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CONTENTS
Letter from the Editor Hancock Guitars 07
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Food and Space Helsinki Sky Breakfast in Inala
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Small Object: Big Discussion
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Negotiating Architecture
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Everingham and Watson
Holloway Eyewear
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Small Spaces Competition
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D/events
If you don’t want to keep me, recycle me
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CONTRIBUTORS 03 Editor Shahmen Suku Art Direction Alice Glenane Editorial Contributors Gabriella Avenia Shahmen Suku Steve Szell Subhadra Aullen-Mistry Printing Allclear Printing Contact @ contactthedub@gmail.com thedub.com.au thedubdesigners
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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR Dear readers, It brings me great pleasure to be writing again in our third issue of D/zine. It has been more than a year since we amateurs came together to put together our very first issue, and we think we are starting to get the hang of it. The Dub has grown significantly in its membership and reputation in a mere two years. Encouraging collaboration is one of our biggest aims and over this time, we have established connections right across the Brisbane design scene. Our lecture series D/talks has expanded to include many of Brisbane’s leading designers. This semester we had Alexander Lotersztain from Derlot share his stories and artist duo Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan discuss the meanings behind their practice. Our second joint collaboration with the Institute of Modern Art (IMA) brought together a distinguished panel consisting of Tim O’Rourke, Robert Riddel and Claudia Taborda to discuss vernacular architecture, and we hope to forge further bonds. The idea of small spaces was introduced to us when we set up the design competition of that name with QUT Precincts. Designing small spaces and objects has a way of creating intimate encounters and powerful memories. Further exploring the idea of the small, this issue features spaces that we interact with and transform, small practices that make modest and often handmade objects, and how our relationship with food leads us to discover new environments. I hope you enjoy the articles in this issue and thank you for picking us up! Thank you to all our fantastic contributors and collaborators and to the wonderful Dub team. Yours sincerely, Shahmen Suku, President, The Dub
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HANCOCK GUITARS Brothers Sean and Dane Hancock began building classical guitars with their father Kim during their teen years up in Mt. Tamborine. These self-taught brothers have come to be known as among the premier Australian archtop builders, combining traditional construction techniques once employed by the master builder D’Angelico, with modern techniques and ideas from their own experiences. The quality of the instruments built at Hancock guitars is breathtaking. By employing combinations of Australian tone woods with original finishing lacquers once used by the famed builder D’Aquisto, it is no surprise that their instruments are sought after by a huge range of players and collectors alike. How did you both become involved in building guitars? S: Well, Dad was a cabinet maker/ carpenter builder until he hurt his back and could not continue with that career. At the time Dane was playing quite a bit of guitar and I was spending a lot of time in the workshop, so it seemed like a good progression to take those skills and put them towards guitar building. We started in high school, and it was just a hobby for about 10 years. So just building them from home then? S: Yes just building them from home. We were at school and it took that long to work out how it all worked and build a few and get them up to a standard
were we could begin to sell them. We both went to university during that time and Dane did engineering while I did design. After that, it was just a matter of deciding whether to continue with the business or if we were going to go find jobs in the real world. How did you figure out how to build these high quality archtops? D: It was a lot of research on the building methods. Before that we were doing classical guitars and they are really the hardest type of guitars to build out of all of the disciplines. So archtops were not a great step up from classical guitars, they’re on par. S: Trial and error is a big thing. We tried a couple of things, saw if they worked and then by doing it a different way on the next guitar we worked out which method is more effective. You will find that with guitar makers that everyone does them a little bit differently just because that way works well for them. How did your process of designing and building come about? S: It is two-sided, half of it is what we want to build and the other half is what the client wants us to build. The idea is to produce instruments that, while not for everyone, still covers a wider range of guitarists. Then there are the collectors who want the ultimate version of your instruments, models like the Adelaide and Hobart.
