Hasta La Ideas

Opinion: Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs reports from Milan design week, where he finds a city seemingly determined to make life unbearable for visitors.

Grey skies over grey buildings make for a grey mood. I’m in Milan for the annual design fair and it’s impossible not to be affected by the miserable weather. But the unseasonal chill that has descended on this dour northern Italian city seems to be a metaphor for the fortunes of the world’s biggest design gathering.

The Fuori Salone events around town feel much less busy than in recent years. You can walk down Via Tortona without running the risk of being crushed to death. Exhibition spaces are unfilled. Taxis are plentiful. I’ve met people who’ve found hotel rooms at the last minute – and not been ripped off. All these things would have been unthinkable in previous years.

There’s also little sense of the excitement of past years when Twitter, SMS and Bar Basso would be buzzing with hot tips and must-see recommendations. As one designer said to me the other night: “It must be a bad year – Alice Rawsthorn has hardly tweeted anything”.

It’s not surprising, since Europe – and Italy in particular – is mired in a seemingly endless economic crisis and the Milanese design brands that form the fair’s backbone are suffering. None will admit it openly but I’ve heard talk of four-day weeks, extended summer shut-downs and mothballed research and development centres.

The Milanese are masters of surface confidence – whenever I’ve asked senior figures asked about their company’s fortunes, the answer has always been a variation of the conspiratorial stock reply: “We’re doing well, but our competitors are finding things very difficult.”

The Salone Internazionale del Mobile (the official fair held in a vast Fiera Milano exhibition centre on the edge of the city) has dealt with the tough conditions by pretending they don’t exist, hilariously plastering Milan in 2009 with banners declaring “Crisis? What crisis? Salone is here!”

But the arrogance and swagger of previous years has finally ebbed, and more than one local has nervously mentioned last September’s article by Julie Lasky in the New York Times, which declared that London had usurped Milan as the world’s design capital.

I don’t (yet) agree with Lasky on this point and nor do any of the senior designers I’ve spoken to in Milan this week. For them, it’s still the paramount get-together of the year and the place where the key product launches take place. They love the city and desperately want it to thrive. Milan’s sheer size and heritage remain unparalleled. The Salone itself gets over 300,000 visitors and citywide an estimated half a million people are involved in the week in one way or another.

Milan practically invented the contemporary furniture industry in the second half of the last century and the Salone, established in 1961, has long been the definitive fair. This dominance stems from the network of family-run companies, prodigious home-grown design talents and highly skilled artisans who collaboratively turned Milan into the furniture design and production capital of the world in the post-war era.

Yet towards the end of the twentieth century the city’s stock of great designers mysteriously began to peter out – Sottsass, Castiglioni and their ilk left few protégés of note – and Milanese companies instead turned to foreign designers to design their products and give them marketing cachet. This has led to the curious situation today where rival Milanese furniture companies work with the same promiscuous pool of international names, resulting in product portfolios that are often indistinguishable. It’s hard to think of another industry where brands would allow their identities to be blurred in this way.

Now the companies themselves seem to be under threat from more adventurous overseas operations that are making the running on their home turf. The most impressive individual show this year is the vast, lavish, recession-defying installation by Dutch brand Moooi. The most innovative new players over the past few years have been the Dutch-run Ventura Lambrate district and the MOST exhibition at the city’s science museum instigated by British designer Tom Dixon (and this year sponsored by US online retailer Fab.com). Unlike his Italian counterparts, Dixon understands the digital forces that are changing the way design is manufactured, marketed and sold.

But the thing that most threatens Milan is Milan itself. The city treats fair visitors with contempt, allowing hotels to more than double their rates during the week, fleecing exhibitors with permits, bamboozling them with red tape (such as the Byzantine impossibility of getting a licence to sell products direct to the public) and doing nothing to help baffled foreigners negotiate the arcane taxi-booking system or the complex public transport network.

There is little evidence of curation across the city, with good shows mixed up with dreadful ones. Cosmit, the company that owns and operates the Salone, has appeared to lose touch with reality in recent years, commissioning lavish cultural spectacles in the city or organising sprawling press trips that had no relevance to the business of selling chairs and lights.

