Designing the Tropical

The dark origins of palm-tree modernism

A skateboarder's
unique take on
urban architecture

Revisiting Archigram:
dreamers of the possible

Desert bloom: the

emerging Emirati
design scene

Plus Martino Gamper,

Alice Rawsthorn, Jamie
Fobert and Gio Ponti

ISSUE 188 FEBRUARY 2019

UK £5.00 EUR €9.99 USA $15.99
NEW 2019

R AY S W I V E L

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Cologne, January 14−20, 2019
Hall 2.2 | Stand A-003

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 CONTENTS / FEBRUARY

20

60

16 114

Front
11
SCENE
The battle for Benin’s
bronzes, and the growth of
the creative industries
12
DIARY
Dior at the V&A and
Adjaye’s take on memorials
at the Design Museum
14
CRIME AGAINST DESIGN
IMAGES: FERNANDO GUERRA / FRED MORTAGNE / ARCHIGRAM ARCHIVES / THOMAS COCKREM / ALAMY
Design
20
THE JUNGLE BITES BACK
Can tropical modernism Architecture
ever free itself from its
colonial roots? 60
SKATEBOARDING,
32 SPACE AND THE CITY Review
DESIGN IN THE UAE How skateboarding
A new generation of challenges the way we think 106
homegrown talent is about urban architecture 12 SHELVES
emerging in the Emirates Design’s perennial support
72 star takes centre stage at
40 MENIL DRAWING the Aram Gallery
PROFILE: INSTITUTE, HOUSTON
DASHRATH PATEL Johnston Marklee adds an 108
He was the father of origami-like gallery to the GIO PONTI
modern Indian design, so Texan city’s remarkable The Musée des Arts
why is so often overlooked? architectural campus Décoratifs plays the Milan
maestro’s greatest hits
46 80
SHANGHAI DESIGN WEEK ICON MINDS: 110
Daan Roosegaarde on why JAMIE FOBERT ARCHIGRAM: THE BOOK

Western museums’ grip
on their colonial treasures
is loosening
16
OPINION
When did architects’
manifestos for the future
become so boring?
China is the ideal place to be
an artist-technologist
50
Q&A: MARTINO GAMPER
The furniture designer
talks to design critic Alice
Rawsthorn about food
design and found objects
58
ICON: THE 45
The seven-inch symbol of
pop’s golden age
The Stirling-shortlisted The 1960s provocateurs
architect on the gentle, are revealed as doers,
precise art of city-making not dreamers
89 114
PHOTO STORY: STORIES
TROPICAL MINIMAL The hidden language of
Jon Setter captures the Ghana’s kente cloth
abstract beauty of the
tropical modernist city
98
M9 MUSEUM, MESTRE
Sauerbruch Hutton gives
a new heart to Venice’s
suburban sprawl

104
ICON: VILLA IM TESSIN
What can model railways
tell us about the public’s
architectural tastes?
On the cover

Photograph by Signe Pierce

February 2019
5
 FRONT
Leader
Priya Khanchandani
Editor
FROM ONE PERSPECTIVE,
decolonisation happened
when the colonisers went
home and the nations they
had subjugated became free.
The last wave was after the
Second World War, when India,
Libya, Tunisia and Morocco
became independent, followed
by many African states in the 1960s.
Only a handful of islands are still colonies today,
but we all remain in colonialism’s shadow. In the
last few years, we have begun to see – particularly
in the cultural sector – that the process of
decolonising was never fully resolved, as we never
confronted the legacy of colonialism. Recently,
we have begun to talk openly about decolonising
everything from education to museums, Karl Marx
and the kitchen sink.
Now it is time we put that talk into action.
Institutions like museums which shape our reading
of history, need to dismantle the power structures
that formed their original foundations. Only
through a rigorous process of decolonisation can
design and the creative industries confront the
structures of oppression that have influenced their
development for more than two centuries.
The potential for fresh perspectives on
imperialist histories is immense. We have only
scratched the surface when it comes to their
impact on our understanding of design, architecture
and culture. This cannot claim to be a cleanly
“decolonised” issue of Icon – if such a state is even
6 iconeye.com
achievable in a post-colonial world. But it certainly
tries to take a positive step forward. We have
asked: how can we start to rethink design from a
“decolonised” lens?
Tropical Modernism, for instance, finds form in
trendy botanical architecture and palm wallpapers.
But as our cover story explains, it has a darker
side. As a design aesthetic it derives from colonial
building methods, which enabled colonialists in
tropical countries to deal with unfamiliar climates.
In such contexts, modernist buildings were not just
dwellings, they were an active and politically loaded
part of the civilizing process, enabling medicine and
hygiene to rescue colonialsts from tropical death.
Our profile of Indian designer Dashrath Patel,
the story about a Ghanaian kente cloth and
the Design Crime column critiquing the colonial
object, represent post-colonial perspectives that
must be voiced in the mainstream if, as a society,
we are to have any hope of decolonising. These
stories are intentionally placed alongside writing
about Archigram, Gio Ponti, Jamie Fobert and
other design stalwarts. They complement other
progressive thinking about the material world, like
the skateboarder’s unique experience of traversing
architecture in the city.
This isn’t a special issue on decolonisation. It is a
normal issue that shows decolonising doesn’t have
to be a niche subject: it fits in here just fine. Making
it mainstream is one way in which we can turn it
from a theory into a flourishing, tangible reality.
priya.khanchandani@icon-magazine.co.uk
IMAGE: LEONIE BOS FRONT

February 2019 7
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OF LIVING OUTDOORS.
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 FRONT

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Lisa Allen Hannah Fenton Association

1 2 3 4 5

Contributors This month’s contributors cast an eye over some ubiquitous paraphernalia.
‘From the plastic lawn flamingo to the tiki bar, tropical inspired design has
long fuelled Western society as escapist kitsch in dark times,’ writes Alice
Bucknell (1). Meanwhile, Adam Todhunter (2) reinterprets the skateboard’s
relationship with the built environment. ‘Beyond the stereotype of a
kid playing in a skate park, skateboarding’s cultural values and unique
relationship with architecture can be challenging to write about,’ he says.
Amid bombastic skyscrapers and luxury bling, Dubai, a city unafraid to flip
expectations, has built a historically engaged design scene, writes Dominic
Lutyens (3). Alice Rawsthorn (4), a world expert on renegade designers,
interviews furniture designer Martino Gamper. ‘One of the things I admire
most about Martino is that he is unalloyedly himself,’ she says. And finally,
don’t miss Debika Ray (5) on the late Indian pioneer Dashrath Patel. Under-
acknowledged, says Ray, he deserves new recognition in a post-colonial era.

February 2019
9
 Contacts Ph Bernard Touillon

info@ethimo.com
+39 0761 300 444

design Luca Nichetto —

Collection Esedra

ethimo.com
Showroom
Milan / Rome / Turin / Viterbo
Paris / Cannes
 FRONT / SCENE

SMALL PRINT
In a rare turn of good news
for these beleaguered
isles, a government report
claims that the creative
industries contributed
£101.5bn to the UK
economy over 2017 – a
new high and a 7.1 per cent
increase on the previous
year. Buried in the details,
however, is the caveat that
the architecture sector PORCH OF AN ARTIST
grew by only 1.5 per cent, If you can’t afford a David
far below the UK average, Hockney – his Portrait of
and that the museums and an Artist (1972) just sold
galleries sector contracted for £70 million, setting
by 2.1 per cent. a new record for a living
artist – do not despair.

Homeward bound SPECIAL COLLECTION

The art and design world’s
seemingly bottomless
France has elected to give 26 bronzes back obsession with the archive
has filtered through to
to Benin, following a report recommending the high street. Topman
the repatriation of looted African artefacts. now sells a denim jacket
This follows the British Museum’s decision with the word “archive”
to lend the Benin bronzes back to Nigeria. emblazoned on the back
and the breast: a perfect
France’s decision represents a landmark mnemonic for the scholar
victory for decolonialisation – with the unsure where they’re
caveat that according to French law meant to be heading of
a morning. At last glance
the objects will technically remain the it had been reduced to
property of the French state even though almost a third of its
they are on Benin soil. original price.
TULIP FEVER ALL THAT GLITTERS
IMAGES: DAN KITWOOD / GETTY / LOUVRE ABU DHABI / MOHAMED SOMJI
There is a more affordable
way to commune with
the Yorkshire painter:
by buying his childhood
home, a four-bedroom
terrace in Bradford, which
is a relative bargain at
£140,000.
QUEENING IT
In New York, where
Amazon plans to open a
campus in Long Island City,
Queens, the company has
promised the creation of
25,000 jobs. In return, it
has transpired, it stands
to gain $3 billion in tax
breaks, and a site that was
previously earmarked for
1,500 units of affordable
housing. Let the

Norman Foster’s Tulip, a When Jean Nouvel’s gentrification commence.

305m, gondola-topped
pleasure tower proposed
to cap the City of London,
has been roundly derided
for its absurd – and for
some, obscene – design.
But the most alarming
critique has come from an
unexpected source. London
City Airport is concerned
that the gondolas will
confuse air traffic control
systems to potentially
calamitous effect.
Louvre Abu Dhabi opened
in late 2017, it appeared to TOO LATE
be a symbol of the UAE’s In an encouraging gesture,
infinitely extending purse Westminster City Council
strings. But perhaps they has announced a ban
aren’t so infinite after on supersize properties.
all. Austrian engineer Currently the median
Waagner-Biro, which house price in the borough
fabricated the building’s is £1,054,400 – almost
latticed steel dome, has twice even the London
announced its insolvency average. It says that
– largely because of the banning “Monopoly
Emirates’ refusal to pay board-style housing”
the full price. → larger than 150sq m will
make space for more than
10,000 affordable homes.

February 2019 11

2 February – 5 May 2019
Design Museum, London
Q&A: David Adjaye
Making Memory
This new Design Museum exhibition of
work by Sir David Adjaye will explore
the constant flux in our relationships
with contemporary monuments and
memorials. The show is set against a
backdrop of controversy and debate
in the American South and around the
world, including the Rhodes Must Fall
movement at the University of Oxford.
Alex Newson, senior curator at the
Design Museum, enlightens us on the life
of a memorial today.
This is a very timely show given recent
reactions to public monuments.
That’s down to David. This exhibition
is part of our programme that gives
designers a platform to explore
something that they’re currently
thinking about. We asked David to think
about a theme or a subject and he came
back to us with this idea of looking at
monuments and memorials, how they’re
designed and how we use them, and how
that constantly evolves.
FRONT
Diary
Have there been challenges in
presenting such ideas?
I don’t think this is a traditional
architectural show. There will be lots of
material, whether that’s a 100-year-
old Yoruba sculpture, or Ghanaian
ceremonial umbrellas, revealing how
these influences are folded into David’s
designs. It’s much more about the
feeling and emotion behind these
projects, so we’re trying to activate as
many senses as possible to give people a
better understanding and a connection
with the designs.
Is Adjaye an architect for
our fractured times?
Totally. And I think that’s part of his skill
and brilliance. He’s quite rare among
architects in that he doesn’t have a
signature style; it’s quite difficult to pick
out an Adjaye building. But what he does
have is a signature process; the way he
interrogates the need for a building.
designmuseum.org
12
2 Feb
– 14 July 2019
Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
The V&A’s largest fashion exhibition
since Alexander McQueen in 2015
promises to be another blockbuster.
The brand that transformed post-war
style will be celebrated with a display
of over 200 haute couture garments,
alongside extensive archive material
such as photography, film and a number
of Dior’s personal possessions.
vam.ac.uk
10 Feb
– 27 May 2019
The Value of Good Design
MoMA, New York
The years bracketing the Second World
War saw the launch of classic products
such as the Fiat Cinquecento, Eames
La Chaise and Chemex Coffee Maker.
Seen through today’s eyes, what do
these and other objects tells us about
contemporary notions of good design?
Try answering that question or simply
wallow in seeing these creations afresh.
moma.org
20 Feb
– 2 June 2019
Siah Armajani: Follow This Line
Met Breuer, New York
The Iranian-American artist’s first major
US retrospective includes a number of
works from the 1960s and 70s, including
his Dictionary for Building series
(1974-75), made up of thousands of
micro-scaled architectural maquettes.
Armajani’s art explores public space and
structure, with his more recent work
becoming increasingly political.
metmuseum.org
iconeye.com

14 Feb
– 24 February 2019
Modernism Week
Various venues, Palm Springs, California
The annual celebration of all things
mid-century returns to the modernism
mecca of Palm Springs, waving the flag
for design, architecture, art, fashion
and culture. This year’s events include
a jaunt around Frank Sinatra’s old
neighbourhood, a Nod to Mod dinner
party and the Illuminated Modern
Sunset Bus Tour.
modernismweek.com
23 Feb
IMAGES: SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION / CHRISTIAN DIOR / JIM RICHE
– 23 June 2019
Phyllida Barlow RA: cul-de-sac
Royal Academy, London
The RA’s new Gabrielle Jungels-
Winkler Galleries are given the Barlow
treatment, with a series of her
trademark large-scale installations,
which make use of cardboard,
plywood, polystyrene and other un-
sculpture-like materials to create
wonderfully vibrant works that seem
to teeter on the edge of collapse.
royalacademy.org.uk
February 2019
FRONT
Diary
4 Feb
– 10 February 2019
Stockholm Design Week
Stockholm Furniture and Light Fair
The Swedish capital warms itself
up with another seven-day design binge,
bringing together buyers, architects,
designers and lovers of Scandi style.
There are over 200 events, including
exhibitions, installations, films, a
showcase for young designers and a
special 25-hour Open House experience
taking place on 8 and 9 February.
stockholmdesignweek.com
27 Feb
– 1 March 2019
Design Indaba Festival
Artscape Theatre Centre, Cape Town
This year’s festival includes an Emerging
Creatives programme and a conference
discussing the role of social responsibility
in architecture, as well as seminars,
workshops and a musical line-up that
waves the flag for contemporary African
sounds. There will also be a competition
to decide Africa’s most beautiful object
and more than 30 industry speakers.
designindaba.com
13
9 Feb
– 19 May 2019
Le Corbusier and the Age of Purism
National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo
This exhibition marks the Tokyo
museum’s 60th anniversary, and is held in
its Le Corbusier-designed main building.
It will feature around 100 works from
the period following the First World War,
when the young architect arrived in Paris
and immersed himself in the burgeoning
purism movement, promoting an art of
‘construction and synthesis’.
nmwa.go.jp
15 Feb
– 10 June 2019
All the Rembrandts of the Rijksmuseum
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
This year sees the 350th anniversary
of Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn’s
birth, with the Rijksmuseum staging
two exhibitions to mark the occasion.
First up is this historic display of the
museum’s entire Rembrandt collection,
including 22 paintings, 60 drawings and
300 prints. A Rembrandt-Velázquez
show follows in the autumn.
rijksmuseum.nl
 FRONT

crimes
against design
–––

The colonial
object
The argument for repatriating
imperial loot is increasingly
difficult to ignore, writes
Matthew Barker

IN NOVEMBER, TARITA
Alarcón Rapu, governor
of Easter Island and
spokesperson for the Rapa
Nui people, held a press
conference outside the British
Museum calling for the return
of one of the island’s famed
Moai head carvings. Known
as Hoa Hakananai’a (‘The
Stolen Friend’), the sculpture
became part of the museum’s
collection 150 years ago,
after being taken by the
Royal Navy and presented to
Queen Victoria.
The same week of governor
Rapu’s visit to London, French
president Emmanuel Macron
transitioned from their proud
origins as religious or social
“It is impossible The Museum of Black
Civilizations, which opened
presented a new report, The items, to 19th-century colonial for us to see in Senegal in December,
Restitution of African Cultural trophies and curiosities, and is pushing the boundaries
Heritage: Toward a New now on to their present- these objects further. Its director Hamady
Relational Ethics, declaring
that his government would
day status as signifiers of
painfully dark chapters in
without being Bocoum has promised to
push for taken objects to be
ensure ‘the conditions to be world history. It is impossible conscious of returned, reclaiming them as
met within five years for the
temporary or permanent
for us to see them on display
without being conscious of their unsettling celebrations of pan-African
culture; of liberation rather
restitution of African heritage
to Africa’. Some have
their unsettling backstories
and controversies.
backstories and than subjugation; life rather
than death.
suggested that Macron’s Macron’s report aside, controversies” Loans, rather than
motives have more to do with most cultural institutions repatriation, have long been
promoting trade with former have been left on their own the set answer for museums,
colonies, but the report did to negotiate postcolonial basis’. The recently revamped both in the UK and overseas,
at least prompt renewed legacies. The British Museum Africa Museum in Brussels, when it comes to requests
conversation around the often refuses to blink in the once hugely contentious for to return what was never
IMAGES: STEPHEN CHUNG / ALAMY

prickly issue of repatriation.
Contested objects like
the Benin bronzes, scattered
around various European
capitals, or India’s Koh-i-
Noor diamond, now part
of the crown jewels in the
Tower of London, have twice
face of any guilt-tripping
(just ask the Greeks), but
is generally sensitive to
questions of historical
plundering and last year
agreed to return some of
the Benin pieces to Nigeria,
albeit initially on a ‘rotating
its unabashed pro-colonial
message, now shows its
collection with accompanying
text explaining how artefacts
were appropriated and
allowing people from the
Congo and Rwanda to tell
their side of the story.
actually theirs. However, the
well-worn argument that
Western institutions are
better equipped to protect
and display their respective
governments’ bygone booty
could now finally be reaching
its expiration date.

