Hasta La Ideas

Movie: Designer Konstantin Grcic tells Dezeen that American furniture company Emeco had to industrialise its production methods to produce his new Parrish chair in this video interview filmed in Milan. 

Grcic originally designed the Parrish chair as part of a range of furniture for Herzog & de Meuron’s barn-like Parrish Art Museum on Long Island, completed in 2012.

The chair was launched by American furniture company Emeco as a commercial product at Milan earlier this year.

In the movie, Grcic explains that he approached Emeco to produce the chair because of its experience of working in aluminium, most famously with the iconic Navy Chair, which Emeco has produced since 1944.

“I felt we needed a company to support the development of the project,” says Grcic.

“Emeco stands for chairs in aluminium and aluminium was the perfect material for the chair that we had in mind because the [Parrish Art Museum] is very open [to the elements].”

Unlike the Navy Chair, in which each piece is welded together by hand, the legs, armrests and backrest of the Parrish chair are all locked together by a single joint under the seat.

“Everything is mechanically joined to a central core, a piece of die-cast aluminium, which is really the heart of the chair,” Grcic explains.

“So we have one moulded piece that solves all of the structure of the chair and the seat is exchangeable. You can have an upholstered seat, a plastic seat or a wooden seat.”

Grcic says that he deliberately wanted to move Emeco away from the time-intensive production methods involved in producing the Navy Chair.

“I felt we should actually change the way [Emeco] makes chairs,” he says. “Industrialise it, simplify it, eliminate all the dirty work, all the hand labour. That’s what really informed the concept of the chair.”

He concludes: “Emeco will always produce the Navy Chair in the way they produce it, but I think now we’ve established another form of production inside their company.”

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See all our stories about Emeco »

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The post “I felt we should change the way Emeco
makes chairs” – Konstantin Grcic appeared first on Dezeen.

Studio Job founder Job Smeets looks back over his career to date and explains why sculpture is so important to his studio’s work in this movie Dezeen filmed at Moooi’s Unexpected Welcome exhibition in Milan. 

“When we started [Studio Job], it was very simple: we wanted creative freedom,” Smeets says.

“The only way to reach creative freedom was to design sculptures, because when you do a sculpture, each sculpture can be a unique piece. That’s perfect. Not for economical reasons, but it’s perfect for creation because every time you can start to design a new piece.”

Smeets continues: “We started to sculpt pieces and cast them in bronze. As with plastic, with bronze you can make any shape you like. Plastic is for the industry and bronze is for the art world, but I thought: ‘let’s turn that issue into something beautiful and introduce sculpture into design’.”

Studio Job’s work straddles both the art and design worlds, but Smeets says he does not distinguish between the two.

“I really don’t care,” he says. “When you are trying to separate art from design, you are creating a ghetto, which is always a bad thing. Let’s not have borders in creation.”

Studio Job has designed collections for Moooi since its range of paper furniture launched in 2007.

“The first thing you learn in Kindergarten is to work with paper,” Smeets says of the collection. “So it’s a very authentic approach.”

Subsequent collections include a gothic chair made from plastic and a series of hand-painted furniture inspired by antique German designs, while Studio Job’s latest pieces for Moooi’s Unexpected Welcome collection include lamps shaped like upturned buckets.

“Now we’re sitting here in a total design environment, we have 35 or 40 products we did for Moooi on show here,” Smeets says. “I’m a happy artist and a happy designer.”

However, Smeets believes that the influence of sculpture is still apparent in these industrial pieces.

“In a way, the Moooi pieces are becoming a little bit more sculptural,” he says. “If you look at the bucket lamp series, for instance, it’s a mixture of wood, of paper, of brass. It’s quite interesting.”

He continues. “[Today], we are allowed to do s*** like that. Five years ago, if I came up with a bucket upside down on a wooden pedestal they would say, ‘do it on your own, don’t do it here’.”

“I think that has to do with trust. We are getting old and people tend to trust you when you’re over forty, no?”

All the designs featured in the movie are by Studio Job. Photography by J.B. Mondino, R. Kot, K. Vrancken, A. Meewis, Groninger Museum, Moooi, Z33.

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you create a ghetto” – Job Smeets appeared first on Dezeen.

In our second movie with Tom Dixon filmed earlier this year in Milan, the British designer discusses his foray into fashion design and says that his capsule collection for sports brand Adidas is based on the idea of creating a personal survival kit for Milan design week.

“I’m doing a collaboration with Adidas,” says Dixon in the movie. “So I am now no longer a lighting designer, I am a fashion designer, okay?”

“That’s been a fascinating experience of diving into a much bigger infrastructure and going in there with a very naive view but also a very different view on sportswear.”

He adds: “It’s been a riot working in this completely new playground of a different typology of goods, in which I can use some of the same ideas but in a completely new world.”

Dixon’s collection, which was on display amongst the steam trains at Milan’s Museum of Science and Technology as part of MOST, includes underwear, trousers, shirts, shoes and waterproof jackets that fold easily and can be packed efficiently. Dixon also designed a coat that doubles up as a sleeping bag.

“Adidas started off with a bag and then I thought, I’m not just going to do a bag, I’m going to fill that bag with everything that I need for Milan,” Dixon explains.

“So I started thinking about my personal problems. I always forget to pack the right number of pants or socks, or I forget that there’s going to be a volcano and I’ll get trapped in Milan and so I’ll need a sleeping bag [a reference to the 2010 volcanic eruption in Iceland, which suspended air travel for weeks].”

He concludes: “All of those adventures I had in Milan went into that collection. It’s as much as I can fit into a carry-on bag on a low-cost airline, with everything that I need for a week away.”

See all our Milan 2013 coverage »
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I am a fashion designer” – Tom Dixon 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 »

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with LED lamps” – Marcel Wanders appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in our penultimate movie recorded at the MINI Paceman Garage in Milan, New York designer Stephen Burks discusses the importance of having a design identity and journalist Henrietta Thompson explains why designers are starting to expand into retail.

Stephen Burks of Readymade Projects was one of the guest speakers at the series of workshops that were hosted in the MINI Paceman Garage during Milan design week.

“I really impressed upon the students that it was important to understand their own identity before choosing manufacturers to work with, before running off and making something,” he says of his talk. “I think now they have a better sense of what that identity can be.”

Henrietta Thompson, editor-at-large at Wallpaper magazine, believes that changes in manufacturing are enabling more and more designers to produce and sell their own products.

“There’s certainly a shift happening in the way that designers are taking much more control over exhibiting their own work and also selling their own work,” she says. “So you’ve actually got a new dynamic opening up and a lot of the galleries and the shows that you go to are actually retail environments as well.”

“You have a lot more designer-makers, so they’re making things in limited editions, which they’re then able to sell,” she adds.

“Because of all these new technologies coming in, which enable the way things are made to change dramatically, things can be made much cheaper. You’ve got 3D printing, which is completely changing the landscape as well. [A designer] can sell things online and actually distribute [their own work] fairly easily now.”

It’s not just designers that are moving into retail, Thompson suggests. “Magazines are getting into retail, exhibitions are getting into retail,” she says.

“It doesn’t necessarily have to be as cut-and-dry as ‘I’m a producer’, ‘I’m a designer’, ‘I’m a retailer’, ‘I’m a magazine’. Now everybody is doing all of those things all together.”

See all our stories about Milan 2013.

The music featured in this movie is a track called Konika by Italian disco DJ Daniele Baldelli, who played a set at the MINI Paceman Garage. You can listen to more music by Baldelli on Dezeen Music Project.

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produce and sell their own work” appeared first on Dezeen.