Design Line: 22 – 28 April
This week saw the design world confront some serious issues, discussed here in Design Line. A display of racist figurines at Milan Design Week 2023 has prompted discussion about exclusion in the industry, while architecture is making up for decades of poor representation with honours for Yasmeen Lari and a scholarship in the name of Diébédo Francis Kéré. Meanwhile, Zaha Hadid Architects endorses AI imagery, and a prize for sustainable plastic announces its winners.
Racism in Milan
Milan Design Week bills itself as a global meeting point for the international design community, but this year’s edition served up a sobering reminder of the ongoing disparities and inequalities within the field. Campo Base was an installation curated by Federica Sala that was billed as a “a utopia of design” and which would offer “visitors a moment of respite, reflection, and calmness” through a series of interior spaces designed by different studios. Amongst these spaces was Il Collezionista by Massimo Adario – a room centred around a glass vitrine containing objects billed as belonging to a fictional collector (but in fact coming from Adario’s own private collection). The display received positive press until a group of design professionals (Stephen Burks, Jenny Nguyen, Anna Carnick and Wava Carpenter) took to Instagram to point out that the display was blatantly racist: many of the objects on display were 1920s glass figurines that grotesquely stereotyped, dehumanised and ridiculed Black and Asian people. “Design is popular culture and our actions shape attitudes and opinions that reflect where we are as a society,” Burks noted in a statement regarding the display. “The unfortunate message this exhibition has sent is that people of non-European origin do not have the right to exist outside of a Eurocentric, often racist, frame of reference.” Those involved in the display have issued assorted explanations and apologies (which Disegno has chosen not to republish, but they are available elsewhere online), but their display of objects that simply served to reinforce and amplify the racist context in which they were produced made clear that there remains huge work to be done to ensure a more open, equitable and diverse design industry. As Burks noted, “As designers we must call out all symbols of oppression and discriminatory practices, tokenism, and stereotyping that continue to take place within our field.”
Yasmeen Lari crowned in gold
This week, the Royal Institute of British Architects announced that the winner of the RIBA Royal Gold Medal for 2023 is Yasmeen Lari. As Pakistan’s first woman architect and the creator of a multitude of socially motivated projects, Lari is an incredibly worthy winner in her own right, but the award is particularly momentous for the industry. Since its inception in 1848, there has only ever been one other woman named sole recipient of the prize – Zaha Hadid in 2016. Seeing as RIBA bills the Gold Medal as “one of the world's highest accolades for architecture”, the gender gap is wholly egregious, something feminist collective Part W has been working to highlight for years. Lari was initially rejected from architecture school in the UK (big mistake, HUGE), but completed her studies at what was then Oxford Polytechnic. She graduated in 1964 and returned to Karachi, where she founded her firm Lari Associates. She completed many impressive state buildings, but it was the Angoori Bagh Housing project in 1970s Lahore that cemented her reputation as an architect for the people. Designed for those displaced by the 1947 partition of India by British colonisers, it created almost 800 low-cost yet practical and dignified homes. Since retiring from her practice in 2000, Lari has dedicated her life to humanitarian projects through her Heritage Foundation of Pakistan, designing self-build shelters, eco-friendly cooking stoves, and a women’s centre in Darya Khan raised on stilts to protect it from flooding. Upon hearing the news of her medal, Lari said she was “surprised” and “totally delighted”. “I never imagined that as I focus on my country's most marginalised people – venturing down uncharted vagabond pathways – I could still be considered for the highest of honours in the architectural profession,” she said. Her commitment to zero carbon and low waste architecture will surely have resonated with King Charles III, whose passion for sustainability and architecture is well documented. Charles’s coronation may be coming up, but it’s Lari who reigns supreme over architecture this year.
Stack It! is the Design Ventura winner (image: The Piggott Schoo).
The winning toy
The Design Ventura programme, a collaboration between London’s Design Museum and Deutsche Bank’s Born To Be scheme, is a charming initiative. Each year, students in years 9, 10 and 11 of British schools are invited to design a new product for the museum, with the winning product subsequently manufactured and sold in the museum’s shop in aid of Cancer Research UK (this sale component of the programme operating as something of a carrot for the more meaningful work of encouraging engagement with design skills in schools). This year’s edition of the programme – themed “Place – how you affect your external environment, and how your environment affects you”, set by Selasi Setufe, architect and co-founder of Black Females in Architecture – was won by students of The Piggott School in Berkshire. The students’ project, Stack It!, is a 3D architectural puzzle structure that challenges players to complete different design tasks, which will arrive in store in early 2024. Disegno, for one, can’t wait to play it.