14 iconeye.com
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at our redesigned London showroom.
USM U. Schaerer Sons Ltd
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 FRONT

it in, don’t you? No, wait, on second

thoughts, what if it’s just a placebo to
salve your desperate need for securely
packaged creativity?
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to
think about the future of architecture,
places and lives in ways that seriously
challenge the status quo, or that don’t
automatically default to musings about
AI, robotics or other tropes of Facebook’s
original motto, Move Fast and Break
Things. Are we turning to historical
architectural visions of the future –
non-commercial jolts of imagination
like Archigram’s – as an antidote to the
commercialised travesties of faux-radical
architecture and design?
It appears that the very idea of the
future has become boring, as per the
novelist JG Ballard’s vitriolic complaint:
‘I would sum up my fear about the future
in one word: boring. And that’s my one
fear: that everything has happened;
nothing exciting or new or interesting is
ever going to happen again. The future
is just going to be a vast, conforming
suburb of the soul.’
That suburb is a new kind of Twilight
Zone in which most of us float like Major
Toms in the zero gravity of multi-layered
distractions – flickering, monetised
visionettes shadowed by Rem Koolhaas’s
remark: ‘Identity is the new junk-food for
the dispossessed.’
opinion Compare our horror vacui zeitgeist
––– with the Dalek-cadenced clarion call
of one of the 20th century’s greatest

Mundanifesto architects, Mies van der Rohe: ‘We reject

Why are we still enthralled by yesterday’s radicals?
Because today’s visions of the future are so dull,
writes Jay Merrick
DO YOU SUFFER from dry, intellectually
flaky existence? At a loss for words or
ideas while ordering your Aperol spritz,
or saying ‘yeah-yeah-yeah’ quite often,
for no apparent reason? What you need
is an easy-to-apply creative manifesto,
an idea-rich moisturiser that will ensure
all aesthetic speculation, all doctrine,
and all formalism. Architecture is the will
of the age conceived in spatial terms.
Living. Changing. New. Not yesterday,
not tomorrow, only today can be
given form.’
Today, nearly a century after that
properly radical declaration, only the
past can be given acceptable form
because our views of the present and
future are shrouded in a digital smog
whose choking density doubles every
two years. Since 2005, the volume
of data in existence has grown by a
factor of more than 200, to roughly 40
zettabytes (that’s 21 zeros). According to
the International Data Corporation, less
than one per cent of this digital data is
analysed. Are we beginning to suspect
IMAGES: ARCHIGRAM ARCHIVES

ABOVE Features Monte
Carlo proposal, by Peter
Cook, Dennis Crompton
and Ron Herron of
Archigram, 1969
your intelligence remains smooth, and so
much more than merely skin-deep.
And, look, here’s just the thing!
Archigram: The Book (reviewed on page
110). It’s big, it’s brand new, it’s lavishly
produced, and it contains jolly interesting
ideas. You immediately want to rub
that we know virtually nothing about
virtually everything? This awareness is
insidious and fundamentally pacifying.
We cling increasingly to evidence of the
past, which tends to stifle any instinct
for experimentation unless it’s related
to consumption.

16 iconeye.com
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 FRONT
BELOW Crop of Control RIGHT Front cover of
and Choice Dwellings, Archigram 4, the Zoom
part section, by Warren issue, designed by
Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Warren Chalk, 1964
Crompton and Ron Herron
of Archigram, 1967
“Are we beginning This commercialisation of iconoclastic
to suspect ideas is evident in even the most
radically-minded designers. In 2000,
that we know for example, Zaha Hadid Architects’
avant garde status was founded
virtually nothing on manifestos that spoke of ‘a new
about virtually phenomenology, navigation, and
inhabitation of space’, and ‘the new
everything?” ontology defining what it means to be
somewhere’. In 2018, a press release
about ZHA-designed sportswear
told us that it ‘combines bio-centric
Organic Bodymapping with material
innovation and design expertise to
deliver exceptional climate control and
natural freedom of movement for all
sports activities’. For around £80, you
18
too can become a radically elasticated
ontological phenomenon – a walking,
talking, lifestyle manifesto.
To avoid these satires I confess that I,
too, resort to the past – for example, by
sampling the idea-rich readingdesign.org
website, which reminds us that there
have been times when design manifestos
and ideas ran very distinctly against the
prevailing grain. There is a strange purity
to the process of reading and thinking
about ideas which are not supported
with imagery.
When was the last time you
encountered a vision or critique of
the future that wasn’t simply some
trope of gee-whizzery? Where are the
troublemakers? Where are the proposals
– think of Superstudio’s shocking
negative utopia, a world covered by grids
of impossibly vast concrete slabs – that
jar us into really thinking about the
meanings (or non-meanings) of space
and form?
This remark by the social psychologist
Nicolas Fieulaine in the Danish academic
magazine, Scenario, seems particularly
resonant: ‘We are caught in a present
where we find it difficult to build a
narrative about the past and imagine
the future. We either adapt to a new
fundamental uncertainty, or we become
a culture that lives in opposition to
the uncertainty …’ It appears that we
are becoming terminally afraid, or
unable, to think about the future in
constructive ways.
iconeye.com
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The jungle

bites

back

A new wave of tropical design is inspiring

everything from houses in São Paulo to bars in
Amsterdam. But the style has a more tangled past
than its playful aesthetic might suggest

By Alice Bucknell
 DESIGN / FEATURE

ABOVE Luxury in the wild – Jungle House in Guarujá, Brazil

by Studio MK27 (2015)

February 2019 21
 DESIGN / FEATURE

ABOVE Kandalama hotel in Dambulla, Sri Lanka by Geoffrey Bawa (1994)

RIGHT Casa Maracanã in São Paulo by Terra e Tuma (2008)

I
t is impossible to go more than a few steps in a major
city without seeing a lush monstera leaf poking out
from someone’s street-facing window, or a copper-fitted,
houseplant-stuffed cafe. And then there are the radiant
renderings encasing the construction site of another new
luxury development – the sun-streaked interiors and
sliding glass doors seeming to offer a tropical teleportation
service alongside the mid-century furniture.
Tropical design and architecture is clearly having a moment,
tied in with the return of postmodernism and 1970s and 80s
design. But this trend has a more deep-rooted history. It once
history. Tropical modernism emerged in the mid-20th century
as a colonial architecture style imposed on the tropical world
by European protagonists fleeing the dangers of the Second
World War, eager to craft a better world in its destructive wake.
Although the movement kicked off in British colonies across Asia,
the most precisely articulated examples stem from Jane Drew and
Maxwell Fry’s work in British West Africa. Here, Drew and Fry
had the opportunity to cut their teeth on large-scale public and
social projects including hospitals, schools and housing schemes.
On their return to England, the duo established the Department
of Tropical Architecture at the Architectural Association in
IMAGES: MATTHEW WAKEM / NELSON KON

materialised as the beloved pink lawn flamingo of the 1950s – a
plastic Prozac for America’s post-war suburban dream – and
before that, the emblematic tiki bar, whose origins can be traced
back to California amid the great depression of the early 1930s.
Peeling back that outer layer of escapist kitsch, we land at tropical
modernism.
Although the term is thrown around lightly today – having
become a favourite catch-all phrase for open-plan concrete crash
pads overflowing with exotic greenery and luxury beach houses
featured on the likes of Dezeen or ArchDaily – it has a darker
London in 1954 and set about teaching an architectural style
already ripe with contradiction.
‘Beyond its exercise as a form of cultural colonialism, tropical
modernism essentially ignored context,’ explains David Robson,
an expert on the Sri Lankan modernist architect Geoffrey Bawa,
and a close friend of the movement’s head honchos. ‘Fry and Drew
would make these gestures to local art forms, but largely, the
result was Bauhaus-inspired, international style architecture that
used imported materials like glass and reinforced concrete.’
The only architects who recognised the absurdity of

22 iconeye.com
 DESIGN / FEATURE

ABOVE The tropicana-infused Bar Botanique in Amsterdam East,

designed by Studio Modijefsky (2016)

“Greenery is becoming more popular in

interior design because people want a
space that is less controlled”

developing an architectural style reliant on European production
methods in countries with no industry were locals such as
Sri Lanka’s Bawa and Minnette de Silva. Returning from their
overseas studies at the AA in 1948 and 1957 respectively, they
set about developing a distinctly Sri Lankan strand of modern
architecture that rejected the international style. This movement
would eventually come to be known as regional modernism.
Emphasising local craft and materials – stone, timber, clay
tiles – regional modernism placed an emphasis on the pitched
roof (which tropical modernism had flattened). Vernacular
motifs were infused with modern design to create warm yet
open interiors. Tropical modernism, broadly understood in Sri
Lanka as a total failure, was abandoned after the European expats
returned home.
to entertain the idea of a simple and enlightened lifestyle as an
attempt to escape the crisis of which they are a direct outcome.
Speaking to architects and interior designers whose tropical
modern inspired projects dot urban jungles and mountainous
rainforests from Amsterdam to Australia, certain commonalities
emerge that defy the restrained palette of old-school tropical
modernism: a push for plush, liveable spaces that blend styles and
reveal the personalities of their makers.
‘We are all travelling more, for sure, and exotic species of
plants are more available nowadays,’ says Esther Stam, founder of
the Amsterdam-based interior design practice, Studio Modijefsky.
‘But I believe greenery is becoming more popular in interior
design because people are looking for a softer and constantly
evolving environment. We want a space that is less controlled,
IMAGE: MAARTEN WILLEMSTEIN

Knowing this complex history, what do we make of the
resurgent interest in the aesthetics of tropical modernism?
Where do we place its historic and contemporary offshoots in
South America, Australia and Florida? As we look more closely,
yesterday’s utopian dreams of a clean slate amid the hangover of
global warfare start to overlap the present tiny house movement
amid the sweltering stakes of the anthropocene. And both seem
something that breaks all the straight lines.’
Stam has cultivated these design ideas with Bar Botanique,
a tropicana-infused cafe-bar that opened in Amsterdam East in
2016. Royal palms and monstera abound while philodendron
dangle from the double-height ceiling and wrap around the art
deco-style balcony leading up to the mezzanine dining area,
where millennial pink emerges from the prevailing shades of

24 iconeye.com
FROM TRE E TO FINISHED P IEC E

OVO Collection by Foster+Partners

benchmarkfurniture.com
 DESIGN / FEATURE

ABOVE ‘Tropical Bizarro’ - Planchonella House in Cairns, Queensland by Jesse Bennett Studio (2015)
LEFT Tropical style for the ultra-wealthy at Canal House, a luxury Miami Beach residence designed by Studio MK27

green. Marble abounds: pink at the bistro tables flanking 1950s
furniture, and moss green for the bar, its bottom half bedecked in
patterned tiles. With its ready Instagrammability, Bar Botanique
is one of the clearest examples of contemporary riffs on tropical
modernism as a fully heterogeneous affair.
Some 14,000km south-east in the remote tropical region of
Cairns, Queensland sits Planchonella House: the first project
by local practice Jesse Bennett Studio. Completed in 2015,
Planchonella is a mixture of pared-back concrete and glass
foundations with jazzy furnishings, including a u-shaped powder-
pink sofa and a wriggly lemon-yellow ladder leading to the
IMAGES: FRAN PARENTE / SEAN FENNESSY
the architecture hasn’t really progressed from the post-war
“Queenslander” style,’ suggests Bennett. By contrast, he believes
Brazil’s dense population was the catalyst for the country’s speedy
development of its own strain of tropical modernism, as seen in
the mid-20th century works of Oscar Niemeyer and Lina Bo Bardi.
The country’s drive for urbanisation also had an impact, with
20 million people moving from urban areas into cities between
the 1950s and 70s.
Modernism quickly seeped into Brazil’s national identity, with
dozens of concrete structures popping up in the public realm.
Niemeyer’s Ministry of Education and Health in Rio de Janeiro

greenery-covered roof. ‘It’s an eclectic blend of different styles;
we call it Tropical Bizarro – maybe it’ll stick,’ Bennett jokes of his
architectural Frankenstein.
The undulating L-shaped structure is sandwiched between two
chunks of curving concrete, curling around an inner courtyard
that provides the necessary light and ventilation between the
house and the tropical rainforest surrounding it. Sliding glass
doors keep the modernist dream alive, while the overhanging
roof gives much-needed shade.
‘Australia’s tropical regions are sparsely populated and
(1936-43) was a paragon of the international style applied to a
tropical climate, with its use of brise-soleils and piloti, jacking the
building up to create a shady undercroft below.
But Brazil’s current run of tropical modernism has veered
away from these concrete civic landscapes – shifting, like most
others, into the residential sector, but continuing to draw
heavily on their modernist heritage. The work of São Paulo-based
practice Terra e Tuma has garnered international attention for
its spin on Brazilian tropical modernist principles. ‘We sail
the same ocean, but we have the conscience to find our own

February 2019 27
 DESIGN / FEATURE

ABOVE Miami Beach house by Studio MK27, complete with sky bridge (2017)
OPPOSITE Casa de Vidro meets Manhattan loft – Terra e Tuma’s Casa Maracanã in Lapa, São Paulo (2009)

“Rudolph was the first one to make the

international style contextual – he knew a
glass box in Florida was not a good idea”

course,’ says Danilo Terra of his practice’s relation to Brazil’s
modern masters.
Taking as much aesthetic inspiration from the concrete jungle
as the real one, Terra’s own dwelling, Casa Maracanã, is caught
somewhere between a Manhattan loft and Bo Bardi’s rural glass
house. A largely open-air, open-plan space meets minimalist
furniture, exposed lightbulbs, metal fence balustrades and
concrete brick walls. Decorative tiles by local artist Alexandre
Mancini enliven the facade, while a bike is poised for the camera
indoors, asserting the coexistence of contemporary life and
modernist design.
One of Brazil’s most prominent contemporary practices, Studio
furniture. Perhaps unsurprisingly, MK27 is big in Miami, where
its latest modernist mansion featuring a sky bridge and an
‘authentically manicured’ lagoon-filled tropical garden sits on the
market for a cool £20 million.
Some 70 years ago, a young Paul Rudolph, fresh out of navy
service, settled down on Florida’s other coast in the sleepy seaside
town of Sarasota, Florida. The lay of the land was much the same
as tropical modern’s other spawning spots: largely undeveloped
and cheap. Opportunistic property tycoons and a booming tourist
economy demanding quaint beach homes for the northern
snowbirds meant Rudolph could perfect his tropical modern
style through seasonal micro-cabins made from bare-bones and
IMAGES: PEDRO KOK / FRAN PARENTE

MK27, has become synonymous with luxe modernist mansions
that make John Lautner’s Hollywood crash pads look like dinky
guest homes. Like Lautner’s space-age Elrod House in Palm
Springs (1968), the studio’s 2013 Jungle House appears to rise out
of the dramatic landscape of São Paulo’s lush coastal mountains.
Quoting the tropical modernist values of site-specificity and a
deeper connection to nature through a pared-back aesthetic,
the Jungle House offers barefoot luxury for clients yearning for
a piece of nature along with their infinity pools and designer
oft-experimental materials: from the crushed-seashell reinforcing
and rooftop cooling system of the Lamolithic House (1948) to the
Cocoon House’s (1950) concave plastic spray-on roof – a technique
Rudolph picked up in his navy days.
Although Rudolph was destined for bigger things, departing
subtropical Sarasota to head up Yale’s architecture department in
1952, his innovative guest houses left an enduring impact on the
contemporary tropical modernist movement. ‘Rudolph was the
first one to make the international style contextual – he knew

28 iconeye.com
 DESIGN / FEATURE
ABOVE Cocoon House in Florida by Paul Rudolph (1948). Innovative techniques included a plastic spray-on roof
“Everyone says they want a
sustainable house, but they still
choose the sub-zero fridge”
a glass box in Florida was not a good idea,’ explains Miami-based
architect Jacob Brillhart.
Fusing modernist design principles with local styles – including
the Florida Cracker and Dogtrot, the simple wooden house on
stilts with a central staircase and front porch – Brillhart and
his partner Melissa set out to build a 21st-century tropical
modernist home. Completed in 2014, the Brillhart House is a
true ‘tiny home’ that sits on a 20m-wide lot. Alongside modern
materials such as thermal glass, icynene insulation and
hurricane-proof sliding doors, the house switches concrete for
ipe wood sourced nearby in Fort Lauderdale, plus steel and glass.
Brillhart sees the material upgrade as a natural evolution of
Rudolph’s beachside bungalows and Mies’s glossy pavilions
into a year-round habitable home that retains all the tropical
modernist principles.
But with the cost of a decent plot of land in Miami-Dade
County often clearing £800,000, says Brillhart, the drive to build
big has resulted in the overgrowth of tropical modernist-inspired
mansions. Brandishing LEED certifications (the US equivalent
to the UK’s BREEAM) and quoting values of humbleness and
sustainability, these multi-million pound homes claim to offer a
30
deeper connection to nature, effectively manipulating the eco-
friendly symbolism of tropical modernism in order to feed the
grotesque lifestyle of America’s wealthiest. ‘Everyone says they
want a sustainable house, but when it’s time to trade in the sub-
zero fridge for solar panels, they choose the sub-zero fridge nine
times out of ten,’ laments Brillhart.
As much as contemporary tropical modernism turns its
back on its dark colonial origins, it could be a richer, more
eclectic style that values the soft and delightful over the cool
and uninhabitable elements of the modernist fantasy. But as
the aesthetic is increasingly co-opted for the sale of luxury
apartments, and the phrase “tropical modern” is used to describe
McMansions with sea views, we should look twice at this trend.
It is time we were more conscious of the colonial history
are we taking on board, or attempting to erase, by replicating
this style. What does the resurgence of these dazzling and
occasionally eye-watering designs say about the experience
economy and distraction culture? We need to re-consider what
are we hiding beneath all the jungle wallpaper, indoor tropical
plantscapes, and plush mid-century modern furniture – or what
are we hiding from.
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 BELOW Common Canvas,
projection of a digital image
database, by Knoth & Renner,
FGDB, 2018

