Hasta La Ideas

Innovation takes over the City of Light

The 12th edition of Designer’s Days decorated Paris inside and out last weekend. The celebration brought a varied bunch of innovative creations all over the city, involving a blend of venues and actors, famous design brands, exclusive creators, art schools, designers’ studios and workshops, embassies and outdoor installations. Every branch of design was part of the feast, including industrial design, interior decoration, homeware, furniture and more.

The festival marked an occasion for brands to debut innovations like the decorative “Add-on” heaters designed by Satyendra Pakhalé for the Italian company Tubes Radiatori, which was shown at Centre Pompidou museum. Trying to convert utilitarian heaters into decorative pieces, “Add-on” utilizes an enlarged surface area to spread heat, and the system’s polyhedric modules can be freely assembled to create infinite decorations. The lattice-style form makes this piece ideal for a room divider, resembling an Arabic Mashrabiya.

Exclusive rug company Dedar commissioned the New York-based Stephan Burks for an artistic performance around rope and fabrics. The artist invented seats with large bunches of tough rope partly covered with caoutchouc and wrapped with zipped corsets inspired by African textile culture and patterns.

The famous inventor of the bag-free vacuum cleaner, Dyson, exhibited prototypes made by fresh design graduates as part of its sponsorship program, with all projects reflecting the brand’s focus on air. Dyson gave an award last year to the “Airdrop“, an innovative system able to produce water for irrigation by capturing moisture from the atmosphere, and the utility of the low-tech device for drought-ridden countries is quite promising. “Kerio” is a home dry cleaner that implements air technologies to replace a washing machine, steaming clothes in a low-water, eco-friendly system. The “Wind Up” lamp, which is turned on and off in the manner of a candle by simply blowing on the bulb, is as simple as it is poetic.

Recent graduates from the prestigious École Boulle design and interior architecture school were also given the opportunity to show their achievements and allow the public to discover this up-and-coming generation. One creation, the “Mister T” table by Antoine Lesur smartly embeds in the piece a ready-to-use set of table, tray, basket and cushions. The light shape of the armchair by Eric Naveteur has also been selected along with the “Pouff” by Norman Bouzidi, a table and seat designed for snack and improvised parties, with storage spaces in the locks.

Italian brand Poltrona Frau asked the French designer Noé Duchaufour Lawrance to create a scenography for its store. The result is an organic chain of leather that emerges from armchairs and spreads all over the showroom, featuring gigantic arms or roots that connect all the pieces of the collection. The piece communicates both the appealing power of leather as well as the brand’s superior level of creative execution.

Many other leading brands on the market commissioned famous or new designers to produce something for the occasion. Silvera-Poliform exhibited the new line “Plia” of side tables designed by Victoria Wilmotte in wood and stainless steel, which reflect light through their beveled edges.

Jean-Michel Wilmotte displayed bushes of street lamps on the famous Ponts des Arts of front of the Louvre, evoking connections between architectural heritage and contemporary design.

We discovered work by the textile designer Tzuri Gueta, who makes a unique line of silicone jewelry evoking blood vessels and anatomic desiccations, as well as weird shellfish and a motorbike helmet, all in sexy silicone lace or in a “rain pearls” curtain trying to marry rain, water and light.

The 1.5 km long promenade “viaduc des arts”, gathering designers and craftsmen workshops, provided a large scope of pieces made for the event like a rocking hobby-horse that brayed like a galloping horse and could imitate sounds of smooth and tough surfaces.

Plenty of other interesting and intelligent ideas for small urban places were on show, such as mini mobile plant pots hung on folded hard plastic maps and planted tables as interior gardens. A clock in a blown-glass bulb recalled Napoleonic clocks under their glassy globe, and we were taken by a poetic variety of lamps: candy-like love-apple lamps in red blown glass and melted sugar sat alongside flower and feather lamps.

The Italian Embassy opened its doors to the public for a tour through the past decades of major achievements in Italian design—all displayed in the golden apartments of an 18th-century palace, such as the famous “Him” chair by Fabiola Novembre for Casamania.

The studio of Jean Nouvel, one of the most famous French architects, was open to the public to show a beautiful play on wood, featuring a line of seven wooden tables and their accessories with sober lines made out of seven varieties of woods. With the purpose of going back to the essentials and basics, the display paid tribute to both plain natural wood and to ancient assembling techniques by avoiding any metallic element such as nails. Their minimalist, elegant aesthetics proved to be the most contemporary.

Images by Isabelle Doal

Artist Daniel Buren plants a forest of candy-colored sunshades for “Exentrique(s), travail in situ” at the Grand Palais

Following the installation by Anish Kapoor in 2011, Monumenta 2012 invited famed French artist Daniel Buren for the fifth edition of the annual challenge to create an installation that will fill the soaring nave of Paris’ Grand Palais. Buren’s take on the site-specific concept is “Excentrique(s), travail in situ”.

True to its name, what Buren has created can best be described as eccentric—a rainbow forest of hundreds of transparent, sunshade-like plastic saucers planted on flagstaffs spreads over the entire area of the 13,500-square-meter space, playing with the light pouring into the huge, glassy cupola to cover the ground with colorful reflected spots.

For this color-dominated installation, even the central cap of the dome itself has been saturated with a blue checkerboard to resemble the stained-glass windows of a church. Working as a huge illuminated forum, the whole display is conceived to attract, reflect, expend and multiply the light into fragments of joyful colors. At night the figure reverses and the glass roof is lit by the reflected colors of the saucers, due to a sweeping electrical device. The forest also features a relatively low ceiling that counterbalances the 35 meter height of the building.

