NOWNESS is pleased to present a new short by Stefan Henrichs featuring “lauded industrial design iconoclast” Konstantin Grcic fawning over Enzo Mari’s “Box” chair. (We’re also fans of the legendary Italian designer.)
Originally trained as a cabinet maker, Grcic made the bold step into industrial design before studying at the Royal College of Art, London. “As a craftsman I became so fascinated by machinery and this idea of working through the processes and limitations of design,” explains Munich-based Grcic… “The machine really forces you to work and think as a designer.”
Not that the video diptych is self-serving in any way—he doesn’t refer to his work at any point—but one can imagine that Grcic hopes his own Chair One for Magis inspires the same reaction from some of his admirers. Then again, what artist or designer wouldn’t want to hear a bit of high praise from one of their esteemed peers?
The Web 2.0 era has allowed unprecedented access to self-publishing in music, writing and videos. While this democratization of communication has both drawbacks and benefits, it’s safe to say the amount of content to sift through is staggering. To avoid getting bogged down…
Trentemøller: Lost As stated on the SoundCloud page for Anders Trentemøller’s record label, Lost In My Room, his newly launched album Lost, is “yet another fuck-you to whatever genre you thought you had him boxed into.”…
Just about anyone can probably come up something cool to do and a most of us can probably actually do some of those cool things. A select few of you (I’m not counting myself this time around) are also able to document those things with photo and video and present them in a way that’s more compelling than your average Instagram or Vine, and possibly make a buck or two doing so. NYC-based artist and filmmaker Casey Neistat happens to be able to do all of the above extremely well, and, after years of putting together wild, wacky and otherwise out-of-left-field short films, someone at Mercedes-Benz took notice. That’s right: Casey Neistat made a car commercial. And it’s awesome.
(For those of you who might retort that it’s a contrived attempt at ‘shaking up’ a staid format—the car commercial—ask yourself this: would you not do the same thing? And would you even come close to the result?)
Granted, it’s one thing make a car commercial and another thing to embed it in a Friday afternoon blogpost (credit also to the automakers themselves), so in the interest of highlighting the substance behind the ecstatically over-the-top finished product, Neistat has done us the favor of posting a three-part making-of doc, and it’s as good as anything he’s ever done… including the commercial. This, readers, is what storytelling is about.
Just about anyone can probably come up something cool to do and a most of us can probably actually do some of those cool things. A select few of you (I’m not counting myself this time around) are also able to document those things with photo and video and present them in a way that’s more compelling than your average Instagram or Vine, and possibly make a buck or two doing so. NYC-based artist and filmmaker Casey Neistat happens to be able to do all of the above extremely well, and, after years of putting together wild, wacky and otherwise out-of-left-field short films, someone at Mercedes-Benz took notice. That’s right: Casey Neistat made a car commercial. And it’s awesome.
(For those of you who might retort that it’s a contrived attempt at ‘shaking up’ a staid format—the car commercial—ask yourself this: would you not do the same thing? And would you even come close to the result?)
Granted, it’s one thing make a car commercial and another thing to embed it in a Friday afternoon blogpost (credit also to the automakers themselves), so in the interest of highlighting the substance behind the over-the-top finished product, Neistat has done us the favor of posting a three-part making-of doc, and it’s as good as anything he’s ever done… including the commercial. This, readers, is what storytelling is about.
We’ve devoted a fair number of pages and pixels to that singular design object known as the bicycle, and whether you’re a leisure rider or all-weather commuter, weekend warrior or retrogrouch, there’s no denying the functional elegance of the human-powered conveyance. Thus, when Harry Schwartzman reached out to us about lending our support to the inaugural Bike Cult Show, a celebration of the beautiful machine and a local-ish community of individuals dedicated to building them, we were happy to support the cause.
With the first annual Bike Cult Show just around the corner, we’re pleased to present our fifth and final builder profile, a short film on the inimitable Jamie Swan by filmmaker Isaac Schell.
Swan may not command the broad recognition of, say, Richard Sachs or Peter Weigle, but he is certainly a legend in the cycling community, in which he is a self-proclaimed “Keeper of the Flame.” At least some of Swan’s renown is simply due to the fact that he’s only built a handful of frames since he put together his first one back in 1981—they’d be grail bikes if he actually had a wait list—yet he’s anything but a recluse. On the contrary, Swan is glad to take the role of mentor and spirit guide (for lack of a better term) for savvy up-and-comers: He admires the current generation of craftsmen who are making a living building bikes precisely because he’s never had to do so.
Parquet Courts: You’ve Got Me Wonderin’ Now The four-piece band from New York has a raw punk sound that could easily have been found on the Tony Hawk Pro Skater soundtrack; the recorder line on Parquet Courts’ newest single, “,…
HAIM: The Wire The sisterly trio of hot rockers known as HAIM continues to leave fans wanting more with their new song “The Wire”—and the track’s brazen video shows they’re breaking a few hearts along the…
Nope, those aren’t 3D-printed; they’re handmade. Ex-chemistry teacher Bobby Jaber—the giveaway to his old profession is that he refers to PVC as polyvinyl chloride—”wanted to combine art and science,” and now that he’s retired, has thrown himself wholeheartedly into clay.
Buckyballs, icosahedrons, octahedrals and other complex geometrics might not be as lucrative as fictional colleague Walter White’s “Blue Sky” product, but they seem to bring a good deal more spiritual peace. Additionally, California-based Jaber has been invited to show (and sell) from as far afield as the Netherlands.
In the following mini-doc, we get to see Jaber doing what I think many of us secretly crave: To create our own things in our own studios, absent market pressures and briefs from higher-ups. (Be sure to stick around until after the credits, when there is an outtake of what appears to be Jaber seeing an iPad for the first time!)
In its first iteration, the Leatherman multi-tool was a Double-Oh-Seven-worthy gadget idea, born out of a traveler’s frustration and initially snubbed by major tool companies. These days, Leatherman is a synonym for any dozen-in-one dream tool you can fit in a pocket. The idea came to Tim Leatherman back in the 1970s, when the recent mechanical engineering grad and his wife Chau decided touring Europe in a questionable Fiat would be a good use of a year. Leatherman found himself regularly eyeballing the guts of the car, wishing for one tool he didn’t have in his Swiss Army Knife: pliers.
Back in Oregon, he spent the next several years developing a design for the tool he had craved, patiently supported by Chau. After partnering with a friend with a machine shop, he pitched the first Leatherman multi-tool to knife and tool companies to resounding disinterest… until Cabela’s unexpectedly ordered 200 for their mail-order catalog. They featured it on their back cover and ordered 500 more before the first order was filled. With that, the Leatherman snowball was off and rolling.
30 years later, the Leatherman Tool Company is still growing. Every Leatherman tool is made in Portland, OR, where the company employs 525 people full time, and runs 24-hour production at three locations. The smallest space is the site of the original machine shop, and the largest is the 90,000 sq. ft. factory, which I recently got to tour because I am an important regional figure.
After chatting with ID honcho Blair Barnes, I left the aggressively air-conditioned design and business offices and entered the stream of activity on the factory floor. Like most factories, this one is laid out for efficiency. Production flows from one side of the building to the other, starting with the lifeblood of the factory: a custom die shop. The die shop (curtained off to outsiders) houses what I imagine to be wizardly figures, conceiving, crafting and repairing the dies used in each machine. Having the designers and machinists in close proximity with production makes it quicker to design new dies and fix broken ones than sending things out of house.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
Portrait by Isaac Schell