ABOVE LLC Redux: A Great Place

for Great People to Do Great Work,
installation by Christopher Benton,
shown at FGDB, Sharjah, 2018

The
desert
blooms
By Dominic Lutyens

LEFT Natal, marble ABOVE Film still from

planter in gold-plated In Progress by Cheb
frame, by Tinkah Moha, FGDB, 2018
Backed by initiatives such as Dubai Design
Week and Fikra Graphic Design Biennial
(FGDB), a new generation of Emirati designers
are fusing local crafts and vanishing traditions
into an engaging contemporary aesthetic

BELOW Flowers for ABOVE Disorientation by Shamma

Immigration, photography Buhazza – a fusion of the flags of
project by Lizania Cruz, Somalia, Bahrain, the UAE and the
FGDB, 2018 UK, shown at FGDB, 2018

NOVEMBER SAW THE opening of the Jameel

BELOW ABC da Cana
(2014), pigment prints
by Jonathas de Andrade,
FGDB, 2018
Arts Centre in Dubai – a major, 10,000sq m cultural
institution in the city centre developed by Art Jameel,
an independent organisation that supports arts and
education in the Middle East. Its arrival, along with
the Louvre Abu Dhabi in 2017, focuses attention on the
UAE as a multi-dimensional cultural destination.
The Jameel’s three-storey white building, designed
by UK-based Serie Architects, is refreshingly
understated – a far cry from the bombastic futurism
of the attention-grabbing skyscrapers of the 1990s
and 2000s that dominate the city’s skyline. It heralds
a contemporary aesthetic that fuses memory and
local craft, an astute reflection of Jameel’s mission
statement. Contrary to the expensively imported
culture of the Louvre, the Jameel Arts Centre will
highlight artists and designers who have grown
locally, drawing on heritage to launch the next
generation. Its opening marks a moment when the
UAE has backed emerging design, art, and craft from
a new generation of creatives from the Emirates and
their Gulf neighbours.
On the ground floor, visitors get expansive views
of the Dubai Creek as the waterway merges with the
Arabian Sea, and from here it is possible to survey
the vast strides the UAE has made in design during
the last decade, and how it has planned for a future
hosting Expo 2020 next year and beyond. This
location on the Creek, with its port and harbour, was
essential to Dubai’s transformation into an important
commercial centre from the early 20th century.
Since the 1960s and the discovery of oil, Dubai has
spread investment into industries such as real estate,
tourism, finance and IT so that, today, oil accounts for
less than five per cent of GDP.
Until quite recently, contemporary design has
played a minor role in the development of Dubai
and the UAE, says furniture designer Aljoud
Lootah. ‘Parents often encourage men to go into
architecture and engineering, assuming they will
earn good money and so support their families,’
 DESIGN / FEATURE

she says. But other areas of design are only now BELOW Al Khaleej Newspaper
becoming established. Archive, by Ammar Al Attar and
Lootah’s studio is one of many creative lots – Mohammed Aljneibi, part of the
including interior showrooms, fashion boutiques and Department of Graphic Optimism
arts galleries – that make up Dubai Design District at FGDB, 2018
(D3), the main venue for the annual, citywide event
Dubai Design Week, which took place in November.
Opened in 2015, D3 is a masterplanned development,
so far comprising 11 buildings that house offices, start-
ups, shops, cafes and the recently established Dubai
Institute of Design and Innovation.
Signs from consumers are positive, with growth in
the UAE design market exceeding 10 per cent yearly,
according to official figures that include architecture.
And education facilities are catching up to ensure that
local designers produce an ever-growing portion of
what consumers take home.
‘The idea of a career in product design is fairly new
in the region,’ says Rue Kothari, fair director of one
of Dubai Design Week’s key exhibitions, Downtown
Design, which takes place a ten-minute walk from
D3. But it has been made possible over the last two
decades, she adds, through education.
The arrival in 1997 of the American University
of Sharjah, founded by the emirate’s ruler, Sheikh
Dr Sultan bin Muhammad Al-Qasimi, marked a
turning point for homegrown talent. ‘With only
a fledgling industry here, talented graduates have
historically developed careers outside the UAE, chiefly
in established design centres,’ says Kothari. ‘But now
the profile of design has been raised enough to signal “Interior design may be traditionally
there are opportunities at home.’ viewed as ‘feminine’ in the Middle
The creation of the Dubai Culture & Arts Authority
in 2008, a government entity that supports the arts, by
East, but ultimately the quality and
Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the UAE’s originality of the work will stand out”
prime minister and Dubai’s ruler, paved the way for
talented graduates to remain in the country and build
businesses. Since then, the UAE has witnessed a steady
growth of local initiatives that have helped establish
the country, notably Dubai, as a design centre.

IMAGES: OBAID ALBUDOOR / FIKRA GRAPHIC DESIGN BIENNIAL / SHUGA PHOTOGRAPHY

ABOVE Liminal Vase,

in aluminium mesh,
acrylic, salts and
minerals, by Hala Al Ani
(pictured left)

34 iconeye.com
 DESIGN / FEATURE
ABOVE Nam Stool by Alia Mazrooei,
shown at Dubai Design Week 2018
BELOW Ramel coffee cups by
Tinkah, made of ceramics and
sand, shown at Downtown
Editions, Dubai, 2018
February 2019
BELOW Dazzle Fungus by
Studio Moniker, part of the
Department of Dematerializing
Language at FGDB, 2018
Among these are Design Ras Al Khor, a collective
set up in 2015 by Shafar and UAE-based designers
Khulood Thani and Nadine Kanso, who hope to build
a new creative district in Ras Al Khor, Dubai’s oldest
industrial area.
Meanwhile, the seemingly more slow-paced
neighbouring emirate, Sharjah, has become home to
the Sharjah Art Foundation, which stages the Sharjah
Biennial, and hosted the inaugural Fikra Graphic
Design Biennial last November. This fascinating
exhibition, held at the former headquarters of
the 1970s modernist Bank of Sharjah, charted the
development of regional graphic design since 1971, the
year the country was formed.
For many designers, prevalent gender biases
– which Lootah described pushing men towards
architecture – also continue to reserve other fields for
women. But, fair director Kothari says, the roles are
now blending, particularly in Dubai where only 15 per
cent of residents are Emirati. ‘Interior design may be
traditionally viewed as “feminine” in the Middle East,
but in a highly competitive field diversity is a huge
advantage and ultimately the quality and originality
of the work will always stand out,’ she says.
Since Sheik Mohammed announced the Emirates
Council for Gender Balance in 2015, the UAE has
begun to address gender inequality. ‘I believe that in
the past seven to 10 years women have broken through
gender boundaries significantly,’ Kothari adds. ‘Male
domination of architecture is being actively subverted
by pioneering women in Saudi Arabia and across
the region who are using their distinctive approach
to their advantage – winning business and leading
the way creatively. Now these women are mentoring
others and sharing their experiences, expertise and
networks to facilitate better opportunities for young
women wanting to enter the field.’
The expansion of education facilities has also
integrated traditional crafts, as in the case of Art
Jameel – advancing local design as more than
35
 DESIGN / FEATURE

LEFT The Mesh, a BELOW Shak’l by

shelter designed Abdalla Almulla for
by FBMI x Roudha Al Safa library,
Alshamsi, Dubai shown at Downtown
Design Week, 2018 Design, 2018

a facsimile of Western design. There is a growing “There’s a lot of experimentation

demand for design that demonstrates an awareness
of local culture, says Rawan Kashkoush, head of with sand.Concrete is commonly
programming at Dubai Design Week. ‘UAE-based used. Wood is rare as there are
designers are now offering what has been missing
from Emirati homes, where for years Western ideas few trees. And in our hot climate
predominated,’ she says. you hardly find any glassblowing”
Last year, Downtown Design included a sideshow
called Downtown Editions, devoted to bespoke and
limited-edition design with a focus on regional work.
There, Dubai-based multidisciplinary practice Tinkah
showed its Ramel coffee cups, made of ceramics and
sand. ‘There’s a lot of experimentation with sand,’
says Kashkoush. ‘Concrete is commonly used. Wood is
rare as there are few trees. And in our hot climate you
hardly find any glassblowing.’
Tashkeel, founded by artist Lateefa bint Maktoum
in Dubai in 2008, nurtures UAE-based designers.
One factor that has contributed to the emphasis on
mass production in the Emirates is the dwindling
manufacturing base for specialist craft skills. Tashkeel
has helped to address this by setting up Make Works
UAE, a directory that enables designers to source
local fabricators.
Five years ago, Tashkeel also established Tanween,
a ten-month programme which involves inviting
four designers to develop limited-edition products
using local materials, production processes and
crafts. ‘Tanween products are often made of camel
leather, khous [woven palm leaves] and recycled coral
[a material used in the construction of houses in
Dubai until the early 1900s],’ says Lisa Ball-Lechgar,
Taskheel’s deputy director.
During Dubai Design Week, former Tanween
participant Myrtille Ronteix, a designer from France,
exhibited her Insight Out pendant lamp, which
has a glossy, black cylindrical shade that separates ABOVE Monstera
at the tug of a tasselled pull cord to reveal an inner Deliciosa by Manuela
handwoven shade. ‘The idea for the lamp came Eichner, FGDB, 2018

36 iconeye.com
 LEFT KAJ tray table by Alia
Al Mazrooei, inspired by the
cone form of the traditional
Kajoja pillow BELOW Insight Out lamp
by Tanween participant
Myrtille Ronteix, Dubai
Design Week 2018

BELOW Eight Colored Beads,

performance by Seendosi, part
of the Deoartment of Flying
Saucers at FGDB, 2018

ABOVE Escape
Routes, mixed-media
table installation y
IMAGES: OBAID ALBUDOOR

Foundland Design,
FGDB, 2018
 DESIGN / FEATURE

BELOW Exhibition RIGHT Coffee cup by

of work by graphic Salem Al Mansoori,
designer Hisham Al shown at UAE Design
Madhloum, FGDB, Stories, London Design
2018 Festival, 2018

from my discovering different layers of Dubai,’

Rontieux explains. ‘I had a light-bulb moment when
I visited [early 20th-century fort] Qasr Al Muwaiji,
which triggered a dialogue between past and present,
heritage and modernity.’
The best products on show at Dubai Design Week
come from local breakthroughs, and tie together
many of the advances in education and heritage
preservation made in the UAE. One example is
Lootah’s Khous sofa and Takya stool. The backrest for
the sofa incorporates a strip of camel leather with a
pattern mimicking khous-weaving, while the stool
comprises stacked cushions fixed to an ash frame.
‘The stool reimagines a memory I have of growing up
in the UAE where it was common to have low-seating
areas with rectangular cushions,’ says Lootah. ‘My
sister and I would stack them up and build make-
believe castles.’
Likewise, the recent work by Studio Muju
highlights the increasingly collaborative nature of
Dubai’s design scene. Its Woven collection – a sofa,
chair, pouf and coffee table – is made using a palm-
frond weave and a Bedouin embroidery technique
called Sadu and is the result of a close working
relationship with craftspeople.
Looking out from the Jameel Arts Centre, where
IMAGES: MARK COCKSEDGE / OBAID ALBUDOOR

the union of history and innovation has already borne

fruit, it’s hard not to wonder where this meeting
of minds will take Dubai next. The exponential
expansion of the design scene in the UAE, fuelled
by major, mainly government-backed investment,
is undeniable. But it remains to be seen how
contemporary design there will evolve.
One wonders if designers will look outwards and
develop new approaches that are less reliant on
ABOVE Grey Area by reclaiming UAE’s vanishing traditions; or whether
Tinkah, Downtown the emerging culture can support the creation of a
Editions, 2018 progressive, but locally derived, aesthetic.

38 iconeye.com
 Set location: Den Blå Planet, Copenhagen.

Design to Shape light

• Size: Ø200, Ø300, Ø400 • Colours: Alu grey, white, corten • System power: 10 W, 22W, 25W
• Colour temp. 2700K and 3000K • Lumen output: 400, 750, 1000 • Lm/W: 40 • CRI: >90

Flindt Wall
Design by Christian Flindt

louispoulsen.com
 DESIGN / PROFILE

BELOW Patel’s photograph

of Ray (with camera) and
Charles Eames at NID. Patel
collaborated with the Eameses
throughout his career

The forgotten father

of Indian design
Artist and sculptor Dashrath Patel was instrumental
in creating India’s modern design identity.
Yet his place in history remains to be written

By Debika Ray

40 iconeye.com

BELOW Collage,
paper on MDF, 2009.
In his final years, Patel
worked mostly from his
home near Mumbai
THE NATIONAL INSTITUTE of Design
(NID) in Ahmedabad, western India, has
been operating continuously for 58 years
and is believed to be the longest-surviving
dedicated design school in the world. The
Ulm School of Design existed for no more
than 15 years, between 1953 and 1968 and
when the Bauhaus shut down in 1933, it
had been running for 14.
NID was launched in 1961 in response
to a report by Ray and Charles Eames
commissioned by the country’s then-prime
minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, to address
how India could develop its crafts and
manufacturing industries following its
independence in 1947. At the school’s helm
was Dashrath Patel, an artist and sculptor
who remained director of education for
20 years.
He took on the role at a time when
the design profession in India was only
February 2019
DESIGN / PROFILE
just taking root, becoming India’s first ABOVE A dargah, or
teacher of design and the nation’s little shrine, near Allahabad,
known father of the discipline. According northern India,
to Pinakin Patel, curator of School: A photographed by
Retrospective, an exhibition of his artwork Patel in 1983
at the Kolkata Centre for Creativity (KCC),
‘He was one of the rarest undiscovered
jewels, maybe India’s renaissance man.’
Until he joined NID, Dashrath Patel
had little interest in design. Born in 1927
in the Indian state of Gujarat, he studied
fine art between 1949 and 1953 at the
Government College of Fine Arts in Madras
(now Chennai) in southern India, then
spent two postgraduate years focusing
on painting, sculpture and ceramics
at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In
1960, he studied ceramics in Prague,
experimenting by inserting objects such
as screws, pebbles and keys into clay. He
moved in circles with masters of modern
41
art like MF Husain and VS Gaitonde and
was introduced to photography by Henri
Cartier-Bresson, with whom he worked for
several years.
It is the diversity and eclecticism
of his practice that earned Patel the
appointment at NID. Over the two decades
that followed, he trained generations of
teachers, established dozens of courses,
became known for his hands-on teaching
methods, and worked with an impressive
array of architects including Buckminster
Fuller, Louis Kahn and Frei Otto (with the
latter, on a 1969 exhibition about Mahatma
Gandhi that included a dramatic roof made
of hand-loomed fabric sewn by prisoners).
Patel was also made responsible for
designing all official exhibitions by the
Indian government abroad – a series of
media-friendly spectacles that acted as a
calling card for India on the world stage in ABOVE Festival of
the independent nation’s early days. These India, Moscow, 1987
included the Indian entry for the 1967 – one of a series of
Montreal World’s Fair, for which he put international events
together a nine-channel video installation directed by Patel
on a shoestring budget. The 1987 Festival
of India in Moscow was a fiesta of dancers,
street food and fireworks, including a
flotilla down the river and a concert at
the Kremlin. In 1985, he arranged for the
IMAGES: KOLKATA CENTRE FOR CREATIVITY
prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, to gift a
baby elephant to French president François
Mitterrand at the foot of the Eiffel Tower
surrounded by folk dancers and music.
‘He said that since the budget we
had was so little compared with the
host countries, we would always appear
inadequate in front of the international
media,’ says Pinakin Patel. ‘So he made
the events as visually rich [as possible]
42 iconeye.com

