Design Line: 28 January – 3 February
Big names in design go toe-to-toe in Design Line this week. Mercedes-Benz takes on Tesla with an autonomous vehicle technology upgrade, top architecture studios hitch their wagons to The Line, and Tiffany & Co teams up with Nike for the collaboration literally no one asked for.
Totally like jewellery but for your feet (image: Nike).
Hypebeasts at Tiffany’s
With its signature turquoise-boxed, heart-shaped charms, Tiffany & Co cornered the market on teen girl jewellery tastes in the noughties. The company had great success with collaborations with noted jewellery designers, such as the late Elsa Peretti, whose pieces for Tiffany & Co are held in art museum collections around the world. But following a tempestuous £11.6bn takeover in 2021, luxury megacorp LVMH seems to be taking its new purchase in a, uh, different direction. This week, the Tiffany & Co x Nike collaboration was revealed, featuring black Air Force 1 Lows with the swoosh in the signature Tiffany’s turquoise and a silver charm stitched onto the back of the heels. Naturally, they come in a matching turquoise box. The collection also includes some shoe care accessories in the form of a silver shoe brush, and a silver whistle. Because Nike is a sports brand. Who this collaboration is actually catering to is something of a mystery. The tiny intersection of Hypebeast and sneakerhead couples who are looking for a novel way to propose, perhaps? The reception from the public has been decidedly lukewarm, including a takedown on how design brands die through this kind of dilution from @dieworkwear, the algorithm’s favourite menswear commentator. LVMH is unlikely to be bothered by the boos from the design crowd, as the shoes will surely be a sellout just like Tifany's 2021 Supreme collaboration, with the brand having made them record profits in 2022. Meanwhile, we’ll be over here lusting over the Nike x Cactus Plant Flea Market shoes that make your feet look like the lovechild of the Grinch and a garden centre.
What a relief: Red Nose Day gets a new design (image: Comic Relief).
iVenose
When Disegno learned that Jony Ive and his LoveFrom agency had designed the 2023 Red Nose for Comic Relief, we did not know what to expect. A milled nose of recycled aluminium, anodised to deepest (RED)? A single enormous ruby, cut into a perfect sphere bar a narrow sliver for nose insertion? The truth, however, is actually rather nice: a concertinaing paper ball, whose purity and economy of construction is a welcome break to the years of zany plastic characters that has characterised previous designs within the long-running comedy charity series. And for anyone who feels that Ive’s paper art nose isn’t fun enough, (adopts the tone of a stern European design professor) don’t you see that the concertinaing itself provides sufficient whimsy? Sure, there are quibbles: the use of bio-plastic elements within the design is a shame; the inclusion of a case for a product that is, if we’re honest, essentially one-use seems unnecessary; and it’s a pity that the folding design will be exclusively retailed through Amazon (bring back Sainsbury’s, we say). But lets not cut off our noses to spite our face: Ive’s design is a charming, nicely executed red conk. He’s hit the brief.
Self-driving to destruction
Mercedes-Benz announced this week that it’s beaten Tesla to the punch on the next stage of self-driving cars. Its Level 3 self-driving system, called Drive Pilot, is due to be on the roads in the US some time later this year. While Level 2 allows the driver to take their hands off the steering wheel, Level 3 means they can take their eyes off the road and entertain themselves by, for example, playing video games. While a few rounds of Mario Kart behind the wheel might be a fun novelty, it would be impossible for the driver to maintain situational awareness if something went awry. But Mercedes-Benz are convinced this will make their products the “the world’s most desirable cars” because “time is one of the most precious commodities”. Dangers of crashing while playing Crash Bandicoot aside, self-driving cars could also put us on a collision course with an even more serious climate crisis. A report released by MIT earlier this month ran the numbers for the extra energy required by the data centres needed to pilot driverless cars. If there were 1bn autonomous cars on the road for just one hour each day, MIT’s models showed that emissions from date centres would double. Currently, data centres are the culprit of 0.3 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions – as much as the country of Argentina. So unless engineers find a way to make autonomous vehicles more efficient, driving around while playing Grand Theft Auto V would drive the planet to destruction.
