Design Line: 7 – 13 October
The past week has brought the sad news of the death of the great Andrea Branzi, but solace in the form of the Design Institute of Australia coming out firmly in support of Australia’s Indigenous Voice referendum. Meanwhile, new designs for the home launched by Philippe Malouin and Räthel & Wolf, while Charlene Prempeh published an important book celebrating the work of overlooked Black designers.
Andrea Branzi, a giant of Radical Design (image: Triennale).
Andrea Branzi (1938-2023)
“I always need some sort of stimulus, or some sort of improvisation, to get going. I need a thought or an intuition to get going, a possible solution to a problem that I can never articulate clearly.” So spoke Andrea Branzi in a series of interviews with Catherine Rossi, conducted in 2020 as part of Friedman Benda’s Design in Dialogue series. It seems a perfect summation of Branzi, who died earlier this week: he was a designer whose practice was ever questioning, provocative, and committed to reaching outside of itself to suggest new possibilities for the world. Branzi was indelibly connected with the Radical Design movement of the 1960s having co-founded Archizoom Associati, and subsequently went on to work with other avant-garde groups such as Global Tools, Alchimia and Memphis. Archizoom's Superonda sofa (1966) forewent a conventional frame in favour of a seating system that was flexible and fantastical, while the group’s highly influential No-Stop City (1969) imagined a hypothetical city that extended endlessly, sparsely layering natural features, appliances, tents and transport atop its strict grid. It was a complicated project (and one that Branzi himself felt was not always understood), but representative of the questing, curious intellect that Branzi maintained throughout his career. It offered, he told Rossi, “an interpretation of the world of design as a highly-evolved system, that is in continuous transformation and is continuously growing.” The world of design is poorer and less interesting for his passing.
Jewels of the table, courtesy of Räthel & Wolf (image: Räthel & Wolf).
From body to table
For a number of years, the Berlin-based brand Räthel & Wolf has offered thoughtful reflections on how jewellery might interact with the mechanics of the body. Founded by designers Sari Räthel and Ricarda Wolf, the brand creates piercing-free jewellery that variously slots, curls, twists and clips around the body – a range that offers fascinating mechanical reflections on how the body might connect to external forms. It was a pleasure, then, to learn that Räthel & Wolf has now extended its experiments into tableware – an area in which cutlery and bowls’ connections to the hand and mouth is paramount. The results are, as one might expect of jewellery designers, beautiful (and all executed in stainless steel and deadstock agate sourced from the gemstone cutting town of Idar-Oberstein in Germany), but the most interesting aspect of the collection may be the manner in which the designers’ disciplinary background has shaped their work in a new field. The collection's spoon, for instance, has been interpreted as a cuttlefish bone-esque scoop: a shape that provides much of the function of a traditional form, but which is eccentric enough to allow for alternative uses at the table. Jewellery is intimately tied to ornament, making it easy to forget that those working in the field also possess considerable expertise in how designed forms physically interact with the body – Räthel & Wolf's tableware presents a compelling case for practitioners in this area to step outside of disciplinary boundaries more regularly.
Not bad digs for a design residency (image: Museum Vandalorum).
In residence
Amongst the forest and lakes of Sweden’s Jönköping region is a striking, light-filled house designed by architect and furniture designer Bruno Mathsson (1907-1988). It is in this idyllic setting that a new design residency launched by Museum Vandalorum is set to take place next year. Open to applications until 12 November, this new programme comes at a time of increasing reflection by the design community about the purpose and mechanisms of design residencies. The recent forum ‘What Does a Design Residency Do?’ held at the Stanley Picker Gallery, for instance, provided a rigorous inquiry as to why residencies exist, the various expectations of participants vs. funders, and how to create a connected network of residencies (see Disegno’s ‘LDF Diaries’). While residencies can offer creative and financial freedom for practitioners and are often career-defining moments, they are almost always entangled in the soft politics of cultural capital, funding streams, institutional bureaucracies and more. For Vandalorum’s part, its new design residency seems broad and generous in its ambitions: “The purpose of the residency is to offer an internationally working designer time for research, development, networking, and focus in a stimulating architectural environment, within the context of Vandalorum Museum of Art and Design and the extensive manufacturing industry of the region.” If designers have to navigate the tensions, politics and unknowns of undertaking a residency to create their work, there seems no lovelier a place to do so than in a home created by one of Sweden’s most influential designers.
