Hasta La Ideas

(Photo: Lyndon Douglas)

Design an awesome home for Adam Lindemann and the world will beat a path to your double-height, multipaneled bronze door, as will Design Miami, which will honor Tanzanian-born, London-based architect David Adjaye as Designer of the Year at this year’s fair (November 29-December 4 in Miami Beach). Awarded annually to an internationally renowned designer or studio “whose body of work demonstrates unmatched quality, innovation, and influence, while expanding the boundaries of design,” the honor has been bestowed in previous years on the likes of Zaha Hadid, Fernando and Humberto Campana, Maarten Baas, and Konstantin Grcic.

“Winning Designer of the Year is huge for me,” said Adjaye. “To win an award like this from the design community is really significant because so much of my work is about crossing platforms. Being recognized this year—which culminates in all of the work and research I’ve been doing in Africa—is extremely meaningful.” Of Ghanaian descent, Adjaye has spent ten years traveling to 53 cities throughout Africa to document the continent within an urban context. The resulting project, “Urban Africa: David Adjaye’s Photographic Survey,” includes more than 36,000 pictures, 3,000 of which were displayed at London’s Design Museum before traveling to other locations around the world.

Among the perks of winning Designer of the Year is the opportunity to whip up a site-specific installation for this year’s fair, and Adjaye has designed a triangular pavilion called “Genesis” (rendering at right) that will welcome visitors to Design Miami. The immersive environment will be constructed of hundreds of vertical wooden planks, with the interior formed by an oversized ovoid shape cut out from the center. Inside, Adjaye will provide seating (on a platform formed by cut-away timber frames) that affords views of the sky and surrounding environment. The Design Miami galleries will be visible through a curved window. According to Design Miami, “Genesis” represents the first time that Adjaye has combined structure, seating, window, and doors into a single gesture.

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This weekend, following a much needed haircut, this writer accidentally happened to pass by the Coonley Elementary School here in Chicago at roughly the same time that former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel was officially entering this city’s mayoral race. While there was some commotion, including dozens of broadcasting trucks and protesters outside yelling about something, it was a relatively subdued affair. But after weeks of travel and not paying any attention to much of anything outside of airplane schedules and what’s on our computer screens, it finally got us thinking about what Chicago would be like with Emanuel as our mayor. In how this relates to UnBeige (we’re trying desperately to make a smooth segue here), ArtNet was on hand to pull out some good details from a recent interview with Emanuel in the local edition of Time Out, wherein, among other arts-specific items, he says “…we should restore the Chicago Art Expo‘s rightful place next to the Basel Expo in Miami.” While we’re not sure when exactly we were ever able to compete with the annual mega-fest down in Florida, it’s positive to see some forward thinking about pushing Chicago’s place in the arts. Though the underlying tone of ArtNet’s synopsis, which is perhaps a better read than the interview itself, seems none too positive about the candidate himself.

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Who knew that this was going to be the year that Design Miami changed completely? First they signed a big sponsorship deal with W Hotels, then just a few days ago, the art fair’s co-founder, Ambra Medda, suddenly resigned. Now another big change with the news that the group has plans to leave Miami proper and move to Miami Beach, to run alongside the other big annual design/art event there, Art Basel Miami Beach. While not 100% solidified yet, according to the Miami Herald, it appears the city (who had been vying for Design Miami to make the move) will give its okay tomorrow, letting the show “rent a parking lot across from the Art Basel home inside the city convention center.” Given that the two groups both have hands in each others pockets, investing-wise, the move certainly makes sense:

In 2007, [owner Craig Robins] sold a 10 percent stake in Design Miami to MCH Group, the owner of Art Basel. MCH also owns 50 percent of Design Miami’s annual Switzerland show, which coincides with the original Art Basel fair in MCH’s hometown of Basel, Switzerland.

