Hasta La Ideas

Jólan van der Wiel‘s “Gravity” stools, tables, candleholders, and bowls appear ripped from an enchanted sea floor–or are they Magic Rocks run amok? At once otherworldly and organic, these moody forms are in fact the products of the Amsterdam-based designer’s “Gravity Tool,” an innovation that earned him top honors at last year’s DMY International Design Festival Berlin. “I admire objects that show an experimental discovery, translated to a functional design,” explains van der Wiel. “It is my belief that developing new ‘tools’ is an important means of inspiration and allows new forms to take shape.” Now, just two years out of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy designLAB, he has a “Gravity stool” at London’s Design Museum, as part of the “Designs of the Year 2013” show that opens today. This short film by Miranda Stet provides a luscious look at van der Wiel’s unique process, which is something of a team effort among opposing magnetic fields, the forces of gravity, two-component plastics, and good old-fashioned elbow grease.

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Terms such as “book” or “graphic novel” fail miserably at labeling the latest creation of cartoonist-cum-wizard Chris Ware. His Building Stories (Pantheon) may well be a high watermark for print culture: open the boardgame-sized box to discover 14 discrete books, booklets, magazines, newspapers, and pamphlets that comprise an infinitely satisfying choose-your-own-graphic-adventure. Meanwhile, having spent twelve years working sporadically on the project, Ware is the picture of modesty, describing Building Stories as “follow[ing] the inhabitants of a three-flat Chicago apartment house: a 30-year-old woman who has yet to find someone with whom to spend the rest of her life; a couple (possibly married) who wonder if they can bear each other’s company for another minute; and finally, an elderly woman who never married and is the building’s landlady.” Trust us, there’s more. Last week, Ware joined fellow story builder Zadie Smith, whose latest novel is NW (Penguin), for a conversation at the New York Public Library. Pour yourself a fresh cup of nog, sit back, and enjoy the below audio recording of the two discussing the role of space and place in their work.

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Whether at the slap-happy climax of a local news broadcast, amidst a sea of chuckles on a morning show, or via the unceasing stream of “Oddly Enough” clickbait, it has been all but impossible to escape the story (and the cringeworthy evidence, pictured above) of the botched restoration of a 19th century fresco that was once the pride of the Sanctuary of Mercy Church near Zaragoza, Spain. The world pounced on the freshly disfigured Jesus Christ in “Ecce Homo,” once so skillfully rendered by Elias Garcia Martinez, after its fumbled “restoration” at the hands of a well-meaning parishioner. BBC Europe correspondent Christian Fraser compared the ruined portrait to “a crayon sketch of a very hairy monkey in an ill-fitting tunic,” and it wasn’t long before the swollen Christ emerged on Twitter (“Washed my head! Big mistake!” tweeted @FrescoJesus) and spawned a Tumblr: the Beast-Jesus Restoration Society. But leave it to Stephen Colbert to offer a fresh take on the story. In a recent segment, he turned the focus on the 80-year-old restorer, one Cecilia Gimenez, naming her his “Alpha Dog of the Week” (past honorees include JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater, Silvio Berlusconi, and Domino’s Pizza) in spectacular narrative fashion:

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“Years ago I was sitting in a rather boring faculty meeting at Princeton. To pass the time, I pulled out my pad to start drawing a plan, probably of some building I was designing. An equally bored colleague was watching me, amused. I came to a point of indecision and passed the pad to him. He added a few lines and passed it back.

The game was on. Back and forth we went, drawing five lines each, then four and so on.

While we didn’t speak, we were engaged in a dialogue over this plan and we understood each other perfectly. I suppose that you could have a debate like that with words, but it would have been entirely different. Our game was not about winners or losers, but about a shared language. We had a genuine love for making this drawing. There was an insistence, by the act of drawing, that the composition would stay open, that the speculation would stay ‘wet’ in the sense of a painting. Our plan was without scale and we could as easily have been drawing a domestic building as a portion of a city. It was the act of drawing that allowed us to speculate.”

–Michael Graves in his recent New York Times op-ed, “Architecture and the Lost Art of Drawing”

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Juergen Teller, “Pettitoe, Suffolk, 2011,” a photograph from his “Keys to the House” series exhibited earlier this year at New York’s Lehmann Maupin gallery.

“I can achieve something in a very quick moment. But it does get very personal. I think I open up a lot too. I don’t come around as the archetype fashion photographer dude, playing the big guy with the horde of assistants. I let them know I’m also nervous or insecure. Then I let them relax. The way I photograph is quite hypnotizing. I found a way to hide my insecurity—I have two cameras and I photograph like this [mimes cameras in each hand moving hypnotically] and this helps me to figure out what I should do, where they should go…it’s so intense, so psychologically draining, it’s like my brain works on overdrive in those minutes—or hours or days—I’m photographing. That’s why I can’t do it so much because I’m really super-concentrated. Other people think it’s a stupid snapshot—I get that a lot—but it’s very precise. And it has to be very fast because if I’m on a job or something, I can’t just doodle around and days go past and I take a picture. Sometimes there’s a lot of money involved and I have a responsibility to the client to get the fucking thing done. A lot of other people say, “Stand like that, stay like that,” and they do a Polaroid and everyone—all the assistants, the hair and makeup, everyone—stands around looking at the Polaroid or nowadays looking at the screen, then they say, “Let’s do it, shoot,” by which time the model is so tense the Polaroid is better than the end product. I ease that up where they don’t feel necessarily, ‘This is the big decisive moment.’”

–Juergen Teller interviewed by Tim Blanks in the fall 2012 issue of Style.com/Print

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