Design Line: 21 – 27 January
The circle of life seems to be the theme for Design Line this week. Schiaparelli sent lions down the catwalk, UAL and Mill debuted recycling bins for the benefit of students and chickens respectively, and both the National Portrait Gallery and Eurostar raided the archives for their rebrands.
Lions and leopards and wolves, oh my
Elsa Schiaparelli made her name with surrealism. A close associate of Salvador Dalí, her fantastical women’s fashion included dresses that looked like a set of drawers, hats that looked like shoes, earrings that looked like ears, and perfume bottles modelled on a bust of Mae West. Schiaparelli’s self-titled brand shuttered in 1954 (after the Second World War and maybe a little, uhhh, Nazi collaboration) but was bought and relaunched in 2014, before coming under the creative direction of designer Daniel Roseberry in 2019. This week, Roseberry sent big cat looks down the catwalk that were a direct homage to the surrealist roots of the brand, featuring evening gowns with giant, realistic (but 100 per cent fake) furry animal heads. The apex predator-chic looks were crafted for the brand’s haute couture spring/summer 2023 collection, and Roseberry says that they were a literal interpretation of the scary creatures populating hell in the 14th-century poem Inferno by Dante Alighieri. But the trompe-l’œil taxidermy sparked outrage on social media as people accused the designer of glorifying big game hunting, with all the violent colonial and ecologically destructive undertones that confers. Was it a faux fur pas? Even PETA, the notoriously anti-fashion campaign group, dismissed the internet outrage and complimented Roseberry on celebrating the beauty of animals and demonstrating that faking it can be high fashion. It may be a storm in a Méret Oppenheim fuzzy teacup (another surrealist friend of Schiaparelli’s), but we eagerly await the verdict of the furry community – the ultimate connoisseurs of the fursuit craft – for the final word on the matter.
This poor cat will no longer be able to blame its farts on the stinky bin (image: Mill).
Screw the gym, bin memberships are the next big thing
This week saw American startup Mill announce that for just $369 every year, you can buy into a product that will revolutionise the way your kitchen works while saving the planet. That’s right, for a mere $33-a-month subscription plan (provided you pay annually), you too can de-stink your kitchen while also cultivating a smug sense of self-satisfaction knowing that chickens will not be going hungry on your watch! “What is this bargain chicken-adjacent product!?” you ask, “Where can I get it!?” we hear you cry. To the first question, the answer is that Mill is a smart food-scrap specific bin that converts your organic waste into chicken feed through a process of dehydrating and grinding. It plugs into your wall sockets, connects to your internet to enable software updates, and comes with an app that seamlessly coordinates with a postal company to collect your converted waste to send to chicken-farmers every few weeks. To the latter question, you can’t, or not exactly. This sleek-white food receptacle can now be pre-reserved for the spring of 2023, but hurry because there are a limited number of spaces for bin memberships! Those of you who are more sceptical of this shiny solution to food waste may be asking “Can’t I just compost?” Correct, you can! But bear in mind that you’ll have to contend with fruit flies and the inevitable stink of rotting food, and did you know that greenhouse gases produced by food waste decomposing amounts to 8 to 10 per cent of global emissions? That’s a lot! But could Mill be over-engineering a solution to the wrong problem and, as a consequence, helping individuals satiate their guilt about over-consumption? Perhaps we should focus on changing our wasteful behaviours rather than spending obscene amounts of money on a very clever bin. Ah well, if eco-capitalism is here to stay, it might as well feed the chooks while it’s at it. Let’s just hope your bin isn’t selling your food-consumption data in the process too.
To move forwards, sometimes you have to look back (image: Edit Brand Studio).
Hitting the refresh button
It’s a new year, new look for several design-minded institutions this week. The National Portrait Gallery, which has been closed for refurbishment since 2020, is marking its reopening with a new look courtesy of designers from Edit Brand Studio. The studio brought in illustrator and typographer Peter Horridge – designer of the Liverpool FC crest – to develop a new monogram for the gallery. Horridge took a sketch of the intertwined initials NPG drawn in 1893 by former National Portrait gallery director George Scharf and turned it into a logo. A new typeface, NPG Serif, has also been developed from fonts found around the gallery. So as to not make it feel like too much of a period piece, a palette of bright contrasting colours has been developed alongside – although these too reference the paints used in the museum’s collection. In a time when everyone and everything has to be a brand and an experience, even historic galleries seem to be getting on the bandwagon. Eurostar Group has also been rifling through the archives for its rebrand, which launched this week. Riffing off the train line’s 1994 wordmark, creative agency DesignStudio created a logo that uses an encircled star shape to form a lowercase e. Called the Spark Logo, it appears on the livery of the carriages, as well as in a 3D format where it spins around for the Eurostar’s digital offering. The rebrand marks last year’s merger between Eurostar and the French-Belgian rail operator Thalys and combines colours from both company’s back catalogues. If you want to design a new identity, it seems it’s safer to stick to the past.
