Hasta La Ideas

Ambra Medda‘s name is familiar to design lovers from her tenure as director Design Miami, which she founded in 2005 with Craig Robins. Three years after leaving the fair, she is back in a big way with L’ArcoBaleno (“the rainbow” in Italian). The new site is devoted to collectible design—from top galleries including Galerie Kreo, Carpenters Workshop, and Demisch Danant—that visitors can learn about, browse, and buy. “Creating the ultimate marketplace for design as well as a platform for the design community to congregate (virtually), share, and push design discourse forward is what stimulates me,” said Medda, who co-founded the site with eBay veteran Oliver Weyergraf. “After the incredible experience with fair it seemed natural to scout the best design pieces and creative talent and promote all the incredible quality and stories surrounding them.” Here she discusses rainbows, covetable objects, and words to live by.

“Fuzz 2010″ by Study O Portable, available from Gallery Fumi on L’ArcoBaleno.

How did you decide on the name L’ArcoBaleno?
Coming up with a name was fun and torturous at the same time. I love language, and there were so many great options but we either couldn’t own the .com or it wasn’t this enough or that enough. When I thought of what gives me the most electrifying feeling. I thought about love at first, but i couldn’t call it love.com, because that’s just silly. So then the next thought was rainbow! Looking up at the sky and seeing a rainbow is an extraordinary sensation, the most powerful natural experience. Add to that we wanted to present the whole spectrum of design from limited-edition design, technology, food, science, fashion. “L’ArcoBaleno” sounds beautiful and stands for a jolt of energy, which i believe the design world needed at this point in time.

What are a few of your favorite limited-edition products available on the site?
I love the Sedimentation Urn by Hilda Hellstrom, Fuzz 2010 by Study O Portable, and Peter Marigold‘s Calendula Cabinet. If I had the cash in the bank that’s what I would buy right now.
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The strange and wonderful world of contemporary architecture takes center stage in False Solution, a new play that runs through Sunday at La MaMa in New York (buy tickets here). That the dialogue crackles with pitch-perfect architect-speak is no coincidence: this is the latest work by Oren Safdie. The Montreal-born, Los Angeles-based playwright is the son of architect Moshe Safdie and grew up in his father’s modular prefab marvel, Habitat ’67, before making his way to Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture.

“Architecture is also still mostly a male-dominated profession,” says Safdie, “so the opportunity to write about sexual politics–one of my favorite topics–is plentiful.” False Solution takes place in the basement model-making studio of a firm led by Anton Seligman (played with brainy yet sizzling charisma by Sean Haberle), a starchitect who has landed a commission to design a Holocaust museum in Poland. He soon finds himself arguing the merits of volumes and voids with intern Linda Johnansson (Christy McIntosh), a striking know-it-all who flinches only when pressed into service at the drafting table: “It’s just at this stage of my career, I’m much more effective as a critical thinker than a generator of ideas,” says the first-year architecture student. Fortunately for theatergoers, Safdie has mastered both roles. He recently answered our questions about his career path, his new play, and why architects make for better characters on the boards than on the screen.

How did you go from studying architecture at Columbia to being a playwright (and screenwriter and director)?
In my last year at architecture school, Columbia University insisted you take a course outside your discipline. I took a playwriting course. A scene I wrote was selected in a contest juried by Romulus Linney, and received a staged reading. Once I saw my words on stage, I was hooked.

Your new play, False Solution, is about an architect’s struggle to design a Holocaust museum in Poland. How did the idea for the play develop?
I would say the kernel of the play was born when 10 years ago, I saw a figure skating event on television. One of the American skaters had donned a yarmulke and wore a sweater with a Star of David sewn on his chest. The theme he skated to: Schindler’s List. I was amazed that someone would actually try and give some kind of expression to the Holocaust. I was reminded by this several years later when I visited Libeskind‘s Jewish Museum in Berlin, where I felt the same sense of someone trying to convey the suffering through architectural expression, albeit more successfully. There were other Holocaust museums I visited, including my father‘s Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem that offered an opposite approach–almost creating a non-building. It was through these difference, that I created two very different type of characters. The other influence on this play comes from my mother, who lived in hiding in Poland during the war. Many of the stories are factual, and I was interested in how, per se, her experiences have impacted my own life.
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For architect Josemaría de Churtichaga, specialization is the enemy. His Madrid-based firm, Churtichaga + Quadra-Salcedo (ch+qs), is just as happy to design city councils, libraries, and cultural centers as it is boats, furniture, books, typography, and, as the English translation of the firm’s website so fantastically put its, “establishments in the Sahara for petroliferous companies” (sign us up for one of those!). De Churtichaga was in New York recently for the opening of “Magic Carpet,” an installation of 36 shipping containers suspended from the ceiling of Pier 57, and made time to answer our questions about his impressions of the cavernous space, the project, and what’s next on his to-do list (spoiler alert: “a secret underground architectonic project on the beautiful island of Mallorca”).

What were your first impressions of Pier 57?
My first impression was of a fantastic atmospheric experience. For me, architecture is more of an atmospheric problem than a formal problem. Architecture is about building atmospheres, about defining the way a space or environment affects us through our senses, which are our interface with the world. The quality of architecture then is rooted in the intensity by which it affects us. Pier 57 is full of this atmospheric quality. When we walk trough the pier, an extremely attractive industrial space excites our memories, the subtle light is challenging our eyes, the loneliness and echoes everywhere affect our ears, and everything has a flavor of the untouched authenticity of a lost activity. Those are spatial and emotional virtues to be preserved in Pier 57.

What did you create for the space?
We decided to build a changing, mutable space of containers, inside an extremely challenging and attractive space that could solve an enormous amounts of different events’ requirements, and at the same time preserving the view across the space from the city towards the Hudson.

