Hasta La Ideas

In this series, Matthew Sullivan (AQQ Design) highlights some designers that you should know, but might not. Previously, he looked at the work of T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings.

Shiro Kuramata: Born in Tokyo, 1934. Died in Tokyo, 1991.

“For him, an object, a piece of furniture, an installation is never finished inside the borders of its own physicality. For him, around an object, or around a piece of furniture or around an installation there is never a silence, never abstract dust; always the air around is vibrating, as if it were shaken by a central provocation. That’s why very often Shiro was trying to represent not only the object, or the furniture, or the installation but also the many mysterious vibrations that were produced around.” —Ettore Sottsass from Vibrations in the Air, 1991

Materials were central to the work of Shiro Kuramata. His palette was the various qualities that matter exhibits: reflectivity, transparency, translucency, opacity, tactility. Form seems a result. It’s not that form is unconsidered, just that the material is the voice; the material is the content of the furniture.

Japan has a very sophisticated visual culture; at times it’s almost ridiculous how astute it is. The continual unification of craft and art transcends some sort of spiritual economy. (Indeed, from a Western perspective, it can seem that our separations of “art” and “craft” are misguided.) There is a long history of cleverly melding a medium with sculptural or pictorial representations, so that the inherent qualities of brush, ink, stone or wood are actually part of the resultant image. This is true of sumi-e/suiboku-ga ink-wash painting, as well as sancai (the Japanese-adopted Chinese technique of modeled, tri-colored glazes in ceramics) and karesansui (the art of dry landscape rock gardens). So when speaking of Kuramata’s work as “matter centric,” it really feels like an extension of this history. With every piece of his furniture (whether his K-Series lamps, his Glass furniture, his various flower vases or his Pyramid shelving), there is no separation between construction, form, interiority, materials—it’s all one thing.

Above: the Pyramid shelving unit for Ishamaru (1968). Top image: Kuramata’s How High the Moon chair for Vitra (1986)

Left: the Glass chair (1976). Right: an interior for the Issey Miyake store in Ginza, Tokyo (1983)

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In this series, Matthew Sullivan (AQQ Design) highlights some designers that you should know, but might not. Previously, he looked at Donald Judd’s furniture designs.

Alan Buchsbaum: Born in Savannah, Georgia, 1936. Died in New York City, 1987.

Alan Buchsbaum was a key figure in three significant, consecutive design phases: Supergraphics, High-Tech and postmodernism. An upwelling of a particular style is a communal affair, though probably really only caused by the few people that have the strength to erupt it. That strength seems to require a love and care of precedent, as well as a commitment to synthesize this knowledge into a material form. From the expressed synthesis usually blossoms what is termed a “new” style. In the case of Buchsbaum, his career took its first real form with the congealing of Supergraphics in the late ’60s. Supergraphics was a style of design (most commonly realized with interior decorators and architects) where large-format text, blown-up photographs and/or oversized patterns were superimposed onto buildings or interiors to effect an augmentation of a space. The augmentation, however, is purely visual, with zero physical change to the actual structure. Perhaps Supergraphics is best understood as a marriage of ad-hocism and pop art—taking ad-hocism’s additive collage technique but eliminating its often folksy handmade quality by tightening it up with pop art’s assimilation of large-scale advertising. Buchsbaum had many designs that promoted this approach. His use of a giant, blown-up photo of a pink rose blossom is completely paradigmatic of the Supergraphics method—and, to my eye, perfectly beautiful.

Above: interiors for the Tenenbaum house (1972). Top image: a Buchsbaum kitchen from 1978 (left) and a 1980 bedroom with a custom platform bed

A 1973 modular-dining design for a show sponsored by the fiberglass manufacturer Owens Corning

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In this series, Matthew Sullivan (AQQ Design) highlights some designers that you should know, but might not. Previously, he looked at the work of Dan Friedman.

François-Xavier Lalanne: Born in Agen, France, 1927. Died in Ury, France, 2008. Claude Lalanne: Born in Paris, France, 1924.

Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne are part of a long, brilliant tradition of Western dilettantes. That is, they are part of a stream of the thoroughly interested sort, who, having deeply submerged themselves in literature, the fine arts and various histories—ancient, lateral and celestial—surfaced with delight and an impish sense of how things aren’t. For the Lalannes, in the company of other folly-makers like Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Prince Pier Francesco Orsini, Piero Fornasetti and Jean Cocteau, were not concerned with bolstering existing conventions of how we eat or how we sit or ultimately how we see and think, but playfully inverting norms and exaggerating ordinary aspects to fantastic effect.

