Hasta La Ideas

In our second exclusive video interview with Richard Rogers, the British architect reveals that key elements of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which he designed together with Italian architect Renzo Piano, were strongly influenced by the radical thinking of the 1960s.

The Centre Pompidou was born out of a competition launched by the French government in 1970 and was completed in 1977. However, Rogers cites the political unrest in Paris in the previous decade, when protesting students and workers came close to overthrowing the government in 1968, as a key influence.

“That moment nearly changed history, certainly for Europe,” Rogers says. “It looked as though there would be a revolution. In fact, it didn’t happen. But we captured some of it in the building.”

He adds: “It was a highly active period of politics, and you could argue that it was a part of the concept [for the building]. This was a dynamic period, a period of change, but we wanted to catch what was going on at the moment.”

The Centre Pompidou is also linked to 1968 by its name. Originally called the Centre Beaubourg, the building was renamed when Georges Pompidou, who was prime minister of France when the protests kicked off and became president after Charles de Gaulle was forced to resign, died during construction of the building.

“It is said in France that Pompidou had a plane revving up because he thought he would lose the war against the students, the intellectuals, and the workers,” Rogers says.

In Roger’s and Piano’s original design, the main facade of the building featured a large screen, which would have displayed information from other arts and cultural institutions around the world. But this was scrapped after Pompidou’s death for political reasons.

“The facade on the building, if you look more carefully, was very much about the riots and very much about Vietnam,” Rogers says. “We had it all going very well until Pompidou died and Giscard [the subsequent president of France] came in and sunk it with no hands. He said: ‘It is a political weapon, I don’t want it.’ So that died.”

Rogers says that the idea of the putting all the structure and services on the outside of the building to maximise the flexibility of the internal space also has its roots in the volatility of this period of history.

“We wanted to make a building that was clearly of our period, which caught the zeitgeist of the now,” he says.

“The one thing we knew about this age is it’s all about change, if there’s one constant, it’s change. So we said that we’d make massive floors, which were the size of two football pitches with no vertical interruptions, structure on the outside, mechanical service on the outside, people’s movement on the outside and theoretically you can do anything you want on those floors.”

“We didn’t say where the museum should go, where the library should go, and of course, the library changed radically because when we started there were books and by the time we finished it books were almost finished because of I.T. So again that’s about change.”

The radical design of the building was initially met with hostility, Rogers claims.

“It was vilified whilst we were designing it from the first day onwards,” he says. “Nobody said one kind word until it opened and when people started to queue up.”

He reflects: “I remember once standing outside on a rainy day and there was a small woman with an umbrella who offered me shelter. We started talking, as one does in the rain, and she asked: ‘what do you think of this building?'”

“Stupidly, I said that I designed it and she hit me on the head with her umbrella. That was just typical of the general reaction of the people, especially during the design and construction stage. [People thought we were] destroying their beautiful Paris.'”

However, Rogers believes that shock-factor is a mark of good architecture.

“All good architecture is modern in its time,” he says. “Gothic was a fantastic shock; the Renaissance was another shock to all the little medieval buildings.The shock of the new is always rather difficult to get over.”

Despite the initial reaction, Rogers says that the French public warmed to the building over time and maintains that the project as a whole was always designed “for the people.”

“When we did our first studies, it showed that there was no public space nearby,” he says. “So we created this big piazza. There were, I think, 681 entries [to the original design competition] and strangely enough there were no others with a big piazza. That is really critical to the workings of the Pompidou.”

“We said that we will put the building not in the middle of the piazza, but actually on one side because that will give people a place to meet,” he continues. “The idea was that you had a public space, and you’d go up the facade of the of the building in streets in the air with escalators floating across it, so the whole thing became very dynamic. People come to see people as well as to see art; people come to meet people. So we wanted to practice that as theatre.”

Rogers concludes: “The whole idea of Pompidou was that it is a place for the meeting of all people. And the success of it was that the French took it over and it became the most visited building in Europe.”

Rogers was speaking to Dezeen to mark the opening of an exhibition called Richard Rogers RA: Inside Out at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. The movie contains rare archive material provided by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners to coincide with the show.

