The Design Line: 15 – 21 October
Here at Design Line we feel that there has been a bit too much news of late, but as ever we remain dedicated to bringing you commentary on this week’s design stories, including a cursed building, flat-pack inflation, and an avocado house on an avocado farm.
Fancy drone footage can’t distract from a mounting death toll (image: Neom via Dezeen).
A line in the sand
There was a sense of surprise this week when drone footage emerged showing that Saudi Arabia actually does seem to be building The Line, a bizarrely speculative linear megacity that is to form a part of its even more bizarrely speculative Neom mega-megacity. The footage shows a vast trench being dug in Tabuk Province, which is to house the city’s foundations (have they learned nothing of the danger of trenches to mega-projects launched by tyrannical regimes?), prompting raised eyebrows that Saudi Arabia’s 170km-long mirrored city may actually slither into the light of day. Neom is billed by its CEO Nadhmi Al-Nasr (and the less said about a city having a CEO, the better) as “redefining the future”, and the project is unashamedly sci-fi inflected. But its tech-bro trappings shouldn’t distract from the grubbiness and old-world brutality that lies beneath. Earlier this month, the ALQST human rights organisation reported that Saudi Arabia had handed down death sentences to Shadli, Ibrahim and Ataullah al-Huwaiti, members of the Huwaitat tribe whose family had been forcibly evicted and displaced to make way for the megaproject. "If we are to solve the challenges of tomorrow, we must face up to them today, no matter how difficult they may seem,” Al-Nasr has previously claimed. In this vein, it seems clear that the tomorrow of Neom is to be soaked in the blood of Saudi Arabia’s today.
Selldorf Architects thanks you for the, uh, feedback (image: Selldorf Architects via Architects’ Journal).
The curse of the carbuncle
Has there been a historical building as divisive as the UK’s National Gallery in London? Designed by architect William Wilkins in the 1830s to house a British art museum on Trafalgar Square, the structure soon came under fire for being too small for purpose, prompting the opening of the Tate Britain further up the Thames. But extensions have also proved incedarary. In 1982 a competition was held to add a bit on the National Gallery, but winning studio Ahrends, Burton and Koralek (ABK) were dropped after King Charles, then the Prince of Wales, decried their modernist design for the Sainsbury Wing as a “monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend". The phrase moved into common parlance in architecture discourse, modernism fell out of favour, and ABK lost work. Postmodernists Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown were brought in to complete the new wing, but now a proposed update to their design is causing more controversy around the Grade I-listed building. Selldorf Architects revealed their design for revamp in August 2022, causing much outrage and frothing over its plans to [checks notes] open up the staircase. The horror. This week, the chastened practice has submitted reworked plans that take into account this “feedback”. At this point, Disegno is starting to think the National Gallery might be cursed – the architectural equivalent of the Scottish Play, perhaps?
Challenger approaching
Just three weeks ago, Google announced that it would be shuttering Stadia, its statement cloud gaming service that launched in 2019, but which foundered when game developers opted not to make their tentpole titles available to subscribers: “it hasn't gained the traction with users that we expected,” acknowledged the service’s general manager, Phil Harrison. Yet the dream of a subscription-based gaming service seems not to have died with Stadia. Presumably buoyed by the success of Microsoft’s Game Pass (which the tech giant reports generated $2.9bn in revenue in 2021), Netflix revealed this week that it is “very seriously exploring a cloud gaming offering so that we can reach members on TVs and on PCs”. Revealed by Mike Verdu, the company’s vice president of games, the move would see the streaming company expand beyond its existing mobile game offering and yolk a full gaming service to its existing subscription model for film and television. “We’re not asking you to subscribe as a console replacement, so it’s a completely different business model [to Stadia],” Verdu said. “The hope is over time that it just becomes this very natural way to play games wherever you are.” It's a fascinating move in the ongoing adoption of streaming across media formats, and – if Netflix acts upon it – should provide an opportunity for reflection on the design implications of the technology. Which is particularly welcome given that a planned Netflix exhibition, announced for summer 2022 at London's Design Museum, seems to have sadly vanished from the institution’s forward planning.
Ingvar Kamprad, seen here shaking hands with the first IKEA store owner, might be rolling in his grave (image: IKEA archives via Wikimedia Commons).