BELOW Paris days –
Patel in his studio at
the École des Beaux-
Arts in the 1950s
and exhausted them by asking to use
impossible places. In Russia he said, “I
don’t want to be limited to one stadium
because it’s too small a canvas – I want
to reach out to every person in the city.”
When it came to advertising [the events],
he took inspiration from Indian village
“melas”; in France, he went to a pre-school
and distributed paper toys to children
made by Indian craftsmen, and told them
to tell their parents to come and see
the show.’
As a teacher, Dashrath Patel’s
approach to design was more stripped
down. Sadanand Menon, a friend and
collaborator, says there were three things
that inspired him: ‘One was the Gandhian
idea of being appropriate and simple,
and using indigenous means. He also
had this idea that, as the Indian capital
February 2019
DESIGN / PROFILE
“He made the events as visually rich as
possible. In Russia he said, ‘I don’t want
to be limited to one stadium because
it’s too small a canvas – I want to reach
out to every person in the city’”
found its feet and became self-sufficient ABOVE Work from
in the post-independence era, it needed the Rural Design
to develop an indigenous idea of design, School near Varanasi,
rather than being dependent on borrowed northern India, which
ideas from the West. Finally, there was a Patel founded in 1982
mix of the high and low – Patel himself
could do everything from the smallest and
cheapest way of [creating], for example,
sitting at a village potter’s wheel, to the
highest types of industrial pottery.’ It is
this mindset that he brought to NID – that
of craft meeting design, and tradition
meeting modern.
In 1981, Patel left NID after a
disagreement with the institution. It was
widely reported at the time that workers
on farms were being injured by a new
thresher machine. Patel believed NID
should play a role in developing a design-
led solution to the problem, but felt that
43

“If everybody had remained true to
Dashrath’s dreams, it would have
been another situation altogether,
but NID was soon designing surplus
products for a faceless market”
his colleagues did not see it as a priority.
For a man entirely focused on design’s
social purpose, Menon says this was a
major disappointment.
Patel went on to set up a Rural Design
School near Varanasi in north India,
focused on crafts such as ceramics,
printing and dyeing, and from 1999,
worked at Pinakin Patel’s practice,
fitting in seamlessly among the twenty-
somethings designing on computers.
For the last decade of his life, he worked
mostly from his home in Alibag, near
Mumbai – now a museum dedicated to
his life and work. He died aged 83 on
1 December 2010.
It is not that Patel wasn’t recognised:
in 1981, he was awarded the Padma Shri,
India’s fourth-highest civilian award, for
his work in the arts and, a year after his
DESIGN / PROFILE
death, received the Padma Bhushan, the TOP LEFT Collage,
third highest. Yet the attention his work paper on MDF, 2009.
receives today is hardly in proportion to Patel worked across
his pivotal role in the design history of a various media, from
country whose consumer market is among ceramics to abstract
the biggest and fastest-growing in the line drawings
world. This could be because he floated
between the worlds of art and design – TOP RIGHT
never fully part of either and unaligned to Artisanal toys being
a particular art historic movement. distributed to French
Vaishna Roy, a journalist at The schoolchildren, 1980s
Hindu newspaper, suggests that Patel
may never have sought out fame or ABOVE Nine-screen
adulation. ‘As he flitted tirelessly from 360° projection of ‘A
canvas to ceramic, from design school to Journey in India’ for
exhibition design, from photography to the Montreal World’s
collage,’ she wrote in 2016, ‘he appears Fair, 1967
to have been driven by nothing as banal
as recognition but only the excitement
of living his art unstintingly.’ It could
44 iconeye.com
be that his relatively ephemeral legacy
relates to his unwillingness to bend his
ideas. ‘If everybody had remained true to
the Eameses’ and Dashrath’s dreams of
India, it would have been another situation
altogether,’ Pinakin Patel says, ‘but [NID]
was soon, in Dashrath’s words, designing
surplus products for a faceless market.’
Menon explains that, in ‘perhaps a
naive way’, Patel had hoped that India’s
development trajectory would follow
Gandhi’s vision for village-level economics
and production, as opposed to the large-
scale industrialisation that ultimately
came about. He was also disappointed with
the proliferation of joint ventures between
Indian and foreign companies, at the
expense of an indigenous industrial class
who looked at Indian needs, used Indian
technology and allowed Indian design to
February 2019
grow. However, Patel’s disappointments ABOVE Events such as
did not leave him cynical; he continued to the 1987 Festival of India
work every day, by drawing and working in Moscow often focused
with his hands. ‘He stayed cheerful and on the creative use of
did not throw in the towel. He remained public spaces
a concerned individual rather than a
bureaucrat,’ Menon notes.
Ultimately, Dashrath Patel perhaps
never truly fitted into the world of design,
particulary its commercial imperative.
Pinakin Patel recalls him saying, ‘a good
artist must never sell his work because
selling involves a reaction that forces
you to relook at your own practice and
ideologies’. Pinakin interprets this as
meaning that somewhere along the way,
an artist could become frozen in the
moment as the result of people’s reactions.
In contrast, Dashrath told his friend,
‘I want to be playful.’
45
design shanghai
–––

“In Europe, clients

usually ask: ‘Are you
sure you’ve done this
before?’ In China, they
IMAGE: SYLVAIN LEFEVRE / HASY / WILLEM DE KAM

ask: ‘Are you sure this

is the first time?’”

By Matthew Ponsford

46 iconeye.com

AS A DUTCHMAN in
Shanghai, a place where
designers are impatient to
invent a better future, artist-
technologist Daan Roosegaarde
has found kindred spirits.
‘China, it’s a whole different
ballgame,’ say Roosegaarde,
founder of Studio Roosegaarde,
a Rotterdam-based practice
combining art, technology and
nature in urban environments,
which launched a pop-up office
in Shanghai in 2017.
‘When I’m doing projects
in Europe, and I present a
new, radical idea to the client
– the museum or the private
collector, or the mayor or the
minister – they usually ask:
‘“Are you sure you’ve done this
before?”’ says Roosegaarde. ‘In
China they usually ask: “Are
you sure this is the first time?”
because they want to be the
first. The difference starts there
– in a different perspective of
what they want.’
Roosegaard takes this desire
for originality as an invitation.
The 39-year-old has built his
reputation on projects that he
RIGHT Smog Free
Tower, Tianjin , 2017.
The tower is designed
to clean 30.000m3 of
air per hour
February 2019
DESIGN / FEATURE
says were once shunned by
designers and instead labelled
as technology. But in the last
decade he has been embraced
by the field, earning positions
in NASA’s innovation team and
as a visiting professor at Tongji
University in Shanghai.
His Smog Free Tower,
designed for polluted streets
in China and Poland, sucks
pollutants from urban air
and can turn the compressed
soot into jewellery, while his
Windvogel comprises green
energy generating kites with
luminous ropes that light up
the night sky.
Roosegaarde’s work is LEFT AND ABOVE
intended to function as Space Waste
public art, often using light Lab, a work that
to articulate abstract issues visualises galactic
but also to point toward ways junk, at Kunstlinie
that design and technology KAF in Almere, the
could respond. He describes Netherlands, 2018
Space Waste Lab, a project that
tracks dead satellites orbiting
the Earth using green beams,
with the ultimate aim of
dragging space junk into our
atmosphere, as a novel kind of
firework display.
47

Waterlicht, an immersive
after-dark visualisation of the
city under water, created with
smoke and light trickery, went
on display in November in
Dubai. For Roosegaarde, using
light to raise awareness of
issues such as rising sea levels,
is a first step to designing our
way out of them. ‘Our world
is changing, our climate is
changing and, for me, a lot of
the problems we are facing are
a sign of bad design,’ he says.
‘Our carbon dioxide emissions,
our air pollution, our rising
sea level – it is [we] who have
unconsciously designed our
atmosphere.
‘So we can do two things: we
can be sad, mad, hide in our
room and blame somebody
else and be very passive. Or we
can say: we have created this
situation, let’s engineer our
way out of it.’
At Design Shanghai in March,
Roosegaarde will evangelise
DESIGN / FEATURE
this approach as a headline ABOVE AND
speaker. But in China’s largest BELOW Waterlicht,
city, many audience members Roosegaarde’s light
will already be on board with installation at the
Roosegaarde’s mission. Jameel Arts Centre,
Shanghai, a port of Dubai, 2018
25 million, has grown as a
laboratory for environmentally
and technologically engaged
design that aims to respond to
social issues. Ling Fan, chief
executive of Shanghai-based
design site Tezign and professor
at the Design & Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory at
Tongji University, says that
while some projects have
attracted media attention
for flashy designs, other,
more impactful, projects are
often missed.
For Fan, the real story is
how design thinking and
innovation are integrated
into fast-developing
economies and the sweeping
urbanisation that is changing
the lived environment on
48 iconeye.com

an unparalleled scale. He
highlights NICE 2035 by Lou
Yongqi, dean of the College
of Design and Innovation at
Tongji University, which has
transformed a typical Shanghai
street through prototypes that
show how urban regeneration
can refill vacant shops as the
country pivots to e-commerce.
In place of vanishing
retailers, the community
has installed an electric car
research unit from Aston
Martin and a development
laboratory for Haier, the
world’s biggest home appliance
manufacturer. Fan describes a
remarkable juxtaposition of the
city past and future: ‘You see
all these clothes hanging from
the balcony, and this Aston
Martin lab on the ground floor.’
This joins a list of similar
proposals aimed at changing
the city through design,
including Tezign’s own work to
create graphic design for small
businesses – such as Shanghai’s
ubiquitous noodle restaurants
– using artificial intelligence to
automate the development of
branding for 10RMB (about £1).
There are also the smart
cities initiatives by Wang
Jian, the ‘father of Chinese
cloud computing’. Jian’s
tech-driven projects have an
explicitly green basis, Fan says.
February 2019
DESIGN / FEATURE
RIGHT Roosegaarde
with Lotus Dome, a
light installation in
Sainte Marie Madeleine
Church, Lille, 2012
Increasing the efficiency of
traffic flow, for example, means
reducing the city’s demands
for road space and ‘the other
percentage of the city can go
back to the environment.’
Major designers from more
traditional fields are also
working on social issues.
One such is Jamy Yang, one
of China’s most influential
product designers, whose
day job includes work for
“We can be sad, mad, hide
international brands from in our room and blame
somebody else. Or we can
BMW to Coca Cola. Yang has
collaborated with China’s
One Foundation charity to
redesign long-term shelters
say: we have created this
for displaced people following situation, let’s engineer
earthquakes in Sichuan, Gansu
and Yunnan. our way out of it”
While Roosegaarde is excited
to expand his own work in
Shanghai, he says it’s a huge
mistake for Western designers
to arrive and try to impose
their own ideas on China
without reflecting on what
the country’s own designers
are producing. He recalls
a book written by another
Dutch designer, John van de
Water, who arrived in Beijing
15 years ago and, through the
hectic swirl of new ideas, was
forced to design differently.
‘It’s called “You Can’t Change
China, China Changes You”. I
believe that.’
49
 DESIGN / Q&A

Martino Gamper

“In the late 1990s, if you

hadn’t worked with Cappellini,
you were a loser”

Interviewed by Alice Rawsthorn

IN THIS CONVERSATION, based on a Italy, and went on to study sculpture under

live event at Sir John Soane’s Museum
in London, furniture designer Martino
Gamper talks to design critic Alice
Rawsthorn about his creative practice,
which spans a variety of projects:
exhibition design, interiors, commissions
and designing mass-produced products for
major furniture brands.
Gamper started out as an apprentice to
a furniture maker in Merano, northern
Michelangelo Pistoletto at the Academy of
Fine Arts Vienna. He took his MA in 2000
from the Royal College of Art, where he
studied under Ron Arad, and has since
presented his works internationally at
venues such as the Serpentine Sackler
Gallery and the V&A in London, the Palais
de Tokyo and Glasgow’s Modern Institute.
Rawsthorn is the author of two
critically acclaimed books, Design as

50 iconeye.com

BELOW Backside,
part of the 100 Chairs
in 100 Days collection,
2007
LEFT Pepper Spitz
and Salt Spitz, inspired
by the mountainous
landscape of the Tyrol,
Gamper’s home region
IMAGES: ANGUSMILL / ÅBÄKE AND MARTINO GAMPER / NILUFAR GALLERY / VICTORIA DAWES / AMIT LENNON / MICHAEL LECKIE
“I was lucky I was in the
company of people who
February 2019
DESIGN / Q&A
an Attitude (Icon 181) and Hello World:
Where Design Meets Life. Her weekly
design column for the New York Times
was syndicated worldwide for over a
decade. A regular speaker on design
at events such as TED and the World
Economic Forum in Davos, Rawsthorn
holds an OBE for services to design and
the arts.
ALICE RAWSTHORN: You began working
with wood and wanted to become a
craftsperson. Why did that command your
attention initially and how did you then
evolve towards design?
also wanted to make”
53
MARTINO GAMPER: It was made clear
to me that I shouldn’t continue further
studies at high school level, and I was
made redundant. Well, not quite as bad
as that.
AR: But you were edging towards the
precipice.
MG: I found it quite difficult to concentrate
at school, so I decided I wanted to do an
apprenticeship. The programme still exists
where you work with a master craftsman,
but once a week you go to vocational
school so it means you’re not completely
dropping out of school. You have an
education and after five years you do an
exam, which allows you to go and study;
not everywhere but in certain art schools.
You can go to university, basically.
AR: Making is now a huge phenomenon:
making, fixing, repairing and using craft
and artisanal techniques. But during this
period, which was over 20 years ago, it
was very unusual for designers to make
their work themselves. It was literally
the making of your career that you could
make exactly what you wanted to, rather
than waiting for a manufacturer to
agree to produce it. Your ability to make
your own work gave you a capacity for
expressiveness and freedom that would
have been denied you otherwise, but it was
an unusual path at the time.
MG: Yes, the late 1990s, especially in the
design and furniture world, was all about
working for the right companies and, if
you hadn’t worked with Cappellini at the
time, you were a loser. It took a while,
but I was lucky that I was in the company
of the right people who also wanted to
make, and early on had the right clients,
who wanted me to create work for them.
It was a humble beginning, when you
made a simple shelf for someone. I got
a lot of satisfaction from making even
a one-off piece for a client, hopefully a
satisfied customer.
 DESIGN / Q&A

“I wanted to make a few

things that would be
kept in the world, rather
than many objects that
would disappear”

AR: Did you have a sense of how your

career was going to develop at that time, or
were you making it up as you went along?
MG: Post the Milan experience, working
for Matteo Thun [& Partners], I wanted to
work not for industry, but only for a few
specific industries. Matteo Thun’s studio
designs everything from toilet seats to
roof tiles and it was quite frustrating
sometimes, because 60 per cent of the
work we did was for nothing – it never
went into production. Maybe 70 per cent.
Also, once I left the RCA I realised I
wanted to make a few things that would
probably be kept in the world, rather than
many objects that would disappear. But
the rest of it was pretty much making it up
as I went along. In 2000 at the RCA there
wasn’t a sense of what we now know as a
[design] gallery world. I started working
with my gallery in Milan [Nina Yashar’s
Nilufar Gallery] in 2007, but before that
Nina worked mostly with vintage design. MG: Yes and it was always done in to a restaurant and spend it, or we could
There were a couple of people in London collaboration with other people. The food spend the same amount of time doing this
and France working with contemporary event Trattoria al Cappello was done with event, eat as well quite nicely, experiment
designers, but there wasn’t really a market. three friends of mine, Maki Suzuki, Kajsa along the way, create some objects and
Stahl and Alex Rich, actually not far from meet some new people.
AR: There wasn’t a market, but there was here in Hatton Garden at a place called
an incredible community of designers, Hat On Wall Bar. And it also came out of AR: Your breakthrough after all these
makers, writers, musicians and artists necessity somehow because there was good years of fun and experimentation was
who were young, ambitious, dynamic and food in London but it wasn’t as diverse 100 Chairs in 100 Days, which is still one
experimental in London, and you were as now. We were just out of college and of your most famous projects. It involved
very much at the heart of it. I remember obviously couldn’t afford to go fine dining trawling around London to find abandoned
meeting you at the time and you always every other day, but we wanted to have chairs that you could remake into other
had an obsessive idea or enthusiasm. You nice food. We wanted to have something forms of seating. Did you plan it like
also staged incredible experimental food that was interesting and experimental as that? Did you think it was time to do
events where you’d make everything: the well. And there was the social interaction something ambitious and coherent, or was
food, the things you’d eat the food off, the that I missed, coming from Italy where it something that had been percolating for
tools you’d use to cook it. Performative you would go to a trattoria and talk with a long time?
approaches to food are relatively common the owner, the people, the guests. Also we MG: It started as a collaboration with a
now, but they weren’t then. realised that we could earn money, then go friend of mine [Rainer Spehl] with whom I

54 iconeye.com
 DESIGN / Q&A

lived, worked and also studied at the RCA. invited repairers, makers, craftspeople, LEFT If Gio Only Knew,
We were invited to take part in the V&A bookbinders, 3D printers and cobblers design performance
Village Fete, an event that was held every from all over Milan to ply their trades using furniture by Gio
summer until around 2010. Designers there, and people were fascinated. Ponti, Design Miami/
could have a stall and make something and MG: The project was about a certain state Basel, 2007
sell it. It was very ad hoc and improvised. and how better to manifest it than with a
We turned up with scrap wood and put it state of repair. I put on the building a big BELOW In a
against a wall and we would make a piece neon light that said In a State of Repair. I State of Repair
of furniture for people with the tools we was quite surprised they did it because it’s at La Rinascente
had there. We called it Furniture While quite a negative thing for a department department store,
You Wait. store to have a big neon sign on basically Milan, 2014
Out of this, I was asked to do an saying they’re broken. But they agreed to
exhibition with a friend of mine who
started a reclamation yard in Kensal Rise
[Retrouvius]; a really interesting place
to go and see furniture. We didn’t need
any paper or drawing and we didn’t need
to convince anyone of the idea, we did it
alone and improvised. After that, Janice
Blackburn, a curator, collector and patron
of the arts and design, invited us to do a
show at Sotheby’s called Waste to Taste,
using raw material and found objects.
Then me and [Mark Lee and Maki Suzuki
of Åbäke] worked on a book and he said,
‘Since you want to do this project, let’s call
it 100 Chairs in 100 Days’.