Watch our previous interview with Rogers about the exhibition »
See our earlier story about the exhibition »

The London home designed by Rogers for his parents, and which influenced his later design for the Pompidou Centre, was recently put on the market for the first time since it was built in 1968.

Read the full story about Rogers House »
See all our stories about Richard Rogers »

The post “The Pompidou captured the revolutionary
spirit of 1968″ – Richard Rogers appeared first on Dezeen.

In this movie Dezeen filmed at the opening of the new Camper store in New York, Japanese designer and Nendo founder Oki Sato explains why he covered the interior walls of the store with over a thousand white plastic shoes.

“I’ve been working with Camper for the past few years on their small retail stores,” says Sato.

“The concept [for the small stores] was these shoes walking in mid air, showing that Camper shoes are not for running fast or for luxury or things like that, but something to enjoy walking.”

See Nendo’s design for Camper’s Osaka store with shoes that seem to walk around on their own »

However, Sato goes on to explain that designing the interior for the larger New York store located on Fifth Avenue, one of world’s biggest shopping streets, was much more challenging.

“Camper asked me a few months ago to find a solution for the big stores that have really high ceilings,” he says. “Because the product is obviously very small, we weren’t sure how to use the ceiling height. Before they used a lot of graphics on the ceiling but it looked really empty.”

Nendo‘s solution was to completely cover the walls in the store with white plastic replicas of Camper Pelotas, the brand’s signature shoe design. The current collections are then displayed amongst these replicas in spaces at the base of the walls where customers are able to reach.

“What it’s doing is making the products really stand out – the colours, the forms of the products,” says Sato. “It starts from a single product but by copying and pasting it becomes an interior element. It catches a lot of light and shadow and gives a lot of texture to the space.”

The protruding shoes also provide an important acoustic benefit, Sato says: “It absorbs the sound so it feels much more comfortable as well.”

Sato goes on to explain that he believes physical retail environments are still important, despite the rise of shopping online.

“Just one click on the internet and you can buy any of these shoes from wherever you are,” he says. “But I guess it’s really the experience of the space that is the most important thing. It’s a space that you have to be there, you have to feel something.”

“In the end if a guy comes into the store and he doesn’t want to buy any shoes in the beginning but he gets excited and he buys a shoe I think that’s the victory of design. That is the goal for interior design in a way.”

See all our stories about Nendo »
See all our stories about Camper »

Dezeen was in New York as part of our Dezeen and MINI World Tour.

Watch all our Dezeen and MINI World Tour movies from New York »

The post “We created an interior by copying and
pasting a single product” – Nendo’s Oki Sato appeared first on Dezeen.

Dutch designer Marcel Wanders discusses how he overcame the challenges of using LED technology in his new lamp for Moooi and defends the high cost of design products in this movie Dezeen filmed in Milan. 

Wanders‘ new lamp for Moooi is called Flattering and features an ornate copper-coloured frame that supports 32 LED lights enclosed by tiny individual transparent lamp shades. It was on show as part of Moooi’s Unexpected Welcome exhibition in Milan.

“With LEDs we need to redesign our thinking about what to do,” says Wanders of the challenges of working with the technology.

“You have these little lights, but each of them is very sharp. If you want enough light in an LED lamp you have to put them together and [if] you have a lot it [will] blind you completely. One of the solutions is to put these little lights further away from each other.”

Normally, spreading apart so many individual LEDs would result in a lot of messy wiring to power them all. However, Wanders explains that Moooi has developed its own proprietary technology called Electrosandwich, which allows the LEDs to be powered directly through layers of conductive material within the frame.

“Here we have developed a patented technology which makes it possible for us to put lights anywhere we want without putting special cables and fittings,” he says.

Wanders then goes on to defend the high cost of products that design companies like Moooi produce.

“If Moooi makes a design, the company doesn’t only make this object in a really good way, with the right materials, with the right techniques and with the right perfections,” he says.”It also did all of the development. To get there is really difficult.”