Nicole Monks’s powerful Yes (2016) (image: Casula Powerhouse, via Design Institute of Australia).
An unreserved yes
On 14 October, the Australian people will vote “yes” or “no” in a referendum that recognises the First Peoples of Australia by establishing an advisory body called the Voice to Parliament. If voted for, this body would be enshrined in the national constitution and consult on matters relating to Indigenous citizens. Polls ahead of the vote suggest that the referendum is unlikely to pass, however, and the past weeks have seen growing levels of racism and division amongst Australian communities. It is a difficult moment for many. While this is disheartening news ahead of the vote, it has been encouraging to see the Australian design community backing the yes campaign. The board of the Design Institute of Australia (DIA), for example, released a statement outlining how it “unreservedly supports enshrining an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice in the Constitution […]”. This support from the industry is further reflected in the number of cultural institutions creating spaces, funding, programming and positions to amplify First Nations’ voices. The National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), for example, has just launched its podcast series Connecting the Dots: First Peoples Art from the NGV with Tony Armstrong. Whatever the outcome of the vote, we hope that the design community will continue to build on the momentum it has gathered in championing Indigenous designers. In doing so, it can harness the power of institutions and visibility of design to help foster a culture of unity going forward.
A book worth seeking out (image: courtesy of Prestel).
Take another look
Looking back on the previous century of design, it’s tempting (albeit naive) to think that the iconic designers who have come to define these years owe their status to talent alone. More often, in fact, it is down to how legacies are preserved, promoted and written about after designers’ and architects’ deaths, and how histories are shaped by the circumstances and biases of the time. Charlene Prempeh’s new book Now You See Me: An Introduction to 100 Years of Black Design is, therefore, a welcome resource to look back on the vast range of talented Black designers who have been overlooked in the past century. Published by Prestel, the book is split into three design disciplines and uses key figures within each to explore the importance of their work and the systemic inequalities that have determined how they have been treated within cultural consciousness. “For decades, Black designers have been sheathed in an invisible cloak,” explains Prempeh in her introduction. “The absence of prestige and recognition afforded to Black figures in this space has shapeshifted as the formality of segregation and colonial rule has given way to more subtle forms of gatekeeping and erasure.” Prempeh uses Now You See Me as an opportunity to readdress this balance, explaining that it is an opportunity to highlight the provenance of works by designers, architects and makers with which the design industry is often familiar, despite the fact that the creatives behind them have been sidelined.
Philippe Malouin’s highly clickable lamp (image: Fabian Frinzel).
A good click
Just like the joys of popping bubble wrap or clicking a ball point pen, there’s a fundamental sense of satisfaction to fiddling about with magnets. This is part of the appeal of Bilboquet by Philippe Malouin, a lamp produced by Flos which has launched this week. Bilboquet is a tabletop light with a pivoting lamp head that allows the direction of the light to be fully adjustable. To enable this, the central pivot is a magnetic ball joint to which the lamp head can detach and attach with just the right amount of magnetism. The magnetic joint needs just a dash of strength to detach it from its base; on reattaching, it does so with a satisfying attraction and click when reunited with the joint, providing enough resistance to allow the head of the lamp to pivot in whichever direction is needed. These multiple uses answer an ambition from Flos that Malouin should create a light that appeals to a younger demographic of consumers. At £247, Bilboquet offers an affordable investment (by design standards, anyway) for younger consumers, rewarding the buyer with a lamp that can be variously used as a task light, a side light, and an uplighter – a flexible approach that is explored more fully in our story about the light in Disegno #36. Bilboquet is a lamp with aspirations of timelessness and neatness, exemplified in its simple and satisfying magnetic “click”.