People who live in glass houses
This week, the UK’s Supreme Court handed down its final ruling on the case of the Tate Modern viewing platform versus the owners of very expensive glass-walled flats in the Neo Bankside development. In depressing news for anyone who doesn’t own a piece of central London real estate, the judges ruled 3-2 in the flat owners’ favour. Despite the Tate Modern having won planning permission for its Herzog & De Meuron-designed Switch House extension in 2007 – two years before the Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners-designed Neo Bankside got the green light – five owners of flats in the glass towers took issue with members of the public being able to see into their homes from the gallery’s outdoor viewing platform. Buying a glass house next to a huge art gallery, then being horrified that people actually visit said gallery may seem very silly, and both the High Court and the Court of Appeal sided with the Tate Modern. But Justice of the Supreme Court Lord Leggatt extended his sympathies to the shy homeowners, saying it must be “like being on display in a zoo”. Wealthy people buying up homes in an area for its cultural cachet, be it art or music or nightlife, then effectively shutting it down through complaints isn’t new, but this case marks a particularly public high watermark. Money can’t buy you happiness, clearly, but it can get you sole rights to nice views over the city – and tickets to spoiling everyone else’s fun.
Fog-X can pluck moisture from the air to make drinking water (image: courtesy of Lexus Design Awards).
For the future
A better future for everyone is something we can all get behind, and the four winners of the Lexus Design Awards 2023 are giving us some much needed hope as we head into February, the worst month. Pavels Hedström, whose masters degree focused on architecture in extreme environments, has designed Fog-X – a portable device that can covert fog into 10 litres of water a day to serve people living in arid areas. Also working with air and moisture, Jiaming Liu’s Print Clay Humidifier is 3D-printed from ceramic waste. Water is poured into the base and diffuses through the absorbent recycled clay to increase a room’s humidity. Temporary Office, the studio founded by Vincent Lai and Douglas Lee, were selected for their 3D topographic map puzzle called Touch the Valley, which was created for visually impaired people to enjoy. Zero Bag was designed by Kyeongho Park and Yejin Heo as a clever solution to packaging waste for clothing. Clothes can be put in the washing machine in the bag, which is water soluble and laced with detergent to wash away any chemical residue on the fabric. From water scarcity to respiratory conditions, accessible design to waste reduction, the four winners cover a wide range of disciplines. The young designers will be in good hands in the capable hands of a grand set of mentors: Marjan van Aubel, Joe Doucet, Yuri Suzuki, and Sumayya Vally.
Meet the architects in line to design The Line (image: NEOM).
Introducing the Line lineup
Despite general consensus on The Line, the linear desert skyscraper city planned for Saudi Arabia, being a resounding “It’s a very bad idea”, it seems like big-name architects are nevertheless lining up to put their star power behind the project. This week the Architect’s Journal revealed the cavalcade of practices and practitioners who have signed on the dotted line to work on said Line: Coop Himmelb(l)au, David Adjaye Associates, Delugan Meissl Associated Architects, HOK, Morphosis, OMA, Oyler Wu Collaborative, Peri Cobb Freed & Partners, Peter Cook, Studio Fuksas, Tom Wiscombe Architecture, and UNStudio. All their designs are currently on display in Riyadh, although how many will be taken forward is unclear. The moral fortitude of Tom Wiscombe, whom Design Line readers may remember recently resigned from SCI-Arc over a scandal involving the mistreatment of student interns, was perhaps already suspect, but the inclusion of names such as Peter Cook was surprising. As a founder of radical architecture group Archigram, you’d think Cook couldn’t be swayed by petrodollars, but alas. Norman Foster, at least, pulled out of the NEOM advisory board years ago citing human rights abuses. Mind you, after this week’s release of the RIBA Jobs Salary Report 2023 revealed how poorly architects’ salaries have kept pace with inflation, perhaps the offer of a piece of the $500bn pie was too much to resist.