AR: Another thing that makes your

practice relatively unusual for a designer is
the nimbleness with which you’ve forged
a strong rapport with the art world. One
project where this was very evident was
one of your exhibitions at the Serpentine
Gallery in 2014. Can you talk about that?
MG: Yes, I got asked by the Serpentine
Gallery to act as a curator, and design a
show about it. So, design an exhibition
with design.
I struggled with the idea that a lot of
design museums show selections of ‘the
best of’: the best of chairs, the best of
tables, the best of mobile phones, the best
of ... This never really interested me. The
world is a much bigger place.
So I wanted to, first of all, mix
contemporary and historic pieces. It
helped that Nina [Yashar] had an amazing
collection of shelves. So I put together an
exhibition about shelves that talked about
the last 80 years, 90 years of design, from
the 1920s to 2014 [titled Design is a State
of Mind]. I asked people I knew, or wanted
to get to know, to lend me their collection
and it wasn’t necessarily a collection, more
like pieces that surrounded them and
inspired them.

AR: You did another project for the

Serpentine as its annual contribution to
Milan Design Week at La Rinascente, the
department store on Piazza del Duomo.
This is one of my favourites of all your
projects: In a State of Repair, for which you

February 2019 55
 DESIGN / Q&A

that and we had 12 different craftspeople

who would repair objects for free. So you
could bring your shoes, your bag, your
coat, your jumper, your bicycle, your toys
and the artisans would repair them during
the opening hours of the shop.

AR: Do you think it would be more or less

difficult for a designer to develop the same
kind of practice if they were starting now
than it was for you 20 years ago?
MG: I always thought I was five years too
late, wherever I went. I went to Vienna
and I thought there was a certain kind of
buzz but I was too late. I went to Milan. I
thought I was five years too late because in
the late 1990s, Milan was somehow on its
way out.

AR: At least you arrived here before Brexit.

“I always thought MG: Yeah. I came to London and I thought

it was already quite tight. That generation
of Michael Marriott, Jasper Morrison and

I was five years

Konstantin Grcic – I missed that train.
But then what was different was it took
me seven years from graduation to my

too late, wherever

first show. And for me they were the most
interesting, exciting years.
Brexit is looming but I think every

I went”
generation, every decade, has got its own
challenge. I think it’s still exciting to
see young people doing their own work.
I think there’s always a question; why
should there be another chair, another
object? There’s so much out there.
What I discovered is maybe we have
to think differently. It’s not just about
creating something, reinventing the
wheel, and creating something that
extends up as a new utopia in a way. Maybe
it’s about working more with what is
there, with contemporary objects and with
history, and mixing as well. A new form
of postmodernism?

TOP Dinner with the LEFT Duo Tone

Trattoria Team – hand-thrown ceramic
Martino Gamper, Maki planter, from the
Suzuki, Kajsa Stahl and From-To exhibition,
Alex Rich – London, Salone del Mobile,
May 2009 Milan, 2015.

56 iconeye.com
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It may have scratched and jumped, but the seven-inch
vinyl disc was the perfect format for conveying
the brash three-minute brilliance of pop’s golden age
THERE WAS QUITE a storm on social
media recently after an image was
posted showing a sign in a second-hand
shop, innocently describing a stack of
old seven-inch singles as ‘little LPs’. The
reaction from miffed vinyl buffs was one of
spluttering indignation. They were riled by
the idea that an LP (that is, a long player,
12 inches in size and usually containing
an album of ten or 12 songs) could ever
be mistaken for a single (much smaller at
seven inches and generally featuring just
two songs, one on each side).
For people of a certain age, the classic,
pristine circle of a 45, conventionally
used for singles, is a zealously guarded,
untouchable signifier of authentic cool.
However, for those beyond that certain
age, the disc is a Proustian rush of teenage
memories, a remembrance of things past,
when music was such a tangible part of
our lives, one that took up space (lots of it,
if you were serious about your tunes), and
time (again lots of it, if you had to traipse
across town to find the right record shop).
Pop music’s golden age, straddling
the late 1950s and a chunk of the 1990s,
was all created on seven-inch. In 1993,
Culture Beat’s Mr Vain (Who? What?
Exactly) was the first single to claim the
number-one spot with a non-vinyl release
(selling on CD and cassette only). Back in
1949, RCA Victor had produced the first
disc commercially available to spin at 45
revolutions per minute (rpm). There’s been
a fair amount of internet forum squabbling
as to what that inaugural 45 actually was,
but most agree that the first to be pressed
was PeeWee the Piccolo, a children’s
song, while the first to be released was,
probably, Texarkana Baby, a country and
western ditty sung by Eddy Arnold, the
Tennessee Plowboy.
Before the 45, records had always been
DESIGN / ICON
The 45
By Matthew Barker
78rpm and, crucially, made of shellac
compounds (mainly used for nail polish
these days). Cheaper to manufacture,
vinyl records also sounded better: cleaner,
with less surface noise thanks to their
fewer bumps. RCA was keen to spread the
vinyl word because, just like with Apple
and other tech giants today, to enjoy the
software you had to splash out on the
hardware. The company’s spanking new
phonographic player boasted a Silent
Sapphire Pickup stylus and a mechanised
“RCA was keen to
spread the vinyl word
because, just like with
tech giants today, to
enjoy the software you
had to splash out on
the hardware”
spindle that could play a stack of up to 10
records with ‘trigger-action speed’ while
the owner sat back and sipped a martini
or two.
In the UK, we had to wait until 1952
before the first 45 was available, when
EMI produced a series of classical music
seven-inch singles, but it was during
the following decade with the advent
of the British guitar bands that the
format properly took hold of the teenage
imagination. Clocking in at under three
minutes, the 1960s pop single was a
brash, bright manifestation of post-
war modernism.
58
Pushed to the margins first by a 1970s
love of rambling album tracks, then by the
advent of 12-inch, cassette and CD singles,
by the late 1980s the 45 was fast losing
its appeal. Record industry execs saw
them as an album promotional tool that
rarely, if ever, made any profit. Suddenly
the seven-inch seemed clumsily old hat,
prone to scratching and jumping, not
helped by drops in manufacturing quality
and cheaper – sometimes ridiculously
flimsy – vinyl.
They lived on, of course, but mainly
in the hands of niche obsessives buying
up specialist stuff, like obscure soul
records or punk 45s in original picture
sleeves. It took a younger generation,
increasingly tiring of the rather flat digital
listening experience, to bring new life
to the old format. The retro charm of a
seven-inch single and its impeccable pop
cultural heritage, mixed in with a certain
alternative DIY cachet, made it the must-
have accessory for many millennials.
Sales of vinyl continue to reach new
heights (at least for the 21st century), up by
26.8 per cent in the UK in 2017. Over the
past decade, they’ve gone up by 1,892 per
cent, with the US boasting similar figures.
The annual Record Store Day event, this
year taking place on 20 April, shows no
sign of fatigue and even Sainsbury’s now
has had its own specialist vinyl label,
mainly selling repackaged compilations,
since November 2017.
People love to talk about the warmth of
a 45 disc; the snap, crackle and occasional
IMAGE: M.SOBREIRA / ALAMY
pop you get with a slice of analogue vinyl.
More than that though, there’s the pure
joy of the sleeve design, the label, the
actual smell of the thing and, sometimes,
a little message scratched into the run-out
groove by the manufacturer … Perfect.
Just don’t call them little LPs.
iconeye.com
Out of the
skatepark
and into
the city
Photography by Fred Mortagne

Skateboarding is more than a street skill – it is also

a unique spatial experience of architecture. Now,
after years of antagonism, cities and their planners
are beginning to embrace these urban adventurers

By Adam Todhunter
 ARCHITECTURE / FEATURE
PREVIOUS A ASIDE FROM BEING asked
concrete river bed in why someone approaching
Los Angeles, 2014. their thirties is still playing
Skateboarders with a toy, the question that
sometimes upgrade skateboarders tire of most –
the natural terrain by as they are asked to clear out
adding DIY features, of a street or public square –
like this quarter pipe is, ‘Don’t you know there’s a
skatepark down the road?’
The truth is that the
skateboarders are likely to
be aware of the skatepark,
and probably visit it often.
But while beneficial for
developing skills and providing
an undisturbed space, the
purpose-built environment is
more like a training ground,
akin to an indoor climbing
wall. What the adventurous
climber aspires to is to use
their skills to experience the
rush of conquering the natural
rock face of a remote mountain
or to traverse a landscape
scarcely ever imagined or
dared. And for the street
skateboarder, it is no different.
BELOW Musée des On stepping out of the park
Confluences, Lyon, and into the architecture of
France, designed by Coop the city, skateboarding changes
Himmelb(l)au, 2018 from an act of skill and
performance to one of spatial
experience involving the city’s
plazas, streets, benches and
diverse structural gestures.
The activity itself becomes
secondary to the process of
urban discovery, and the
skateboard becomes a tool for
unlocking new ways to engage
with architecture.
62
Most skateboarders – of
which there are an estimated
11 million worldwide – may
be unaware that they have
entered a piece of architectural
history when they skate
through Mies Van der Rohe’s
Neue Nationalgalerie in
Berlin. But they understand
the layout of the external
upper storey and border of
granite ledges more than
most. Instead of admiring the
cantilevered steel roof plane
of the exhibition pavilion,
they form relationships with
the concrete tiles beneath the
wheels, and the dimensions
and materiality of the polished
granite as the board slides and
grinds over the surface.
Just as Berlin has its Neue
Nationalgalerie, Barcelona has
Richard Meier’s Mediterranean
modernist Museum of
Contemporary Art. This
landscape of linear form
extruding from the museum
into a granite courtyard,
meeting sloping surfaces
and stairs, now welcomes
almost as many international
skateboarders as art fans.
Skateboarders across
the world form personal
relationships with
architecture. One staircase
outside London Bridge train
station is more iconic to local
skateboarders than the Shard,
Renzo Piano’s skyscraper that
looks down on it – although
OPPOSITE Oscar
Niemeyer’s Le Volcan
cultural centre in
Le Havre, France, 2005
iconeye.com
 ARCHITECTURE / FEATURE

“A skateboarder sees the city

not for the spectacle of its
architecture, nor is he or she
concerned with participating
within the prescribed model
that has been laid out by it.”

non-skaters might have a hard Undercroft, the lesser-known

ABOVE Diagonal
ZeroZero tower by
EMBA in Barcelona,
Spain, 2018
OVERLEAF A flume –
a man-made channel
for water – north of
Los Angeles, 2015.
California’s long-
term drought allows
skateboarders to take
advantage of these
‘natural’ transitions
time working out which one.
This physical experience is
engaged with the raw forms of
architecture. As skateboarder
and architectural assistant
Mark Gavigan puts it: ‘A
skateboarder sees the city
not for the spectacle of its
architecture, nor is he or she
concerned with participating
within the prescribed model
that has been laid out by it.
Really for a skateboarder the
meaning of buildings and
the spaces between them
is nothing more than the
limitless skating opportunities
which they provide.’
Skateboarders re-appropriate
architecture to unlock the
hidden opportunities of, for
example, the celebratory
concrete of brutalism. The
sleek surfaces beloved of the
modernists provide perfect
surfaces to traverse, and
although the weathered
flourishes of classicism
or Victorian gothic are
more resistant to physical
interaction, they too are to
be desired without contact:
to be jumped over, between
and down.
So it is that architects’
creations find alternative
worth. The London Bridge
steps are one of endless ‘spots’
that collectively form the
skateboarder’s experience of
the UK capital, also comprising
the well-known Southbank
sloped walls of the Museum of
London roundabout, and the
marble tiled banks that form
the podium of One Eversholt
Street by Euston station.
Skateboarders understand
the policies that govern
these semi-public realms
and how other skateboarders
and members of the public
move through the space.
Each develops their own
interpretation of spaces
like this against their skill
levels, style and preference,
guided by the marks left by
previous users.
Despite the skateboarder’s
relationship with underused
parts of the city, they often
receive a defensive reception
from authorities and the
public. Our cities increasingly
consist of illiberal spaces where
purportedly non-productive
and harmful activities such as
skateboarding are unwelcome.
That skateboarding does
damage to some surfaces is
the end of the story for many
members of the public. Among
skateboarders, views are more
diverse. No-one wants to see
architecture crumble but for
most skateboarders, activation
of a piece of architecture
is more important than its
pristine preservation.
Yet attempts at negotiation
with authorities have a
disappointing history. For
over 20 years Philadelphia’s

64 iconeye.com

skateboarders engaged the
city – through protest and
negotiation – to legalise
skateboarding in Love Park,
the central square officially
known as John F Kennedy
Plaza, but nicknamed for
its reproduction of Robert
Indiana’s Love sculpture.
Even after shoe brand DC
offered the city $1 million
for the maintenance of sites
that suffered skateboard-
related damage, and the
architect of the park, Vincent
G Kling, stepped on a board
at the age of 92 to support the
skateboarders’ right to occupy
the park, the city dismissed
their pleas. Every stone bench
and slab from its central
amphitheatre was removed
in the 2016 redevelopment,
expelling the skateboarders
from memory.
In the UK, skateboarder-led
spatial activism campaigns
such as Long Live Southbank
(LLSB) are proving that valued
spaces and the public’s right
to free community assets can
be protected. The proposed
redevelopment of the
Undercroft of the Southbank
Centre – constructed along
with the Queen Elizabeth Hall
in 1967 and known for the
involvement of three future
members of the Archigram
collective – provoked a fight for
the right to the space.
“Love Park’s architect,
Vincent G Kling, stepped
on a board at the age of 92
to support skateboarders’
right to occupy the space”
February 2019
ARCHITECTURE / FEATURE
The brutalist playground OPPOSITE The Oscar
inadvertently created a Niemeyer Foundation
home for generations of in Niterói, Brazil, 2017
skateboarders who have
occupied the space for over
40 years. But in 2019, the space
is valued not only by them, as
observed by Stuart Maclure,
project manager at LLSB. In his
view, dancers, musicians and
artists of all sorts are ‘using the
space together, respecting the
culture of co-existence that the
Undercroft has’.
The campaign has
encouraged communities of
skateboarders worldwide.
‘LLSB gets messages from all
over from people taking pride
in their environment and
working with, and against,
the powers that be to improve
these places,’ says Maclure.
‘Whether it’s Dublin, Tel Aviv,
Paris, Milton Keynes or Atlanta,
local communities have similar
stories of being interested in
creating better places to live, BELOW Benches
work and skate.’ outside Richard Meier’s
We are now in an age Barcelona Museum of
when skateboarding is set Modern Art, 2017
to be introduced, in 2020,
as an Olympic sport, and
skateboarders have held their
first academic conference in
association with the Bartlett
School of Architecture, called
Pushing Boarders, which was
held in summer 2018. And in
some cities there are signs of a
future beyond antagonism.
69
 ARCHITECTURE / FEATURE
“People are taking pride in their
environment and working with,
and against, the powers that
be to improve these places”
In Malmö, Sweden, even
though skateboarders are
more populous than in any
other city, hostile architecture
like ‘skate stoppers’ – design
interventions that disrupt
the ability of skateboarders
to engage with many skatable
surfaces in cities such as
London – are nowhere in sight.
Instead, Malmö has invested
ABOVE Superkilen in skate-friendly public
park in Copenhagen, space, temporary skatable
Denmark, designed by artworks, and more than
Superflex with Bjarke five skateparks. ‘We want
Ingels Group and to send the message that
Topotek1, 2017 Malmö is for skating – by
skaters in collaboration with
the city,’ says Gustav Edén,
Malmö’s appointed ‘skateboard
coordinator’.
Edén now works with
the city’s parks department,
advising on the benefits of
skateboarding. The decision
to design skateboarding into
a space can prevent hostility
against undesirable use,
explains Edén, and issues like
surface damage, noise pollution
and spatial conflicts can be
designed out.
What remains is the
positive social activation of
spaces. In one example, the
city installed Svampen, a
granite ‘mushroom’ mound
outside the city’s art centre
– an architectural statement
that has given the space its
identity, and the skateboarders
a new canvas.
Just over the border-bridge
70
from Malmö, in Copenhagen,
is Bjarke Ingels Group’s
community-led Superkilen,
a statement-red area within
a park. The city could have
blindly purchased a half-pipe
but have instead commissioned
a sweeping concrete
amphitheatre and painted
tarmac hill. The expressive
architectural gestures exist
without the need for an
explicit purpose, allowing
children, families, cyclists
and skateboarders to develop
their own relationship with
the space.
These initiatives have
generally been hailed as
successes, securing the
respective cities a place on
the global skateboarding
map and inspiring skate-
friendly architecture
initiatives in cities such as
Melbourne and Hull. While
their progressiveness remains
an exception, skateboarders
worldwide are beginning
to understand their right to
protect socio-spatial value
in our cities – and many in
power now accept that skating
is here to stay.
In London and globally,
we’re seeing the green shoots
of the skate-friendly city and
demonstrations of the power
that this once-fringe activity
has to creatively reinterpret
public architecture, benefiting
skateboarders and non-
skaters alike.
iconeye.com
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 ARCHITECTURE / BUILDING