Interview by Steve Szell
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Steve Szell
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The solid body guitars that you build, particularly your Edge model, how did they come about? D: I just sat down with a pen and paper for a couple of days working out different shapes, and eventually came up with something that I thought might work. Then I got onto AutoCAD where it was mostly designed, but there were modifications throughout the process of building. A bit of fine-tuning as we were making it, mainly with the fins, and a bit of tweaking on the headstock just to make it as aesthetically pleasing as possible. S: The newer technologies or available hardware and parts influenced it too. It makes you try new things, experiment and push it further. You have a fairly large pile of raw materials in the corner here, how do you go about selecting your tone woods? D: We researched types of materials used by the master builder Antonio de Torres Jurado who used a huge variety of timber. He was the first to dive into using different tone woods. He used cypress, Brazilian rosewood, Indian rosewood, and European maple and experimented with different configurations, which we too experiment with. S: We are also starting to experiment with some sustainable options. A few of the electrics are made using Empress Wood, which is a fast growing local timber and is more environmentally friendly than say Brazilian rosewood which has to be harvested from the rainforest and shipped out to Australia. But you can’t use it for everything, but it is nice to start being able to test the material. How does sustainability play into your practice as guitar builders? S: With the small quantity our impact is minimal, for example that pile of timber would be a lifetime’s worth of material for us as we take only what we need for each instrument at a time. It is nice to look at alternatives and to try to use sustainable materials when we can. If you
can encourage people to want to use those materials then the big factories may start using them. It is as much influence as it is personal action. Keeping with the Australian themed instruments, having named models after Adelaide, Melbourne and Bendigo, is there anything inherently Australian about the instruments which inspired the model names? S: The name is indicative of the influence onto the instrument. We did one called the Tamworth which was a country guitar, the Bendigo which has a very earthy look and the Melbourne which was for a client from that city. The Australian jazz guitarists like James Sherlock, want a particular sound with their archtops, which is a bit warmer than some of the American players, so that does make them have a uniquely Australian sound.
Words by Subhadra Aullen-Mistry
FOOD AND SPACE HELSINKI SKY When I day-tripped across the Baltics to Helsinki in June this year I encountered a city in the throes of summer celebrations. In the late afternoon venturing down Pohioisesplanadi, a more upmarket cobbled Adelaide Street, council workers began setting up tables stretching the length of the entire street with crisp white table cloths. The busy street quickly transformed into an intimate gathering of friends and family bringing their own food and wine, and beautiful adornments for the table. “Dine under the Helsinki Sky” I later found out is a city wide picnic, the initiative of City of Helsinki. The organisers are a group called Yhteismaa translating to ‘Common Ground’ encouraging residents to gather for shared meals in public spaces. This sense of reclaiming the normally traffic filled streets as sites for social was incredibly inspiring. Yhteusmaa captures this participatory culture and economy through social innovations where food has become their medium. Watching what seemed like such a serendipitous encounter of city dwellers with their urban landscape was joyous, perhaps even more so as they sat and dinned undeterred by the rain.
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Subhadra Aullen-Mistry
Words by Shahmen Suku
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FOOD AND SPACE BREAKFAST IN INALA There is no other way I would rather spend my Sunday mornings than with a big bowl of Pho Tai (Vietnamese beef noodle soup) and a glass of Vietnamese coffee for breakfast. I thought I would share this guilty pleasure with a group consisting of an art curator, an architect and a fashion aficionado, and talk a little about the space that surrounded us.
elements of Vietnam” observes Joel, who has travelled extensively in the country. “It feels like Brick Lane on a Sunday with all the checkerboards” chimes in Subhadra, who recently returned from London.
