Design Line: 2 – 8 September
Materials come under the microscope in this week’s Design Line. MoMA curates an exhibition celebrating ecological materials; crumbling concrete puts UK schools on collapse watch; and Toast launches a programme to re-circulate garments. Meanwhile a secretive city-building project surfaces in California and the Stirling Prize shortlist fails to see beyond London.
Lavender Hill Courtyard Housing by Sergison Bates architects has made it onto the shortlist (image: Johan Dehlin).
Snoring Prize
The six-strong shortlist for the Royal Institute of British Architect’s (RIBA) 2023 Stirling Prize – among the the UK’s most prestigious architecture awards – is here, and the response so far has been one of underwhelm. It’s not the fault of the individual projects, which each have interesting social and material merits, but rather that seen together they all appear so same-y even the headlines have had trouble finding variety. ‘London dominates the Riba Stirling Prize Shortlist’ points out The Times; ‘Stirling Prize shortlist dominated by London projects again’ sighs the Architect’s Journal. Only Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios’ design for the University of Warwick’s faculty of arts is outside of the M25, with nothing from Wales, Northern Ireland, Scotland or, indeed, anywhere beyond England’s Midlands. It’s not that the RIBA jury don’t have eyes on regional architecture. Winners of the 130 regional awards get put forward for the 30 national awards, which forms the longlist for the Stirling Prize. But, as The Guardian’s Oli Wainwright points out, the tiered awards system at RIBA allows for a London-centric hierarchy to emerge as “regional juries often see their opinions trampled”. Invisible Studio’s design for community-run arts centre East Quay in Watchet (voted the RIBA South West Building of the Year Award 2023) was, in Disegno’s opinion, robbed (see ‘Onions Have Layers’ in Disegno #32). The RIBA hasn’t exactly been covering itself in glory recently (newly inaugurated president Muyiwa Oki certainly has his work cut out for him) and such a myopic shortlist does little to raise the profile of what contemporary architecture the UK has to offer.
Cow Dung Lamps (2021) by Adhi Nugraha are one part of the exhibition (image: Studio Periphery).
The ever-shifting contemporary
In 1995, Paola Antonelli, then an associate curator at MoMA, curated an exhibition with the brilliant title Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design. The exhibition explored the notion that “Materials can be designed, and new techniques can customize, extend, and modify their physical properties.” It celebrated innovation in materials through exhibits such as planes made from carbon fibre, fins manufactured in liquid plastic, and titanium wheelchairs. Twenty-eight years later, Antonelli (now MoMA’s senior curator and director of research and development) has returned to this theme with the exhibition Life Cycles: The Materials of Contemporary Design, which opened this week. Organised by Antonelli and curatorial assistant Maya Ellerkmann, this iteration continues the celebration of materials but has taken a notable ecological turn, focusing on materials that help shape design as “an agent of positive change and play a crucial part in restoring the fragile ties between humans and the rest of nature.” Instead of cheering on the use of fossil fuel-derived materials, the show features materials that reduce their impact on the planet at every stage of their life from extraction to disposal. On display, for example, are lamps made from cow manure by Adhi Nugraha; a chair made from the paper waste of fashion brand Issue Miyake, designed by Nendo; and Fernando Laposse’s Totomoxtle veneers made from heritage corn husks (featured in Disegno #22). Looking at the two exhibitions together provides a fascinating lens into how our understanding of design’s role can and must change as the world changes. It also reveals the growth and influence of Antonelli’s career, with many of the 80 objects in the show being pieces that she has acquired for MoMA’s collection throughout her time at the museum. What better way to celebrate her career than to pay the new show a visit?
California Forever promises an idyllic city… built by the super rich (image: California Forever).
Welcome to the secret city
The mystery behind who has been buying up tracts of farmland in Solano county, California, was revealed this week. A group of Silicon Valley investors including a LinkedIn co-founder and the wife of the late Steve Jobs have been acquiring the land with plans to build a new city. Their company and website, titled California Forever, promises a “complete, sustainable community” with walkable neighbourhoods and solar farms. Cheerful illustration-style renderings show sunny streets filled with outdoor dining and groups of happy cyclists enjoying the outdoors. It’s a utopian vision that California Forever promises will create jobs and homes, but local communities are understandably unnerved by the cloak and dagger tactics around the project. The group reportedly spent $1bn secretly buying up 55,000 acres, drawing consternation from everyone from local officials to the FBI. Planning entirely new cities has become something of a craze amongst the super-rich recently. There’s Neom, of course, the 26,500 sqkm pet project of Mohammed bin Salman, Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, as well as cryptocurrency millionaire Jeffrey Berns’ plans for a city backed by blockchain in the Nevada desert. These grandiose plans certainly create jobs for the architects and designers willing to create fantastical renderings, but whether being fantastically wealthy alone bestows the ability to build an entire functioning city and all the infrastructural complexities that entails remains to be seen. Maybe the wealthy should content themselves with playing SimCity for now.