Design Miami is the lone authorized satellite fair for Art Basel Miami Beach, the country’s leading contemporary arts fair. MCH also is a partner in a joint venture with Global Spectrum that runs the convention center year-round. In winning that city contract, MCH pledged to bring another of its international shows to the expo.

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(Photo: UnBeige)

Among our favorite finds at Design Miami, which wrapped up Saturday in the sunny city’s Design District, is the metal menagerie created by Cathy McClure and exhibited by Moss. The 13-member family of mechanically articulated “Bots” includes cats and dogs (pictured above, “My Good Friend” and “Bassett“), a horse named Buck, and a prize piglet (“Some Pig“) who is up on his E.B. White classics. McClure’s charming bronzes suggest creatures rescued from the burn unit of a doll hospital or plucked from the aisles of a Toys”R”Us in hell. Their post-apocalyptic quality is the product of deconstruction and reconstruction. McClure begins with plush robotic toys that she skins to their plastic bones. Preserving the mechanical organs, she disassembles the carcasses and then recasts the limbs and armatures in bronze, eventually revivifying them with the original circuit boards, batteries, gears, and voice-boxes. For McClure, the work is about juxtaposing disposable objects with unique pieces. “The underlying plastic object embodies more potential for my imagination than the stuffed object layered with intricate marketing identities,” notes McClure in a statement posted on her website. “This contrast between the discarded forgotten object and the cherished precious one underscores societal contradictions and reintroduces us to the magical quality of flipping frogs, drumming monkeys, and slowly turning carousels.”

(Photo: Moss)

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If you haven’t yet had the good fortune to attend Design Miami, the discipline-defying modern design extravaganza that follows Art Basel around like an impossibly hip younger sibling, it involves walking very short distances and pausing to allow for intense emotional reactions. There is much gasping, glee, pointing, and the occasional grimace as fairgoers scrutinize objects that they instantly want to own, hug, abscond with, or circle cautiously. Even the coolest collectors, freshly alighted from a VIP SUV, find it impossible to keep their eyebrows level.

For its fifth year, Design Miami was back at its 2008 site in Miami’s burgeoning Design District, which has gained a cultural anchor in the 30,000-square-foot de la Cruz Collection Contemporary Art Space that opened Thursday. Inside a futuristic temporary structure (pictured above) designed by New York-based architectural studio Aranda\Lasch, Design Miami’s international roster of exhibiting galleries (14) was down by more than a third compared to last year, but design fans know that quality trumps quantity every time. Veteran exhibitors (Moss, Galerie Patrick Seguin), fresh faces (Droog, Paul Kasmin Gallery), and top-notch curation mixed with innovative programming that included animated chats with the likes of Christian Louboutin and Gaetano Pesce, an installation dedicated to Designer of the Year Maarten Baas, and a series of mind-blowing concerts by OK Go (we’re working on editing our amateur video footage). After taking it all in, we put on our trendspotting glasses and detected a theme we’ve termed “bio-chaos”: organic shapes and forms, often run beautifully amuck. Below are some of our favorite things.

(Photos: UnBeige)
In addition to masterminding the fabric-wrapped setting of Design Miami, Aranda/Lasch was also the focus of an exhibition by Johnson Trading Gallery. Pictured here are the architectural studio’s undulating aluminum sculpture, which suggests a Mobius Strip reworked by the aforementioned Monsieur Louboutin, and walnut “Quasi” mirror.

(Photo: Ornamentum)
Which came first, the chicken or the egg-necklace? Russian-born Sergey Jivetin‘s “Poultry Accumulus Necklace” (2009), exhibited by Ornamentum.

(Photo: UnBeige)
Ornamentum also debuted new sculptural works by Idiots, the Dutch duo who are to thank for this sextet of wall-mounted rabbit heads.

(Photo: UnBeige)
We’ll toast to Tom Dixon‘s “Comete” geodesic lamps, created for Veuve Clicquot from the champagne house’s signature goldenrod packaging. The lamps were given away for free on Saturday, the final day of the fair.

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