Inala is the best place in Brisbane to eat Pho Tai. It has been home to the Vietnamese community for decades the nearby Wacol Migrant Centre was where the first Vietnamese refugees to Queensland settled in 1977. It has become a cultural hotspot, with the busiest and most vibrant square I have seen in Brisbane. Inala’s town centre is flanked by the council library and a shopping mall with a Woolworths store, and the square is lined with Asian fresh grocery stores, fishmongers, restaurants and a smoky grill. It’s filled with people who hail from all over the globe – African, Indian and Pacific Islander, as well as Vietnamese – shopping, eating, talking, playing music and board games. We arrived at Phuong Trinh, and ordered rice paper rolls and Pho Tai. The square echoed with the clatter of men playing Vietnamese chess and the chatter of many who get their groceries and Bánh mì (Vietnamese sandwich) from the street vendors. Inala “definitely has some Image
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The Dub
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What I think makes this very simple space work so well is the complex layers that make up the scene and contribute to the experience. There is the layout of small stores selling almost the same ingredients but each specialising in some, thus competing; the restaurants that fill the gaps between these stores; and the varied activities that take place. Most importantly, it is the community that add the final strokes to paint an all-encompassing experience. As we order a second round of juices and coffees we notice a middle aged Vietnamese lady straddling her bags of vegetables sporting an iconic Bob Katter hat. Hilarity ensued, but that is Australia. A land made up of migrants, and the best part is the cultures that come with it.
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The Dub
Participants in this conversation included Shahmen Suku, Subradra Aullen Mistry, Joel Alcorn and Russell Storer.
Words by Gabriella Avenia
SMALL OBJECT: BIG DISCUSSION Hopefully, because we live and breathe design, many of us have stumbled across (or even better, sought out) the YouTube phenomenon of October, Phonebloks. Phonebloks is a short film created by a Dutch designer, David Hakken, who was proposing an idea: technology, in particular mobile phones, designed to last. Hakken’s 2:47 minute video, originally with an aim to reach 5000 people, offers a prototype and examples of potential consumers for a new mobile phone, concluding with a call for a mass social media shout-out on 23 October. He was hopeful that if enough people put their hands up with him, someone would take notice. With over 17,000,000 hits on YouTube, someone did. Motorola released their newest project, an interchangeable-component mobile phone titled ‘Ara’, about a year ago. They have since partnered with Hakken and his vision child Phonebloks, to bring to the market another cellular alternative. Hopefully soon enough, a mobile phone with a conscience will be available to us all.
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I believe that this short video is important beyond the realm of electronic waste. The discussion it has started is central to the issues facing the future of designers. We are a population bred to consume and we have been eating our way through our resources without care for far too long. Consumerism won’t change and the desire for the newest product won’t cease. Where a difference can be achieved is in the way products are designed: Hakken is calling together creative thinkers to acknowledge their own ability to make change. Hakken is not working with an original concept here; many before him have been calling for a reconsideration (if not a total rewrite) of the way we make, use and dispose of things. Design made to last, and product life projected beyond its primary use. William McDonough has been campaigning along these lines for many years now; his book (co-authored by Michael Braungart) Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things (Rodale Press) was published in 2003. Coining the phrase, “cradle-to-cradle”, McDonough’s philosophy of product design is designing objects, which at the end of their life, will contribute back into the system from which they came.
McDonough and Hakken are merely two of the many architects and designers striving to work responsibly around the world. Designing with a greater conscience is becoming increasingly a trend. A trend that I hope will be embraced fully by our generation of designers.
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Phonebloks Youtube
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NEGOTIATING ARCHITECTURE My virgin trip to Europe began with a sprint to the Australian Pavilion at the Giardini (Garden) in Venice before the gates closed for the day. Every two years, Venice plays host to the largest contemporary art event in the world, the Venice Biennale. Famous for being one of the worlds’ most beautiful cities, Venice is transformed into a land of art, with exhibitions located throughout its villas and palazzos, its historic Arsenale, and, most romantically, its Giardini. There was a lot to take in for a first timer. Established in 1895, the Biennale is enormous, and national pavilions litter the landscape of the Giardini. Many are designed by renowned architects: Carlo Scarpa’s Venezuelan pavilion (1953), William Adams Delano and Chester Holmes Aldrich’s American pavilion (1930), Alvar Aalto’s Finnish pavilion (1956), and Léon Sneyers’ 1907 pavilion for Belgium, the first to be built by a foreign country. These small permanent structures are rendered rather semi-permanent, evolving and changing with each Biennale in response to contemporary artists. A famous example is Hans Haacke’s work in the German pavilion for the 1993 Biennale. Haacke uprooted and smashed the marble floor slabs that were installed for the pavilion’s redesign in 1938 by Hitler, drawing attention to the dark nationalist history of the building. In 2009, Scandinavian artist duo Elmgreen
& Dragset responded to the modernist architecture of the Nordic and Danish Pavilions by transforming them into a stylish domestic setting, their contents suggesting the life of the fictional characters who used to live there. Simryn Gill’s exhibition ‘Here art grows on trees’ represented Australia this year, housed in the Australian pavilion built in 1988 by Philip Cox. This was the secondlast national pavilion to be built in the Giardini, and Cox offered to place this ‘temporary’ structure, funded by himself and other sources. Mostly prefabricated, this building has since remained in Venice. Gill’s work is a great example of how an artist interacts with the building they exhibit in. She removed elements of the roof, opening up the space to provide a view to the sky and trees above, to let in the sounds of birds, and to allow the weather to impact upon the works on display, which become a part of the pavilion and the environment around it. This truly Australian vernacular representation of a shed, made with a tin roof and timber, will soon however be replaced by Denton Corker Marshall’s big black modernist box. This new design appears to lack the personality and narrative of the existing building and the surrounding pavilions which tell the stories of each country.
