The Design Line:
It’s been a week of design highs and design lows, as today’s Design Line will attest. The Royal Designer of Industry programme has appointed its new members, while Dubai is seeking to birth the hypertower, the latest 21st-century megastructure. Lab-grown chicken gets the green light, but you may have to eat it in a branded McCrispy chair. We can’t win ‘em all.
It may be time for these dormitories to rest easy (image: Edmund Sumner via Dezeen).
Kahn-t stop the wrecking ball
The demolition of the Louis Kahn-designed dormitories at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA) is back on the cards once more. Built in the 60s and 70s, the school’s brick buildings are beloved by architecture fans, but the IIMA has announced that 14 of the 18 dormitories need to be knocked down and replaced after engineers and restoration experts deemed them “uninhabitable”. There was uproar in 2020 when the IIMA first announced it wanted to demolish the structures, and the school was forced to do a U-turn after 20,000 people signed a petition to save the buildings. Architecture historian Willian J.R Curtis, who led that original campaign, has already complained about a lack of transparency in this latest report. While seemingly resigned to the destruction of Kahn’s work, Curtis warned it could be an “absolutely wasteful destruction of a masterpiece replaced by a third rate pastiche”. Kahn, an Estonian-born American architect, is highly regarded for his brutalist style and his designs earned him a place in the pantheon of 20th-century modernist architects. The loss of the dormitories can be folded into the wider threat to many beloved buildings of this era, and arguments as to whether they have simply reached the end of their useful lives – or been deliberately allowed to fall into a state of neglect. It’s a thorny topic, but while IIMA students deserve to live in iconic buildings, they also deserve habitable quarters.
Welcome to the faculty
There would be worse ways to chart the historical progression of the design fields than by looking to the progression of the UK’s Faculty of Royal Designers for Industry (RDI). Founded in 1936, the programme is a way of recognising practitioners who have excelled within design, each year appointing a fresh intake of Royal Designers and honorary Royal Designers (the same honour, just reserved for non-British practitioners). Yet if the RDI’s inclusion of “industry” within its own title speaks to a 20th-century framing of the field, the 2022 intake of designers felt reassuringly inclusive of different forms of practice. There was space for heavyweights such as Oscar-winning costume designer Jenny Beavan and Pritzker Prize-winner Diébédo Francis Kéré (whose own practice, while vaunted by the architecture establishment, is hardly traditional), but also recognition for a crop of younger practitioners whose studios presents refreshingly alternative perspectives on design: Stefan Diez, whose work within furniture and lighting has increasingly leant into designing for the circular economy; Sebastian Cox, whose design with wood encompasses forest management as an essential element; and both Formafantasma and Superflux, two very different practices, each of which has pushed design as a form of research and social exploration. In this sense, the 2022 laureates feel like a compelling portrait of design in the 2020s, serving to highlight the progression in the discipline over the course of the programme’s 86 years. Here’s to 86 more!
Fernando Campana in his São Paulo studio for Disegno #19 (image: André Penteado).
Fernando Campana (1961-2022)
“We don't want to repeat what others do,” designer Fernando Campana told Wallpaper* in a 2003 interview. "We don't even want to repeat ourselves.” It’s a quote that serves as a fitting memorial to Campana, whose death was announced this week by the São Paulo-based Estudio Campana that Fernando founded with his brother Humberto in 1984. Within the world of furniture design, Campana was a true original: working with Fernando, he brought Brazilian design and craft to international attention; pioneered a form of practice that transformed everyday, affordable materials into sumptuous design pieces that nevertheless spoke eloquently of their origins (the 19991 Favela chair is a prime example); and created designs that were possessed of a wit and irreverence that is rare within the field (it is difficult not to smile at the studio’s Banquette series of chairs, which deploy soft toys as upholstery). Fernando’s death is a great loss to the field, and Disegno’s thoughts are with his family, friends and colleagues. Comfort may be found, however, in the fact that the studio's Instituto Campana, a not-for-profit that the brothers founded in 2009 to extend their design work into social and educational programmes, will work to continue his legacy.
