luxury brands, has pivoted from being a path to liberation to becoming a means of “recharging” for the primary purpose of enhanced performance.

McKinsey consultants aren’t microdosing LSD to expand their minds and love their neighbour; they’re taking it to spur entrepreneurial breakthroughs. The pursuit of wellbeing has incongruously been streamlined into yet another commodity – one that is traded, branded, and consumed with fervour in the quest for a personal equilibrium in modern life.

It’s telling that the ethos of the Whole Earth Catalog, with its grassroots quest for knowledge and empowerment, has roots intertwined with early technological developments. Stewart Brand himself, far from being an outsider to tech innovation, played a role in the iconic “Mother of All Demos” –

a prophetic display of early graphical user interfaces. This deep-seated connection between the countercultural drive of the Whole Earth Catalog and the burgeoning realm of personal computing reflected a shared desire: to democratise access, be it to knowledge or technology. As Silicon Valley burgeoned, its new generation of tech innovators, including Steve Jobs, drew inspiration from this fusion of the hippie-dippie and technological. Jobs’ admiration for the Whole Earth Catalog (which he referred to as “sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along”) didn’t only result in technological marvels; it inadvertently wove the catalog’s countercultural tapestry into Silicon Valley’s techno-utopian ethos, planting seeds of the belief that technology alone could be the panacea for society’s ailments.

Despite their hubristic desire to change the very fabric of society, techy, direct-to-consumer wellness brands often position themselves as the ‘humble alternative’ to impersonal personal-care giants like Johnson & Johnson or Procter & Gamble.

With brand-awareness at an all-time high, communications that mirror the aesthetics of the fringe – that look and act more like

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individual people or influencers – may be perceived as more trustworthy than overly polished corporate communications. What is an influencer if not a modern spiritual guru guiding the helpless flock? Mimicking the messaging and aesthetics of historic countercultural movements is just a case of further leveraging inherent trust in what is perceived as “authentic”. But while today’s wellness brands may use referential visual motifs like mixed imagery, grainy textures, and the appearance of low-quality paper stock in an attempt to capture

the same sincerity they find in the Whole Earth Catalog, these aesthetic choices were hardly intentional in their first iteration.

Instead, they often arose from constraints: a result of the desire to make a publication that was affordable and accessible to all.

Other visual tropes seen in the catalogue, like the use of black-and-white photography, were simply the default of their time. As such, adopting them in the contemporary era becomes a surface-level emulation that misses the deeper ethos. If the Whole Earth Catalog were reborn today, it wouldn’t look like any modern wellness brand – it would look like Craigslist.

This “small and personal” facade (the reverse wellness mullet) is crucial for the success of these modern brands; it gives the illusion of a more ethical, more human-centred company fighting against the tyranny of free enterprise. In an article for New York magazine earlier this year, writer Emily Sundberg refers to this concept as “small-washing”, saying, “We know these minimalist-ish generic aesthetics are not connected to any true local origin, but we see them as indicative of some kind of authenticity.” But while their communication channels might echo the aesthetics of the grassroots, companies like probiotic brand Seed, with its recent $40 million series A round, and vitamin brand Ritual, with a $25 million series B, are every bit the corporate powerhouses they discreetly distance themselves from. Few embody the paradox of commercial wellness as pointedly as the sauna brand Ancient Ritual. It’s experiential product, Arc, which features a “personalised wellness program” administered by an AI-powered counsellor, is advertised via diagrams of “self-realisation” and language around exploring one’s “inner world”. Yet,

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the gap between their marketing façade and the holistic spirit they allude to is stark; for $12,000, Arc’s sauna ultimately offers what amounts to an individual experience of luxury and solitude – a far cry from the community-driven ethos of the 1970s countercultural movements. Then again, perhaps the path to contemporary salvation isn’t spiritual ascension, but ascending the ladder of capitalism; to be the seller, not the buyer.

We’re certainly in a zeitgeist of commodifying empty spiritualism; we’re all sort of trying to find something to latch onto in a time that’s increasingly isolated and devoid of meaning. But while publications like the Whole Earth Catalog operated more like decentralised webs of knowledge – a shared repository that was constantly evolving, contributed to and drawn from by a wide array of individuals – platforms like Instagram are inherently more hierarchical.

While hashtags, stories, or shared interests might create a semblance of community, the interactions remain largely transactional.

The platform’s mechanics encourage passive consumption over active participation.

The essence of ‘sharing’, in its truest sense – exchanging ideas, challenging perspectives, building upon collective knowledge – is conspicuously absent. Today’s digital platforms, while revolutionary in reach and potential, seem to have sidestepped this democratic ethos in favour of curated, algorithm-driven content dissemination and product advertising.

The Instagram approach to complex topics can perhaps trace its roots to more recent events; during the pivotal Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, Instagram underwent a marked transformation, becoming a crucial hub for political dissemination at a time when in-person conversation was severely limited by Covid-19. While historically a platform for curated snaps of luxury,

leisure, and one’s “personal brand”, Instagram quickly became a conduit for pastel explainers on more sobering subjects like “The 10 Ways We are Racist Every Day”.

This shift presented challenges, however; the platform’s native photo-sharing tools seemed at odds with the deep, text-heavy content that emerged. Users were increasingly encountering Instagram stories spanning dozens of slides, captions that felt more

like a micro-thesis, or the ubiquitous ‘link in bio’ callout. Designers quickly adapted.

Profound messages became repackaged into a more palatable format: concise and stylised, with text and image contained neatly within a single tile – no caption required.

This redesign allowed content to be more

easily shared, and ensured that a singular message would seamlessly weave through the diverse aesthetics of the explore page, even if its content felt worlds apart from the ‘fit check’ post it sat beside. This shift towards information that’s neatly buttoned up, easily shareable, and presented with an appealing aesthetic flair has bled out from activists to influencers to brands, seeding itself in the fabric of modern online discourse.

The value of being shareable or viral has now superseded the depth and nuance that some subjects demand, leading to an age where complex topics are distilled to their most basic essence, sometimes sacrificing understanding for visibility. In this realm, wellness brands and their offerings are no exception. They too have learned to navigate and thrive in this ecosystem of simplified narratives and stylised aesthetics, positioning themselves not just as products, but as solutions to the existential void of the digital age.

