The Design Line: 15-21 January, 2022
The Design Line is here, marking the passing of Ricardo Bofill and André Leon Talley, and passing comment on a floating tennis court and the great NFT art debate. Scroll down for this week’s roundup of design news.
Ricardo Bofill (1939 - 2022)
This week, the design world marked the passing of Catalonian architect Ricado Bofill, the postmodernist enfant terrible of the 1960s and 70s, who lived to see his pink concrete behemoths become Instagram darlings in the winter of his life. Bofill’s reputation for both work and play was legendary. He got kicked out of the Barcelona School of Architecture after becoming embroiled in a Marxist protest-turned-riot at 18, but by 23 he had his first projects. He built citadels and housing projects in sweetshop hues, taking inspiration from the courtyards and connecting stairways of architecture from across the Maghreb. No one could deny he had flair; he painted the pool of his holiday home blood-red and once had a reputation for being something of a playboy. By the 80s his kitsch style had fallen out of fashion, but he came right back into it when the 21st century’s obsession with sci-fi and millennial pink arrived. This century’s dystopian cinema loved him. Les Espaces d'Abraxas was the backdrop for The Hunger Games, while WestWorld filmed at La Fábrica, the cement factory that Bofill turned into his home and studio. Meanwhile, the influence of his stairways and colourways were most recently evident in the set design of Netflix phenomenon Squid Game. He may have considered himself an outsider architect, but he lived long enough to become cool twice over.
We’re playing musical chairs with the dates for fairs (image: Diego Ravier, courtesy Salone del Mobile.Milano).
Calendar Chaos
“We are all really longing for a Salone,” concluded Maria Porro, president of the Milanese trade fair, as she announced its postponement from April to June 2022. Porro is onto something. Despite their well-documented issues surrounding sustainability and international travel, trade fairs remain a major lubricant (in all senses) for the international design industry. Carefully mapped out throughout the year, the fairs are meant to keep business ticking over and provide coordinated platforms for new launches, deals between different markets, and networking opportunities aplenty. Yet with the latest raft of Covid delays and cancellations, the system is looking increasingly stretched. IMM Cologne is off until 2023, Maison&Objet has shifted from January to March, Stockholm Furniture & Light Fair from February to September, and now Milan. Postponements are the sensible, responsible thing to do, but they clearly have knock-on effects. Salone now coincides with Copenhagen’s rapidly growing Three Days of Design, while Stockholm is head to head with Maison’s planned September edition. Faced with the Covid calendar squeeze, audiences and brands are quickly having to choose between rival events. Where do you prefer to summer – Milan or Copenhagen?
Do you ever feel like a plastic bag drifting in the wind down to the Marina Trench? (image: Ben Kirkx via Pixabay).
The point of no return
Plastic is bad for the environment. We know this. But, to add to the damage already done, a study conducted by scientists in Sweden has found that we’ve now crossed a “planetary boundary” of plastic and chemical pollution. Research scientists from the Stockholm Resilience Centre have warned that the fiftyfold increase in chemical production since 1950 – intrinsically linked to the steep rise of consumer culture and fast fashion – is expected to triple by 2050. The current production of chemicals is accelerating at such a rate that governments are unable to track and assess its environmental effects, prompting scientists to call for action and caps on chemical production. There are currently around 350,000 different types of manufactured chemicals globally, while plastic pollution has been detected at both the depths of the Mariana Trench and the peaks of Mount Everest. Our pollution of the planet is inescapable. But crossing this particular chemical Rubicon is putting the systems that keep Earth ticking over at risk of becoming unstable. We’ve already been warned that we may be entering into the sixth mass extinction. Good luck turning that round. So far, we don’t have a great record for making positive change.
Microsoft’s mad money
If you had a spare $68.7bn lying around, would you consider buying a scandal-hit, but spectacularly lucrative video game developer? If you answered yes to that question, you may well be Microsoft. News broke this week that the US tech giant had agreed a deal to acquire video games behemoth Activision Blizzard, the home of leading game franchises such as Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and Candy Crush. The deal, Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella said, “will play a key role in the development of metaverse platforms” (the fact that Activision Blizzard’s mobile gaming wing, King, single-handedly brought in $1bn in operating profit over the last year probably sweetened the deal ). So far, so zeitgeisty. But the slight oddity of the news is that Activision Blizzard is not known as a leading light in gaming’s exploration of the metaverse, with its experiments in virtual and augmented reality comparatively low-level in comparison to other studios. Nevertheless, virtual reality ain’t everything (aren’t immersive online games such as Fortnite rudimentary metaverses in their own right?), and a studio with a representation for building digital worlds with vast fan bases (Call of Duty alone is reported to have more than 100 million monthly players), is no bad starting point for a company looking to take the lead in building the metaverse. The design world should take note – the video games of today are probably a good guide as to the metaverses of tomorrow.
