The Design Line: 5 – 11 February
New York’s Cooper Hewitt gets a new director, MVRDV spills the tea on the Marble Arch Mound, and the pink interior that started it all gets a shock redecoration in this week’s edition of the Design Line.
Maria Nicanor has promised to go beyond “beautiful cups of tea” at the Cooper Hewitt (image: Oliver Farys courtesy of BMW).
A new director/broom
Three cheers for Maria Nicanor, the new director of New York’s Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum! Due to take up her position in March, Nicanor is a smart choice: she’s already served as the inaugural director of the Norman Foster Foundation; worked for the design, architecture and digital department at the V&A; taken an assortment of roles at the Guggenheim in New York; and, most recently, led Rice Design Alliance at Rice University’s School of Architecture. A sensible appointment, then, but also an exciting one, with Nicanor having told The New York Times that a theme for her tenure will be looking at “what it means to talk about design in the larger context.That means not just exhibiting beautiful cups of tea, but also explaining the infrastructure bill.” Nicanor’s virtues aside, the Smithsonian will probably be relieved just to have some stability. Over the past few years, the institution has been hit by charges of racism, while the Cooper Hewitt itself has spent two years in limbo after its former director Caroline Baumann was forced to resign when an investigation found she had used her “Smithsonian position for private gain” – a charge Baumann rejects, labelling the museum’s ruling “a sham report” that was coloured by sexism. Assuming she doesn’t invite further scandal, Nicanor could probably exclusively exhibit cups of tea, even very ugly ones, and her tenure would still be deemed an upturn in the Cooper Hewitt’s fortunes.
We could have had it all (image: MVRDV).
MVRDV’s Mea Culpa (sort of)
Architecture studio MVRDV has finally revealed its version of events regarding the London Mound debacle, in a tell-all worthy of any scorned celebrity girlfriend approaching a gossip magazine. The title – Learning From Marble Arch Mound: A Premature Opening and an Execution Lacking In Love (Our Side of the Story) – certainly tells it all. Like a bad date, the callous Brits of Westminster City Council came on strong then didn’t return their calls. First, they took advantage of MVRDV and commissioned them for a measly sum of £10k. MVRDV was apparently under the impression that there was a social imperative, although who would benefit from a paid attraction on a shopping street is less clear. Anyway, out of the goodness of their hearts, MVRDV created a spectacular vision for a “25m-high roofscape” that would rise up and over the Marble Arch itself. Only, the fun sponges at English Heritage and Historic England put the kibosh on that. WCC became distant and then ghosted MVRDV, who were doomed to watch in horror as the mangy Mound was unveiled and the “Fleet Street barbers” took out their razors (journalists get called many things but the musical murderous cannibal pie-maker analogy seems a little harsh. The Mound was comically bad). MVRDV owned their mistake of… not disowning the project. Nothing else was their fault, according to, well, them.
Thelma screen divider by Pauline Deltour for Offect.
Honouring a legacy
“There were so many projects in the pipeline, I felt I had to do something,” the filmmaker Nicolas Tiry, husband of the designer Pauline Deltour, said this week. “It was something we needed to do to complete the project, because there was no way for me that her work would stop like this.” Deltour died unexpectedly in September 2021, leaving behind a significant body of finished work, but also a host of unfinished projects. In order to honour Deltour’s legacy, Tiry and her colleague Claire Pondard resolved to finish them for her, collaborating with friends and other designers to bring her final designs to reality. The first of these launches are the Thelma screen divider and Pauline chair for Swedish brand Offect, launched this week during Stockholm Design Week. They are classic Deltour – clean and elegant, but still possessed of a visual flair, all developed from drawings and prototypes left behind by the designer. “We will try with our strength to make something special – as special as she was,” Tiry noted, who alongside completing Deltour’s existing commissions, hopes to launch an exhibition and an award for young, female designers in her name. It is a gorgeous tribute to Deltour’s talent and a fitting continuation of her work – it seems only right that her final works should be brought to light by those who knew her best.