The Pioneer Plaque, a piece of etched metal sent into space aboard the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecrafts in the early 1970s, is a profound gesture of connection – a message into the vast void of space that encapsulates humanity’s profound desire to be seen, recognised, and perhaps, understood. Lined with drawings of a man and a woman, a map of our solar system, and other universal symbols, the plaque deftly marries meticulous details meant to be universally decipherable with deeper sentiment. Much like it, the Whole Earth Catalog was an endeavour of its time to grasp and present a holistic life, unburdened by consumerism. Today’s digital wellness space, with its borrowed aesthetics and Instagrammable moments, strives for a similar connection. Yet, amidst this quest, there’s a palpable tension: the yearning for authenticity collides with the artifice of digital presentation. In this delicate dance between past and present, one wonders if our modern mantras, stripped of their grassroots ethos, might be sending signals from a void of their own.

SUPERMAX

by Hannah Williams.

Forty years after its creation, Flexform’s Max sofa is revitalised

Max sofas at the Triennale di Milano museum, 1983

In his Bauhaus Manifesto, Walter Gropius outlined his vision for a holistic form of artistic creation, a call to “desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity”. Central to this theory is a dissolution of the boundaries between utility and design, a belief in the potential to elevate the everyday object to the status of art. Both work of sculpture and piece of furniture, the Flexform Max sofa is a perfect encapsulation of this idea.

Designed in 1983, it’s a paean to the beauty of our daily lives, a fluid, fluxive synthesis of form and aesthetics.

For Antonio Citterio, designer of the Max, this idea of unity was embedded in

PHOTOGRAPH: GABRIELE BASILICO

the sofa’s design, into its flowing seat and arching, winding backrest. Far from merely decorative, the sofa’s liquiform shape “creates a situation where people sit more face-to-face, which allows them to talk and look at each other”. This presented challenges, namely that it’s near-impossible to cover a curved back with a single piece of fabric. But it’s this difficulty that led to the Max’s elegant fabric-wrapped back, one of its most distinctive features: “It was someone in the factory, their design team,” notes Citterio, “that gave me this idea, and immediately I said, ‘Ok, but not just one colour…’ The idea was to highlight the technical solution, and from the technical solution we gained the decoration

of the product.” It’s an art object made for socialising, made for joy, made for life. And, 40 years after its creation, the Max is getting a successor: the Flexform Supermax.

Echoing the fortuitous happenstance that resulted in the Max’s iconic design, the Supermax came “almost by chance”, Citterio tells me. “We have an incredible archive, and we started to revisit Gabriele Basilico’s fantastic picture of the Max.” The enduring contemporariness and originality of the sofa struck the Flexform team, who began to consider the “possibilities” an updated Max could present. It was a truly organic process, not the work of, as Citterio says, “emails or meetings”, but a serendipitous rediscovery.

The Supermax pays homage to its predecessor, retaining that classic curved back and kidney bean-shaped seat. But it also allows a greater variety of use, as at home in outdoor environments as it is inside. This emphasis on relaxation means that the sofa is built lower, to encourage a more casual atmosphere, as well as enlarged dimensions and more plush padding. Citterio and Flexform have also taken the opportunity to imagine different colour combinations, including a two-tone monochrome palette.

In other words, they’ve instantly updated a sculptural design classic, built for the demands of 21st-century life.

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Page 42

Re-Chair, launched 2022. Manufacturer Kartell, Italy Designer Antonio Citterio b. 1950, Meda, Italy The Re-Chair is the result of the coffee maker Illy’s net-zero strategy. The company’s waste coffee pods are recycled to create a thermoplastic technopolymer

Page 43 Images Leon Chew

Ghiaccio, launched 2011. Manufacturer Porro, Italy Designer Piero Lissoni b. 1956, Sergeno, Italy Piero Lissoni works for Porro as both the company’s art director, helping to shape its creative strategy, and on the design of individual pieces such as the Ghiaccio armchair

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Mad Chaise Longue, launched 2013. Manufacturer Poliform, Italy Designer Marcel Wanders b. 1963, Boxtel, the Netherlands Wanders first made an impression on the design world with his surrealistic knotted chair, part of the Droog collection in 1996. This collection offers a range of possibilities incorporating asymmetric elements

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Grande Papilio, launched 2009. Manufacturer B&B Italia, Italy Designer Naoto Fukasawa b. 1956, Kofu, Japan Naoto Fukasawa, one of the most successful Japanese designers of his generation, has work including electronics for Muji as well as interiors and furniture. This range includes items from stools to armchairs

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Doris SH, launched 2023. Manufacturer Flexform, Italy Designer Antonio Citterio b. 1950, Meda, Italy Antonio Citterio’s design for the Doris chair is based on traditional woodworking techniques, using solid ash legs turned by hand, with a leather seat, offering a modern take on the Arts and Crafts movement

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Back-wing, launched 2018. Manufacturer Cassina, Italy Designer Patricia Urquiola b. 1961, Oviedo, Italy Urquiola has been Cassina’s art director since 2015, working with a historic and celebrated range of designs from Gio Ponti onwards, still designing such pieces as the Back-wing armchair on her own account

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Vegetal, launched 2008. Manufacturer Vitra, Switzerland Designers Ronan Bouroullec b. 1971 and Erwan Bouroullec b. 1976, Quimper, France The Bouroullec brothers and Vitra’s engineers spent four years looking for an appropriate polymer polyamide and injection moulding technology that could mass produce the organic inspiration for this chair

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Chester Moon, launched 2009. Manufacturer Baxter, Italy Designer Paola Navone b. 1950, Turin, Italy Navone’s starting point for this range was the 19th-century English chesterfield sofa whose buttoned upholstery signalled comfort. She exaggerates the curved form, with foam replacing horsehair and springs

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Air Chair, launched 2000. Manufacturer Magis, Italy Designer Jasper Morrison b. 1959, London, UK The Air Chair uses the same blow moulding techniques developed to produce low-cost components for car interiors to make an affordable, light-weight, stackable chair

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Glove, launched 2005. Manufacturer Molteni, Italy Designer Patricia Urquiola b. 1961, Oviedo, Spain Now based in Italy, Urquiola was a student of Achille Castiglioni in Milan, who encouraged her to broaden her range of interests from focusing on architecture to include design in a wider sense

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Daiki, launched 2020. Manufacturer Minotti, Italy Designer Marcio Kogan b. 1952, Sao Paolo, Brazil Kogan trained as an architect, but began as a film maker. That narrative sensibility has shaped his subsequent design work; the Daiki armchair is a nuanced interpretation of the Japanese version of mid-century modernity

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Page 54

AN AGITATOR OF MEN AND MACHINES

by Richard Williams.

