Hasta La Ideas

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in our next movie from Eindhoven, Simone Farresin and Andrea Trimarchi of Formafantasma show us their experiments with unusual materials including fish skin, cow bladders, animal blood and even lava.

Italian designers Farresin and Trimarchi, who met at Design Academy Eindhoven and set up Formafantasma in the small Dutch city after graduating, have become well-known for their interesting use of materials.

Past projects include objects made out of food, a range of natural plastic vessels and furniture covered with discarded animal skins.

The duo’s latest project involves melting down volcanic rock from Mount Etna in Sicily.

“We are conducting some really simple experiments by remelting lava,” Farresin tells us when we visited their studio during Dutch Design Week.

“We are working with basalt fibres, which is this really interesting material that we found. It is similar to glass fibre, but is entirely produced by the melting of lava. Because of the chemical components of lava, you can create fibres with it.”

Farresin shows us two applications of the material, a textile made from woven threads of basalt fibre as well as a ceramic-like material, which is made from layers of this textile heated in a kiln.

“We put it in a ceramic oven and control [the temperature] so that the basalt fibre does not melt completely and turns into a more structural material,” Farresin explains.

He then shows us fish skin samples from Formafantasma’s Craftica project for Fendi.

“What we like about these skins, which we got from a company in Iceland, is that they have been discarded by the food industry,” he says. “We are actually continuing the investigation of these materials and are [currently] designing a piece for a company using fish skins.”

The Craftica collection also included water containers made from animal bladders, which Trimarchi shows us next.

“These are from cows and, again, they come from the food industry,” he says. “Usually these are used in Italy to make cases for mortadella [an Italian sausage].”

Farresin adds: “We still find the material fascinating, so we thought to use them in lighting. We made a construction using the valve of a bike so that we can basically dry the piece and inflate it directly on the LED light source.”

Finally, Farresin and Trimarchi show us samples from their Botanica project, a series of vessels made from natural plastics, which was acquired by London’s V&A Museum this year.

The first is bois durci, a nineteenth-century plastic made from sawdust and animal blood. Then he shows us pieces of shellac, a natural polymer secreted by lac bugs, a small parasitic insect native to India and Thailand.

Trimarchi says that, since the Botanica project, they have been looking into better methods of producing the material as well as ways of using it.

“Something we are really trying to investigate is to make the production process of shellac more efficient,” he explains.

Farresin adds: “Nowadays it is just farmed by small communities in India and Thailand. We see a parallel between this and silk production, but the farming is really difficult.”

“We are interested in getting in touch with institutions in India to see if we can participate in improving the bug farming there.”

We drove around Eindhoven in our MINI Cooper S Paceman. The music in the movie is a track called Family Music by Eindhoven-based hip hop producer Y’Skid.

You can listen to more music by Y’Skid on Dezeen Music Project and watch more of our Dezeen and MINI World Tour movies here.

The post Eindhoven design studio Formafantasma
is “experimenting with lava” appeared first on Dezeen.

Adrian Shaughnessy’s new book on the designer FHK Henrion offers a detailed look at the work of a seminal figure who shifted from civic-minded poster artist to pioneer of corporate identity during his long career. We talk to Shaughnessy about Henrion’s reputation and why his name perhaps isn’t as widely known as it should be…

“He had everything; he was the complete designer,” Shaughnessy says of Henrion as soon as we start our conversation. Aside from being the subtitle of his monograph on the late German-born British designer, it’s clear that the sheer range of Henrion’s interests – “from exhibition and interior design, products, through to semiotics in the 1980s” – is what continued to beguile Shaughnessy as he compiled FHK Henrion: The Complete Designer for Unit Editions.

“When you study him, nobody came close,” he says. “He could have been an architect, an interior designer – and he knew about things such as perception theory long before it was fashionable, he’d studied all that. He was trained in a poster studio, he was well read and then became a part of the intellectual set”.

In 1939, Henrion left France, where for one year he had studied at one of the best art schools in Paris, the Ecole Paul Colin, and came to Britain. He was held in internment camps on the Isle of Man and in Shropshire and released in 1940 in order to work for the Ministry of Information on war posters (he was 22). His first job was a poster for the Post Office Savings Bank.

In London, Henrion also worked for the United States Office of War Information (OWI), and by 1944 headed a team of 15 designers working on US war propaganda. In addition to his poster work, he also began to work on commercial projects during this time: he designed covers for Harper’s Bazaar, for example, and also acted as a consultant art director to Crawford Advertising agency. He then moved into exhibition design, most notably creating two large-scale exhibitions for the Festival of Britain in 1951.