Words by Shahmen Suku
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With few local references besides using South Australian black granite to encase a white cube, it seems to leave very little space for conversations to be had with the building or its surroundings. The Giardini demonstrates the complex process of interaction between artists and architects, art and design, and people and buildings that we may lose with the new pavilion. But knowing artists, it will just prove to be another challenge to be overcome.
Lara Almarcegui - Spanish Pavilion
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Shahmen Suku
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Simryn Gill - Australian Pavilion
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Shahmen Suku
Interview by Shahmen Suku
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EVERINGHAM AND WATSON Susie Everingham and Liz Watson are long-time friends and collaborators who recently launched their brainchild, Everingham and Watson, a design and lifestyle business with a focus on making and collating Australian-made Australiana and kitsch homewares. This interview with Liz Watson took place at their Newstead store. Let us start from the beginning. L: We started in November 2011. Susie and I had been hanging out just after the floods, the State Library where I work was shut and Susie’s husband’s blacksmithing business just went under. We had several ideas and decided we would have a popup shop that sold vintage clothes, some tea towels and a blackboard. The idea was to try everything once, throw it out there and see where it goes. We had the venue for three days but sold out and had to shut the store in two. After that we realised we liked each other enough to spend lots of time together and even when we did have fights we got over them very quickly, so that worked. We then spent six months developing the website which we launched in June 2012. And how did this permanent retail space come about? L: We did another pop up shop last year and decided to test out the idea of having a real retail space. We decided
on a premise and leased out this tiny little space in Newstead in April. From then we decided we would launch our own wholesale range based on products we made. How much of the product in your store is made by you and how much of it is made for the store? L: It is currently 60% ours and 40% outsourced, but we are trying to change that to make more of it our own. Currently it is a collection of Australiana objects. Why is this idea of Australiana so important to you both? L: My great-aunt, Olive Ashworth, was a textile designer in the fifties. She was an extremely prolific designer who did tropical Queensland motifs around the Great Barrier Reef. I used to hate all the gifts I got for Christmas which I used to think were ugly, but now it is just amazing that I had that influence. What about Susie? L: Susie is a lawyer by trade, and so we have fairly complementary skills, me having a graphic design background and working at the Asia Pacific Design Library. I never thought we could work together. She is all about the billable hours and getting things done while I am more like in my head and not getting things done. She also did interior design and her grandmother, who was a beautiful lady,
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Everingham and Watson
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only wore Liberty and Marimekko prints. We discuss all of our designs; it is not just me coming up with it or her. We talk it through and decide on the ideas and colours it will be. When this idea of Australiana first came into your mind? L: While I was working in London, I noticed that they have such patriotism – much like in America too – but we are a young country with a problematic history. So it is kind of a fine line to walk, we are trying to include the Australian lifestyle as well as Australiana, kind of contemporary and taking the mickey out of it too. We saw one your latest tea towels with the Southern Cross print and did not really know what to feel about it. L: See it is borderline, it is a terrible thing, the Southern Cross which is a big part of ours and Indigenous cultural history has now become a sign of being bogan, and it should not be that way. I think that is tragic. I was originally going to call it the ‘non-bogan’ Southern Cross but called it Southern Skies instead, not wanting to be political. But how can you not when you are dealing with Australiana? L: I know it is a fine line but we try and keep it light and humorous. And how does this fit in with your day job? L: It is pretty hectic and we have been pedalling like we have never been before. We now stock at over 70 stores Australia wide! It is really great having to meet the people I do with my job and it keeps me enthusiastic about design. Dub: So what is next? Liz: We have got a big textile range coming out next year. What we have
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So what is next? L: We have got a big textile range coming out next year. What we have found quite difficult, because we are dealing with Australiana, we want all our products to be Australian made. Everything we make is Australian made but a lot of Australiana products are made in China, the irony! We will also be having a popup store in James Street and are really excited for it. Everingham and Watson – Pop Up Store 7/65 James Street, New Farm. 9:30am - 5pm DAILY. 15 November - 1 December 2013.
