The Design Line: 22-28 January, 2022
The Design Line is here with a selection of design mysteries, including a vanishing house, missing chips, and some carbon capture that ended up releasing its own carbon to capture. Put on your detective hats and read on for our weekly news roundup.
Geller House I is gone for good (image courtesy of Docomomo).
The house that Breuer built
A house vanishing almost overnight may sound like the start of a spooky story, but that’s what happened in a residential neighbourhood in Long Island this week. The missing house isn’t just any random bungalow, either, but Geller House I, built by Marcel Breuer in 1943. Geller House I was considered an important midcentury work, representing Breuer’s first use of a bi-nuclear layout, where sleeping areas for adults and children were placed at separate ends of the common areas. Breuer imagined it as a radical yet affordable new way of living for the postwar American family and it was also his first solo work after the dissolution of his partnership with Walter Gropius. When Geller House I appeared in an eight-page spread in House and Garden it helped the designer arrive on the New York scene. Supporters of the house were working hard to get it listed as an architectural landmark, and believed that they had made progress towards this goal – which made it all the more shocking when the house was discovered to have been reduced to rubble. There's nothing supernatural about the demolition, however. Developers, keen to capitalise on rocketing land prices, have plans to absorb the plot it once stood on into a larger project. Design history’s loss will be some property magnate’s gain.
Thierry Mugler (1948-2022)
“I don’t believe in natural fashion,” the fashion designer Thierry Mugler told The New York Times in 1994. “Let’s go for it! The corset. The push-up bra. Everything! If we do it, let’s do the whole number.” Nobody could accuse Mugler, who died this week, of serving up half measures. During the 80s and early 90s, he was one of the cornerstones of French fashion, creating bombastic silhouettes in a palette of latex, leather and S&M sensibilities. Drag queens and supermodels mixed in unashamedly theatrical catwalks that owed as much to stadium rock as they did to couture, with the entire spectacle buoyed up by healthy sales of his perfume, Angel. Mugler stepped away from frontline fashion in 2002 – his style out of step with the aesthetic of the day – but remained relevant. His sensibilities were well matched to Zumanity, the 2003-2020 show that he created to show "the sensual side of Cirque du Soleil”, while his defiantly outré work was perfect for the age of social media, being picked up and worn by figures such as Lady Gaga, Cardi B, Beyoncé and Kim Kardashian. Renewed critical attention also came with Thierry Mugler: Couturissime, a show originated at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts before transferring to Paris’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs. “What Thierry Mugler did over four decades was so rich and varied,” noted the show’s curator Thierry-Maxime Loriot, “it is really the work of an artist who used fashion to express himself.”
Carbon dioxide goes in; more carbon dioxide come out
Shell had it all figured out. Sourcing hydrogen from natural gas would be environmentally fine, it said, because carbon capture and storage systems (CCS) could reduce carbon emissions from fossil hydrogen by 90 per cent or more. They even had evidence for this. Its CCS at the Quest fossil hydrogen plant in the Alberta tar sands had, the energy giant claimed, stopped 5m tonnes of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere in less than five years. Which is just brilliant, although slightly less brilliant is the fact that they didn’t add that Quest had also emitted 7.5m tonnes of climate polluting gases during that same period. Shell can be so cheeky sometimes! A new investigation from Global Witness discovered that, rather than the promised 90 per cent carbon capture, Quest was actually running at around 48 per cent, with this figure dropping to 39 per cent when other greenhouse gas emissions (such as methane pollution from the fossil gas supply chain) were included. Poor old Shell, eh? CCS was the technology meant to keep them in business, free to continue extracting fossil fuels with nary a thought for the environment. Such a pity that it doesn’t actually work.
It looks like we’ll never know how the 2018 fire started (photo: Police Scotland Air).