The winding arc to Ferrari’s Roma coupé

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There is no official record of the first sighting of a Ferrari on the bustling streets of post-war Rome, but it is likely to have been early in 1948, around the time Enzo Ferrari received the first customers for his road cars. Right from the start, an unusually powerful mystique surrounded even the act of buying one of the cars bearing the badge of a black horse on a yellow shield. Ferrari didn’t go out seeking clients. They went to him, and not infrequently they were made to wait for an audience with the Pope of Maranello, as he was sometimes called, in reference to the town in Emilia-Romagna where he had set up his business and which he was to make world-famous.

Ferrari designed none of his cars. That was done by the team of technicians he assembled and supervised. “I am not an engineer,” he once said. “I am an agitator of men and machines.” His genius was that of an organiser, not just of a factory building wonderfully exotic cars but also of a racing team subsidised, from its earliest years, through the pioneering use of sponsors to finance his efforts. But he seemed to know beauty when he saw it.

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Italy had made desirable cars before the war, but it soon became apparent that a Ferrari was something different, particularly when, in 1948, the team’s cars raced to victory in the Targa Florio and the Mille Miglia, two classic endurance events of the international calendar, run over public roads, over mountain passes and along seafronts. The message was that while a Ferrari was very fast indeed, it was also impressively rugged.

The effect on the socialites and film stars taking a break from work at Cinecittà and lounging in the cafés on the Via Veneto – then approaching its height as the centre of Roman dolce vita – can only be imagined. Perhaps the first Ferrari they saw was the 166MM Barchetta (little boat) sold to Gianni Agnelli, the playboy head of Fiat, its open two-seater bodywork painted in an unusual but very stylish combination of dark blue and dark green. Agnelli’s car – now the property of an English collector – was the double of one that would bring Ferrari even greater international prestige by winning the 24 Hours of Le Mans the following year. Yet he could use it to cruise the boulevards of Turin on his way to and

from the Fiat factory, to drive up to the ski resort of Sestriere, which his grandfather had founded in the 1930s, or to head for a rendezvous with his yacht at Ravello, on the Amalfi coast.

Soon queues of the rich and famous were forming outside Ferrari’s door, many of them arriving from Rome. Among the first celebrities to respond to the cars’ special appeal was the film director Roberto Rossellini, who made the pilgrimage in 1949.

Following his early successes with Rome, Open City and Paisá, he was working on Stromboli with a new female star, the Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman. To the delight – and feigned horror – of the gossip columnists and the genuine horror of the Vatican, Rossellini had left his second wife to take up with Bergman, who had abandoned her Swedish husband and their small daughter to be with him.

Rossellini’s first Ferrari was a 166 Inter, one of three made with cabriolet bodywork

by Pininfarina. There would be many others, including a 212 Inter coupé bought for Bergman as a wedding present when they married in 1953, even though she was not keen on fast driving. Enzo Ferrari was hap-

py to be photographed sharing a table with his glamorous customers at a restaurant across the road from his factory.

Rossellini had ambitions to race, and that year he entered the Mille Miglia in his own open-cockpit 212. But after setting out from Brescia, his attempt was halted when he reached the halfway control point in Rome, where Bergman, now the mother of their three children, was waiting. As the car came to a halt, she leaned into the cockpit and begged him not to continue.

In 1954 he bought her another Ferrari: a 375MM coupé with special aerodynamic bodywork, again by Pininfarina. He paid Ferrari $6,000 for the car, first unveiled at that year’s Salon des Automobiles in Paris, stipulating a respray from its original pale blue to a shade of grey-gold that would be named Grigio Ingrid. Even this machine, among the most beautiful Ferraris ever made, failed to arouse her interest, and Rossellini drove it himself for three years before selling it to the first of several American owners, one of them the president of Microsoft.

Ferrari’s Roma, introduced to the public in 2019, can trace its bloodline back to the gorgeous Bergman/Rossellini coupé via

PHOTOGRAPHY: ELEONORA AGOSTINI

the sumptuous race-bred 250GT Lusso of the early 1960s. The Roma has a twin-turbocharged 3.9-litre V8 engine, rather than the Lusso’s 3-litre V12, but it is built to do the same job of providing a stimulating driving experience while conveying its occupants in comfort to their next destination – a villa in the Tuscan hills, perhaps, or a reserved parking space in Monaco’s Casino Square during the Grand Prix weekend.

As it happens, Rome was the location of Ferrari’s first race win, when Franco Cortese drove to victory on a circuit around the Baths of Caracalla in the spring of 1947, only a few weeks after the prototype had been fired up and made its way along the road outside the factory, still lacking bodywork. On 11th May the team travelled to Piacenza, where Cortese was in the lead when the engine developed a misfire that forced him to retire.

A promising failure, Enzo Ferrari called it, and two weeks later the team went south for La Primavera Romana di Motori (the Roman Spring of Motor Cars), a race through the tree-lined roads around the old Roman baths near the city centre. This time Cortese’s car had new full-width bodywork,

and pulled away to win easily. That victory would come to be seen as the forerunner of a record including 241 Grand Prix wins, 16 constructors’ championships, 15 drivers’ titles, 10 wins at Le Mans, including the centenary edition in 2023, and countless other victories around the world over the last 75 years.

Ferrari’s view was that he made road cars in order to subsidise the racing activities that built the legend, offering reflected glory to anyone who could afford it. Production went from 26 cars in 1950 to 306 in 1960, 928 in 1970, 2,470 in 1980 and 4,309 in 1990, after which the fallout from worldwide economic crises depressed the total for a while.

But a careful recovery and the exploitation of new markets brought the total up to 6,573 in 2010, and in 2022 the number of Ferraris produced stood at 13,221, many of them finished to custom specifications. In 75 years, then, just over a quarter of a million Ferraris have emerged from the now historic factory beside a road that, if you were to turn left out of the gates, head south and carry straight on for 250 miles, would take you all the way to the city whose name your brand-new Roma so proudly and elegantly bears.

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Page 58

DESIGN RESEARCH UNIT

by Michelle Cotton.

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On the team behind the face of British Rail and the Victoria Line, who made Britain modern CREDITS IN HERE OVER 2 LINES PLEASE AND THANKS

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The ‘British Rail’ logo printed on every train ticket in Britain is a prominent yet small part of the legacy of the Design Research Unit. One of Britain’s most prolific design agencies, their work prevails long after many of their clients have been privatised or absorbed within multinationals. Between 1944 and 1969 they employed 365 people and hired more freelance artists and specialists for specific projects. Their practice included architecture, exhibition design, industrial design and some of the most comprehensive and enduring corporate identities produced in Britain in the post-war decades, but in 1943 they had a staff of one, the art historian, critic, poet, novelist and anarchist, Herbert Read.

