Hasta La Ideas

(Photo: Seth Browarnik for Design Miami Basel)

When last we saw Kanye West, he was wandering the tulip-lined halls of the European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF). His latest appearance on the international art circuit (Gray hoodie? Check.) was at Design Miami Basel, where, in the wee hours of Thursday morning, he gave an impromptu listening party for Yeezus. The album, due out on June 18, is expected to sell 500,000 copies in its first week of release.

Some 2,000 guests (Hans Ulrich Obrist? Check.) gathered–amidst a few Rick Owens chairs–at the center of the Herzog and de Meuron-designed Hall 1 Sud at Basel’s Messeplatz to sample West’s latest, including a track produced by Daft Punk and an a capella rendition of “New Slaves,” which includes a shout-out to Alexander Wang. The decision to appear at Design Miami Basel makes perfect sense considering that West has moved on from George Condo to…Le Corbusier. In a recent interview with Jon Caramanica of The New York Times, he pointed to architecture as influencing the pared-down vibe of Yeezus:

You know, this one Corbusier lamp was like, my greatest inspiration. I lived in Paris in this loft space and recorded in my living room, and it just had the worst acoustics possible, but also the songs had to be super simple, because if you turned up some complicated sound and a track with too much bass, it’s not going to work in that space. This is earlier this year. I would go to museums and just like, the Louvre would have a furniture exhibit, and I visited it like, five times, even privately. And I would go see actual Corbusier homes in real life and just talk about, you know, why did they design it? They did like, the biggest glass panes that had ever been done. Like I say, I’m a minimalist in a rapper’s body. It’s cool to bring all those vibes and then eventually come back to Rick [Rubin], because I would always think about Def Jam.

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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.
continued…

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Diller Scofidio + Renfro excels at inversion, masterly flipping concepts of public and private, nature and structure (see also: High Line, The). The interdisciplinary design studio’s transformation of New York’s Lincoln Center is revealed in the pages of Lincoln Center Inside Out: An Architectural Account, hot off the Damiani presses. Falling somewhere on the continuum between art book and architectural diary, the monograph chronicles the extensive redevelopment project through photographs, drawings, renderings, texts, and interviews. Upping the book’s giftability quotient are the series of 30 gatefolds: large-format photographs by the likes of Iwan Baan and Matthew Monteith that open up to stories and ephemera documenting the spaces shown in the images.

In Miami? So are Elizabeth Diller, Ricardo Scofidio, and Charles Renfro. The trio will be signing books today at Design Miami from 1-2 p.m. before heading across the street to chat with Ari Wiseman, deputy director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, as part of the Art Salon series at Art Basel Miami Beach.

This is part of a series of elegantly wrapped December posts about desirable goods that we suggest you purchase with the laudable yet vague intent of giving to others and then keep for yourself. Got a “nifty, gifty” idea? Tell the UnBeige elves: unbeige (at) mediabistro.com

Previously on UnBeige:
• Nifty, Gifty: Rodarte’s Out-of-This-World Ornament

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This just in: Brooklyn-based architecture and design collaborative Acconci Studio, founded in 1988 by Vito Acconci, will be honored as Designer of the Year at this year’s Design Miami, (December 5-9 in Miami Beach). Awarded to a designer or studio “that has made a mark on design history, pushing the boundaries of the discipline through a singularly innovative and influential vision,” the honor has been bestowed in previous years on the likes of Zaha Hadid, Konstantin Grcic, and David Adjaye.

Among the perks of winning Designer of the Year is the opportunity to whip up a large-scale installation. These commissions have typically consisted of site-specific, temporary installations for the fair iself, but now Design Miami is setting its sights on projects that will be both permanent and public. Acconci Studio will get the ball rolling with “Klein-Bottle Playground,” the Moebius strip-style climbing structure in the above rendering. Originally developed for the “Art for the World” program, as part of a touring exhibition of experimental recreational equipment and toys for refugee children, it will be permanently installed in the Miami Design District in 2014. The structure was inspired by the German mathematician Felix Klein, whose “Klein Bottle” had no identifiable “inside” or “outside.” Acconci Studio’s playground-ready riff will consists of a series of tubes extending out from and into a central sphere, allowing children to climb in, through, and on top of it.

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A photo from Karen Knorr’s “India Song” series and a view of the Genesis pavilion designed by David Adjaye for Design Miami.

Few things pack the overstimulating punch of Miami in early December (or late November, depending on the calendar). In the wake of this year’s swirl of fairs, events, and exhibitions, as we packed up our haul of foreign periodicals, flip-flops, and a signed copy of artist Erwin Wurm‘s latest book (mmm, pickles), we asked a handful of highly esteemed fellow fairgoers to share with us some of their highlights— the stunning, interesting, surprising, and/or delightful— from the Art Basel Miami/Design Miami week that was. Miami-based architecture critic and author Beth Dunlop went above and beyond the call of duty. Here are a few of her favorite things:

Art Basel (known to many in Miami as Art Frazzle, or even Art Hassle) has come and gone. What was most compelling? In the end, the places to sit and contemplate are what linger on—David Adjaye’s miraculous pavilion outside of Design Miami, Luis Pons’ personal chapel shown as part of Inventory 2 in the Miami Design District, and to a lesser extent, the Fondation Beyeler homage to Louise Bourgeois at Art Basel proper. I have to admit, however, that there were other highlights. I’m crazy for Jorge Pardo, and though it took some hunting across the giant Miami Beach Convention Center, found two different sets of his light fixtures and a brilliant table and chair set done in wood, glass and synthetic (vinyl?) cording (they were at Petzel and Neugerriemschneider) and if blurring the lines between art and design, they also speak to the magic of the mundane. And though not design (but about the way we inhabit space) were to be found at the Danziger Gallery’s Pulse booth: Karen Knorr’s elegant photographs of Indian palace rooms occupied by exotic animals, almost the exact opposite of Doug Aitken’s mesmerizing video—he called it “Migration (Empire)”—of some few years back in which wild animals rampaged through seedy motel rooms. In a way, the whole Art Basel experience is much more like Aitken, but there’s something deep and profound in Knorr’s work that takes us full circle to the Adjaye pavilion and the Pons chapel, especially—retreats into simplicity and even moments of tranquility amid all the art-buying and social-climbing and frantic partying that is what is now called, in Miami, “Art Week.”
—Beth Dunlop

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