Design Line: 18 – 24 November
AI leadership kerfuffles; 3D-printed wool; a vernacular garden house; and an inflating/deflating sphere: it can only be this week’s Design Line.
A railings-rich chair that takes Tom Dixon back to his roots (image courtesy of Dan Fontanelli and Themes & Variations).
Tom through the ages
A retrospective of an established and respected designer always holds a certain appeal, but Metalhead at London’s Themes & Variations gallery is particularly enticing. Dedicated to Tom Dixon, the show argues that its subject “has lived many design lives”, and it’s not kidding. Dixon’s early work grew out of London’s clubbing and music scene in the 1980s, from which he producing chop-shop-style welded metal furniture that was raw, rough and vital. As time has passed, however, Dixon’s design has softened and professionalised. Furniture such as the Pylon chair (1991) and S chair (1987) retained the daring and anarchic quality of earlier works (albeit manifested in a more highly resolved format), but Dixon’s more recent work has often exhibited a degree of polish and commercial savvy that seems a world away from its creator’s DIY past. Nevertheless, Metalhead argues that there is an “essential attitude concurrent across Dixon’s extensive catalogue”, and seeks to draw this out through a display of projects from across its subject’s career (and a series of recent furniture pieces and masks, developed during lockdown using metal salvage, does seem a clear callback to Dixon’s earlier work). It’s a fascinating premise and a welcome tribute to a designer whose career has come to embody multitudes. Over the course of his four decades in design, Dixon has shown an ability to evolve, adapt and reinvent himself – Metalhead offers a suitable vantage point from which to map these changes, and the commonalities that may rest beneath.
(This is) Air at full inflation, awaiting its subsequent slackening (image courtesy of Ben Hocking and NGV).
A Ballsy Installation
Breath in… Exhale… How often do we take the time to think about the air that is passing through our bodies at every moment of every day? Architect Nic Brunsdon thinks not often enough. His installation. (This is) Air, which opened to the public this week as the National Gallery of Victoria’s 2023 Architectural Commission, seeks to remedy this blind spot by making the invisibility of air visible, thus inviting its contemplation. Beyond the air in our bodies, the installation also aims to encourage us to consider air in relation to social, political and economic forces - the inequality of access to clean air, for example, or how recent airborne viruses and natural disasters like bushfires change our relationship to air. But transforming something as intangible as air into an architectural form is no easy task and the result is, essentially, a giant white balloon. Built from polyester-based fabrics, it measures 14m in circumference and contains the average amount of air that one person circulates through their body every year. The sculpture was made in collaboration with ENESS, a technology and art company, and inhales and exhales on a fifteen minute cycle, morphing into slack shapes as the air leaves its body and then returning to a perky sphere as it refills. Compared to previous commissions in the NGV’s gardens, (This is) Air feels fairly pared back. It is simple in form and lacks decoration, and could perhaps be considered a little bland; on the other hand, perhaps it is a breath of fresh air for architecture to simply slow down and take deep, long, reflective breaths.
Perhaps the world’s loveliest garden shed (image courtesy of Vitra Design Museum).
Old skills for a new future
Tsuyoshi Tane: The Garden House opened this week at the Vitra Design Museum, an exhibition presenting the thinking and research behind its titular structure. Designed by architect Tsuyoshi Tane to sit within the Vitra Campus’s gardens, the small hut was created to provide a space for the campus’s gardeners (as well as including a rooftop viewing platform for visitors). Its thatched exterior chosen to represent vernacular building materials from the area surrounding Vitra’s base in Weil am Rhein, Germany. The Garden House opened earlier this year, but the new exhibition features models, mock ups, and paraphernalia from Tane’s collaborations with local artisans that led to its creation, and further expands on his philosophy that architecture can be seen as an “archaeology of the future.” Speaking in an interview in Vitra’s online magazine, Tane explains his approach to the project as being akin to “a quest to encounter things we did not know, what we had forgotten, what has been lost through modernisation and globalisation.” The Tane Garden House is small in footprint, but large in ambition, proposing a lighter, more responsive form of architectural practice.