LEFT Open corners

allow glimpses out to
the lawns and in to
the cloisters

Sharp as a paper
cut but loose
as a sketch –
Johnston Marklee
adds the Menil
Drawing Institute
By Edwin Heathcote

to Houston’s
most intriguing
cityscape
72 iconeye.com

HOUSTON IS A late modernist dream. Even
at its centre, right downtown, there are
barely any people to spoil the architecture
and the Alphaville streetscapes. It is the
manifestation of the corporate capitalist
city, a collection of colossal buildings
with a weirdly post-human mode of non-
expression. The people are there, but they
are either confined to air-conditioned cars,
interiors or the network of air-conditioned
subterranean tunnels and sky-bridges that
seem to accommodate the city’s chain-
retail culture. But it has its own beauty,
an almost seductive alienation in which
February 2019
ARCHITECTURE / BUILDING
glassy towers survive unmolested.
Beyond that is suburbia. Endless
suburbs, many with unfeasibly
enormous new houses. But there is one
neighbourhood which blends late modern,
mid-century, bungalow suburbia and
today’s super-slick contemporary to form
the city’s most intriguing cityscape. The
Menil campus has been building into a
remarkable architectural and artistic
menagerie since the de Menils (French
émigré collectors Dominique and John)
decided to bring a little continental
cultural heft to Houston in the 1950s.
73
LEFT The roof angles
down towards a
series of landscaped
courtyards
The latest piece is a cool, low-
slung structure by Los Angeles-based
architecture practice Johnston Marklee.
This is the Drawing Institute, that very
rare thing, a free public gallery devoted
to original works on paper. From a
distance, it has the horizon-hugging
horizontality of a Mies or an early modern
villa, its crisp whiteness sparkling against
the assertively blue Texan sky and the
aggressively sprinkled super-green lawns.
Perhaps its white steel walls with their
sharp edges are meant to have a hint of
the drawing paper displayed inside in

RIGHT The west
elevation – the roof
appears to float in
the landscape when
viewed from a distance
them; certainly they look sharp enough to
cut yourself on.
What you first encounter is the canopy,
a kind of cloister which acts as an awning
that puts the sun-shading at one remove
from the actual building, cutting it out in
stages. The cloister roof is angled down
towards the building so that it projects up
towards the outside, like a porte-cochère
on a mid-century Miami hotel. The roof
dips down towards a series of carefully
landscaped courtyards and these in turn
lead you into the building.
Inside, the origami roofs are
everywhere in evidence, dipping, sloping
ARCHITECTURE / BUILDING
LEFT The Janie C Lee
Drawing Room. While
some rooms have
faceted ceilings, others
have gabled pitches
and colliding to create a pleasingly
complex roofscape, or resolving themselves
to make a perfectly symmetrical domestic
interior with high gables, like the inside
of a bleached Monopoly house. There are
spaces for contemplating the landscape
and rooms for contemplating drawings
and there is a huge archive underneath. At
the centre is the gallery itself, an elegant
space with two asymmetrical windows
that were blocked up for the inaugural
Jasper Johns show, making the space seem
rather anaemic just at the moment it is
revealed. Drawings are, of course, fragile
things, photo-sensitive, flash-sensitive and
74
prone to damage from humidity or non-
humidity, so the gallery at the heart of the
building takes on the character of a refuge,
a place apart.
Before you know it, you are outside
again. For $40 million this doesn’t seem
like a lot of building. Until, that is, you
begin to walk around the rather eccentric
campus and you suddenly realise that this
is in fact a deceptively clever and subtly
elegant piece of work.
The first things you notice are the
bungalows. Rather than demolish them
and start again to create a tabula rasa,
the de Menils were keen to conserve
iconeye.com
 ARCHITECTURE / BUILDING

ABOVE AND LEFT The

exterior facades are
formed from painted
white steel and stained
Port Orford cedar

what was already there and place their

new buildings within the suburban
context. And what was already there
was a load of bungalows. Screeds of
them with porches, fancy fretwork and
broad decks. They are all painted a light
shade of battleship grey, which gives
them a curious, ghostly appearance,
like something from a military training
ground – not quite domestic, not quite
installation art. Keeping them all allowed
the infrastructure, the offices, the cafe,
the bookshop and much more to be
“The de Menils were keen housed in them rather than the new
buildings, so not only do the galleries
to conserve what was feel uncluttered, but the campus feels

already there and place their inhabited, culture spreading through

it and not concentrated only in one or
new buildings within the two structures.
The other thing you come across is
suburban context. And what Renzo Piano’s 1987 gallery. This too is a
was already there was a load single-storey structure, a brush stroke
of white set against the lawns. It too
of bungalows” refers to the porches of the original
bungalows in its canopy and its spindly
columns, but its architecture is more
industrial than domestic, sparingly and
deceptively simple. With its wavy roof

February 2019 75
 ARCHITECTURE / BUILDING

“Perhaps the building is like a

sketch: an analogy of a drawing
that doesn’t show everything but
instead intimates a possible future”

ABOVE Corpse by
Jasper Johns, coloured
ink, oil stick, pastel,
and graphite pencil on
paper, 1974-75

profile designed to admit exactly the right

kind of light, this was the building that
made Piano’s career, propelled him into
the stratosphere of museum architects,
made him the trustees’ favourite and the
almost boringly inevitable first choice for
moneyed museums. But he has also never
been this good since.
You can see how Johnston Marklee has
referred to Piano’s profile, to the porch
and to its horizontality, replacing spindly
columns with slender-profiled white
walls, but the reference is slight, barely
perceptible. More pivotal in its genesis is
a house in the grand neighbourhood of
River Oaks. Designed by Philip Johnson for
the de Menils in 1948 (the year before he
built his Glass House in New Canaan), this
was a boxy brick affair arranged around
garden courtyards. Unassuming, at a
far smaller scale than the surrounding
over-scaled suburban mansions, and
revealing itself as a very social space
with domestically scaled walls on which
to admire the de Menils’ astonishing ABOVE Triangular
collection, this is a building very much facets create a
in tune with what Johnston Marklee ‘pleasingly complex
has done. roofscape’

76 iconeye.com

IMAGES: RICHARD BARNES / JASPER JOHNS / LICENSED BY VAGA, NEW YORK, NY
Johnson, thanks to his association with
the de Menils and their wealthy friends,
became a pivotal presence in Houston.
His 1975 Pennzoil Place launched his
career as a skyscraper architect and his
delicately Miesian University of St Thomas
is almost good enough to redeem his
clunky postmodern works in the city.
But he was also involved (not always
happily) in the buildings around the
Menil campus. It was Johnson who was
supposed to design the Rothko Chapel, a
rather underwhelming concrete container
for a specially commissioned and very
dark series of works by the abstract
February 2019
ARCHITECTURE / BUILDING
expressionist. He quit, however, perhaps
in revenge for Rothko having messed him
around by failing to deliver the paintings
planned for Johnson’s lair, the Four
Seasons at the Seagram Building in New
York, which he designed and where he
lunched every day. The restaurant has now
relocated and the paintings ended up at
Tate Modern.
In its new building for drawings,
Johnston Marklee has left things open.
It is a building that extends into and
embraces the suburban landscape and
it seems to imply that there might be
something more. Which there is. The
77
LEFT Installation view
of The Condition of
Being Here: Drawings
by Jasper Johns – the
institute’s inaugural
exhibition
building also accommodates all those
rooms for admiring drawings,
holding meetings about drawings, and
archiving and conserving drawings. But
it also intimates that this is a campus
open to change. Perhaps it is like a sketch:
an analogy of a drawing that doesn’t
show everything but instead intimates a
possible future.
It joins a remarkable pantheon of
buildings for art in a city still known
mostly for oil. Steven Holl is working
on a huge extension to the Museum of
Fine Arts (having already completed the
rebuilding of the Glassell School of Art).
 ARCHITECTURE / BUILDING
TOP Flag by Jasper The Museum of Fine Arts itself features
Johns, graphite pencil one of Mies van der Rohe’s less sublime
and graphite wash on structures, with an unlikely, and rather
paper, 1959 unsuccessful, curve.
Which takes us back to the echoes
ABOVE RIGHT The of Mies in the Drawing Institute. He is
internal courtyards and inescapably there in the minimal form,
lawns were landscaped in the roof that seems to float and in the
by Michael Van slick, stripped-down, meticulous detail.
Valkenburgh His finesse is hybridised with a knowing
pop sensibility, which evokes an Ed Ruscha
gas station as much as it does a glass
house. Yet despite its elegance there seems
to be something missing. Just as the visitor
leaves with the sensation that there must
78
“Mies is inescapably there
in the minimal form, in the
roof that seems to float and
in the slick, stripped-down,
meticulous detail”
be more to see than the one gallery of
drawings, there is a niggling feeling that
the building is a little blank – beautifully
executed but existentially bare.
Johnston Marklee is among the
brightest stars of the emerging generation
of US architects – more restrained, perhaps
more intellectual, than the generation
they’re replacing. The practice is steeped
in both Mies’s minimalism and a kind of
attenuated, stripped and intellectualised
pomo which makes it feel at home in
Houston. The building suits this city’s
blank, late-modernist landscape better,
even, than it first appears.
iconeye.com
 made in Italy

AIRWAVE Designed by Charles Godbout

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ENDLESS CONFIGURATIONS
v i s i t w w w. p ro t o c o l u k . c o m
Stitches
in space
Jamie Fobert has woven a series of finely crafted buildings
into the awkward, hidden folds of our urban fabric. What
lessons does his work hold for the future of the city?

Interview by Priya Khanchandani

Portrait by Carl Russ-Mohl

OPPOSITE Jamie
Fobert has lived and
worked in London since
moving from Canada
30 years ago

RIGHT Tate St Ives,

Cornwall, 2017.
The gallery space
is embedded in the
cliffside, with only
the entrance pavilion
and rooflights visible
externally

80 iconeye.com
In partnership with CANADIAN-BORN JAMIE Fobert moved
to London three decades ago and founded
Jamie Fobert Architects in 1996. Having
worked on a string of commissions
for arts institutions, each taking more
than a decade, he has learned to take a
long view and engage with the needs of
local communities.
Fobert’s practice has built a reputation
for carrying out sensitive work on
major cultural institutions, including
extensions to Kettle’s Yard gallery in
Cambridge and Tate St Ives in Cornwall,
which was named the Art Fund’s Museum
of the Year 2018. Having recently been
commissioned to remodel London’s
National Portrait Gallery, Fobert explains
February 2019 81
the importance of operating within the
existing context of cities, rather than
bulldozing to start over.
In this third instalment of the
Icon Minds series, Icon editor Priya
Khanchandani spoke to Fobert at Arper’s
showroom in Clerkenwell about his
practice and his views on the future of
the city.
PRIYA KHANCHANDANI: In an era of
urban population growth, how do you
think architects can respond to an issue
like the housing crisis?
JAMIE FOBERT: Well, I think our own
personal experience has been working
within the existing fabric of the city.
 ARCHITECTURE / Q&A
“It’s about being able to weave
between existing buildings …
It’s an additive process, one of
incision and of finding ways to
make new spaces from old”
82
THIS PAGE Kettle’s
Yard, Cambridge, 2018.
The retained street
front gives little clue of
the expansive, naturally
lit spaces within
[It has been] about being able to weave
between existing buildings, to find
opportunities in the city as it stands. It’s
an additive process, one of incision and of
finding ways to make new spaces from old.
We’re not very interested in large-scale
demolition and the creation of big new
housing developments. Personally, I find
that they can be incredibly sterile. I know
that it’s a model that developers prefer, but
I think there are much more intuitive and
gentle ways of creating spaces in cities that
allow densification to take place.
We spent 14 years working in St Ives
in Cornwall, and what we learned in that
period was about community, in a way
that I’d never engaged with community
before. It’s a town of 10,000 people; it’s
quite small. It’s an incredibly idiosyncratic
piece of architectural town-making. It’s a
really beautiful piece of city.
PK: Instead of the landmark cultural
institutions that architects are often
commissioned to create, you opted instead
for a structure that is mostly invisible
from the outside. Why?
JF: In almost all of our projects, I tend
to be more interested in creating an
architecture of internal spaces. I’m really
not interested in these iconic forms –
with whatever use is necessary shoved
into them. It’s not an architecture that
is about creating iconic buildings that
speak more about the ego of the architect
than they do about anything else. We’re
much more interested in creating really
emotive pieces of architecture that have IMAGES: HUFTON+CROW / DENNIS GILBERT / MIKE TONKIN
great internal presence, and they do have
external presence at times, but that’s not
our priority.
PK: Was that because you were working in
a relatively small town, or is it something
you would propose even for a cultural
institution in, say, London?
JF: It’s something that has occurred
naturally over time in many of our
projects. The first house that we ever
built was hidden in the centre of a block
and could only exploit top light. It had
no possibility of windows. And yet it
iconeye.com
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BELOW Anderson RIGHT Promenade
House, London, 2003. of Light, Tonkin Lui’s
The top-lit house is regeneration of the
enclosed on all sides by public realm in Old
7m party walls Street, London, 2006
was a house with immense presence.
Internally, it had one door on the street,
and it somehow became a pattern of
working which I became very comfortable
with, and which I found was a very
powerful way to make architecture.
We’ve rarely done a facade, which is an
extraordinary thing.
PK: That’s really interesting.
JF: I think this division between the
architect doing the exterior and the
interior designer doing the interior is
a huge mistake, and that architecture
should be in the interior as much as on
the outside. If you own a house, you live
in the interior 90 per cent of the time.
The exterior is a different gesture. It’s a
gesture to the street and to the city, but
your experience as a human being is of the
interior of the architecture, much more
than of its exterior.
PK: You’ve obviously lived in London for
quite a long time.
JF: Yes, for 30 years.
ARCHITECTURE / Q&A
“People’s awareness of
their environment and what
architecture can be is much
more heightened than when
I arrived in Britain in 1988”
PK: Are there any examples of areas, or of
projects, that you particularly admire?
JF: When we first arrived, I moved into
a building on the corner of Old Street [in
east London]. In 1999, there were derelict
buildings everywhere, there were empty
sites everywhere. The city was, in a way,
seriously under-populated.
So, I’ve watched this transformation.
While people are disparaging, and with
good reason, about the cost of real estate,
at the same time, buildings are being
inserted very finely into the fabric of the
city, like the Tonkin Liu housing on top of
a warehouse block [Growing House, 2006]
that I go past on my way to work, and the
way they also changed the whole of Old
Street with their urban furniture.
PK: We had a London special issue last
year, and we included a feature about how
young people can’t afford property and
that creativity can no longer thrive in
the capital.
JF: Yes. I think this is a problem
that’s very hard to address. There are
84 iconeye.com
certain creative industries, particularly ABOVE AND RIGHT
young artists, who require almost free At Tate St Ives,
accommodation. They require derelict Fobert eschewed an
spaces. This city had a lot of derelict ostentatious exterior,
spaces, supporting a really thriving artist instead prioritising
community, but I think most artists have human-scale
had to leave and go to Düsseldorf and experiences inside
Berlin and cities that still have derelict
outer regions, but have sort of a thriving
centre. London’s almost been gentrified
to the point where these communities are
having to leave.
I’m very conscious that when I was a
young architect and I worked in David
Chipperfield’s office in the 1980s and 90s,
it was incredibly difficult, but my partner
and I managed to buy a house that was
derelict, completely derelict.

ICON: Was that in east London?

JF: In Stoke Newington. And then we
sold that as this wave of house price
soaring happened, and bought a derelict
warehouse. And the building that we
bought in 1999 had not been occupied by
anyone since the war.

February 2019 85
 ARCHITECTURE / Q&A

RIGHT Levring House

occupies a
tight end-of-mews
site in a London
conservation area

PK: You wouldn’t even find a property like

that now.
JF: That’s right here, in the next
block [near to the Arper showroom in
Clerkenwell]. No one had bothered to
occupy this building in any way. I look
at the people in my office who are the
age I was and there are no opportunities
for that to happen again. We thought we
were doing an extraordinarily dangerous
thing – buying this building for huge
amounts of money that seemed way
beyond our scope. In retrospect, it was
a tiny amount of money and it was an
incredibly sensible thing to do. I think this
is really discouraging. And if it leads to a
revolution, I wouldn’t be surprised.

PK: Well, one can only hope.

JF: A certain kind of revolution.

PK: Not the sort that’s occurring currently.

JF: No.