Through greed and mismanagement, the Tortona district managed to turn the most vibrant core of the fair into an overpriced, over-branded and overcrowded hell. The other districts and the Salone itself seemingly refuse to communicate with each other. There is no overarching organisation linking everything together, no decent free guidebook (the ubiquitous Interni guide is a navigational disaster) or map  (although our digital one is pretty darned good) and – astonishingly – no agreed brand name for the week. Is it Milan Design Week? Milan Furniture Fair? I Saloni? The Fiera? Nobody knows.

Milan’s hotels and exhibition venues appear to treat the internet as a nuisance, making it as difficult as possible for visitors to get online. Its design brands don’t seem to be capable of printing enough press packs to last beyond the first day or setting up a functional and up-to-date online presence. “How can they produce such beautiful furniture yet do everything else so badly?” exclaimed an exasperated American architect over dinner earlier this week.

Most incredibly of all, the Salone doesn’t even have a website, but rather piggybacks on the domain of its Cosmit parent, which provides little useful information beyond the dates of the fair. How can the world’s biggest design fair not have its own website?

In short, to visit Milan during the Salone is to experience the antithesis of design. Given the sheer hassle and expense of attending, it’s little wonder people are staying away. Compare that to London, which has brought all its sprawling September design events under the London Design Festival banner with a clear identity, website, guide and purpose. London is ten times the size of Milan but the London Design Festival is ten times easier to comprehend. If I were a rookie foreign design journalist trying to choose between the two cities, I know which I’d go for.

Another fair that understands the importance of the visitor experience is Kortrijk’s Interieur design biennale, which last year made huge strides towards treating that experience as a design task. “I sometimes get a bit frustrated coming back from Milan and feeling that even though I travelled a lot, I missed a lot,” its curator Lowie Vermeersch told me, pointing out the paradox that as a design fair, it “is not designed.” But Milan doesn’t seem to be listening.

The one glimmer of light in Milan this year seems to be the Salone itself, which has been packed with visitors after several years in which it felt like an increasingly optional sideshow to the events in the city. Besides being under a roof and therefore offering one of the few warm and dry experiences in town, this was surely helped by the common-sense decision to at last present a high-profile and relevant design-related exhibition – Jean Nouvel’s Project: Office for Living show – at the fair itself, rather than in a remote palazzo.

Last December, Cosmit appointed Claudio Luti – the savvy chairman and owner of thriving Milanese design brand Kartell – as its president and the word is that further long-overdue changes are afoot. Perhaps the next thing Luti should do is put together a high-powered Milanese design delegation, and visit London.

Top: photograph by Nicole Marnati at Ventura Lambrate 2013

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the antithesis of design” appeared first on Dezeen.

Our job of the week on Dezeen Jobs is a position for a lead designer in interiors at British fashion brand Paul Smith. See more stories about Paul Smith on Dezeen.

Visit the ad for full details or browse many other architecture and design job opportunities on Dezeen Jobs.

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at Paul Smith appeared first on Dezeen.

News: the iconic 1920s Moscow home of Russian avant-garde architect Konstantin Melnikov is showing signs of serious structural damage as work continues on a large complex next door, warn heritage experts and international architects including Rem Koolhaas and Álvaro Siza.

The cylindrical Melnikov House, located on Krivoarbatsky Lane off the Arbat pedestrian strip, has developed “numerous new cracks” and accrued damage to its foundations as a result of the construction of a mixed-use scheme nearby, according to an appeal addressed to Russian president Vladimir Putin and posted on the website of Moscow-based preservation watchdog Archnadzor last week.

The risk of losing the “masterpiece of twentieth century world architecture”, which was designed by Melnikov as a home and studio, had “grown significantly” said the post, as reported in the New York Times.

The architect’s granddaughter and current occupant of the house, Ekaterina Karinskaya, believes the greatest threat to the physical condition of the house is the three-level underground parking garage for the building planned behind the house.

The walls of the garage would block the path of groundwater and flood the Melnikov House, she explained in a report posted on the US website of international heritage watchdog Docomomo.

“All of this is being done in order to simply destroy the house,” said Karinskaya. “They cannot just knock it down because it will draw a widely negative response. So they have dug from two sides, setting off processes underneath in the soil.