Yale has honoured Diébédo Francis Kéré with a scholarship in his name (image: Astrid Eckert).
A new pathway
When Diébédo Francis Kéré was selected as the 2022 Pritzker Prize laureate, he became the first African architect to be honoured with the award – not a great statistic when you consider that the award was founded 44 years ago. Good news, then, that this year saw the Yale School of Architecture announce its new Francis Kéré Scholarship – a funded programme designed to financially support the education of aspiring architects from Africa within the school. The scholarship has been facilitated by a gift from the Sidney E. Frank Foundation, and will likely be augmented with further donations. It is being billed as part of Yale’s wider for Humanity: The Yale Campaign programme, which aims to increase access and affordability to the school. Kéré has previously taught at Yale, and is clear as to the value of the scholarship to African practitioners. “There are so many aspiring African architects and with a Yale education they will be able to excel,” he said. “I am the first African architect to be recognized with a Pritzker and, thanks to the Francis Kéré Scholarship, I hope there will be many more to come.”
Kernal is made from old wind turbines (image: Ro Plastic Prize via Dezeen).
Plastic fantastic
Plastic has been getting a bad rap. Everything that made it a panacea to design in the last century – its cheapness, its supreme durability, its resistance to degrading – has made it public enemy number one now that our rivers and seas are choked with it and micro plastics are everywhere from the top of Everest to the placentas of unborn babies. It’s fair to say it’s been a PR disaster for the material. Enter the Ro Plastic Prize, founded by Rossana Orlandi in 2020, which invites designers to rethink how the material is used and discarded. The 2023 winners were announced at Milan Design Week and the results are uplifting. The winner of the Emerging High Technology category is Isinnova, an Italian company that has developed a 3D-printed prosthetic leg made from recycled plastic in response to the war in Ukraine. Called Letizia, the prosthesis costs €500 and can be customised to the wearer’s body and the nature of their injury. Designer Geo Minelli and architecture studio External Reference both won the Art and Collectible Design category. Minelli has created Kernel, a monolithic table made from Glebanite – the material result of a two-year research process recycling plastic taken from disused wind turbine parts. External Reference’s project, Pure Plants, 3D-prints ornamental greenery out of a corn-based bioplastic the studio has developed. On the speculative side, designer Lucrezia Alessandroni got a special mention for Soothing Cup, a design for a menstrual cup and incubator that would allow the user to cultivate their own natural microbiome on the tool when not in use. While single-use plastic is still terrible for people and the planet, these innovations may help rehabilitate it as a useful material when applied judiciously.
Zaha Hadid Architects has embraced AI for competition projects (image: via Digital Futures).
AI architecture
This week, Zaha Hadid Architects announced that it has embraced AI text-to-image generators to create renders for its projects. As this news came from ZHA principal Patrick Schumacher, who loves to create a contrarian stir, it should be taken with a grain of salt. Yet it is nonetheless interesting to see a large global practice go all-in on AI. “Not every single project is using it, but let's say most,” Schumacher said at a roundtable for Digital Futures. “I’m encouraging everybody who's working on competitions and early ideation to see what comes up and just to have a larger repertoire.” The competitions mention is interesting on several levels. Studios are under a lot of pressure to enter and win competitions to raise their profile, but it doesn’t necessarily bring in money for the practice. These prestige-generating roles can often go to low-paid junior architects, so while AI may speed up their process, it doesn’t automatically suggest the time-saving tool will see them better remunerated – or help them gain any practical skills. Then there’s the question of ownership and originality. If a competition is won using images created in MidJourney or DallE, does that mean that the AI, rather that the architects, should take credit? Can these systems ever create something original, or are they just repackaging existing forms? And what about the unpaid labour of the countless architects, designers, photographers and artists whose works were used to train the AI? It’s a concerning precedent to set. Whether design competitions will ban the use of AI for entrants remains to be seen.