One student’s trash is another’s treasure (image: Orlando Callegaro via Dezeen).
Lessons in waste not, want not
If you’ve ever visited an arts university campus at the end of the academic year, you’ll likely have spotted skips brimming with unwanted materials: leftovers from projects that have been signed, sealed, delivered and then forgotten as the pressures of assignments are traded in for sunshine. The environmental cost of throwing away still usable materials – such as spray paint, timber off-cuts and swathes of fabric – is huge, especially since many are toxic, synthetic or non-recyclable. But that’s not the only cost, because being a design student is pricey. The often unacknowledged cost of buying supplies on top of paying tuition fees and covering rent makes studying an arts-based subject prohibitively expensive for many (as astutely illustrated by Kathryn Larsen in Design Drafts published alongside Disegno #34). Tackling these two issues are the new Re-Use Units, which were installed across University of the Arts London’s (UAL) campuses this week. Instigated by UAL’s sustainability interns, the grey mobile units, mounted on caster wheels, offer a space where students can leave unwanted materials for others to use. It is a small gesture in the grand scheme of things, but could have a significant impact on the 1,000 tonnes of waste that UAL discards annually. The considerately designed units build a healthy distrust of students’ behaviour into their design, benefiting from the first-hand knowledge of the current and former student interns who created them. They feature clear labelling and “vision windows” to encourage students to engage with what’s on offer, for example, and have tilted roofs to prohibit the dumping of materials on top of the units rather than sorting and placing them inside. Ultimately the success of the units, no matter how carefully designed, relies on users putting in that extra bit of care in order to share.
Exhibition suspicion
Vkhutemas, the Russian state art and technical school, was founded in 1920. Although it existed for only 10 years, its teachers and students made it a focal point for contemporary avant grade movements in design, such as the austere industrialism of constructivism and the abstract geometry of suprematism. With its state-sponsored model, focus on cutting-edge materials and technology, and innovative teaching methods, the Vkhutemas inevitably drew comparisons with the Bauhaus. Anna Bokov, an assistant professor adjunct at New York's Cooper Union has written a book on the Vkhutemas and led on an exhibition called Vkhutemas: Laboratory of the Avant-Garde, 1920-1930 that was due to open at the New York school this week. But, at the last minute, Cooper Union put out a statement announcing it is delaying the exhibition due to Russia’s war on Ukraine. “As this exhibition would be experienced amidst the present-day conditions, it has generated concerns and started instructive dialogue,” it said in a statement. The implication that an exhibition of Russian design history is somehow suspect is bizarre and particularly concerning considering Bokov was also the target of a malicious op-ed published on Archinect last week. Peder Anker, a professor at NYU Gallatin, wrote that Bokov was associated with Vladimir Putin – a libellous accusation that Archinect has now retracted. Anker’s paranoid insinuation that “Russian acolytes in New York” are waging a “cultural war of propaganda targeting our minds”, however, remains up. It is disappointing that the Cooper Union wouldn’t defend a non-tenured staff member in the face of such a bad faith attack.
Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi has died at the age of 95 (image: Pratik Gajjar).
Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi (1927 - 2023)
Pritzker prize-winning architect Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi died this week at the age of 95. Doshi became the first Indian architect to receive architecture’s highest honour in 2018, and went on win the Royal Gold Medal in 2022. Still working well into his 90s, Doshi is credited with bringing the modernist style to Indian architecture. He trained under Le Corbusier in Paris in 1951 before moving to Ahmedabad where he supervised the construction of Corb’s Indian projects. Setting up his own practice in 1954, Doshi went on to collaborate with another giant of modernism, Louis Kahn, to design the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. Despite never having finished his own schooling, Doshi was a champion of architecture education in India, founding the Center for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT) and designing its campus. Social housing was another passion of his, and he was widely feted for his work in Aranya, where he designed low-cost housing for the poorest residents of Indore. Instead of mirroring the wholesale slum clearances implemented in the West, Aranya was designed to be built incrementally with local materials and user participation. It was a project that encapsulated his philosophy of design. “As architects we are supposed to be social, economic and cultural designers,” he said when receiving his Pritzker. “If I as an architect am not able to do something for my people and provide them with what they need, then I should say my job is incomplete.”