Read had worked as a curator for the Victoria and Albert Museum, where he wrote books on English stained glass and pottery. He translated Wilhelm Worringer’s influential book Formprobleme der Gotik into English, and through Worringer and Max Sauerlandt, director of the Museum Für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg, he met the Bauhaus architects and artists who would inspire his vision for the Design Research Unit. In 1934 he published Art and Industry: The Principles of Industrial Design, positioning international modernism as a rational development for Britain, with its long-established tradition of socially minded applied arts, while arguing for a new Bauhaus-style model for arts and design education. Living at that time in Hampstead among what he described as “a gentle nest of artists” (that included Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth), he was a close observer and advocate of the art and architecture group ‘Unit One’ and became neighbours with European émigrés Naum Gabo, Piet Mondrian, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and László Moholy-Nagy, who all moved to London between 1934 and 1938. It was Nicholson and Moore who first introduced Read to Marcus Brumwell, an advertising executive and patron of their work. In 1940 Brumwell formed the Advertising Service Guild, a group of companies that would finance the social research organisation Mass Observation and, initially, the Design Research Unit.

The Unit was first described in terms that closely resemble the vision that Read set forth in Art and Industry. In a leaflet addressed to “artists and designers” its aim was summarised as: “To secure the co-operation of artists and designers in projects involving more than one material or more than one purpose: to bring such artists and designers

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into productive relation with scientists and technologists.”

Central to their philosophy was a scientific approach informed by the application of new materials and technology (signified by the ‘Research’ in their name): “The machine is accepted as the essentially modern vehicle of form. Our designs will therefore be essentially designs for mass production, but at the same time we hope to rescue mass production from the ugliness and aesthetic emptiness which has so far characterised the greater part of its output. It is impossible to accept the view that any essential antagonism exists between art and industry, between beauty and the machine. But it is necessary to reintegrate the worlds of art and industry, for only on that basis can we progress towards a new and vital civilisation.”

A complementary text for clients explained: “Design is essentially an expression of function, and in most cases the designer will be an artist who fully comprehends the technical process of manufacture and the functional and economic processes of the materials he works with.”

One of their first projects was to commission Naum Gabo to design a car for the Bradford company, Jowett. The artist’s proposal was nothing if not radical. He envisaged nylon seats, a vinyl floor and Perspex windows, three new materials that Gabo was able to obtain for his sculpture from ICI, despite all wartime production being commandeered by the British government for military use. The car’s streamlined, aerodynamic body, two-tone paintwork and doors that extended into the roof were devised to employ fewer panels and increase interior capacity, avoiding what Gabo described as a “house on wheels”. The curvilinear form and detailing, including a kidney-shaped steering wheel and a spiral grille, recalled the biomechanical forms that characterised his art from the early 1940s. Unfortunately, Gabo repeatedly missed deadlines and the company pronounced his design, “impracticable”, too costly to be produced, eventually cancelling their contract with DRU. By that time Read had been joined by Brumwell’s co-founders and partners, Milner Gray and Misha Black. The two designers had been working together since 1932, most recently within the wartime Ministry of Information: Gray as Head of the Exhibitions Branch and Principal Design Adviser and Black as Principal Exhibition Architect. As the war drew to a close, Gray chaired weekly meetings where designers working for the ministry discussed how their work could be adapted to the task of

post-war reconstruction. The multidisciplinary model of the British government’s wartime propaganda machine at Senate House inspired Gray’s ideas for “a design group” with sections for architecture, industrial design and graphics. Outlining his ideas for Brumwell in 1942 he proposed a focus on “national services”, imagining a group that could act as an advisory body to government and industry alike. He outlined what would become the Unit’s core business, recommending that the group apply themselves to “the problems of physical reconstruction” such as “the reconditioning and re-designing of public utility services and… railway companies, motor coach lines and so on”.

By 1947 the Unit’s staff included teams of exhibition designers, graphic designers and architects, many of whom were already working on the 1951 Festival of Britain, where Black was coordinating architect for the ‘upstream’ half of the exhibition.

He later recalled the epic task: “Everything that could be said would be said: there would be brown owls and flatfish, a locomotive and aircraft, Anglo Saxons and Romans, chemistry, biology, physics and nuclear science, telescopes, agriculture and Darwin, all the Nobel Prize winners and polar dogs, public health and the White Knight.”

This miscellany might also be used to describe DRU’s ‘Dome of Discovery’ exhibition. A vast, 365ft concrete and aluminium structure designed by Ralph Tubbs housed an exhibition in 10 themed sections with exhibits celebrating “national achievements”.

The Polar section, designed by Jock Kinneir, featured a life-size reconstruction of part of Captain Cook’s ship, the Endeavour, a waxwork Inuit and a live demonstration of an Antarctic expedition (a sledge drawn by huskies). A giant locust and Colorado beetle were made to hang from the ceiling for another section entitled The Land. Hundreds of fossil shapes were cast in plaster for the mural of the Living World. Tubbs protested that his building was overwhelmed by the exhibition but in fact the installation was never completed, and several display cases were lined with coloured paper but left empty.

In the years following the festival, interiors for showrooms, shops and corporate headquarters replaced exhibition design as the Unit’s main business, while Gray’s graphics department provided commissions for comprehensive graphic identity programmes that would set new standards in British industry. One of the most detailed was commissioned by the brewery Watney Combe Reid. Between 1947 and 1958 the

STREET NAMEPLATES FOR THE CITY OF WESTMINSTER C. 1967 (PHOTO: CHRISTOPHER RIDLEY) JOWETT CAR, THE WORK OF NAUM GABO © NINA & GRAHAM WILLIAMS / TATE ALL OTHER IMAGES COURTESY OF SCOTT BROWNRIGG © DESIGN RESEARCH UNIT

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London firm acquired thousands of pubs and off-licenses across southern and eastern England. Concerned that its brand might be considered too metropolitan for its provincial houses, the designers were brought in to “re-establish… comfort and conviviality” in “public house architecture, furnishings and accessories”. The pubs were divided into typical architectural style groups and a House Identification Manual directed the appropriate use of lettering giving instructions for typography, scale, spacing, colour, method of application, and type of illumination accordingly. They wanted to ensure “identification, without submerging the individual character of each house or its suitability to its surroundings”. Between 1956 and 1970, the Design Research Unit envisaged almost every aspect of the firm’s visibility from pub signage, exteriors and interiors to labelling, beermats, bar accessories, transport fleet and stationery. Meanwhile the brewers (by now named Watney Mann) switched to using cheaper malts to produce weaker, sweeter beers. Their “bleedin’ Watneys Red Barrel” became the butt of Monty Python jokes and the design legacy was eclipsed by the much-maligned beer.