The enticing design of Teenage Engineer’s EP–133 K.O. II (image courtesy of Teenage Engineering).
Cooly Packing in the Punches
This week, the perpetually cool Teenage Engineering launched a new product to much furore. The Verge’s headline, for example, read “Teenage Engineering’s new synthesizer is powerful, portable, and gorgeous” while Tech Crunch’s says “I’m trying so hard not to gush over Teenage Engineering’s latest gadget”. The product in question is the EP–133 K.O. II – a groovebox that combines a drum machine, synthesiser and sampler. The internet seems to unanimously agree that this product, like its name suggests, punches above its weight in both price point (retailing at just under £300) and design. The K.O.II builds on the success of Teenage Engineer’s PO-33 K.O! sampler (£89); it is more powerful and has more features than its predecessor, with David Pierce of The Verge describing it as “more than a toy but less than a professional tool.” The brand knowingly leans into this liminal audience of enthusiasts who are willing to spend quite a bit, but not too much. Customers and fans can also buy into the product through its accompanying merch line, offering everything from branded caps to inflatable groovebox toys; from K.O.II emblazoned tape and boxing shorts, to limited edition Muhammed Ali packaging. The hype is being stirred. The main criticism of its design to date is a lack of internal storage space – just 64MB. Teenage Engineering claims that this is intentional, encouraging would-be musicians to finish their songs in one sitting rather than storing and abandoning them. Cooly considerate? Perhaps. Cooly designed? Definitely – and who can say no to that?
Sam Altman, now more comfortably seated at the top of OpeAI than ever before (image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons).
A glorious return?
The development of AI is a fast-moving field, and it seems that the corporate structures through which these technologies emerge are no different. Last week, OpenAI (the developer of ChatGPT) announced that its co-founder and chief executive Sam Altman had been fired, with its non-profit board claiming that he had not been “consistently candid in his communications”. Cue an absolute meltdown. Around 750 of the company’s 770 employees threatened to resign if Altman was not immediately reinstated; Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, quit in solidarity with his colleague; and multiple failed efforts by investors to resolve the situation ultimately culminated this week with the return of Altman to OpenAI, and the departure of the majority of the board who had ousted him. It is a curious situation. Altman’s colleagues clearly craved his return and see him as essential to the company’s future, and it has become apparent that he and OpenAI are now essentially synonymous. There is much to be said about this tendency of tech companies to yoke themselves to “visionary” individual leaders and the dangers therein, but perhaps more concerning is the actual reason for Altman’s departure. No further details have been given over the nature of Altman’s dispute with the board, or what his lack of candour refers to, but it has been documented that there were internal clashes over the safety, speed and commercial impetus of the company's approach towards developing AI technologies. The immediate firestorm may have been quelled by Altman’s return, but the cause of the original dispute is seemingly still aglow.
Worthless no more: Christien Meindertsma is developing new treatments for low-grade wool (image courtesy of Mathijs Labadie).
The right tools
When Christien Meindertsma was asked to present a research exhibition using waste, her instinctive reaction was, “But it’s not waste!”. The Dutch designer was speaking at the opening of Christien Meindertsma: Re-forming Waste her new display at London’s V&A, which was commissioned as part of the institution’s ongoing Make Good: Rethinking Material Futures programme. The resultant display presents Meindertsma’s research into wool and linoleum, two traditionally “flat” materials that she is now re-forming (as the title suggests) into 3D forms. Sourcing wool from a Rotterdam flock, Meindertsma has devised a robotic 3D printer that can needle print wool into different forms, allowing material that has traditionally been seen as low-grade or worthless by the textile industry to be used in new ways. Meinderstma’s second research strand focuses on linoleum, detailing her use of recycled linoleum flooring to create a series of new linoleum blocks, tiles and structures. Both old linoleum tiles and low-grade European wool have commonly been seen by society as waste, but, Meindertsma argues, could easily be treated as “virgin” resources. Linoleum is pliable enough to be broken down and recycled into new linoleum endlessly, whilst the low-grade wool that Meindertsma works with would have been considered a high-value resource only a couple of centuries ago. With the right tools, she proposes, these materials have untapped potential and new futures ahead of them.