PK: Overall, how do you feel about the

future of cities?
JF: Well, I think I’m intrinsically
optimistic. I think the swing of politics
to the right and how divisive politics has
become and how divided communities
have become of course is a worry. But I
think there’s a moment when it will swing
back, and I think this is just how politics
has been for the last few hundred years.
I have an intrinsic optimism about Arper is an Italian design-led company that creates chairs,
humanity, and about people’s ability to tables and furnishings for community, work and home. At Arper,
protect and create their own environment. we explore design to improve the relationships between people
People’s awareness of their environment and the spaces in which they live.
and what architecture can be is much As a forward-looking company, we are committed to
more heightened than it was when I understanding how design and technology are affecting
arrived in Britain in 1988. our lives and we wish to push the dialogue forward through
The general public has a much greater our partnership with Icon. Operating internationally and
understanding of what they can achieve in a constantly evolving world, we believe in being open to
and what has value for them. Yes, inspiration from the creative industries; to anticipate needs,
these are huge challenges, particularly and thus contribute to a better future in which creativity plays
economically. But I think people are clever, a crucial and transformative role. Building culture enriches our
and they will find ways, and hopefully perspective and affords us the opportunity to support our
another generation of architects will carry community and the design world at large.
on finding ways to make better cities, and
cities that are great to live in.

86 iconeye.com
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B AT H S | B A S I N S | F U R N I T U R E | B R A S S WA R E | A C C E S S O R I E S
 ARCHITECTURE / PHOTO STORY

Tropical minimal

Jon Setter is a Sydney-based photographer whose images

explore repeated formal patterns of colour, material and
texture in the urban environment. The works shown
here transform expressions of tropical modernism
into abstracted versions of space

Photography by Jon Setter

February 2019 89
 ARCHITECTURE / PHOTO STORY

PREVIOUS PAGE Pink, White and Orange 1, Hollywood, 2018

LEFT Red, Blue and Yellow Stripes, Hollywood, 2018
ABOVE Red, White and Palm, Sherman Oaks, LA, 2017

February 2019 91
 ARCHITECTURE / PHOTO STORY

ABOVE Villa Necchi Campiglio, Turquoise Tiles, Milan, 2018

RIGHT Pink and Shadows, Hollywood, 2018

92 iconeye.com
 ARCHITECTURE / PHOTO STORY

ABOVE Palm with Red and Green, Burbank, LA, 2017

LEFT Pink, White and Orange 2, Hollywood, 2018

February 2019 95
 ARCHITECTURE / PHOTO STORY

ABOVE An Intersection of Lines and Colours, Northern California, 2017

RIGHT White and Flora, Balmoral Beach, Sydney, 2017

96 iconeye.com
Escape

from

Venice
By Tim Abrahams
BELOW The
museum exterior
is clad in 14
different colours
of ceramic tile
Sauerbruch Hutton’s M9 Museum in Mestre
doesn’t flinch from immersing visitors in
Italy’s recent history, but can it craft a new
narrative for a town long overshadowed by
its glittering neighbour?
AMONG VISITORS TO the
Veneto, Mestre is usually
known, if at all, as a transport
hub for Venice; the last bit of
solid land before one passes
through the looking glass
into aqueous fantasy. But as
Venice loses population in the
face of rising house prices and
increased tourism, Mestre is
gaining it. About 120,000 lived
in Venice in 1980, but that
figure has dropped to around
55,000 in 2018, with many of
these decamping to the more
conventional town next door.
Yet even as Mestre slowly
changes into a significant
urban settlement with a
permanent population that
now exceeds Venice’s historic
centre, it is likely that its
fractious relationship with its
more famous neighbour will
continue to dominate.
So great remains the draw
of La Serenissima that the
opening of the ceramic-clad
M9 Museum in the centre of
Mestre won’t necessarily draw
many tourists off the main
trail. M9 – whose full name is
the Museo del Novecento – sets
the lofty and slightly unusual
goal of interpreting how we
live today through a history of
the radical changes in Italian
lifestyles, politics, landscapes
and sciences through the 20th
century. Though the museum
was proposed and funded
by a foundation set up by a
local bank, it was established
under the leadership of the
philosopher-politician Massimo
Cacciari, whose academic
writings challenged the beliefs
of Heidegger and Nietzsche
that philosophy should limit
its sphere of inquiry to the
apparent hopelessness of
man’s existence.
After winning three
elections as mayor of Venice, in
1993, 1997 and 2005, Cacciari
set his sights on extricating
the city’s then-spiritless
post-industrial suburb from a
somewhat similar existential
dread. He promoted the idea
that Mestre should dedicate
its centre to ‘a memory in
conflict; a memory made
up of lights and shadows; a
sometimes tragic memory’.
Not your average regeneration
programme, then.
The results, after eight
years of work and €110
million of investment, are an
unpretentious triumph. Across
the museum’s exhibition
halls, the digitally designed
storytelling, including an
immersive 360º experience
which places the visitor at the
heart of a fascist rally and a
student revolt, is unflinching
and brilliantly executed. Its
permanent exhibition grasps
the nettle of Italy’s history
and attempts to explain
 “The digitally designed
storytelling, including
an immersive experience
which places the visitor at
the heart of a fascist rally
and a student revolt, is
brilliantly executed”

ABOVE External
spaces are paved in the
same trachyte stone
used to pave the docks
of Venice

RIGHT The public areas

on the ground floor of
the museum are open,
with minimal structural
interventions

LEFT Unabashedly
modern interventions
have been inserted into
the historic fabric

OPPOSITE The
development creates
two new pedestrian
axes linking the town
centre with newer
neighbourhoods

the huge disparities in wealth
and ideology that generally
lie hidden in the country,
due in part to the serenity of
its architecture and artistic
patrimony. Culturally, it is
precisely what the strange
inland empire of the
Veneto needs.
Moreover, in architectural
and urbanistic terms, Berlin-
based architect Sauerbruch
Hutton provides exactly what
Mestre itself needs. This bizarre
periphery of chemical plants,
Palladian villas, shopping
IMAGES: ALESSANDRA CHEMOLLO
malls and ribbon settlements
has lacked a heart, a means of
explanation, and the M9 begins
to give this.
The chosen site was the
so-called ‘distretto militare’,
off one of the main east-west
arteries of Mestre’s old town.
February 2019
ARCHITECTURE / BUILDING
This church and convent
complex was deconsecrated
by that great liberator of
the Italian people, Napoleon
Bonaparte, and turned into
barracks, which later fell
into disrepair.
Sauerbruch Hutton’s subtle,
sympathetic work on the site
succeeds in transmuting this
collection of rather mundane
historical buildings on three
counts. First, it works at an
urbanistic level, creating two
new pedestrian axes: a diagonal
north-south that provides
a missing link between the
town’s heart in Piazza Ferretto
and newer neighbourhoods;
plus another, more modest
link between a vibrant cluster
of bars in the west and the
boulevard leading to the lagoon
in the east.
101
It is, second, a rigorous
renovation of a 16th-century
convent, which shares
something of OMA’s work at
the Prada Foundation in Milan.
Here, the new elements are
unabashedly modern. Escalators
have been inserted into the
narrowest and most water-
damaged wing of the convent
and simple space for co-working
has been created in the upper
floors by inserting black glass
door frames in the old walls,
which also contain a natural
air ventilation system. At the
centre, the courtyard is now
covered by a series of sculptural
umbrellas – steel stems holding
up a PTFE canopy which stands
free of the historic structure.
Inside these stems, rainwater
flows down to a cistern for
use as greywater. Technically
brilliant and architecturally
generous, they typify the
approach to the whole site.
The third and most
conspicuous aspect of
Sauerbruch Hutton’s work is
the new museum, all 7,012sq m
of it. Of course, the three parts
of the work are linked, the
unusual triangular plan of the
museum being derived from
the path of the north-south
route dividing the site.
The museum is thus split in
two, which has its drawbacks.
Its administrative offices and
loading bay are collected in
a three-storey pavilion to the
west, connected to the main
museum by a subterranean link
through which any major works
to exhibit will have to pass.
But the pay-off is important.
The pavilion stands next

to two other free-standing
buildings, a pair of in-situ
poured concrete sheds;
memories of the derelict
military stables they replaced.
Instead of a single structure,
the architects have created a
collage of different buildings,
generally modest in scale,
befitting the accretion of
mundane buildings of different
ages that gives Mestre its
unassuming and decidedly
non-Venetian charm.
The entrance to the main
museum is within the core
of this grouping of different
structures. On entering, a
bistro is revealed to the north-
west, a bookstore to the east,
and the auditorium to the
south. Part of the pleasure
of the building is the views
it affords into the historical
grain of Mestre, to the town
itself but also its neighbours:
the old convent church that is
now an independent cultural
centre, a 1930s apartment
block that will be developed at
a later stage and the new M9
buildings themselves.
RIGHT Much of the in-
situ concrete structure
is left exposed – a
memory of the site’s
utilitarian past
ARCHITECTURE / BUILDING
Throughout M9, four
materials dominate: the
ceramic cladding on the
museum, exposed concrete,
trachyte (the stone used to
pave the docks and vennels
of Venice) and a light-hued
engineered timber. The last of
these has been used to great
effect in the old convent,
creating new ceilings and
providing the extra strength
required to meet the demands
of new retroactive, earthquake-
resistant structural codes that
test every renovator of old
buildings in Italy. Trachyte
paving leads the visitor from
the sheltered convent courtyard
into a public space and then
right into the museum,
providing a robust and familiar
gesture to the public – and
it is intended pre-eminently
for local users – who will
understand the paving material
as a sign of public space.
As well as a courtyard, this
trachyte terrain is likewise
legible as the entrance into a
cave, with the main structure
making a landscape of itself.
102
Structurally, the mass of the
building – its upper three
floors – sits within a concrete
shell. Apart from a single full
wall, this stands exclusively
(and almost miraculously) on
a series of slender columns
at the ground floor, thereby
providing for wide entrances
or large expanses of glazing in
ground-floor restaurants and
bookshops and around the
auditorium. As the permanent
exhibition spaces are digital
environments, the second and
third floors are effectively
shuttered and so the ground
floor is thus a great opportunity
to reveal the building’s interior
and make it welcoming.
M9 is an exemplar of such
solid architectural decisions.
The ceramic cladding is
the single moment of self-
indulgence on the part of the
architects. Sauerbruch Hutton
used a similar technique
brilliantly on the Brandhorst
Museum in Munich to create
a subtle, textured means of
adding colour to the po-faced
architectural palette of our
times, but here the 14 different
colours feel like they have
become an in-house brand.
It is a quibble perhaps,
but the choice doesn’t quite
have the same honesty of the
other materials. Contrast this
with the timber, which is
used superbly throughout the
interiors of the main museum
– a sturdy, warming presence,
which achieves the impossible
task of creating an ensemble of
a 16th-century convent and a
21st-century museum.
The benign way that the
building encourages its visitors
to consider the historical
townscape around it sits at
odds with the visceral honesty
of the museum’s permanent
exhibition. So much the better.
With Treviso to the north and
Padova to the south, Mestre is
now less an adjunct of Venice
and more the heart of a modern
conurbation of medium-sized
towns connected loosely by
suburban sprawl and small
rural settlements. Sauerbruch
Hutton’s museum makes sense
of that status.
iconeye.com
 ARCHITECTURE / BUILDING

THIS PAGE The

museum is split in two,
with the smaller block
housing offices and the
loading bay

February 2019 103

 ARCHITECTURE / ICON

Villa im Tessin BEYOND THE LIVES of

What do we learn about the regular
person’s architectural preference by
looking at model railways? One cult
figurine is a lesson in democratic
architectural history, on a scale of 1:87
By Matthew Ponsford
children, model railways
are generally confined to
dusty basements. Yet among
railroaders, the hobby
presents itself as a pursuit that
transcends politics, with noted
fans including Rod Stewart,
Hermann Goering, Buster
Keaton and Neil Young, who
posts videos of his train sets
online under the pseudonym
Clyde Coil.
In Germany – a country that
has loved little railways like no
other – the habit has bridged
cultural chasms. Although
more deeply political than
the apparently apolitical. In
neat miniature, these fusty
models provide a portal to the
architectural battlefield of the
mid-century, which simmers
on – sadly undead – today.
Leaf through the catalogues
of model railway makers like
Faller, Vollmer and Kibri and
encounter diverse scenes, both
rural and urban, mixing gothic
spires and then-radical design.
While many post-war
German model makers pined
for romanticised chocolate-box
cottages and Alpine A-frames
IMAGE: COURTESY JOVIS VERLAG / HAGEN STIERM

stereotyped as a curious habit to accompany their sleepy

of the salaryman during West
Germany’s post-war economic
ABOVE Villa im Tessin miracle, for decades factories
by Faller (1961) – a both sides of the Iron Curtain
reproduction of a mass-produced tiny urban
1950s Swiss villa communities and miniature
architectural dreamscapes.
RIGHT A But as a new German
cityscape from the touring exhibition titled
märklinMODERNE märklinMODERNE argues,
touring exhibition there is rarely anything
steam train’s journey, modern
architecture abounds. Gridlike
facades and glass cupolas
re-appear across carefully
assembled micro cities, with
floating, hipped roofs seemingly
capturing the mid-century
modeller’s imagination like
nothing else.
The exhibition (Märklin, like
Jet Ski or Sellotape, the brand

104 iconeye.com
 ARCHITECTURE / ICON

name by which all producers

became known) is currently
than a little daydream – a neat
hillside escape purchasable for
“Unlike architectural models,
on show at Munich’s AIT a few Deutschmarks. Unlike railway model buildings
Architektur Salon. Its curators
match up photographs showing
architectural models, say
the curators, railway model are not supposed to reflect
real-world inspiration with buildings are not supposed to any actual future, but a
model high-rises, boxy post reflect any actual future, but a
offices, glass cafes, a railway free-playing version of now. free-playing version of now”
station resembling the new That is bad news for Britain,
station at Goch on the border where our top model railway
with the Netherlands, and a producer, Hornby, specialises in
cantilevered petrol station with houses and buildings apparently
a Mercedes logo on the roof that modelled painstakingly,
spins, thanks to a tiny motor millimetre-by-millimetre, on the government’s Building suspicion of wealthy white
enclosed within. the High Brooms station in Better, Building Beautiful men and their penchant for
In a forward to the exhibition Royal Tunbridge Wells, home commission, condemned the the past. Where indeed is the
book, Peter Cachola Schmal and of the stuffy, reactionary modernists – followers of Mies proof that we’re a country in
Oliver Elser, the director and Middle England monster. Under and Corbusier – for stoking love with mock Tudor, pseudo-
curator at Frankfurt’s Deutsches the punning product name appetites for aberrant, cultural Georgian, neoclassical, 21st-
Architekturmuseum, praise Skaledale, these trainsets reflect Marxist design. century gothic?
the exhibition’s researchers for a vision of British village and Architects have demanded For Britain’s model
opening up a new perspective town likely to please arch- evidence that Brits today share railroaders, there never was a
on architectural sociology. conservatives currently hoping Scruton’s reductive vision. radical villa in Tunbridge Wells
‘Owing to research by to reignite a type of style For them, Hornby’s input is to reflect the popular affection
moderneREGIONAL, it has now war not seen since the 20th unlikely to be of concern when felt for modernism. But
also emerged that a hitherto century, when modernity was weighed against popular apathy Germany at least has the Vila
rather ridiculed, predominantly considered dangerous. towards historical styles. Most im Tessin as lasting proof that
male section of the population This tradition continues. of us – not least anyone who the architectural imagination
who lived out their control In the dying months of 2018, has read (or seen the TV version of the weird everyman was not
fantasies at the controls of a conservative philosopher of) Margaret Atwood’s The limited to romantic fantasies of
model railway in their hobby Roger Scruton, as chair of Handmaid’s Tale – have a deep reliving a long-gone past.
cellar, representing a rather
suspicious subspecies by vulgar
psychological standards,
cultivated a downright avant-
garde relationship to the
architecture of their era,’ write
Schmal and Elser (in a sentence
I can only imagine sounds even
better in the original German).
Among this subspecies, the
Villa im Tessin was beloved
above all. Produced by the Faller
company, it was designed by the
architect Leopold Messmer who
built the company’s real-life
factories in the Black Forest.
Brothers Edwin and Hermann
Faller, the company’s owners,
asked him to reproduce a
single-family villa built in 1958
by Aldo and Alberto Guscetti,
which they often drove past on
a mountainside in Ticino, one
of the Italian-speaking parts
of Switzerland. They liked
the model so much that they
designed themselves a home
based on it; a modernist pad
with a (flat) floating roof in their
hometown of Güttenbach.
Yet for many in post-war
hobby rooms, it was never
supposed to be anything more

February 2019 105

 REVIEW

THE SHELF IS among the with how shelves are used, as

most indispensible typologies
in design, a near-essential
feature of almost every
interior space that people
have contrived to build,
from libraries to workshops,
kitchens to studies. It is also
one of the most ignored,
particularly relative to the
chair. Part of this might
be due to its simplicity of
design: a shelf is, after all, a
flat plane on which objects
are placed. But it is also to do
repositories and display cases.
They are supporting players
to the objects they hold. The
smug 2013 Instagram trend
for the ‘bookshelfie’ was about
displaying the breadth of one’s
book collection, not the shelves
that held it.
12 Shelves, an exhibition at
London’s Aram Gallery, offers
a rare chance to consider the
shelf on its own terms. It is
the latest in a loose series
of shows at the gallery that

exhibition
–––

12 Shelves
London’s Aram Gallery reveals this
most overlooked of design typologies to
be far more than a mere support act,
writes Joe Lloyd