In 1963 the Design Research Unit embarked upon the largest and most complex corporate identity ever undertaken in the UK. Their work for British Railways addressed the signage and general appearance of approximately 2,000 stations and in the course of its implementation the company estimated that 4,000 locomotives, 23,000 passenger carriages and 45 Sealink ships were repainted. Gray somewhat accidentally renamed the company ‘British Rail’, after realising the shortened version of the name, used to try out different lettering styles, looked “much better”. Similarly, the two-way arrow logotype, so far outliving the nationalised industry by nearly three decades, was only adopted after the original design was leaked to the press. Gerald Barney’s design was a striking break with the past, replacing a crest (a lion and crown) and an antiquated idea of travel (a cartwheel) – with an abstract representation of speed or, in Gray’s words, “two-way traffic movement”. Margaret Calvert and former DRU associate Jock Kinneir (who were nearing completion on their redesign of British road signage) drew the ‘Rail Alphabet’ for station signage. Devised to be mechanically or photomechanically reproduced, as opposed to being enlarged or cut by hand, each character was spaced on a tile to ensure consistently compact arrangement.

This and the accompanying ‘plank system’ that allowed each concept in the signage to be stacked according to a ‘one message

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– one plank’ rule provided a cost-effective, flexible formula for manufacturing and easy maintenance. Such solutions were not only illustrative of rigorous technical research but a commitment to improving public sector efficiency and producing good design for the benefit of society.

Within the office, the graphic designers were “flat boys” and architects were “round boys”. Several more notable figures can be counted among them: architects Frederick Gibberd, Sadie Speight, and Clifford Hatts who went on to design many landmark television productions for the BBC, perhaps most memorably Quatermass and the Pit. In 1967 Richard and Su Rogers (the latter Brumwell’s daughter) joined as associates, and with Renzo Piano designed a ‘zip-up’ structure extension for the Unit’s Marylebone offices. During the 1960s and 1970s DRU’s architects designed schools, social housing, care homes, offices and the Charles Clore Pavilion for Small Mammals at London Zoo. The industrial designers worked on whisky bottles, egg cups, saucepans, cameras, school desks and data-processing equipment. The graphic designers developed corporate identities for the Dunlop shoes, Austin Reed, Unilever, ICI, Sadler’s Wells, Tarmac and Ilford. They designed interiors for Bata Shoe Corporation’s stores and the headquarters of BP. Black also designed the now world-famous street nameplates for Westminster City Council.

Their work found its way into all corners of daily life, but perhaps most notably in transport; from British Rail to the Hong Kong Mass Transit Railway; from the Oriana cruise ship to London Underground’s Victoria Line.

From 1964 to 1976 Black acted as a design consultant to the London Transport Executive, during which time he took responsibility for every aspect of the design of the Victoria Line. The 14-mile-long underground railway connecting 16 stations was believed to be the most advanced underground railway in the world when it opened in 1968. Its lightweight, unpainted aluminium, computer-controlled trains were designed to cut operational and maintenance costs and reduce energy consumption and staffing while making services more regular and uniform. Ceramic tile murals were commissioned for the station platforms from various artists and graphic designers: Hans Unger for Green Park, Oxford Circus, Blackhorse Road, Brixton and Seven Sisters; Edward Bawden for Tottenham Hale, Highbury and Islington, and Victoria; Tom Eckersley for Euston, King’s Cross St Pancras and Finsbury Park; Abram Games for Stockwell; Peter Sedgley

for Pimlico; Crosby, Fletcher and Forbes for Warren Street and George Smith for Vauxhall. The William Morris patterned mural for Walthamstow Central was devised by Black’s daughter, Julia.

Yet at the height of their success, in unflinching pragmatism, Black was also anticipating the Unit’s demise: “In the end the group will outlive its usefulness and should dissolve. There is comfort in long-established practices, and convenience in the sturdy administrative structures which build up around them, but the function of design is to find new formal relationships which simultaneously serve the needs of society and symbolise the emotional forces which motivate it. When the design group is no longer expressive and becomes content to reiterate forms which have only archaic interest, then its life is ended… Complacent middle age with its desire only to regurgitate the victories of its long-past youth can afflict groups as easily as it can devastate individuals.”

By 1978 Gray was the only founder still working, outliving Black and Read and outlasting Brumwell who retired in 1974.

Writing to commemorate the Unit’s 25th year in 1969’s The Practical Idealists, John and Avril Blake predicted that: “The ‘software’ stage in designing – thinking, data collection, analysing, organising – will become more and more important in the future, while the ‘hardware’ stage – the transformation of data into design – will occupy a smaller proportion of the total design effort… in the future will emerge the need for a new type of designer who is capable of using all the resources of science and technology to conceive and plan a sense of order out of what appears to be an increasing chaos of unrelated problems…

The growth of populations, the speed of industrialisation, the drain on the world’s natural resources, will make such haphazard development less and less tolerable in the future…”

Alluding to the sense of social responsibility and ‘shared purpose’ that the Design Research Unit represented, they called for: “…designers capable of fulfilling a far wider brief… designers capable of spanning the spectrum of human and technical factors, within the context of major systems design problems are missing from the present-day scene.”

Michelle Cotton is the Head of Artistic Programmes and Content at Mudam Luxembourg and the Designated Artistic Director at Kunsthalle Wien. She is the author of Design Research Unit 1942 – 72 (Koenig Books, 2011).

ILFORD VEHICLE LIVERY C. 1966 (PHOTO: JOHN MALTBY). PAGES FROM THE ‘WATNEY HOUSE IDENTIFICATION MANUAL’ C. 1966.

ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF SCOTT BROWNRIGG © DESIGN RESEARCH UNIT

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Page 64

SLIGHTLY IMPOSSIBLE

by Deyan Sudjic.

In studio with Industrial Facility

Left: a recharchable battery for Herman Miller

If one is looking to understand Industrial Facility, the studio set up in 2002 by Kim Colin (an American architect) and Sam Hecht (a British designer), the monograph on their work published by Phaidon is a good place to start. As you might expect for a studio that has built its reputation on a series of quietly resonant objects, and from Colin’s experience as an editor at an earlier stage of her career, the book is as carefully considered and as well-crafted as any of their remarkably refined designs.

That Industrial Facility chose to ask Paul Neale and Carole Courtillé of GFT to design it for them suggests a certain modesty.

