Design is a large world with many different approaches and applications. In the conferences such as architecture week and broken earth, we saw that contemporary designers are primarily concerned with designing new ways of being; to redesign community relationships and systems-level solutions to systemic problems. On the other hand, designers enjoy the world we live in and produce things which help others, or bring them joy, or elevate their status. While the idea of producing a $75,000 chair doesn’t appeal to me, creating new things, or new experiences, or new ways of interacting with the world is one of the most enjoyable parts of design.
Nobody needs a chair like this. But isn’t it nice to look at?
So what do I want to do? I hoped that focusing my attention on design for 5 weeks would help me decide, but I’m still more torn than ever. On one hand, we need to rethink the world and the ways that communities interact and organize, but I’m still not convinced that design has the capability of being this vehicle for change. On the other hand, the world doesn’t need another chair or iPhone app. So how do I approach my future as a designer? Fortunately it’s a path of discovery and I don’t need to answer this question now.
Just as well, nobody needs a bathroom like this. But it made for a memorable experience — so much so that I snapped a picture to show people.How can someone who worked willingly with a terrible totalitarian government be so sensitive to the scale of children? This school by Terragni was incredibly humanistic though his other work supported the Mussolini’s fascism.
———————
Some additional thoughts on design:
Remembering our visit to the Studio FM, our host explained in great detail design decisions. The parameters of the project were X, so we made design decision Y, through and through. What separates design from art is objectiveness — the designer has the ability to allow constraints and context be the primary means through which a thing is created. Design is primary functional and logical. And although we don’t want to admit it, designers still have to make subjective decisions. I believe that in the gaps where there is no design direction, we must turn to design history in order to “fill the gaps” of what should be designed and how it should be designed. This trip, the exposure to very different ideas of architects and designers, is now part of my design toolkit to “fill in the blanks”. I am more able to respond to ambiguity and have a more narrow scope in my design process because I can think to the ideas of Portallupi or Castiglioni (or the architects of the Vitra campus) to help guide my decision making through the design process. This new collection of specialized tools, an understanding of theory and history, is the most valuable lesson from this trip.
Adventures always come with unexpected rewards. When you explore the world, you will be rewarded with unexpected inspiration. Never stop wandering!Always take the architecture tour! I got to see Zaha Hadid’s first building on a weekend trip to Vitra. On this trip, my curiosity paid off and I got to learn so much more just by having an expert on hand.
Along these lines, I have been exposed to a lot of new designed objects in Italy. Back home, our design history coursework if focused very much on the story of how “modern” design came about, how it’s been defined, and the historical narrative. In Italy, the story of design is in tangent to the dominant history from English Arts and Crafts through the Bauhaus, but it is still a “modern” movement. Italian design if more playful, inventive, and takes liberty in exploring form through a mix of joyfulness and engineering. Never in my life have I been in the workshop of an industrial designer, and visiting Castiglioni’s workshop was one of the more eye-opening experiences. The way he was influenced by everyday objects to create unique object was really fun. He explored the object in the world and synthesized them into something new. The ability to synthesize is, I think, the single most important job of the designer, and Italian designs have more eclectic and interesting ways to synthesize information into design than other “modern” designers.
During this trip, I was able to visit two Tadao Ando buildings. He just might be my new favorite architect. I still don’t understand how something as mundane as form and material can evoke such great feelings.
The adventures still aren’t over. My trip in Milan taught me that curiosity is rewarded with knowledge. I visited Design Mecca after Milan and I’m on my way to more design adventures this next week and a half.
This past week was a blur.
Each day was something different. A day of plastic furniture. A day of light. A day of type. A day of fine art. A day of architecture. A day of architecture pavilions. A day on an island with no cars. So much happened in such a short time that it’s hard to make sense of it all.
Like last week, I experienced a Tadao Ando building.
Artemide is one of the most interesting producers we have visited this far. I came to Milan wanting to observe public lighting, but found the street lamps homogenous and rather boring. Artemide was the antithesis of ubiquitous and pedestrian.
I snapped a picture of this Artemide task lamp my first week in Milan because it’s great.