Toast’s Reworn programme aims to reduce waste from the garment industry (image: Suzie Howell).
Reheated Toast
Recently, the British fashion brand Toast has launched a number of progressive design initiatives around extending the lifespan of its garments. The brand’s Circle programmes already include a repair service, clothes swap events, and a line of one-off creatively repaired garments that were either damaged in-store or else returned by customers. This week, Toast announced an extension to this project with Toast Reworn, an online programme that will operate from 5 October and allow customers to repurchase pieces from previous Toast collections. The garments will be sourced through the company’s existing take-back scheme for all its products, with pieces directed through its resale programme or reserved for future repurposing as appropriate (or else donated to Traid, a charity that works to reduce clothes waste). The Reworn programme is due to launch with 50 pieces (with additional garments added each month) and its prices, although higher than many will be used to paying for second-hand clothes, appear reasonable given that the entire point of the programme is to stress that there is still value and worth to older garments (£68 for a linen jumpsuit; £49 for cotton twill trousers). A positive step for Toast, then, and one that other players in the industry would do well to learn from.
Raymond Moriyama has died aged 93 (image: Azure Magazine).
Raymond Moriyama (1929 – 2023)
Canadian architect Raymon Moriyama has died at the age of 93. Widely recognised as one of Canada’s greatest architects, Moriyama co-founded the Toronto-based practice Moriyama & Teshima Architects in 1970 alongside Ted Teshima, designing high-profile buildings such as the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo, the Canadian War Museum, and Ottowa City Hall. Born in Vancouver, Moriyama was imprisoned along with his whole Japanese-Canadian family at the age of 12 in an internment camp during the Second World War. To cope with with the deprivation, Moriyama built a secret treehouse that he considered his first architectural project. “I used just an axe as a hammer, an old borrowed saw, six spikes, some nails, a rope, and mostly branches and scraps from the lumberyard,” he recalled. “It was hard work building it by myself, and it was a lesson in economy of material and means.” Freed at the end of the war, he worked in a pottery factory and went on to study architecture at the University of Toronto and McGill University. His career was highly decorated: amongst other prizes he received Canada’s highest award for architecture, the RAIC Gold Medal, and was made both a Companion of the Order of Canada and a member of Japan’s Order of the Rising Sun. "We ask for particular respect and privacy for Raymond's family,” Moriyama & Teshima Architects said in a statement. “The world has lost a visionary architect and they have lost a treasured loved one.”
Cast your bids at the Unika Auction this weekend (image: Anne Bråtveit).
Sold!
Unika Auction is a comparatively new initiative within the design world, but one worth keeping an eye on. Launched in 2017 as part of Designers’ Saturday Oslo, and repeated in 2019, the auction provides an opportunity to see and purchase new works from an assortment of leading Norwegian practitioners. Now, after a three year absence, the auction is to make its welcome return at Oslo’s Bankplassen 4 as part of this weekend’s Designers’ Saturday festival. The programme recalls previous design auction initiatives such as Stockholm’s Örnsbergsauktionen, and should provide the expected pleasures of seeing new, experimental works from talented practitioners. Hunting & Narud’s Serendipity mirror, for instance, finds beauty and poise in a makeshift construction guided by making use of materials available in their studio; Kim Thomé’s stacking Voilá bowls show the designer’s experiments with a Harrison lathe, and provide visual delight in their oversized turned wood feet; Hanne Kvig’s blown-glass Amorphous 2.0 vase is pleasingly fluid and strange in its form; while Edvin Klasson’s Ni timers undamon is a partition wall that has been ingeniously and wittily formed from a car door. The auction promises further surprises, with more than 30 works on display. For those who find themselves in Oslo this weekend, be sure to visit.
The curious case of the crumbling concrete
Crumbling is the last adjective you want associated with concrete, but this is the terrifying prospect facing more than a hundred schools in the UK this week. Instead of welcoming students back for the start of the school year, buildings have been declared off limits at risk of sudden collapse. The problem is reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC), a popular postwar building material that is produced in such a way that it is cheap and light, but eventually prone to erosion and corrosion, running the risk of spontaneous collapse without warning. Obviously, this is the last thing you want in a building full of children. Moisture poses a particular risk to RAAC, and the UK being a famously rainy country means that its buildings are failing faster, although the problem is exacerbated by a lack of spending on public buildings. “This is not a bad material,” materials specialist Philip Purnell told the journal Nature. “It is behaving exactly as it would have been expected. This is a failure of maintenance, refurbishment and rebuilding budgets.”