IMAGES: AGNESE SANVITO

LEFT Bow shelf for ABOVE Square Peg system

Swedish Ninja by by Adam Blencowe and
Katrin Greiling (2013) Thor ter Kulve

106 iconeye.com

have narrowed their focus
on a single aspect of design,
whether one material (2014’s
Kraft Work, whose entrants
were all made of cardboard)
or one process (2012’s Send
to Print/Print to Send, about
3D-printing). However, while
these topics allowed for a
diverse array of functions
(focusing respectively on what
something is made from, and
how it is made), 12 Shelves is
tightly focused around what
something is made to do.
Remarkably, 12 Shelves
is not the first exhibition in
London to focus on shelving. In
2014, Martino Gamper curated
Design is a State of Mind at
the Serpentine Galleries,
which gathered seminal pieces
from Alvar Aalto, Charlotte
Perriand, Vico Magistretti and
many others. Gamper (who is
interviewed on page 50) then
invited various contemporaries
to fill the shelves with their
own collection of objects,
however curious or humdrum.
February 2019
REVIEW
“The These items, including found-
object paperweights, kitchen
fundamental utensils and smoothed black
simplicity of
and white rocks, activated the
shelves, effectively becoming
the shelf form the exhibition’s real focus.
By contrast, 12 Shelves
makes it an presents its exhibits
interesting unadorned, thrusting the
support actor centre stage; it
medium for also focuses on shelf-making
as it is practised today. The
material immediate effect of this is
experiments” to spotlight the typology’s
genuine looseness. There are
single wall-mounted pieces,
courtesy of Silo Studio and
Martijn Rigters; a (particularly
LEFT Installation elegant) freestanding bookcase
view, with Matteo unit by Charlie Crowther-
Pacella and Phillippine Smith; and manifestations
Hamen’s Palazzo of larger shelving systems,
bookshelf (2018) in the such as Adam Guy Blencowe
background and Thor ter Kulve’s endlessly
variable Square Peg, where
BELOW Mass shelf by brass rods can be inserted into
Odd Matter (2018), irregularly spaced holes to
made from gypsum both support timber shelves
plaster and cork and serve as bookrests. Despite
terrazzo the shared function, each
offers a different type of design
challenge.
Only two of the shelves –
Silo Studio’s Blash (2018) for
Pulpo, and Katrin Greiling’s
Bow (2013) for Swedish
Ninja – are commercially
available as discrete products.
The others are all either
prototypes, customisable
systems or commissions for
a particular space. Dimitri
Bähler’s T-shelf (2015), for
instance, was designed for
a ceramics exhibition in
Lausanne. Wall-mounted,
T-shaped and weightlessly
slim, the simplicity of its
form is counterbalanced by a
shimmering finish taken from
the car industry.
The fundamental simplicity
of the shelf form makes it
an interesting medium for
material experimentation.
PESI Studio’s Timber (2018) is a
self-assembling, easy-to-move
unit made from dark green
cardboard, die-cut so that it
resembles timber, while Odd
Matter’s Mass shelf (2018) –
undoubtedly the strangest
item on display – uses gypsum
plaster and cork terrazzo to
107
create something that looks
like it has been excavated
from an underwater city. Silo’s
Blash shelves, meanwhile, were
created by allowing molten
glass to be folded over the
edge of a table before being
rapidly cooled, granting them
a dynamically rippled texture.
We are a long way from the
Billy bookcase.
The word ‘shelf’ derives
from the Old English ‘scylfe’,
meaning ‘partition’, and
one thing that shelves do is
divide, ordering things on to
separate levels, even as they
bring things together. A pair
of shelves by Matteo Pacella
and Philippine Hamen (both
2018), coated in bright blue
resin, respectively imitate the
forms of a classical aqueduct
and palazzo, with the latter
resembling Rome’s Palazzo
della Civiltà Italiana. Moving
away from the traditional
horizontal row in favour of
a series of thickly-walled
compartments, it proposes
the shelf as akin to a piece
of architecture composed of
numerous rooms, each with its
own function.
Shelves can also partition
things off from view. Sammi
Cherryman’s illusionistic
Aerate (2018) and Bram
Kerkhofs’ woven COIL (2016)
both work to disguise rather
than to display. The latter,
faced on all sides by elastic
rope that one must part
aside to enter, only allows
the vaguest intimation of
the contents within to be
glimpsed. Its discretion is poles
apart from the ostentatious
displays that shelves sometimes
encourage.
That the shelf can
encompass such contrasts is
one of 12 Shelves’ essential
takeaways and perhaps the
real reason why the shelf lends
itself so poorly to chair-like
chronicling. But Aram Gallery’s
show makes a good case for
giving them some time in the
limelight.
12 Shelves
Aram Gallery, London
Until 19 January 2019

exhibition
–––
Gio Ponti
The Musée des Arts Décoratifs gives the greatest hits treatment
to the maestro of Milanese post-war design – and ponders what
he could have done for Paris. By Christopher Turner
‘IN MILAN, GOD hasn’t
done much,’ said Giovanni
“Gio” Ponti. ‘So making
Milan beautiful is our job.’
He designed 40 buildings in
his native city. The Pirelli
Tower (1960), which cuts the
city skyline like a knife, is
perhaps the most elegant of
these contributions, and one
that has often been imitated
REVIEW
(Zaha Hadid’s CMA CGM Tower
in Marseille is a parametric
homage). With a slender plan
that resembles a boat and a
sleek 127m-high silhouette, it
was the tallest building in Italy
until 1995. ‘She is so beautiful,
I’d like to marry her,’ Ponti said.
Ponti trained as an architect
at Milan Polytechnic and
practised industrial design, as
108
well as founding and editing
Domus and running his
architectural practice. The
retrospective, titled Tutto Ponti,
at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs
(MAD) in Paris brings together
400 objects designed by the
prolific maestro. His wide-
ranging outputs include La
Cornuta (1948), a coffee machine
that resembles a V8 engine; an
IMAGES: LUC BOEGLY / GIO PONTI ARCHIVES, MILAN / ANTOINE BARALHÉ CARACAS, ANALA AND ARMANDO PLANCHART FOUNDATION
ethereal Superleggera (‘super-
light’) chair for Cassina (1957);
a cathedral in Taranto (1970);
a sculptural toilet for Ideal
Standard (1953); and a capital
complex in Islamabad (1964).
Together they represent
Italy’s post-war confidence and
the apotheosis of Milan as the
global design capital, against
a backdrop of rapid urban and
social change that is captured
in Michelangelo Antonioni’s
film La Notte (1961). Ponti
was mercurial and constantly
reinvented himself as he
absorbed the zeitgeist. The
exhibition traces his classical
beginnings in the 1920s as a
member of the Novecento group
– which had an ambiguous
ABOVE Tutto Ponti relationship with Mussolini‘s
brings together 400 fascism that the curators have
objects from the chosen to leave unexplored
polymathic designer’s – through to the playful
career postmodernism of the Denver
Art Museum (1971), a massive
ABOVE RIGHT Domus crenelated castle cloaked in a
issue 537, August perforated ceramic screen.
1974. Ponti edited the The exhibition is arranged
magazine for over half quite traditionally as a selection
a century of Ponti’s greatest hits. However,
iconeye.com

the curators pause to look
at two early preoccupations;
his theatre design, with sets
and costumes created for La
Scala, which helped define his
fluid theatricality and taste
for illusion and surprise; and
his interiors for ocean liners,
which he considered floating
embassies of Italian culture.
Next to his bold, expressive
crayon drawings and pastels
of this fleet, his auditorium for
the Time-Life building in New
York (1959), composed of large
coloured triangles, resembles a
dazzle ship.
The MAD retrospective also
brings Ponti to the city by
showing how, if things had
been different, he might have
transformed Paris as radically
as he did Milan. In 1969, almost
a decade after the Pirelli
Tower, Ponti submitted plans
for a series of multi-coloured
“The Pirelli Tower was the
tallest building in Italy until
1995. ‘She is so beautiful, I’d
like to marry her,’ Ponti said”
February 2019
REVIEW
triangular towers in La Defénse,
models of which are on display;
these luminous facades would
have been wired to light up the
skyline at night like a colour
organ. He also submitted an
unsuccessful 1971 scheme for
the Pompidou, ‘a supermarket
of culture’ out of which a
battery of thin, coloured towers
emerge like kryptonite.
In fact, one of Ponti’s first
houses was built on the
outskirts of Paris, and it is
the first of a row of room sets
that have been reconstructed
very successfully under the
supervision of architect
Jean-Michel Wilmotte. The
neoclassical L’Ange Volant (1926)
was built for the Christofle
family. It has a double-height
living room with a blue and
yellow stucco ceiling, and a
nymphaeum in the garden, and
was inspired by the Palladian
109
LEFT The plaster-clad
concrete exterior of the
Gran Madre di Dio
cathedral, Taranto,
Italy (1964–70)
villas he had visited when
serving as an army captain
during the First World War.
Ponti edited Domus from 1928
until his death in 1979, and it
was a vehicle that promoted
the enchantment and porosity
that Ponti admired in earlier
Mediterranean architecture,
as well as serving to redefine
the idea of modern living. Also
recreated as a set is Ponti’s own
apartment in Via Dezza – next
door to his studio in a former
mechanic’s garage – where he
lived in a light and airy open-
plan blueprint of his ideas,
with a candy-cane striped floor
and folding partitions. His
voluminous archive, made good
use of at MAD, is still housed on
the ground floor of the building.
BELOW Living room,
Villa Planchart,
Caracas, Venezuela
(1953-57), Ponti’s ‘total
work of art’
A final space depicts the Villa
Planchart (1957) in Venezuela,
which shows the influence on
his Mediterranean aesthetic
of Oscar Niemeyer, whom he
befriended in the 1950s. With
its floating roof, Ponti wrote,
it hovers ‘as light as a butterfly
sitting on a hilltop’, and he
considered it a ‘total work of
art’. It is a large-scale abstract
sculpture that embodies his
hyperactive aesthetic, designed
to tease the eye with pattern,
colour and texture, and his
restless, inventive search for
a joie de vivre in architecture
and design.
Tutto Ponti: Gio Ponti,
Archi-Designer
Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris
 REVIEW
book MIKE WEBB OF Archigram
––– is the kind of person who uses
Archigram:
the word “groovy” unironically.
Having left the UK to teach at
Virginia Tech in the USA in
The Book 1965, he retained his quirky
but classless Carnaby Street
patois. Perhaps in resistance to
the American accent, he held
This suitably massive tome is a valuable on to how he spoke in his late
reminder of the rigour and intellectual heft 20s. No one speaks like an extra
behind the collective’s lightweight, ephemeral from a swinging London movie
architecture, writes Tim Abrahams like Blow-Up any more. This
stunning book of Archigram’s
work has the same quality:
a way of speaking, once so
exciting, now existing as a
strange and exotic anomaly.
Archigram’s work shone
brightest throughout the
1960s and the ten issues of
their magazine and their
unbuilt projects typify the
extraordinary optimism of the
era in a particularly material
way; brightly coloured and,
with an interest in temporary
or adaptive architecture,
ephemeral and disposable. But
we make a huge mistake if
we place them in a box with
some of the paper architects
that came after, as creators
of wilfully impossible
architecture; of drawings
110
that were simply critiques. As
Michael Sorkin puts it in his
excellent introductory essay to
the book, ‘Representation was,
for them, the only real means
of ownership of the imaginary.’
And indeed what comes across
first and foremost is the heft not
just of structural thinking that
went into their architecture, but
also the drawing and publishing
that depicts it.
This constant affirmation of
architectural representation
– section, plans, structural
models, as opposed to
whimsical diagrams or
sketches – weaves its way
through this massive book.
It is itself a rhetorical objection
to the treatment of their
ideas as disposable because
they dared to address the
disposable. The collages they
are popularly known for take
their place in an array of
different drawing techniques,
and suddenly axonometrics of
IMAGES: ARCHIGRAM ARCHIVES
steel-framed megastructures
loom to the fore. This is not
a trick of hindsight. On the
contrary, part of what makes
the graphic work on the
early Archigram magazines
so appealing is the gradual
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accumulation of architectural
motifs until the final pages
are a welter of words, images
and possibilities.
Another phenomenon of
seeing Archigram’s work
compiled as it was published,
with contextualising essays,
is that the words come to the
fore. In Archigram 7, their
friend Cedric Price takes
to the typewriter to slate
the diagrammatic turn in
architectural representation as
‘puerile pattern making’, and
suggests that the diagram ‘is
an oversimplified indicator of
desirable physical planning or
form’. The goal of the architect
should be to build as they
draw and draw as they might
build – working with structure;
layering paint on pen work;
drawing, scratching out and
drawing again space frames
in which to best plug learning
pods. By Archigram 8, Peter
Cook, Dennis Crompton, David
Greene and Ron Herron are
clearly getting fed up of being
dismissed as dreamers: ‘[Our
magazines] have always been
based on proposition as well as
discussion since the Archigram
group believe in trying to sort
REVIEW
things out and do something
[their emphasis].’
Even work such as Webb’s
utterly ephemeral Auto-
Environment, whose interior
can be constantly and
automatically transformed, not
only contains an axonometric
on how the panels might be
arrayed but also the system by
which the raw materials for
the panels are pumped into
the house. The temptation is
to ascribe certain interests to
certain members of the group:
the poetics of Webb, the blobby
form-making of Cook and
beneath it all Crompton and
Warren Chalk puzzling away at
the social structures. Emerging
throughout the book though
is the narrative of what killed
the collective Archigram vision
in the historical sense: their
misplaced faith in systems,
particularly but not exclusively
the limitless sources of energy
that would animate their work.
If the book fails in one
thing, it is a general lack
of description of how these
incredible drawings were made,
leaving us to focus on their
intentionality instead. In the
hands of Herron – a supreme
112
PREVIOUS PAGE artist – the architecture of the
Instant City in a Field, Walking City (1964), which was
by Peter Cook, Dennis considered an icon of the 1960s,
Crompton, Ron Herron, emerges as not aggressive, nor
Archigram, 1968 wantonly mechanistic, but fun.
Technology, and the technique
ABOVE Plug-In City, of drawing it, emerges as a
Section, Max Pressure classless language. The Walking
Area, by Peter Cook, City is a rare moment when
Archigram, 1964 this becomes overwrought.
At other times it proves to be
tremendously prescient.
Archigram don’t need to be
judged exclusively on whether
they predicted the future or
not, because they spoke to their
own times with remarkably
little self-consciousness. Yet
it should be pointed out that
the Instant City looks like a
contemporary music festival
“Technology with interiors, amusements,
emerges as canopies, amplification, toilets
and colour. Another abiding
a classless impression of this book is
language.
Archigram’s willingness to
risk ridicule and prioritise
The Walking fun over irony, happiness over
knowingness, in the face of the
City is a rare sombre early modernists and
moment when
the know-it-alls.
this becomes Archigram: The Book
Edited by Dennis Crompton
overwrought” Circa Press, £95
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 STORIES

A many-layered cloth
The colours and patterns of the Ghanaian kente cloth are loaded
with symbolism. Designer Ella Bulley explains how a fascination for
these coded signals led her back generations in family history

‘MY MUM BOUGHT some kente cloth with her from
Ghana, which stayed in the family,’ remembers Ella
Bulley, a designer trained at Central Saint Martins
who is currently in residence at the Design Museum.
‘It was a fabric that invoked memories of knowledge
and heritage.’
Kente is a Ghanaian – specifically Akan – fabric
woven in strips, usually cotton or silk, and often
stitched together, with a wealth of regional variants,
colour combinations and symbolic patterns, each
holding different meanings and telling different
stories. Some are straightforward: white is purity,
black represents mourning. Blended together
they become more detailed, so black and white,
for instance, would mean that the wearer is
commemorating the life of the deceased, typically at
a ceremony on the Sunday after a funeral. Even the
shape of the cloth has a deeper significance. A square
worn as a dress wrapped around the body references
was woven in strips and then sewn together.’
Tradition dictates that you must never cut kente.
‘The seamstress would unpick the fabric, then sew
it and make it look flat against the body, where
you would think that it’s been cut to shape,’ Bulley
explains. ‘You had to journey out to find these people,
these other Ghanaians who had this knowledge,
this craftsmanship.’
Kente has always been highly valued and is
traditionally worn by nobles and royalty. This sense
of history, together with those coded signals and
displays, fascinates Bulley. ‘When a new pattern
was developed, they would give it a name, one that
references the social and economic movement of the
time. Through the name of each cloth you can link it
back to the year that it was made. So it’s almost like
an archive, a history.’
‘It’s amazing how this one item that was passed
down from my grandmother to my mother has
IMAGE: THOMAS COCKREM / ALAMY

the four points of spirituality and celebrates women
as divine.
A decade ago, at the age of 21, Bulley, whose mother
is from Ghana, was given her own kente cloth,
echoing a rite of passage for many Ghanaian women.
‘I wanted mine fitted like a Roland Mouret dress,
which was a big phenomenon at the time,’ she says.
‘We had to go to this seamstress in Surrey. The kente
influenced my work,’ says Bulley, whose residency at
the Design Museum has involved developing a project
about objects taken to and from their home country
by Ghanaian expats and repats. ‘It’s almost like a
story-telling piece that travels through time.’
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114 iconeye.com
“O” Pierpaolo Ferrari, 2018
Elemental

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