“Now they will build a dam so that the house would crumble down by itself. And once that happens, they will say ‘well, what did you expect, [the house] is old… it’s over now, it’s dead’.”

Another open letter called for the preservation of the house as a public museum to house all Melnikov’s archival material, most of which is currently inaccessible to researchers.

The letter, whose signatories included architects Rem Koolhaas, Álvaro Siza and Arata Isozaki, also demanded “fair compensation of the Melnikov family for their efforts to preserve it”.

Architects Peter Eisenman, Kenneth Frampton, Steven Holl, Alberto Pérez‐Gómez and Bernard Tschumi were also among the letter’s signatories.

Moscow’s expansion continues apace with a proposal to build a new district around manmade waterways and the recently completed skyscraper Mercury City, which last year usurped Renzo Piano’s The Shard as the tallest building in Europe – see all news and architecture from Moscow.

In New York this week the Museum of Modern Art announced plans to demolish the American Folk Art Museum next door, just 12 years after it was completed by US architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien.

Top photograph is by dbasulto and lower photograph is by qwz.

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Dutch studio Maxwan has renovated a thatched house in the seaside town of Noordwijk in the Netherlands and added concrete and glass protrusions to the front and back (+ slideshow).

Named House N, the residence dates back to the 1930s and had become run down over the years, so Maxwan was brought in to repair the existing structure and create more room on the ground floor.

The architects added two extensions to the house. The first is a precast concrete block that stretches the kitchen out beyond the facade, while the second is a glazed box at the rear that extends the living room into the garden.

“We wanted the extension of the kitchen to read as one monolithic object, almost like a sculpture or a piece of street furniture,” Maxwan’s Jason Hilgefort told Dezeen.

Strips of glazing across the roof of each extension create a visible separation between the old and new structures.

To create a new route up to the second-floor attic, the architects installed a spiral staircase with a custom-designed filigree balustrade.

“This historic lace-like pattern traditionally would have to be repeated to be formed, but this was fabricated with a metal laser cutter,” explained Hilgefort. “Therefore, the pattern could do things traditionally not possible, which is why we chose to warp it in places.”

“An additional feature of the lace pattern is that it is structural. This is why the pattern is more dense at the tread level, but has a more open transparency along the handrail.”

Bedrooms, bathrooms and the basement in the house are also renovated, plus the thatched roof is restored.

Other residential extensions completed in the last year include a barrel-vaulted addition to an English farmhouse and a dark brick extension to a red brick house in France. See more house extensions on Dezeen.

Photography is by Filip Dujardin.

Here’s a project description from Maxwan:

House N
Extension to a seaside villa
Noordwijk, 2012

Built in 1938, this Noordwijk seaside villa was originally the holiday home of a concrete factory owner. Battered and blustered by the salty sea weather over the decades, the house was in need of renovation.

Besides roof replacement and basement repairs, the bedrooms, bathrooms and windows were outdated and some spaces had grown too small for the clients’ requirements. Maxwan’s additions bring new distinctive features to the house, while respecting its original character.

Extending into the back garden with floor-to-ceiling glass on three sides is the new living room, which maximizes light and views from among the treetops towards the garden and further out to the sea.

In the opposite direction stretches the new kitchen, incorporated in a single precast concrete block. Its color contrasts to the existing house while harmonizing with the surroundings.

Both extensions of the new kitchen and living room are clearly separated from the existing structure with glass slits, through which the sky dramatically bursts.

The bespoke spiral staircase connecting the uppermost levels elegantly uses the balustrade to support the treads, with the laser-cut pattern blending from closed to open for structural efficiency and recalling the breaking waves. The attic is given a new lease of life by new multi-functional wall furniture and large windows.

In addition to these major components, the entire house is renewed in a manner complementary to the original house.

Above: concept diagram – click for larger image

Client: private
Country: Netherlands
City: Noordwijk
Scale: S
Team leader: Rene Sangers
Partner in charge: Hiroki Matsuura
Team: Anna Borzyszkowska, Larraine Henning, Jason Hilgefort, Claudia Strahl
Collaborators: F. Wiggers – Varsseveld (structural engineer)

Above: site plan – click for larger image

Above: ground floor plan – click for larger image

Above: first floor plan – click for larger image

Above: second floor plan – click for larger image

Above: cross section – click for larger image

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With all eyes on Rio ahead of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games, Brazilian firm Bernardes + Jacobsen Arquitetura has grouped three disused buildings under an undulating roof to create a new art museum and art school (+ slideshow + photographs by Leonardo Finotti).