Miserly Meades
Like many, Design Line holds a torch for Jonathan Meades. He writes like a dream; is funny; has been one of architecture’s most insightful critics across both print and television; and we are reliably informed that his “Elephant gratin” is delicious. As such, it pains us to say that Meades himself has been rather less than delicious this week. Published in The Critic, Meades wrote a spiteful and stupid column accusing the Welsh government of condemning its people to “self-harm and curtailment”. Its crime? Running various programmes (which were announced in 2017, so God know why Meades is bothering now) intended to increase the number of native Welsh speakers. To Meades, this “moribund language” is “a linguistic straitjacket”, whose promotion risks “creating divisions, fomenting tribalism, feeding delusions”. The fact that monoglot Welsh speakers are a statistically tiny proportion of the population seems to make no difference to Meades’s rallying cry that we must “have no fear of the mongrelism which is the very lifeblood of the human race.” Apparently, those who learn Welsh may be doing so out of fear – a strange third option within the famed fight or flight response. It makes for depressing, hateful reading – particularly when Welsh speakers from ethnic minorities are branded as being “burdened with a double handicap” – all delivered in a tone that suggests it could be satire, but which seemingly serves no purpose other than cruelty. We suggest you stick to Meades’ work on architecture or perhaps try the gratin. He has a tin ear for languages.
It’s an end of an era as Sketch prepares to de-pink (image: India Mahdavi).
Bye bye millennial pink, hello mellow yellow
The restaurant interior that launched a thousand Instagram posts is about to undergo a chromatic makeover. Expensive London eatery Sketch put itself on the hashtag design map in 2014 with the Gallery, an all-pink room in its restaurant created by interior designer India Mahdavi, its walls later adorned by some 90-something pieces by artist David Shrigley. It was the patient zero of social media-orientated hospitality interior design, so it was a momentous occasion this week when Sketch announced that the pink room is set to be de-rouged by Mahdavi. “The Gallery at Sketch has been linked to the colour pink for such a long time that it was very challenging for me to overcome this success,” she fretted. Luckily, artist Yinka Shonibare has rustled up 15 new pieces to give her hint when it comes to the palette. The new hue will be a cheery sunshine yellow for the furnishings, with copper wallpaper and golden lights. For the ceiling, Mahdavi picked out a shade she created herself called Mandarine au Lait. For those missing their hit of millennial pink, Mahdavi has promised a scale model of the original pink room for posterity (and more Instagram photo opportunities, natch).
Visual affects artist Douglas Trumbull worked on 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Douglas Trumbull (1942-2022)
To quote Amy Trumbull, daughter of the visual effects artist Douglas Trumbull, the world has lost an “absolute genius and a wizard”. Trumbull’s words were justified: her father was the man who created visual effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek: the Motion Picture and The Andromeda Strain, introducing generations of cinema goers to what the future may look like. A major figure in the visual culture of the 20th century, Trumbull’s work will have proven formative for many designers. “My sister Andromeda and I got to see him on Saturday and tell him that [we] love him,” Amy wrote when announcing his father’s death on Facebook, “and we got to tell him to enjoy and embrace his journey into the Great Beyond.” Through his landmark work, Trumbull played a greater role than many in shaping people’s imaginations of what that Beyond could be.
WWF + NFT = WTF
Another week, another NFT debacle. This time it’s the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), erstwhile saviour of charismatic megafauna, which somehow stumbled into (then out of) the cryptocurrency world. The UK arm of the WWF launched Tokens For Nature, NFTs of digital artworks of cute animals including the Galapagos penguin and the Amur leopard rendered as rotating cubes, like polygonal Pokémon. Sales of these virtual collectables were to help fund the WWF’s conservation work, and the organisation thought it had found a green loophole for using the notoriously energy-hungry cryptosystem with Polygon. Polygon makes the highly dubious claim of being eco-friendly, a point it makes with a lot of lovely pastel-coloured graphics and not many facts or clear explanations. Other environmental activists were quick to point out to the WWF that 1) Polygon is perhaps not as green as it seems and 2) encouraging people to buy NFTs entices people to make more cryptocurrency transactions to trade them, which leads to more electricity usage, more carbon emissions, and a lot more sad animals with their habitats destroyed by climate change. The one thing that the WWF didn’t want to happen! After a sound bollocking on Twitter, the WWF turned tail and ended it’s “trial” of Tokens For Nature a mere 24 hours after launch. Swap you a Tapanuli orangutan for a Javan rhino?