The Design Line: 20 – 26 August
Summer is almost over but Design Line is always here. This week, Gucci loses a trademark war, severe drought in China leads to factory shutdowns, and the culmination of a city-sized artwork.
The Yangtze River has shrunk so much the drought is visible from space (image: European Space Agency).
Running dry
China is the latest country to suffer from an unusually fierce heatwave, and the ramifications could be global. Southern parts of the country saw record temperatures this week and the Yantgze river has reached an all-time low. The heat and drought has placed huge pressure on China’s electricity grid due to a hydropower shortage. Rolling blackouts and power shortages have forced industry to grind to a halt, and in Sichuan – which relies on dams for 80 per cent of its energy – factories have been ordered to shut down for a week. While this isn’t the first summer it has happened, with the added pressure of the pandemic and an already stressed supply chain the whole world may soon see shortages of important items such as batteries and electric vehicles. Apple suppliers such as General Interface Solutions and Foxconn, for example, are reported to be affected by the shutdown. The Chinese government has responded by boosting coal-fired electricity plants, but flying in the face of the country’s carbon goals will only accelerate the climate change that’s causing increasingly hot summers in the first place.
Goodbye gas-guzzlers
It’s not all climate doom and gloom. Hainan province in China announced on Monday that buses, taxis and rental vehicles will be swapped for electric versions by 2025. The island province, which is the size of Belgium, estimates that 35 per cent of its emissions come from vehicles. “Hainan aims to become the ‘top student’ in advancing its carbon peak and neutrality projects,” said officials. Not to be outdone in the competition for teacher’s pet, California in the US voted on Thursday to restrict and eventually ban the sale of vehicles that run on gasoline. By 2035 all new cars sold will have to be free of CO2 emissions. Given that California is America’s biggest car consumer and a legislative leader, it’s big news for a country famous for its fervent relationship with really big and gas-hungry cars. Now we just need the charging infrastructure, electric vehicles, and batteries to power it all – which could be an issue (see above).
Tony Hunt at a meeting at Foster Associates’ Bedford Street studio in 1971 (image: Tim Street-Porter).
Tony Hunt 1932 – 2022
One of the oddities of architecture is that despite famous landmarks being a group effort, often only the architect’s name goes down in history. So it was important this week to see the big names come out to remember Tony Hunt, an engineer who was crucial to so many of the notable buildings from the high-tech era. Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, Michael and Patty Hopkins , Nicholas Grimshaw: Hunt, who died last week aged 90, worked with them all. One of his first projects for his studio, Anthony Hunt Associates, was Neave Brown’s low-rise high-density social housing scheme for Alexandra Road in Camden. His work was integral to projects such as the Reliance Control factory in Swindon by Team 4, London’s Sainsbury Centre, and Waterloo Station. Foster paid tribute to a “loyal and trusted friend” who “retained a child’s sense of wonderment at anything mechanical.”
Forewarned is forearmed
Given the number of online conspiracy theories about vaccinations (we see what you’re up to, Bill Gates) you may be surprised to learn that new research suggests that a good way to combat online misinformation is, well, inoculation. This week brought the news that researchers at Google, the University of Cambridge and the University of Bristol had found that “inoculating” internet users against lies and conspiracy theories was effective in debunking fake news. Published in Science Advances, the study found that misinformation could be “pre-bunked” in some cases by showing users videos that made them aware of the design strategies and tools used by those wishing to sow mistruths. Conducting experiments with close to 30,000 participants, the researchers showed 90-second animations that taught people about propaganda tropes and manipulation techniques, such as scapegoating, deliberate incoherence, or the use of conflicting explanations. Testing users after watching one of the videos, the researchers found a 5 per cent increase in their ability to recognise misinformation techniques. Pre-bunking, then, may be a valuable tool in combatting fake news, although the researchers warned that it was ineffective on people with extreme views, such as white supremacists. Some people, it would seem, are simply in too deep.
Life in the lonely City (image: courtesy of the Triple Aught Foundation; photo by Joe Rome).
Welcome to City
Rocks, sand, and concrete, mined and mixed from a parcel of remote Nevada desert: 50 years and $40m later, artist Michael Heizer’s masterpiece City is now open. Begun in 1972 when Heizer was a key player in the earthworks movement, City is a a mile-and-a-half-long mega-sculpture, which shapes the desert into a series of dirt mounds, roads, buttes and depressions, bookended by two works (45°, 90°, 180° and Complex One) that are part ancient ruin, part nuclear bunker, and part motorway offramp. City is hard to describe (beyond saying that it would, in the very best way, make for a truly excellent level on Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater), but its play with landscape, sculpture and the abstracted forms of urban infrastructure should make for extraordinary viewing: the Triple Aught Foundation that is overseeing the site plans to sell six tickets a day for those who wish to explore the artwork on foot, but only on certain days during particular times of year. City is a monumental achievement and represents a singular vision that has been half a century in realisation. “I only compare it to itself,” noted Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and a board member of the Triple Aught Foundation. “It’s an artwork aware of our primal impulses to build and organize space, but it incorporates our modernity, our awareness of and reflection upon the subjectivity of our human experience of time and space as well as the many histories of civilizations we have built.”
Everything’s coming up CUGGL
Remember how every legacy fashion house suddenly switched over to sans serif fonts a few years back? As the 2010s drew to a close, Chanel, Burberry, YSL, Balmain, Balenciaga et al all got very same-y as they rebranded away from more classic fonts in an attempt to woo a new generation of HNIs (high net worth individuals). Unfortunately for these luxury brands, these logos are much easier to troll, as one cheeky Japanese garment seller has recently found out. An Osaka-based company has registered CUGGL as a trademark and is selling T-shirts with its bold, sans serif logo on. The catch is that the bottom half of the logo is obscured by neon spray paint and, because our brains love to fill in any gaps in our perception, looking at the top half of the letters brings another brand to mind. Gucci has complained, but the Japan Patent Office has ruled there is little similarity with CUGGL “from visual, phonetic, and conceptual points of view”. Now all that’s left is to ordain CUGGL in the great tradition of hard-to-pronounce fashion names. Is it “cugg-al” as in “cuddle” or “coo-gel” as in “frugal”? Apparently, the official way to say it is “kyuguru”, so now you know.