The dilemma of a furniture dealer
“We shall offer,” begins ‘The Testament of a Furniture Dealer’, the 1976 manifesto of Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad, “a wide range of well-designed, functional home furnishing products at prices so low that as many people as possible will be able to afford them.” Imagine Kamprad’s likely horror, then, to learn that the store he founded has increased the prices of its furniture by up to 80 per cent over the last year. Ikea has blamed “surging raw material and transport costs”, noting that it is not immune to “macro-economic developments”such as the war in Ukraine and inflation, and has therefore been forced to jack up prices. Ikea has always presented its pricing as essentially democratic in spirit (“It is the many people whom we aim to serve,” Kamprad writes in ‘The Testament of a Furniture Dealer’. “The first rule is to maintain an extremely low level of prices.”), but the brand has long been criticised for promoting a form of throwaway consumer culture within furniture that is fundamentally disconnected from ecological realities. “Without low costs, we can never accomplish our purpose,” Kamprad concludes in his manifesto’s section on pricing, but even the fevered ideology of Ikea’s founder seems powerless in the face of present economic realities.
Data server drama
Digital messaging apps have become vital parts of people’s everyday lives and businesses around the world, but when disaster strikes and a whole mode of communication goes down, the results can be chaos. South Korea was plunged into one such scenario last weekend, when a fire at a data centre outside of Seoul cut power to 32,000 servers for Kakao, the internet company behind the country’s largest messaging app, KakaoTalk. With an estimated 47m users in a country of 51.7m people, the damage left swathes of the country without service, prompting public outrage. On Monday the president of South Korea Yoon Suk-yeol warned that the government might “take necessary measures for the sake of the people” if it finds “the market is distorted in a monopoly or severe oligopoly, to the extent where it serves a similar function as national infrastructure”. Then, on Wednesday, a Kakao co-CEO resigned over the catastrophe, while the remaining CEO Hong Euntaek admitted that while the internet company had contingency plans for traffic surges, it hadn’t prepared “for a complete shutdown of an entire data centre”. Kakao is blaming the fire on lithium-ion batteries, a claim that the SK Group, which owns the data centre and whose subsidiary makes the batteries, is refuting. Regardless of the how, the incidents highlights how vulnerable the design of both data centres and systems where almost a whole country uses one internet-based app that’s so vulnerable to a single incident.
Dream holiday idea: eating avo on toast in a giant avocado on an avocado farm (image: AirBnB).
OMG, look over there!
The backlash against AirBnB is gathering steam as more and more communities are impacted by the holiday rental platform. Its effects on tourist cities hollowed out by short-term lets at the expense of permanent residents is already well documented, as are the safety issues that users face. This week, a report into the impact of AirBnB in the UK’s coastal regions warned that soaring holiday rentals risk turning towns into “playgrounds for the wealthy” as one in four homes in places such as Croyde are listed on the platform. Has AirBnB responded to these concerns? Of course not, but what’s that over there – it’s the $10m OMG! Fund winners! Announced this week, 100 designers will receive up to £100,000 each to build a suitably zany rental home for AirBnB. The kooky competition was judged by octogenarian maximalist style icon Iris Apfel. Novelty shapes were the order of the day, with finalists including a giant pig for a pig sanctuary, an avocado for a Chilean avocado farm, and a cereal box intriguingly billed as a “Modern Cereal Lover’s Paradise”. There are also some wild conversions in the offing for holiday-makers, including beds in a giant fallen tree, a landlocked cargo ship, and an abandoned missile base. Is AirBnB turning everything into a moneymaking opportunity for landlords of leisure time? Possibly, but the appeal of spending a night in a giant beehive/desert flower/upcycled tube carriage/disco-ball-on-wheels (delete as appropriate) could manufacture enough positive PR to drown out the ghost towns.
Disegno goes Dutch
While Design Line is normally devoted to reviewing the previous week in design, this week also sees us casting our eye ahead to the 2022 Dutch Design Week, which opens this weekend in Eindhoven. The full programme for the event is available here, but we’re particularly keen to flag up ‘Interactive Experiences’, a talk hosted by Disegno on Thursday 27 October that will explore how emerging digital technologies are enabling designers to develop new forms of storytelling, explore socio-political questions, and open up fresh questions around bodily autonomy, gender identities, and historically marginalised voices. Developed in conjunction with Dutch Design Week and STRP, the talk will feature presentations from and discussion between designers Gabriel A. Maher, Cream on Chrome, Tamara Shogaolu of Ado Ato Pictures, and STRP’s Nadine Roestenburg. Tickets are available here, but Disegno is also making a small number of complimentary tickets available to readers on a first come, first served basis. To apply for a free ticket, please email events@disegnojournal.com.