Are you McWinning, son? (image: McDonalds)
McChair
Lord give us strength. Earlier this month (it was technically last week, but some wrongs merit the breaking of Design Line’s format in order to seek redress), McDonalds announced the McCrispy chair, a limited edition gaming chair that comes complete with holders for fries and dips, a ”burger ‘heat zone’” to maintain optimum warmth for McDonalds products, and (*shudders*) a grease resistant leather treatment “so no need to worry about spills and stains.” On the one hand, it’s a clear marketing wheeze that does nobody any real harm (and, come on, it's McDonalds – what do you expect?), but it’s also irritating to see a puerile entry into a design category that could do with some actual attention. Millions of people game regularly, and the creation of ergonomic furniture to support this is no bad thing, particularly given that existing products on the market tend to be either macho and juvenile in tone, or else dive deep into technical performance (as with Herman Miller’s recent foray into the field). The issue, however, is that designs such as the McCrispy flirt heavily into stereotypes surrounding gaming (viz, greasy teenage boys sat in their bedrooms, fuelling marathon gaming sessions with junk food) and seem to have little interest in the actual diversity and growing maturity of the field: something that exhibitions such as the V&A’s Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt (2018) and MoMA’s Never Alone Video Games and Other Interactive Design (2022) have done much to champion and communicate. A mature, attractive gaming chair is practically begging to be designed – the McCrispy, needless to say, is not it.
No chickens were harmed in the making of this chicken burger (image: Upside Foods).
What the cluck
This week, an American lab-grown meat startup had its product cleared for human consumption by the country's Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which said it had “no further questions at this time” about the safety of the cultured chicken for people to eat. Upside Foods is a Californian company that plans to sell chicken meat without the chicken murder. Sample cells are taken from chickens and selected for quality in a process called “immortalisation” (sadly not to create immortal chickens, perhaps they’d be too powerful), basted in a nutritious cell-culture medium, and popped in a series of steel tanks to grow until they’re ready to harvest. “The world is experiencing a food revolution,” said the FDA, “and [we are] committed to supporting innovation in the food supply. “As an example of that commitment […] we have completed our first pre-market consultation of a human food made from cultured animal cells.” Upside Foods will still need to jump through various hoops, such as having its facilities approved, before its products will get onto supermarket shelves, but it’s a big moment for the lab-grown meat movement. While it’s not an enticing prospect to non-meat eaters – it’s still an animal product, after all – lab-grown meat aims to be more sustainable as a practice. Along with less animal suffering, the European Environment Agency estimates that cultured meat could use 82 per cent less water and a whopping 99 per cent less land than traditional farming. erhaps in the future we will all be eating lab-grown McNuggets from our wipe-clean McCrispys.
It’s lonely at the top (image: Burj Binghatti).
Hypertower overhype
Apart from good views on cloudy days, the appeal of living at the top of a supertall skyscraper seems limited. But when you have more money than you could spend in 500 lifetimes, maybe it sounds like fun. But for too long New York City has laid claim to the tallest residential towers in the world. All three of the top spots are taken by Manhattan, with the 472m-high supertall skyscraper Central Park Tower – designed by Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture – taking the crown. Now Dubai is making a bid to knock the CPT off its perch, however, with the reveal of a brand new marketing ploy architecture typology: the hypertower! The catchily named Burj Binghatti Jacob & Co Residences will include a “Billionaire Penthouse” (for those who prefer a subtle display of wealth) and will offer amenities including an in-house private bodyguard service. Developers Binghatti and watchmakers Jacob & Co celebrated the structure at a groundbreaking ceremony this week, but the final height of the tower is yet to be revealed – they just want it to be the tallest, obviously. Potential buyers will have to go through a pre-qualification process first, presumably to make sure they’re good for it, and will then have the option to buy limited edition Jacob & Co jewellery to go with their new pad. It’s the kind of “luxury” design excess that becomes extra stomach-churning as the risk of a global recession looms ever larger. But those 2,668 billionaires who control $12.7trn have to spend it somehow, right?