At the center of the work is an interruption in the cover of the sunshades, with disk-shaped mirrors on the floor that make the area seem like a glade among the forest of umbrellas. Their pools reflect the steel structure of the roof above, and from there, the exhibition spreads out on all sides in a dotted landscape of colorful saucers.

In keeping with the idea of the eccentric—meaning away from the middle, existing on the fringe of the mainstream—the experience was designed to keep the center from swallowing up the rest of the space. Visitors enter on the north side of the nave and exit through the south wing, an intentional course that forces the visitor to cross the length of the expanse while avoiding the center. As Buren explains, the center tends to draw all the attention and leave the rest of the space empty.

Buren touches on the idea of the eccentric by diverging quite far from his typically austere and minimalist black and white vertical stripes which established his name. Though still highly recognizable, Buren’s new work hasn’t been seen before from him, all circles, transparencies, light and color.

Having now established himself as a master of color, Buren uses his basic figures—black and white vertical flagstaffs—along with the new round shapes of the saucers and mirrors. The circle is the key figure of the installation—the high, round saucers as sunshades, the round mirrors on the floor in the center. Buren started considering the circle after he realized that the whole architecture of the Grand Palais building was based on the pattern of this figure.

Continuing the 40-year pursuit of his work, Buren plays on forms with a mathematical approach. The game here consists in assembling tangent discs, all in contact with one another, filling the empty space as much as possible. Employing only four basic colors (blue, yellow, red and green) Buren displayed them after an alphabetical order, with blue appearing 95 times and the others, 94 times each. The installation is completed by a soundtrack comprising the repetition of the names of the colors in 40 different languages.

“Excentrique(s), travail in situ” is on display at Grand Palais through 21 June 2012.

Denmark’s notoriously conceptual fashion designer in a new book spanning boobies to mint

The new self-titled book from Henrik Vibskov is a lot like his work—slightly haphazard yet cohesive; purposeful, but ultimately entertaining. Since graduating from London’s Central St. Martins in 2001, the Danish designer has penetrated the regimented fashion industry with a distinct style that bucks conventionality and traditional seasons in favor of more conceptual shows and collections that reflect his artistically driven mind.

“Henrik Vibskov” the book is set up to explore these themes and his larger creative oeuvre in a natural progression, starting with a preface split between five contributors that loosely alerts readers to the collage-like layout that lies ahead. The collaborative foreword is written by Vibskov’s brother Per, German professor of experimental fashion design Dorothea Mink, New Museum deputy director Keren Wong, Danish artist Jørgen Leth and Röhsska Museum director Ted Hesselbom. Together they shed a little insight on Vibskov while referencing five keywords that help define his career—”donkey”, “boobies”, “mint”, “tank” and “shrink wrap”. Before delving fully into what these words mean, social anthropologist Camilla R. Simpson offers a more serious biography in the three-page essay “The Vibskov Scenario”, which is followed by an equally extensive but completely different story—novelist Jokum Rohde’s “Science-Fiction Noir”, an imaginary work that draws from Vibskov’s various show titles over the years.

From there Vibskov takes over, detailing his career to date with randomly ordered sketches, candid commentary, inspiration shots and behind-the-scenes images of his shows and art installations (which are sometimes one in the same). While slightly confusing at first, the arrangement actually works out well and fans will enjoy how the book mimics the same sentiment expressed in his bizarre ensembles. At first glance there is a lot going on on the page, but further inspection reveals a beautiful chaos. As Wong comments in the preface, Vibskov’s work is always full of contradiction—to her, he simultaneously evokes confidence and humor, and inspires performance and relaxation.

The layout also shows how his projects continue to evolve and more importantly, how many different artistic elements they incorporate. Stating in his short note at the beginning that this is a book “mainly based on visual materials”, Vibskov, who is also a serious drummer, shows how his vision applies to a myriad of media. For example, an over-sized blue cardigan sweater from his A/W 2008 collection, “The Mint Institute”, is featured on the page opposite his explanation of “Drumming Friday”, a concept initiated in 2007 where Vibskov and musician Mikkel Hess send out a text message asking who wants them to stop by. They then hit the streets with their drums while donning blue plastic tarps. In 2009 he employed the same shade of blue in his S/S collection called “The Tent City”.

Vibskov notes that in retrospective they should have named that show “The Tent City Blues”, but it isn’t until 20 pages later that he speaks candidly about the importance of show titles. “I think in general it’s nice to have bizarre, twisted names for the collections, and actually we end up spending a lot of time talking and discussing what the name of the collection should be,” he writes. After emailing around for ideas, he lets it hang there for a few weeks and typically makes the decision at the last minute, which, he says “mostly works out well”.

Leaving things to chance to work out well seems like a modest understatement for the industrious designer. By allowing his imagination to lead the way and exploring fields outside of fashion, his collections are highly original and fully developed, making his one of the most honest and interesting labels to watch.

“Henrik Vibskov” sells online in Europe and soon the US from Amazon and Gestalten.

Le photographe Lee Eunyeol a construit des installations lumineuses de toute beauté. Il exposera ses clichés à Seoul au Gana Art Space durant le mois de mai 2012 et permettra ainsi de contempler ses clichés très réussis à découvrir dans la suite.

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Le collectif madrilène Luzinterruptus est très engagé dans les enjeux écologiques. Notamment envers celui de la pollution lumineuse, qui nous empêche de voir les étoiles dans le ciel la nuit. Ils ont voulu exprimer cela en imaginant de l’herbe lumineuse en pleine ville.

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