Claude and François-Xavier met in Paris in the early 1950s, at an exhibition of François-Xavier’s paintings. They were together until his death in 2008. Their working practice was fairly unique, as they always kept separate studios—Claude preferring to express flora in hers and François-Xavier giving form to strange fauna in his. But quite early on they eschewed first names, and all subsequent work (no matter the creator) was to bear the mark of only “Lelanne.” They were close friends, personally and idealistically, with many of the leading artists of midcentury Paris (Yves Tinguely, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Arp, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Salvador Dali). François-Xavier’s first studio was even adjacent to Constantin Brâncusi’s—interestingly enough, he took the studio as a painter and left a sculptor.

Above: François-Xavier and Claude Lalanne. Top image: sheep stools from 1974

More sheep stools in the Lalannes’ Gae Aulenti–designed apartment, seen in 1966 (left) and 1969

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In this series, Matthew Sullivan (AQQ Design) highlights some designers that you should know, but might not. Previously, he looked at the work of Ugo La Pietra.

Luigi Caccia Dominioni: Born in Milan, Italy, 1913

The beauty of form is either a digression or a clarification. In the latter case—clarification—time or collective use is the shaper of form, as in the way a spoon or any quotidian object is morphed by broad utility through generations. The former case, the digressive, is when an individual journeys into an exclusive focus on the shape of a particular thing; this is the singular task of designers, generally speaking. This is true for the deceptive simplicity of Dieter Rams as well as the material arabesques of Ettore Sottsass. To be clear, contrary to popular opinion, a designer doesn’t clarify, she/he explores. An individual can’t possibly control the unforeseen and logistical, like the cosmic economy of collectivity, so it is giving shape to the mystery of memory and preference that really informs a designer’s quarry.

In light of the above lines, the work of Luigi Caccia Dominioni is an impeccable example of what a single designer can achieve. His 70-plus years of work have yielded buildings and objects of a deep sensitivity.

Above: Dominioni’s 1953 Monachella floor lamp for Azucena. Top image: the Ambrosianeum Chair from 1955 (left) and the Luis Chair from 2003

Dominioni is an architect and a designer. At university he studied under Luigi Moretti (a first-wave Italian modernist), which seems to have been a fairly influential tutelage, as Dominioni’s architectural work has consistently been in close dialogue with this first phase of modernism. His professional life started successfully, designing objects and interiors with the Castiglioni brothers (Achille, Livio and Pier Giacomo). He is often quoted as saying that a good building is designed from the inside out, and this idea was surely the catalyst for Dominioni’s 1947 opening of Azucena, a design firm focusing on furniture and objects. From then on, Dominioni was a cornerstone of the post-war generation of Italian architects, alongside Franco Albini, Ico Parisi, Ignacio Gardella, Osvaldo Borsani, Angelo Mangiarotti and Carlo Mollino.

When looking at Dominioni’s designs, it is important to keep in mind that European homes, unlike those in the U.S., are often older, having ornamental notes in the keys of different eras (at times classical, sometimes even ancient). And, even if a particular building is totally new, the street on which it rests typically presents an array of historical perspectives. American designers working in parallel with Dominioni (George Nelson, Charles Eames, etc.) were less confined and were often designing toward unbuilt, forward-looking vistas. The shapes of much midcentury modernist Italian furniture, due to said architectural constraints, have a modern feel, but with accents more inclusive of a multitude of situations; whereas much American furniture can feel of the time. Dominioni’s Monachella floor lamp (1953), Ambrosianeum chair (1955), Boccia sconce (1967) and Pipistrello desk (1998) speak to this versatility amazingly well.

The Pipistrello desk for Azucena (1998)

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In this series, Matthew Sullivan (AQQ Design) highlights some designers that you should know, but might not. Previously, he looked at the work of Jacques Adnet.

Martino Gamper: Born in Merano, Italy, 1971

So many design movements have come and gone in recent times, with each new one obfuscating or damning the previous, that we are often left to think that replacement (and probably a relativistic stasis) is all there is. It can seem like there is no genuine, conscientious dialogue; that the child is impervious to the parent. Whether this is an entrenched biological strategy of evolution or simply not seeing the forest for the trees is not for me to know, but . . . the feeling is certainly a drag.

Countering this tendency and this feeling is possible, but it would require a particular intelligence and temperament, a standalone perspective with buoyancy and perhaps joyousness. This person would need to have a conversational and extemporal technique for problem-solving, not inclined towards specious, ex nihilo design innovations.

Martino Gamper is such an empathic and curious personage, and is a fair and welcome exception for our times.

Above: Gamper’s 2010 Vigna chair for Magis (left) and a chair from the exhibition Tu Casa, Mi Casa, now on view at the Modern Institute in Glasgow, Scotland.
Top image: three chairs from Gamper’s 100 Chairs in 100 Days series

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