The Design Line: 26 February - 4 March
This week on the Design Line, your weekly roundup of design news and commentary: the shelling of Ukraine’s Babyn Yar memorial site; dangerous ice falls from New York’s supertall superskinny skyscraper; Amazon debuts its Just Walk Out technology at Whole Foods; museums reckon with oligarch ties; Dries Van Noten Beauty launches with collectible containers; and the Climate Clock comes to London’s Design Museum.
The Babyn Yar Synagogue near Kyiv, with the giant menorah to the right (image: Manuel Herz Architects).
Babyn Yar under attack
As the Russian invasion of Ukraine enters its second week, atrocities continue to pile up. A missile attack on Kyiv’s television tower killed five people and set fire to a cemetery building at the nearby Holocaust memorial of Babyn Yar. The wooded site on the outskirts of the Ukrainian capital commemorates a ravine where one of the Second World War’s largest mass murders of Jewish people took place in 1941. The ravine became a mass grave, which is now marked by various memorials. Officials initially struggled to access the area and there were initial fears that the large Menorah, a significant landmark, and the new Babyn Yar Synagogue had been struck. Swiss studio Manuel Herz Architects had designed this place of worship, which opened in 2021 to mark the 80th anniversary of the massacre. Made from oak-clad steel, the building opens like a pop-up book – a moment of wonder and joy conceived by the architects as a reclamation of a site of so much death as a place for Jewish worship. Before Russia declared war, the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center had been preparing to begin construction on a museum to tell the history of the site. Although the synagogue was spared, the bombing of Babyn Yar has stirred deep emotion in Ukraine, a country with a significant Jewish population and a Jewish president. “What is the point of saying ‘never again’ for 80 years, if the world stays silent when a bomb drops on the same site of Babyn Yar?” President Volodymyr Zelensky tweeted after the attack.
Supertall ice fall
Supertall, superskinny New York skyscraper 111 West 57th Street became a supervillain this week after it was fingered as the culprit for a chunk of plummeting ice that fell on a car and its driver, who was thankfully left shaken but uninjured. Designed by architecture studio SHoP, the 435m residential tower is currently the third tallest skyscraper in the city. In a scene that went viral on TikTok, user Japanese Carlos provides a soothing voice-over backed by smooth EDM as they cut between icy projectiles hurtling down to smash on pavements next to startled New Yorkers. The NYPD ended up closing the road, and a 17-year-old was hurt by falling ice from the nearby 40 West 57th Street. 42nd Avenue also closed in places due to ice falls from the 427m KPF-designed One Vanderbilt. The phenomenon is thought to have occurred due to suddenly warming temperatures loosening ice that had formed on the glass and steel skyscrapers. Even for a street named Billionaire’s Row, everyday citizens risking life and limb due to the luxurious lifestyles of the 1 per cent seems a bit on the nose. We much prefer when expensive skyscrapers victimise other rich people, such as when 432 Park Avenue trapped residents in its lifts during high winds, or when London’s Walkie Talkie fried a Jaguar car parked below it.
Whole Foods, whole picture
There was intrigue in Washington DC as the Glover Park neighbourhood’s local Whole Foods reopened under the auspices of Amazon’s automated IRL shopping system. Shoppers simply scan a QR code or provide a palm print upon entry, noodle around the shop picking up organic avocados and unusually flavoured yoghurts, and then exit once done. No tills, no cashiers, just a bill in your Amazon account. It’s a frictionless shopping experience facilitated by a veritable cornucopia of technology – sensors on the shelves track products as they’re picked up or put back, while cameras dangling from the ceiling track shopper’s movements. Amazon christened this technology, in a moment of preemptive nominative determinism, Just Walk Out because you can literally just walk out of a shop – no need for pesky things like human interaction or till workers. Human labour is still required to stock the shelves and greet customers, so it’s not a wholly automated Whole Foods, yet. The Just Walk Out technology has actually been trialled for some months in various locations at Amazon-branded grocery shops (Amazon mashed potatoes, anyone?). The technology corporation hasn’t done much with the Whole Foods brand since it snapped it up for $13.7bn in 2017, but now tech-enabled organic food with a helping of surveillance capitalism could be coming to a bougie street near you. Interestingly, later this very week, Amazon announced it would be closing 50 of its less successful physical retail locations selling books and general merchandise in order to focus on Just Walk Out and Whole Foods. It’s a strange circle where the e-commerce giant that pushed bricks-and-mortar stores out of business is bringing its tech knowledge to try and compete on the same high street it’s been squashing for years.