While the form of the fixtures, lamps, and lighting solutions are beautiful, I was interested to learn about the processes between design, engineering, and manufacturing that our host explained to us. I consider myself a rather logical person, and the total consideration of technical aspects of lighting combined with the sensibility of architecture gave me a complete appreciation for each designed lighting object.
Lamps on lamps on lamps on lamps on lamps.
I was glad to be introduced to the architecture of Carlo Scarpa over this weekend as well. His designs are unexpected, esoteric, and from an ambiguous ancient past or far future. Something about his architecture, and I can’t quite put my finger on it, reminds me of Eero Saarinen’s buildings that I’ve visited. If I had to put it into words, the architecture seems otherworldly and full of secrets that only the architect knows.
Scarpa’s Olivetti showroom. Scarpa was the master of weird stairs.This stairset from a Saarinen church in my hometown reminds me of Scarpa’s details.
When I arrived in Zurich on Saturday, I needed to eat. A google search for “vegan” lead me to a cafe a few blocks from the main station, but avocado toast was 20 USD! Switzerland is expensive. I found a veggie burger in the area that was 16 with a student discount, but the prices were unexpected.
The brutalist-inspired structures were a nice break from the Milanese neo-classical buildings.
After eating, I had to decide if I wanted to spend the after noon exploring, or try to visit both design museums before they closed. It was three o’clock and they both closed at five, but I walked to Museum für Gestaltung in the Zurich University of the Arts. It was the smaller of the two spaces for the day, and they had an exhibition cover design from branding and graphics, to product design of pens and electronics, to a collection of William Morris print blocks and textiles. The other exhibition in the space covered the design of protest.
The museums had case studies of different types of design. Here is a pen progressing through prototype stages.
Next, I walked to the new Ausstellungsstrasse location. There, I visited the permanent collection, full of everyday objects from Braun Razors to actual sketches of fonts by the influential Swiss designer Adrian Frutiger (creator of one of my favorite fonts: Avenir).
This chair by Mario Botta was a great example of post-modern furniture.
I really enjoyed their collection showing the history of furniture in Europe. In particular, the collection of 80’s post-modern furniture caught my eye and I took the time to sketch a chair and a task lamp.
Task lamps are quickly becoming my favorite category of design object.
Sunday was my day to explore. I had a ticket to Basel in the northwest for any time during the day, so I woke up early, checked out of my AirBnB, and walked back toward the interior of the city. My first stop was MAME, a third wave coffee shop owned by a Canadian couple. My coffee was carefully extracted through a V60 and I made friends with a Portuguese man while sipping my floral coffee.
The Swiss National Museum was near the train station so I walked over to see what they had. They had an exhibition about design called “In Search of Style” which traced the development of the Arts and Crafts movement from John Ruskin and William Morris through the Weiner Werkstätte and Josef Hoffman. I took a few hours examining prints from The Grammar of Ornament and seeing important pieces of furniture and product design I’ve engrained into my memory from my History of Design studies.
I wasn’t allowed to take photos of the exhibit, but the gift shop was selling original prints of The Grammar or Ornament.
In the evening I took the one hour train from Zurich to Basel. Rather than taking public transportation to my AirBnB, I walked two hours along the Basel riverfront to Germany and then over to France to meet my host in Huningue. Along the way, I saw kids doing backflips off of a bridge into the river, and walked through a really interesting industrial area where people had turned the abandoned crates and pallets and used them to build small bars and art studios along the riverfront. Huningue was a cute small town. It was hard to believe that Germany was on the other side of a pedestrian bridge and that Basel, a city of 175,000 people, was accessible by walking through Germany for 10 minutes.
A photo of Germany and Switzerland from France.
My host offered to drive me to Vitra on Sunday morning, and I arrived on the campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany at 10am. Virta’s campus is a collection of incredible architecture hosting two museums, a 4 story showroom/shop, as well as factory space, a conference center, and a fire station. My day started at the exhibition space designed by Frank Gehry which tracked the interior architecture of night clubs from the 60’s through today. For me, it wasn’t that exciting, but it was my first encounter with Gehry’s architecture first hand, so I walked through the building and found the opening of spaces and surprised around every corner delightful.
The Vitra Campus used iconic furniture as outdoor seating.