Apart from all the design work that it documents – ranging from cordless telephones and cities-in-a-bag wooden toys for Muji to projectors for Epson, by way of eccentric clocks for Alasdhair Willis’s Established & Sons – the book stands out both for its front and back covers, and perhaps even more for the author of its foreword. The covers use line drawings made with a sensibility somewhere between that of Patrick Caulfield and Michael Craig-Martin. The drawings capture the essence of two of Industrial Facility’s designs – for the Bell alarm clock, shown from the back, rendered in flat pillar-box red with just a flash of lime green, and the Branca table and chair on the front cover shown as a close-up fragment. It’s a

PHOTOGRAPHY: LUCY SHORTMAN

span that encompasses both product design and furniture, two fields of work that while superficially similar are actually quite far apart. “A piece of furniture is different from a product; you can’t design a product without understanding the components.

You start inside and gradually build your way out,” says Hecht. “A chair has to sit at a table or a bench. To do furniture well you have to bridge methods of production, and architecture, furniture contributes to the feeling of a space. We were in California in the summer and saw some of the Richard Neutra houses, and understood how much of the furniture was built in.

Product designers can have a tendency to over-complicate furniture.”

The drawings are a further distillation of what Industrial Facility have already materially achieved – reducing physical objects to their essential minimum. They seem to suggest what Colin and Hecht would do if they were freed from the material weight of physical objects altogether, as if they were trying to make an object into an icon – not the same as an iconic object – or an archetype.

They hint at the idea when they describe their approach to design. Talking about a product that they designed for Herman Miller, they discuss trying to find the way to give an adjustable mechanical table (otherwise a piece of seemingly mute equipment) the quality of ‘tableness’.

Yet Industrial Facility is rooted in the analogue world of material objects much as the world of ideas. Of their alarm clock, they admit that; “even though the growing digital world has made the archetypical analogue alarm clock appear like a historical record, people are still attracted to them for their loud sound, and simple interface. Bell [the clock] was designed to help this product take up a more desirable position and to satisfy people who struggle with the layers of information required to set digital clocks.”

When they unveiled their design for Pure’s Evoke radio, they suggested that: “radio behaves inherently differently to playing from pre-defined playlists – it is generated from broadcast media and is generally unexpected content. For many, this is why radio is like a re-assuring ‘real-time’ companion in the workshop, bedroom, kitchen or bathroom.” With its perforated wood front, it looks like a radio, if not like a retro styled product – but it’s internet capable, like a smart speaker. The digital interface is provided by a small screen that – since it is rarely used – is concealed under a flap, to leave the object itself looking reassuringly uncomplicated.

Its design is a response to two related tendencies that have had a magnifying effect on each other. On one hand, “radio has now become this confusing product that struggles to know whether it’s a speaker, a

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Above: Pure Evoke Radio

clock or a multimedia device,” as they put it.

At the same time, digital appliances have consumed other products. “Phones and laptops suddenly became media devices.”

Like the Herman Miller adjustable work surface, Pure’s Evoke is the comfortingly simple essence of ‘radioness’, even if it can actually do a lot more.

Revealingly, Alain de Botton contributes that foreword, in which he quotes Horace: “The art lies in concealing the art.”

Perhaps the first time in the recent history of design criticism that the Roman poet has been cited – but it explains how much Colin and Hecht’s restraint and consistency can achieve. De Botton does not refer to his own books, but the idea of the consolations of the well-considered everyday object, if not the idea of philosophy, hovers over his words.

Industrial Facility’s work offers the simple pleasures of a handle that feels good to touch, a machine that communicates how it works without any need to read the instruction manual, and a colour palette that could have come from a Giorgio Morandi still life. Except for the colour, it’s part of an approach to design that reached its first clear expression in the work of Dieter Rams for Braun. But it would not be correct to call Industrial Facility’s work Rams revivalism. Their work belongs to a different time, and relies on a different technology and a different audience. It has

things in common with Jasper Morrison’s laconic refinement, as well as the designs of the Bouroullec brothers. It carries a sense of being more than a fleeting response to transient circumstance.

Sam Hecht once approvingly described an exhibition of Rams’ designs as looking as if they had all been made for the same room. He is as interested in the legacy of designers, including Joe Colombo, Richard Sapper (the German-born Milanese designer of radios for Brionvega), and his partner Marco Zanuso as in that of Rams.

Part of Colin and Hecht’s first exhibition at the Design Museum was a display of their collection of pieces of anonymous mass-produced ingenuity – from a chainmail oyster-shucking glove to a combined craft knife and scissors set, suggesting that close observation is an essential part of their working method.

While this is clearly an unusually cerebral design studio, that is not to say that they take themselves entirely seriously.

The effect of Industrial Facility’s important-looking polished door plate on the studio door in Clerkenwell is somewhat undermined by the words ‘Est. a while ago’ embossed in the brass below the name in a Helvetica font.

Industrial Facility was started more than two decades ago. Colin was in publishing. She worked with the LA-based

artist Mike Kelley to build the architectural models for Educational Complex, his artwork that is now in the collection of the Whitney in New York, and later interviewed veteran Californian architect Pierre Koenig and the photographer Julius Schulman for Koenig’s monograph. Hecht had worked for the high-tech specialist consultancy IDEO in California, Tokyo, and had moved back to Britain. Among many other projects he was on the team that designed the pioneering technology for Prada’s Rem Koolhaas-designed stores in New York and Los Angeles that eventually proved to be too far ahead of its time. Prada invested in a premature attempt to use radio frequency tagging, now standard, but at that point at least five years away from being generally adopted. A decade later the sales staff would have used offthe-shelf iPads – in 2001 Hecht and IDEO designed specially made devices for them.

They were beautiful but did not survive the impact of the actual shopping experience.

Behind their brass door plate, Industrial Facility occupies the upper three of a small five-floor building. The lowest level has the neat sense of order of a well-organised carpenters’ workshop, tools of all shapes and sizes have a place, hanging on walls around a workbench. Next up is the studio, with a single line of work tables facing a wall of books arranged as carefully as the tools

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Above, left: The Ishinomaki Chair Right: Kim Colin stands behind the OE1 Mobile Easel

below, on Rams’ Vitsoe shelving system.

They work with a handful of assistants: “We are small, but we are very ambitious.”

Reached by a spiral staircase, the top floor is empty. Colin and Hecht use it to show clients their work. In fact, they use each of the three levels to orchestrate their presentations. “When we present, we only show one solution. It’s a high-risk strategy: we may spend two or three months working on a project, but we will only show the solution that we believe in,” says Hecht.