Fabergé egg on their faces
The situation in Ukraine has seen most of the world attempt to distance itself from Russia, particularly its oligarch class, putting the museum world in a tight spot. In the UK, the Tate came under scrutiny this week for its connections to Viktor Vekselber, who came into his estimated £6.9bn fortune after the privatisation of Russia’s oil and gas industries. Vekselber was made a member of the Tate Foundation in recognition of his donations, and had also donated to the Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall (prior to the introduction of US sanctions). The Russian billionaire is an avid collector of Fabergé Eggs, several of which he loaned to the V&A for its exhibition last year. It’s all a bit awks now the UK government appears to have miraculously woken up to the large amounts of kleptocrat cash sloshing round the so-called “money laundering capital of the world” where arts institutions play no small part in washing reputations. Meanwhile in Moscow, Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson is boycotting the GES-2, a former power station converted into a culture centre by architect Renzo Piano, which opened late last year and has drawn obvious comparisons with London’s Tate Modern. The GES-2 is the project V-A-C Foundation, which was founded by Russia’s richest man Leonid Mikhelson and the foundation also has a space in Venice. Suddenly the flow of money and power through the art and design world is under a whole new level of scrutiny.
Collectible beauty
Beauty collaborations are in boomtown right now, and fashion designer Dries Van Noten has just upped the stakes with a beauty line that doubles as collectible design objects. Dries Van Noten Beauty incorporates perfume and lipsticks, along with compact mirrors, combs and pochettes (fancy pouches, to you and I). Van Noten invited perfumers – or noses, to those in the know – to tour the gardens of his Antwerp estate to find inspiration for the 10 genderless scents in the collection, as you do. The results are displayed in colourful glass bottles with different contrasting bases that are reminiscent of hip flasks, although these are definitely for spritzing not drinking. Voodoo Chile has a base of engraved silver, Cannabis Patchouli (we assume Van Noten isn’t growing hemp in his Antwerp back garden, but who knows) comes with a responsibly sourced wooden base, while hand-painted french porcelain features on Rock the Myrhh. The bottles are all refillable, which makes a nice change from the disposable nature of most beauty packaging, especially when these feature such luxe materials. Lipsticks are also refillable and modular, so buyers select a shade then pick out a two-tone case made from enamel, ceramic or even leather. The only plastic in the collection appears to be the lipstick shade Plastic Pink, and everything comes delivered in packaging made from biodegradable wood fibres, natch.
Tick, tick, boom
We don’t mean to alarm you (although, if you’ve been reading the news this week you may be arriving at this conversation pre-alarmed) but this climate change thing is getting real bad. In case you weren’t stressed enough about being swallowed up by the sea/boiled alive by soaring summer temperatures/swept away by superstorms (delete as appropriate), London’s Design Museum has, um, helpfully installed a Doomsday Climate Clock on its second floor that is counting down the seconds to the moment scientists predict we will sail past the critical threshold of keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. The clock also displays a tickertape of climate news and our “lifelines” – the percentage of global power from renewable sources, the dollars in a green fund, and the square kilometres of protected indigenous land. You don’t even need to go to the museum to freak yourself out about the under-seven-years deadline, as the clock is available online. The Design Museum’s timely display comes as the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report contains dire warnings that the window for a liveable future is rapidly closing. We desperately need less of the above – war, billionaires, supertall skyscrapers, tech giants, consumerism – and a concerted international effort to turn this ship around before it’s too late.