The Museu de Arte do Rio, which opened last month, occupies the renovated interiors of the Palacete Dom João, an early-twentieth-century palace beside Mauá Square in Rio’s port. Meanwhile, the Escola do Olhar school is inserted within a former police building and bus station next door.

Inspired by the shape of waves, Bernardes + Jacobsen Arquitetura added an undulating concrete canopy over both of the buildings, sheltering a new outdoor bar and events space on the rooftops.

“We had the challenge of proposing an icon,” architect Bernardo Jacobsen told the Rio Times. “The more modern building had two extra floors so we eliminated these to balance the set. Then we built a wave over the two, almost like a flying object.”

The museum of art comprises eight double-height galleries, accommodated across four near-identical floors. A ground floor entrance leads in through the centre of the facade, where visitors can either head straight towards the exhibitions or take a lift up to the roof.

The neighbouring school is an elevated structure supported by pilotis. The architects have cleaned up the ground floor area to create a public square, while a small sculpture area is positioned alongside.

Three levels of classrooms, workshops and exhibition rooms begin on the first floor, plus a library and auditorium are located on the fourth floor and a bridge links the two buildings on the next level up.

The Museu de Arte do Rio opened to the public with four eclectic exhibitions of Brazilian and international art.

Above: site plan – click for larger image

The renovated palace won’t be the only museum completed ahead of the 2016 Olympic games. The Museum of Image and Sound Rio by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Casa Daros, a museum of Latin American art, by Paulo Mendes da Rocha are also set to open in the next three years. See more architecture in Brazil on Dezeen.

Above: ground floor plan – click for larger image

See more photography by Leonardo Finotti on Dezeen or on the photographer’s website.

Above: mezzanine level – click for larger image

Read on for more project details from Jacobsen Arquitetura:

MAR – Art Museum of Rio

Our challenge was to unite three existing buildings with different architectural characteristics to house the Museu de Arte do Rio, the school “A Escola do Olhar” as well as cultural and leisure spaces. The existing buildings, the palace “Palacete Dom João”, the police building and the old central bus station of Rio, connected shall be part of the major urban redevelopment in the historic downtown of Rio de Janeiro. For each construction we analysed different levels of preservation.

Above: first floor plan – click for larger image

The first step was to establish a flow system allowing the Museum and school to work in an integrated and efficient manner. Therefore we proposed the creation of a suspended square on the police building rooftop, which will unite all accesses and host a bar and an area for cultural events and leisure. Consequently, the visitation will be from top to bottom.

Above: second floor plan – click for larger image

It was established that the palace, due to its large ceiling height and structure free plan should hold the exhibition areas of the museum. The police building shall be used for the school, auditoriums, multimedia exhibition areas, administration areas and employee areas of the complex.

Above: third floor plan – click for larger image

The stilts, currently used as an access to the road, will turn into a large foyer for entire complex, and will hold the sculpture exhibition areas. Access will be controlled between the two buildings, characterizing this empty space as internal, open and covered. The marquee of the Road, heritage element listed by the City, will be used for lavatories, store and region of loading, unloading and deposits.

Above: fourth floor plan – click for larger image

The connection and circulation of visitors between the two buildings, in the form of a suspended catwalk will belong to this new building, featuring the most unusual state possible.

Above: fifth floor plan – click for larger image

For the police building, we propose the suspension of the last floor to balance the height of the two buildings as well as the replacement of the masonry closing façade profiles using translucent glass, making the structural system of indented columns visible and revealing the stilts.

Above: sixth floor plan – click for larger image

Finally as the main mark of the project, we suggested that the suspended square have an abstract and aerial form. A fluid and extremely light structure, simulating water surface waves. A poetic architectural character full of meaning, simple and at the same time modern in regards to the structural calculation. This element shall be seen near and by far, and from below to who is arriving at the Praça Mauá, from above by those who are at the Morro da Conceição.

Above: cross-section – click for larger image

Above: elevation – click for larger image

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