Mackintosh mystery
There’s no shortage of architecture-based mysteries this week, as the inquest into the fire at the Glasgow School of Art, affectionately nicknamed the Mac, came up empty. The blaze ripped through the Charles Rennie Mackintosh-designed building in June 2018, just as it was in the process of undergoing a £35m refurbishment following a fire four years earlier. First as tragedy, then as mystery. Despite dedicating 172 weeks to sifting through the debris and pouring over CCTV footage, the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service has been unable to pinpoint a cause. Unfortunately, the school’s CCTV hard drive was irreparably damaged in the disaster, along with a control panel of its Fire Warning System. Conspiracies abound around a lone figure caught on CCTV watching the fire who has never been traced, and the report doesn’t rule out “wilful fire raising” (the fancy word for arson). Occam’s razor would suggest the fire was another unfortunate accident, given that old buildings are at their most vulnerable when they’re being refurbished – just ask Notre Dame. Mackintosh’s original duct system design for the building was created for ventilation, but helped fan the flames of both the 2014 and 2018 conflagrations. Plans to restore the Mac faithfully to its original 1909 state are due to go ahead later this year. Third time’s a charm.
You want chips with that?
America has a serious chip shortage. This isn’t another Freedom Fries debacle or a paucity of pommes frites. We’re talking semiconductors not snacks, the wee bits of hardware that power everything from your microwave to Microsoft PC. Back in 2019, most companies could keep 40 days of supply in stock, but thanks to the global semiconductor shortage most businesses can now only lay their hands on five days’ worth. “This tells you how fragile this supply chain is,” said US commerce secretary Gina Raimondo, which, after the past two years of supply chain fragility writ large across the global economy, is somewhat stating the obvious. Of course, this being America, Raimondo went on to say they are particularly concerned that the US is not making the kinds of chips needed for military purposes. Those kinds of advanced chips are made in Taiwan, which is currently being menaced by China’s navy, much to America’s chagrin. Bearing in mind that these chips are also important to things like electrical grids and cars, the pressure is on everyone. The US – or all the other countries affected – can’t simply snap their fingers and start making their own chips in-house, as it were. But Biden has promised to throw $52 billion at the problem, so that’s a start eh?
[Don’t] be our guest
In a recent speech, the Royal Institute of British Architects’ (RIBA) president Simon Allford called on the organisation to “become a generous host”. A fine sentiment, and one that RIBA immediately put into action by preventing a whistleblower on bullying and discrimination within architecture education from hiring a room in its headquarters. Generosity personified! In 2021, fashion designer Eleni Kyriacou compiled a dossier outlining allegations of systematic discrimination around race and gender at the Bartlett, encouraging others to subsequently come forward in her wake. In response, the Bartlett’s parent institute UCL launched an ongoing investigation that is due to report early this year. Continuing her work as an activist and designer, Kyriacou had planned a fashion shoot that would respond to trauma suffered by ex-Bartlett students (who would also serve as models), for which she attempted to hire a room in the RIBA to serve as a base for hair, makeup and outfit changes. RIBA had other ideas. “We declined this opportunity,” said chief executive Alan Vallance, “as it related to an ongoing investigation into the welfare of individual students.” At the risk of editorialising, what does Vallance even mean? The UCL investigation is targeted towards the institution, not the survivors of its alleged abuse, so it’s pretty fatuous to claim that denying them a room to get changed in helps “avoid prejudicing important investigations”. It’s hardly the act of a generous host.
Chester Dols’s delightful lamp that looks like a sea anemone was featured in last year’s edition of the show (photo by Jonathan Hökklo).
A welcome beacon of positivity
Look, we know we have a tendency to grumble here at Design Line. It’s all, “Shell’s setting the world on fire” or “Nobody knows who set the Mac on fire – probably Shell though”. Important stuff, we’re sure you’ll agree, but it can undeniably be a bit of a downer, especially on a Friday. That’s why we’re also in the business, when we can, of rootling out real feel good stories from across design – and we have a particularly nice one for this week. The Head Hi espresso bar/book shop/ arts space in Brooklyn is currently running an open call for the third edition of its annual Lamp Show, which is, delightfully, exactly what it sounds like. People of all ages and abilities are invited to submit a lamp to the show, which will run from 26 February to 26 March. The piece can be made, customised or even just selected by you, but the organisers have a particular interest in “‘non-standard' materials and objects”. A show rewarding creative interpretation, reuse and community participation across disciplines – what’s not to like? Entries close on 6 February, so get designing now (before Shell comes along and burns the whole thing to the ground).