“We start a presentation downstairs, and show the essence of the project, then come upstairs, where we might reveal some prototypes, up here we have invested in a final working model. It’s always a physical model, which is a completely different experience from showing a rendering. Even if it’s a chair made of paper, and they can’t sit on it, we can make it look as if it’s resin.” If Industrial Facility’s methods are determinedly analogue, it should not be understood as nostalgia, any more than Wes Anderson or Quentin Tarantino can be called nostalgic for commiting to using film. “There is an analogy with film,” they say. “You have to be editing in your mind as you work when you are making physical working models, you have to be economical, which is not something that digital design encourages.” They do not apologise for

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being interested in giving form to objects.

“Physical objects are what we are good at.

It’s what we enjoy doing.”

But they are as interested in how things are used as they are in what they look like.

Their recent work with Herman Miller is driven by the changing nature of the workplace. In a world of work where people no longer have their own desk, let alone an office of their own, Industrial Facility has come up with a range of products that respond to the realities of working from home, and to a workplace that has become a single – supposedly flexible – shared space.

Nook is for those who don’t have a desk of their own, in which to carry the essential tools they will need in the course of a day. The OE1 Mobile Easel is an easily moved focus for group working. The OE1 Micro Pack can be mounted against a wall, a compact desk that can adjust to sitting or standing work for concentration away from others. The most recent element is a shareable mobile power source, a rechargeable battery that can run a laptop and power a phone, with a locator tag inside. It’s available individually, or as a set of four, and has what Industrial Facility would call a look of ‘batteriness’. It comes with a carrying handle that expresses portability, and a chamfered form that gives a sense of its power.

Industrial Facility are as fluent in their work in furniture as in product. Their new chair for the German Thonet company is very much in the mainstream of furniture design, and the duo are well aware of their client’s remarkable history going back to the start of the 19th century. Thonet has been manufacturing the 214 bentwood ‘café’ chair since the 1850s, perhaps the most successful mass-produced chair of all time.

The company worked with Mart Stam and Mies van der Rohe in the early days of modernism. Industrial Facility’s S 220 chair is designed in response to what they call Thonet’s request for something “slightly impossible”, a plywood shell chair that felt as if it belonged to the company catalogue.

Their strategy was to give the chair a profile that referred to the company’s history, and to use contemporary moulding techniques to give it a higher level of comfort.

Few periods in history have seen a faster rate of change than the past 20 years, coinciding with Industrial Facility’s work to date. It has seen the mass extinctions of whole categories of object, driven by the digital explosion. And yet objects still offer us the consolations of a relationship with the things we need and use in everyday life. Few designers have been as skilled in giving those things lasting meaning as Industrial Facility.

The PORT Review of Design: PAGE 71

REYNER BANHAM ENJOYED IRRITATINGPEOPLE

by Deyan Sudjic.

Remembering an offbeat, but prescient design thinker

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Reyner Banham’s biography is as unconventional as his approach to architectural history and design criticism. He left school at 16 to start a course as a management trainee in the aeronautical industry, and then worked as an aircraft fitter in WW2.

But he abandoned engineering after the war to study the new field of architectural history at the Courtauld Institute under Nikolaus Pevsner, earning a doctorate for his thesis, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age. It spent more time on the history of air-conditioning than on the Bauhaus. He published it as a book in 1960 and it has been an essential on reading lists ever since.

Banham saw himself as a provocateur, an eager participant in the culture wars of the 1970s and 1980s, notably between modernism and the former Prince of Wales, even though by this time he had moved to America. When the right-wing Cambridge historian David Watkin published Morality and Architecture, Banham reviewed it dismissively, singling out Watkin’s praise for the English classicist Edwin Lutyens for particular disdain. Watkin had his revenge when, in an exhibition he curated at the Hayward Gallery, he captioned a photograph of Lutyens riding an elephant in New Delhi, “Reynerbanaman, Lutyens’ faithful elephant wallah”.

Banham’s career was built on overturning received wisdom wherever he encountered it. He was close to Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi and the Independent Group, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and saw the birth of the English pop art movement at close quarters. He was fascinated by Los Angeles at a time when most English critics saw it as the personification of the non-city, the smog-soaked embodiment of all that was wrong with contemporary urbanism. His preferred means of transport was a Moulton bicycle with tiny wheels, but he claimed to have learned to drive so that he “would be able to read Los Angeles in the original”. He approached the city from the perspective of social anthropology. He observed different behaviours on the freeways and the surface roads. He noticed that makeup was being applied by passengers in cars coming down the off ramp and concluded that Los Angelenos were treating the freeways as private domestic space, and the surface roads as the public realm.

Banham championed Cedric Price, architect of the aviary at London Zoo, for his pragmatism. For Price every building was out of date by the time it was finished. In the 1950s he was one of the first to discover the work of Peter and Alison Smithson, the socalled brutalists responsible for two of Britain’s most internationally celebrated buildings of the time: a school in Hunstanton, a steel-and-glass evocation of Mies van der Rohe’s Chicago, mysteriously transplanted to Norfolk; and the Economist Building, a travertine slab just off St James’s in London.

Banham was attracted by what he saw as the Smithsons’ pragmatism and their sceptical view of monumentality. Later on, he was

clearly disappointed by the reluctance of his protégés to conform to his idea of what made architecture culturally relevant. He turned his attention to the young Norman Foster, who was capable, in those days, of telling potential clients that the answer to their needs might be to not build anything at all. Most unsettlingly of all for those who took a conventional view of architectural aesthetics, Foster and Banham admired the maverick visionary Buckminster Fuller and his geodesic domes.

The Braun toaster had already been the subject of a series of Hamilton’s screen prints, and an essay by Banham. These were not quite the unquestioning endorsements of timeless platonic form that we now expect of Hamilton’s work. Hamilton and Banham were conflicted about Braun. Their early attitudes to his objects – explored in an attempt to find significance in the consumerism sweeping and changing the world – were those of the Independent Group. They wanted to celebrate throwaway pop culture all the way from Cadillacs to giant refrigerators.

They were from the generation that had been through war and rationing, they endured baths limited to four inches of hot water, saw utility furniture and clothing coupons. They had had enough of restraint, and they weren’t keen on objects that were going to last forever when there might be something newer and better to come along shortly. Banham, who had a weakness for the more robust American approach to product design, complained in one of his articles about the essentially authoritarian nature of a toaster coming with an instruction manual that demanded tolerances of plus or minus four millimetres in the thickness of the bread that it could handle.

Banham enjoyed irritating people. Asked to contribute an essay to the catalogue for the Whitechapel Gallery’s exhibition on the modern chair, he used his text to mount an attack on what he called galloping furniturisation, “which may be diagnosed as an intolerable tension between culture and technology”, he claimed. “Le Corbusier’s Grand Confort when you sit in it, slowly slides you forward onto the floor with your knees up and risks cracking your spine.”