Sorry lads, I’ve just remembered I get terribly seasick (image: Adidas).
Adidas loses its grip
It’s been a busy week in the world of plastic pollution. Just in case you missed the news that there’s plastic in our oceans, Adidas has helpfully floated a full-size tennis court over the Great Barrier Reef to spread the word. The court was made from recycled plastic as part of the sportswear manufacturer’s longterm partnership with Parley for the Oceans, an ocean-clearing organisation (which has solved the problem by planting volunteers on coastlines and having them simply collect the plastic they find - phew!). Coinciding with the Australian Open, the court saw one match-on-sea, featuring two Olympic players, before then being donated to a local school. Perhaps donating the money spent on constructing said floating court to facilities researching the effects of and possible solutions for the trillions of fibres of microplastics in the oceans would have been a more impactful gesture, but where’s the fun in that? This way Adidas gets to float its name over the Great Barrier Reef complete with celebrity endorsements. Although it’s publicly committed to reduce its carbon emissions and use more sustainable materials in their manufacturing, Adidas remains tight-lipped about how it actually plans to achieve such promises. Let’s just hope none of those rubber and nylon tennis balls went hurtling into the ocean after a poor serve.
This work of art(?) by Beeple sold for $69m. Nice (image: Beeple).
A $91.8m question
The thorny question of what, exactly, art is has spilled over from the philosophers and curators to the crypto bros. Editors of Wikipedia, that famously free and crowdsourced repository of collective internet knowledge, have decreed that NFTs (those pieces of data with an indestructible digital papertrail) are not art. Cue outrage and much gnashing of non-fungible teeth. The trouble began with the hallowed List of most expensive artworks by living artists, which, as the name suggests, records record prices reached by art at auction. It’s currently populated by the likes of Jasper Johns, Jeff Koons, David Hockney and Damien Hirst. If NFTs were eligible, then the $69m sale of Everydays by Beeple would rank 7th, while the $91.8m sale of an NFT merging 266,445 units of art by Pak would be 3rd. For the Wiki editors, it’s a semantics issue. Is the NFT the art or the token for the art, in which case the price was paid for the NFT but not the piece of media it represents? But it’s a tense moment for the crypto market, which relies on the model of art as an asset to counter accusations of being all fur coat and no knickers. On the one hand you have legitimate institutions such as the British Museum getting in on the NFT act, flogging off limited digital Turners on the blockchain. On the other, there is mounting evidence that a lot of NFT sales are wash trades, with a few individuals trading assets back and forth to artificially inflate prices. Wikipedia, it appears, has accidentally aired crypto's dirty laundry.
André Leon Talley (1948 - 2022)
Fashion’s very own caped crusader, journalist André Leon Talley, has died at the age of 74. No adjectives can really do justice to a truly larger than life character. Tally was fashion’s self-made fairytale, but one that was far more Brother’s Grimm than the Disney version. Raised by his grandmother in North Carolina during the Jim Crow era, he escaped the horrors of childhood sexual abuse from neighbourhood men by wallpapering his room with pages from Vogue and becoming a devoted francophile. As a young man he moved to New York and lived hand to mouth as an intern at the Museum of Modern Art, where he met Diana Vreeland. Vreeland became his mentor, alongside Andy Warhol and Anna Wintour, as Talley carved a creative path through 70s New York. In 1983 he became the fashion news director at his beloved Vogue, ultimately winning the post of creative director – the first African American person to hold the prestigious position. In an industry notorious for its noxious attitudes, Talley survived the sallies of racism, homophobia and fatphobia to reach icon status of his own. There was drama, infighting and untold swathes of swishy kaftans and gorgeous capes, but he will be most remembered for the boundaries he pushed and the troubles he triumphed over.
Words: The Disegno editorial team and Francesca Anderson