“But he’s different from Abram Games or Edward McKnight-Kauffer in that, in the 1960s, he went modern,” says Shaughnessy. “He realised that one could make a living from corporate identity. He rationalised the system of design, threw out the ‘house style’ and invented corporate identity in Europe. Total Design [in Amsterdam] thought ‘Hang on, how come KLM is going to this British guy?'”

Shaughnessy believes that at his core, however, Henrion possessed a radical spirit – and so, in time, the very systemisation that he had helped to pioneer began to have limited appeal.

“A strange thing happened,” says Shaughessy. “Because everyone else had learned this systematic, rationalised approach to design – a Henrion discipline – he rejected it. At heart he was a radical, he was opposed to the ‘over-professionalisation’ of design. With some design groups, he wondered why their motive was profit, not design.”

Shaughnessy’s book contains an impressive selection of Henrion’s work, much of which is held at the University of Brighton’s Design Archives. From Henrion’s early poster commissions, it moves through his work in exhibitions and products, into corporate identity design, and also examines his interests in visual theory.

“He was also one of the very first graphic designers to think about design for broadcast [and] TV design,” Shaughnessy adds. “There’s a brilliant paper given to the Royal Society, when he was invited by Lord Clark of [the programme] Civilisation. In the 1950s, [Henrion’s] theory was that if you were a ‘visual person’ this was a medium that you had to be part of. There were theories about how to present information and he was complaining that TV work was already being carried out and that designers would have to get in there fast, or it would go to other disciplines.”

As well as a detailed life of Henrion as he gradually moves between these disciplines (and into education), there are some lovely personal details in the book, such as the airbrush gun ‘rivalry’ that Henrion had with Abram Games, who highly skilled at using the tool.

Meeting for lunch one day, Henrion apparently complained that his gun wasn’t working properly, so Games offered to look at it for him next time they met. Having done so, the gun was returned to Henrion with a note from Games – “There is nothing wrong with this air gun” – written in pencil-thin, airbrushed lettering. Henrion, still unable to work sufficiently with it, confessed airbrushing just wasn’t something he was ever going to master.

But it is Henrion’s work on big corporate projects that is documented most extensively in the central section of the book. Studies of identities for Tate+Lyle, C&A, Courage, KLM, LEB (London Electricity Board) and Blue Circle Cement all benefit from the range of archive material that is reproduced.

There are 544 pages here, yet the question remains: Why has it taken so long to finally bring Henrion’s work together in this way?

“Why is he under-represented?” says Shaughnessy. “Well, he’s known for the wartime posters, and there’s a cult around that, but you can’t quite believe it’s the same person who designed the LEB work, for example; it’s fantastic. Yet he was also really interested in Gestalt theory, in additional meanings – and few people have done it as well as him. Look at the old-fashioned posters and then at the work for Blue Cement: he’s liked by two camps who don’t really get on.”

So in having a hand in these distinctive fields, Henrion’s support has perhaps suffered over the years by being divided as well. “He’s almost two people. He did exhibition design, he did jewellery. He died in 1990 and a lot has happened since then, so I think he just got sidelined,” Shaughnessy says.

“But when you look at his work and you see multiple faces – really, it’s only two. That’s why he’s a genius. And I became enchanted with him.”

FHK Henrion: The Complete Designer is published as a hardback book with foiled slipcase by Unit Editions; £65. Editors: Tony Brook, Adrian Shaughnessy. Design director: Tony Brook. Senior designer: Claudia Klat. Designer: Sarah Schrauwen. Design assistants: Victor Balko, Roos Gortworst. Archive photography: Sarah Schrauwen. See uniteditions.com

Après sa série New York in the Black, le photographe français Christophe Jacrot revient cette fois-ci avec Paris in the Rain, réunissant de superbes clichés de la Ville Lumière. Jouant sur les reflets de l’eau et de la pluie, ces images d’une grande qualité sont à découvrir dans la suite de l’article.

Jonathan Lagache et Julian Ansault ont réalisé ce joli clip pour illustrer le premier morceau Siblings du prochain album Mira de Gush. Cette vidéo nous propose de découvrir une histoire de frères partant à l’aventure, à la recherche d’une étoile échouée au fin fond des montagnes. Une production Kidam à découvrir dans la suite.

Stream nostalgia with the first ever Bluetooth gramophone, the Gramovox! The timeless design is not only aesthetically “old-school,” but also recreates the same resonant, vintage, organic sound by adhering to the same acoustical principles as the old gramophone. To achieve this, the designers worked around the philosophy that the fewer things they changed about the original, the more things would still work. Catch the vid to see how it blends classic acoustics with modern tech…

Designer: Gramovox

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(Classic Acoustics Meets Modern Tech was originally posted on Yanko Design)

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