You’ve used shipping containers in previous projects. How did they function here?
In some way this space is setting the tone of what will happen in the whole pier refurbishment. The container as a design tool has in my opinion many advantages. Its repetition and its diversity gives the spaces a less formal sensation, and at the same time is a “memory machine” that talks to us about dealing directly with the industrial world.
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Fab made a splash in Milan with more than cushy Warhol Brillo boxes. The online retailer invited designers from around the world to pitch new products for the chance to have them produced and sold on Fab. More than 150 creative types from 30 countries turned out, and now it’s onto New York. In addition to showcasing its new private label alongside collaborations with the likes of the Albers Foundation and Blu Dot at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair, which opens to the trade tomorrow, Fab is hosting another “Disrupting Design” competition.

The fearless leader of the judging panel will be Fab co-founder and chief design officer Bradford Shellhammer. “At Fab, we are constantly reinventing ourselves and rethinking what Fab can be,” he says. “By directly engaging with designers to find the best new work out there, we’re hoping to help even more of our members find things they love.” Today’s ever-changing offering ranges from a Louis Ghost Chair signed by Philippe Starck and vintage Kodak Brownies to a subscription to BirdWatching magazine and a pepperoni pizza t-shirt. Shellhammer paused in his booth preparations (find Fab at #1220 at ICFF) to answer our questions.

How did the Disrupting Design competition go in Milan last month?
We were overwhelmed by the response in Milan, which is why we’ve decided to do it again in New York during ICFF. We had so many great entries from all over the world when we did the call out in Milan. Initially we were planning on selecting three winning designs, but we couldn’t narrow it down so we ended up shortlisting twelve designs which we are working to put into production and sell on Fab–the revenue of which we of course share with the winning designers.

What advice would you give to those interested in presenting their designs to the Fab jury on Tuesday at ICFF?
Take a look at our site and keep the Fab viewpoint in mind when presenting. The winning designs from Milan all embody the Fab ethos–they tell great stories, utilize interesting materials, or have a sense of whimsy. We are looking for designs that will be appreciated by our global community of more than 12 million design lovers.

What are some qualities of a successful product on Fab?
Great products tell a story, elicit emotions, or solve problems. It’s that simple. It needs to check at least one of those boxes (hopefully all three). They can be in any category and at any price, as long as there’e something compelling.

What is a product that you’ve sold on Fab that has surprised you, in terms of expected versus actual interest from customers?
Yves Behar‘s medicine accessories for Sabi I thought may be targeted for a customer older than ours, but we sell a lot of them!
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(Photo: Richard Patterson for Design Miami)

The countdown to Basel is on, and this year Design Miami/Basel moves to a Herzog & de Meuron-designed home in the new permanent exhibition hall. The eighth edition of the Basel fair is also shaping up to be the biggest yet. “We’ll have about fifty percent more galleries than last year,” Design Miami director Marianne Goebl told us during a recent trip to New York. “And we’re expanding our geographical reach. For the first time in Basel we’ll have a gallery from South Africa, Southern Guild. We’ll also have a first-time participant from Beirut, Carwan Gallery, which will present the work of India Mahdavi.”

A Vitra veteran who took over from founding director Ambra Medda in February 2011, Goebl has succeeded in freshening up Design Miami for an audience that ranges from die-hard design fans to newcomers who strolled over from the neighboring art megafair. “I have this very naïve mission of wanting to communicate to a large audience that design matters,” she says. “Everybody lives with design, whether they want to or not. Not everyone can make choices, but to a certain degree a lot of people can make choices and I think that not enough people do it…until now.” We asked Goebl about how she became interested in design, what’s in store for Basel, and if she believes the 3D printing hype.

How did you become interested in design?
I thought I would end up in the arts, so growing up in Vienna and already when I was a teenager and during my studies [in economics], I always worked in galleries and museums. I interned at the Museum for Applied Arts, worked for an art gallery for three years, and really felt like I wanted this to be part of my life, but then designer friends of mine took me to Milan [Salone Internazionale del Mobile] when I was maybe 22. This whole new world opened up and I realized that in design I could find…conceptual thinking, but also something beyond that, which is tangible and really part of everyday life. And I felt that this is what I wanted to be part of.

Since taking over as director in 2011, what have you found particularly surprising about your job or the fair itself?
What I’ve really learned over the last two years–and what I hope to continue in the future–is that Design Miami can speak to different types of people. First there’s an audience of general enthusiasts, people who are just really interested in design. They may not be interested in buying something, but it doesn’t matter. They can just come [to the fair], get all of the information, ask all of their questions, see the material, interact, use it as a forum. And on the other end of the spectrum, we can reach an audience that can actually help fuel the market and help designers to continue their research and to tell their stories. I don’t want to call it two levels, because it’s not necessarily two different levels, but it’s a broad spectrum of audience, and that wasn’t clear to me before I joined Design Miami.

Tell us about Design Miami’s new location for Basel in June.
In Basel this will be Design Miami’s fourth location. It’s like an itinerant fair! It brings a lot of opportunities, because first, it’s a brand new hall with great architecture. It’s part of the fairground of the Basel convention center. They built a bridge across two buildings on a public plaza. There’s a skylight. It’s in the middle of activities. And then the fair will unfold in the bridge. And there’s moments when you can overlook the square, so it’s nice to communicate with the outside world. I would say it is sophisticated, industrial, not at like a sleek, carpeted convention center.

And Design Miami will also have another space, in addition to the main fair?
We’ll have an additional space that we did not have before in Basel, on the ground floor, where we’ll be able to stage a design performance. We’re working with a German designer who collaborates with dancers. It will be about the relationship between the maker and the object. It will be an ongoing thing, so that every time you come something else will be happening.
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