Banham called into question the whole idea of the canon of furniture design, and the way that we interact with it as he put it, “through the arse”. He had a particular objection to floor-standing air conditioning units: “At the next Triennale exhibition in Milan there will doubtless be fully arted-up versions by named designers and another service will have been furniturised another class of self-assertive objects will have got their claws into the living room carpet never to be dragged out again.”

In 1970 he devoted 1,200 words in New Society, the weekly magazine of sociology, to a piece titled the ‘Crisp at the Crossroads’.

“This sense that there is no diet busting substance in crisps is reinforced by their performance in the mouth apply tooth pressure and you get deafening action bite again and there is nothing left it’s a food that vanishes in the mouth.

IMAGE: ARCHITECTURAL PRESS ARCHIVE / RIBA COLLECTIONS

The pack is analogous in its performance, Keeping the crisp crisp means keeping water vapour away from it. Until recently the only cheap paper type flexible materials that formed effective vapour barriers were comparatively brittle and inflexible, and thus produced a lot of crinkling sound effects, whenever they were handled.

What with the crisps rattling about inside, and the pack crackling and rustling outside, you got an audio signal distinctive enough to be picked up by childish ears at 300 yards. More than this, the traditional method of sealing of the top of the pack produced a closure that could only be opened destructively and couldn’t be resealed. So eating crisps was an invitation to product sadism. You tear the pack open to get at the contents, rip it further to get at the corner lurkers in the bottom, and then crush it crackling flat in the fist before throwing it away, and probably sublimates more aggression per annum that any quantity of dramaturgical catharsis.”

He had a way of putting half-formed thoughts that had already occurred to me into words with a sharpness and wit that made an indelible impression. I remember that he once described the clipboard as the “power plank”, pointing out that the meanings of an object sometimes go beyond what its designer intended. He seemed to be offering a new way of looking at things: a modern way of understanding the modern world.

Though his analysis of everyday objects, from toasters to ice-cream vans, made him a particularly acute observer of taste, Reyner Banham did not by and large discuss fashion directly. But in his choice of neckwear, he maintained a running commentary on the changing significance of fashion. It was one of the ways in which he demonstrated his perception of himself as a truculent outsider.

Despite his doctorate from the Courtauld Institute, he was keener to talk about his days as an engineering apprentice than he was about studying with Antony Blunt, and he took to wearing a bolo tie.

In English usage, a bolo is a bootlace tie, a narrow strip of leather held in place by a silver clip, which had been popular with the Teddy boy cult of working-class dandies in the 1950s. In America the bolo tie is a manufactured tradition in the Western states with its roots going back no further than 1940. It is a form of neckwear more associated with conservative republican politicians than architectural historians. By adopting it, Banham was carefully signalling both that he knew a lot about the world of taste, and that he did not care to be part of it.

Banham could claim as his greatest achievement his transformation of the conventional Anglo-Saxon view of the modern movement. He demonstrated the significance of figures as far apart as the Russian constructivists and the Italian rationalists, who had previously been excluded from the usual narrative of mainstream 20th-century architecture. In so doing, of course, he made room for himself as a new critical voice to supplant his predecessors.

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PARTING SHOT

by Nils Leonard.

A momentary work of sublime innovation Yves Klein is blue.

An artist with an obsession for a colour.

He dallied for a while with other hues, experimenting with monochrome moments of gold and rose. But for Klein, true being was blue. He became famous for it.

Vast expanses of blue. A ferocious kick of colour. Blue smeared in thick swathes across giant squares of canvas. An obsession so large he had to conquer the colour. He needed to possess it.

To create his own. And so IKB was born, a deep hue, a blue of his very own.

So, blue.

1958. Paris. The anticipated opening of ‘The Void’.

More than 2,000 people standing in line, all of them waiting and wondering what Yves Klein would unveil next. They wait there on the street outside.

The talented, the great, the fucking rich, the hot as fuck.

The queue is heaving with excitement, only 10 allowed to enter at a time.

Drinks are served to the ones that wait. Colourful cocktails of Cointreau and gin.

There’s anticipation, loud laughter, small talk and catching up.

Sips and stories.

The coolest people on the planet being forced to wait in line, dancing in nonchalance, necking the booze to kill the burn of a peasant position in the line.

And so in tiny groups of 10 they are all allowed to enter.

Eyes scan the space, excited.

But there’s nothing there.

Just walls of white.

No art.

No paint.

No IKB. No curtain.

No unravelling.

No artistic interruption or creative mayhem.

Nothing.

Social occasions must escalate or die.

This is an orchestrated death.

No hint of the blue of being, just ghost white walls and emptiness.

‘What the fuck was the point?’

‘Who the hell does Klein think he is?’

‘What exactly did we miss?’

Answerless, they came for blue and go home red.

The night was a nothing.

They stumble drunk into their bedrooms, tired and let down.

But before they fall into their beds there is the human need to piss, the weight of cocktails crushing heavy on alcohol soaked bladders.

Zips, belts clinking and deep sighs.

And then a jet of pure blue piss into the toilet.

There it is.

The pure IKB. Warm and wet, the perfect colour streaming and steaming from more than 2,000 bladders, in bathrooms spread across the city.

Breathless they must have been.

Staring in disbelief at themselves in the bathroom mirror.

Yelling for someone, anyone, to witness the fact their own bodies and an unspoken act had become art. You’d never flush that toilet again.

No canvas or bronze could have offered the emotion that those carefully mixed cocktails did that evening. No timeline to post this onto. Just gasps. And revelation. And memory.

A story as vivid as that liquid blue even 70 years later.

This is it.

It is funny and ugly. Deep. And unbelievably moving.

The unshackled escapologist swimming up from watery depths.

The whisper that became Woodstock.

1,000 songs in your pocket.

The EpiPen. The Tampon. Apollo 11. Jordan 1s.

This is design.

Drunk and ridiculed the social elite leave in small clusters and disperse into the city, filtering out into the Parisian night. No mobiles to hate into back then, there is no one to tell of their ridicule, of the arrogance of Klein for wasting their time.

It is every story that lives and lives.

So they curse to themselves, spit insults in the air.

They witnessed empty walls, came home with a party bag of questions.

These are what I live for.

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Small moments that remain with us, immortal and hot in our chests.

Nils Leonard is the founder of Uncommon Creative Studio.

Albert Camus’ note to Klein from the night, which reads: With the void, full powers.

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