“You will always find that the companies who copy something sell only the things that sell really well,” he continues. “A company that does design has to also find a way to make it’s margins for all the other things that fail, which is part of design.”

Wanders concludes: “Ultimately, an original design product will have a cost higher than its copy.”

Wanders also believes that owning an original product rather than a copy is important.

“If you want an authentic life, if you want to be an authentic being then you want to connect with with your surroundings,’ he says.

“My grandfather used to say ‘show me your friends and I’ll tell you who you are.’ Show me your surroundings and I’ll tell you who you are.”

We also filmed interviews with Wanders about Moooi’s Unexpected Welcome exhibition in Milan, as well as about his new Dressed watch for Alessi.

Wanders also features in this movie about the phenomenon of copying in design.

See all our Milan 2013 coverage »
Watch our Dezeen and MINI World Tour video reports from Milan »

The post “We need to redesign our thinking
with LED lamps” – Marcel Wanders appeared first on Dezeen.

Dutch designer and Moooi art director Marcel Wanders explains why the design brand wanted to make a big impact at Milan this year in this movie filmed at Moooi’s Unexpected Welcome exhibition. 

The Moooi show featured pieces from its Unexpected Welcome collection arranged in small room layouts, with giant portraits by Dutch photographer Erwin Olaf dividing the large warehouse space.

“I am 100% sure that we are by far the most expensive exhibition in this Milano fair,” Wanders says in the movie. “We might hopefully be the most impressive one.”

“For Moooi, this is the right moment to do something,” he continues. “This year we felt we were really ready to do more development.”

“We wanted to show that besides making iconic objects, we are ready to do spaces, to make things work together. To not only make objects, but homes.”

Wanders believes that the quickly developing economies in the east provide a new set of challenges and opportunities for companies like Moooi.

“The west has been educated in its own kind of rational way for a hundred years,” he says. “We arrive now to clients all over the world. These people don’t have this dogmatic education. You’re not going to sell them a grey sofa because you tell them it’s a great grey sofa.”

Wanders continues: “You have to give real value, give them something that they think is really vital to them, something valuable to them, something they really want to have in their hearts. And I think it’s a great opportunity for design.”

See all our Milan 2013 coverage »
Watch our Dezeen and MINI World Tour video reports from Milan »

The post “I’m sure we had the most expensive exhibition
at Milan this year” – Marcel Wanders appeared first on Dezeen.

Interview: in this exclusive interview designer Tom Dixon tells us why he decided to design his first watch – and how he wanted to make it easy to read the time (+ movie).

“We’ve spent a lot of time doing lighting over the last ten years, and also more recently furniture, and now we’ve decided it’s time to also do accessories,” says Dixon, speaking in the Tom Dixon showroom at The Dock in north-west London.

“I’m trying to produce something with an expressive neutrality,” he says. “I tend to try and work out what I can strip out without losing character.”

The result is Block Watch, which features a square case stamped out of stainless steel or brass. The watch face is circular, with etched numerals and markers. The watch’s hour, minute and second hands are powered by a high-quality Swiss movement.

“I tend to try and work out what I can strip out without losing character,” says Dixon, explaining his design philosophy. “A watch has really got to be round if it’s analogue, because the hands sweep round. I wanted to make sure you could tell the time – because with all too many contemporary watches you can’t tell what time it is. And I wanted to set it in a square because the strap has to go to a square anyway.”

The watch is available in either stainless steel or rose gold (plated) with matching mesh straps, or in brass with a chunky brown leather strap.

The mesh strap is inspired by vintage TV detective Kojak, Dixon says. “It’s got this chain link bracelet, which I guess is a reference to when I was growing up – Kojak, maybe.”

He adds: “It’s just the minimal elements you need to make a watch all reduced to their bare essentials and, I hope, still expressive enough to be something you want to buy.”

Block Watch by Tom Dixon is available to preorder now on Dezeen Watch Store with free worldwide shipping. Prices start at £166.67 excluding VAT.

www.dezeenwatchstore.com

The post “With too many contemporary watches you
can’t tell what time it is” – Tom Dixon appeared first on Dezeen.