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HOLLOWAY EYEWEAR Martin Gordon Brown and Raffaele Persichetti founded Holloway Eyewear in 2011, describing it as ‘an incubator for the restless minds of the creative compulsive’. Their current practice includes, but is not restricted to, upcycling skate decks, scrap furniture, used timber and even a 152 year old Schaller piano into high quality, exquisitely designed eyewear. Through this approach they hope to inspire others to restore, reuse and give back to the environment. As I headed down the road towards the Holloway warehouse office/studio to meet with Martin and to better understand their practice, I half expected to see a polished studio space with a conveyor belt production line with a row of workers sanding and assembling eyewear products. What I did not expect to see was just one communal table and an all-too-familiar messy workshop of creative minds. After being offered a coffee I was invited to sit and listen in on a meeting that was taking place. Nothing seemed to be a secret here: everything felt like it was open for discussion. Asking questions about their business proved challenging in understanding what they do. The issue, I later figured out, was that their practice is not run as a business model as such, but on ideologies and ideas. A lot of what Holloway does here is working to fill a need that exists but
in ways that are responsible and sustainable. The basis for this practice, Martin tells me, is “providing examples of adaption or a responsible approach to design and manufacturing so that others who are embarking on this same journey – and that is all of us who design our lives – have got a case study to refer back to and also embrace the idea of making with their hands”. When asked about their focus on eyewear, Martin responds, “We accept that eyewear is a fundamental part of everyday life. From that point we’ve got an opportunity to get some leverage from an audience into where we really want to head”. This tangible product could then direct attention to wider things they are trying to do. Eyewear here is more of a platform to enable them to run their other projects. Some of these projects include sustainable fisheries in Western Australia and ‘Frames without Borders’, which aims to explore one-for-one frames, where the purchase of one of their rimless spectacle frames, made from a single continuous wire, will supply another to someone in need. Their varied projects and ideas left me questioning their main goal, to which Martin replied, “Empower others who are looking to do the right thing with the time that they have got here, be the change you want to see, if not don’t bother!”.
Words by Shahmen Suku
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Holloway Eyewear
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Holloway Eyewear
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SMALL SPACES COMPETITION A part of the Queensland University of Technology Precincts place-making strategy, the Small Spaces competition was set up in collaboration with The Dub to look at ways to activate and introduce a sense of place at QUT within the context of Brisbane city. The aim was to design an element that is a dual purpose intervention in one of the two selected small spaces around QUT Gardens Point that would encourage student and public interaction in these areas. Out of 15 entries, Masoud Pourshafighi and Ali Dabirian won the first prize with their impressive design for the space involving light architecture. Inspired by the folding techniques used in origami, they explored the various structural iterations as well as a prototype of a timber framed component. Congratulations to Masoud and Ali, to Ruwan Fernando for winning the second prize, and a special mention goes to the Slinky furniture team.
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Ali and Mosoud
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D/events
D/zine 02 Launch
D/talks
Small Spaces Images
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The Dub