I had an architecture tour of the campus that started an hour and a half later, so next I walked to Vitra Haus, a building designed by Herzog & de Meuron, which looks like a pile of houses stacked on top of one another. I’ve never seen such a collection of designed good in my life. Vitra’s flagship store, it housed tables, chairs, lamps, toys, and everyday objects. I walked through the store for an hour and a half and systematically sat on every chair of interest, including a ton of Eames designed furniture (Vitra was Europe’s manufacturer of Eames’s furniture and had good working relationship with Herman Miller). In Vitra Haus, I kept coming across chairs that I really liked, and on the top floor I found an exhibit about the designer Jean Prouvé — an engineer turned designer.
A weird display of Prouvé furniture in Vitra Haus.
At 11:30, I met my tour guide and two fellow tour-takers. My new friends were from California, one an interior designer and his partner a doctor. Our tour guide was an architect from Sweden and she brought us into the restricted interior part of the campus. We started at the Buckminster Fuller Geodesic Dome, then a prefabricated and modular building for a gas station designed by my new design interest Prouvé, then walked us over to the real gem of the campus: Zaha Hadid’s first structure. This fire station was a flying collection of heavy concrete magically suspended in air with no parallel lines and no obvious structure. It was absolutely incredible. The craziest thing about this building is that Hadid had her studio for 12 years before she was awarded a project, and this project was a building for a volunteer fire-fighting team that was funded by this private company.
Zaha Hadid’s first building was this volunteer fire station on Vitra campus.
As the architecture tour continued, we learned that the Vitra campus had burned down in the 90’s. Each of the buildings that were put up after the fire had the task of being architectural masterpieces, but had the task of not overwhelming the important building by Hadid. It was really interesting how architects approached the problem. One used a bridge to frame the station, and others used humble materials. Our group was great since we were each well-informed about design, and we casually chatted about our design interests as we walked through the factory and other buildings on campus.
The largest building, the community was worried about the size. The architect finished the building with this wavy fiberglass and used an amorphous shape to make the building visually smaller.
The tour ended at a conference building by Tadao Ando. Before the tour, I had a vague idea that he built with concrete, but I had no idea how unique and memorable his architecture would be. We entered the building through a narrow entryway and entered a conference room finished with warm plywood, board formed concrete, and glass. Our tour guide pointed out the level of detail; the lines from the concrete pour lined up perfectly with lights, windows, and other elements in the architecture. Nothing was left to chance. Ando dug a courtyard into the ground an designed the house from an elliptical base that allowed light to penetrate into the ground floor and basement. The floor plan was asymmetrical, unpredictable, and full of surprises. Natural light penetrated in all of the right spots and narrow entries between curved and straight walls opened up into voluminous spaces.
This room was a library that had natural light in the reading nook.
After the tour ended, I spend a few minutes picking wild cherries and exchanged information with my new friends to keep in touch. The last building to visit was the owners’ of Vitra’s personal collection of chairs. I started in the basement and found Charles Eames’s personal office reconstructed. When he died, a large portion of his estate was sent to Vitra and they have a great archive of his work. The ground floor contained stacks and stacks of iconic chairs, much the like that stacks of a library. It was ordered chronologically starting with object by Morris & Co, Frank Lloyd Wright, and moved through mid-century and contemporary designs. I couldn’t believe the collection. Any chair important to the story of design history was in front of me, and I took the time to observe and sketch.
Chairs on chairs on chairs on chairs on chairs.
The rest of my day was travel. I grabbed a soup from the cafe and walked twenty minutes in the rain to the nearest tram station. The tram took me over the border to Switzerland and I took the first train to Zurich. I had a few hours to kill before my train to Milan, so I walked to the old town and found a vegan hotdog vendor. I connected to the wifi and found that the birth place of the dada art movement was very close, so I walked to Cabaret Voltaire and walked through the space, imagining the shenanigans that probably took place over the years.
Classic Swiss design in the train station.
It was an action packed weekend, and when I arrived back to my apartment around midnight I slept.
I brought my own lunch to Alessi, so when our bus stopped in Omegna for lunch, I took the opportunity to explore this small lake town.
Lago d’Orta
First, I did the obvious thing; I walked along the waterfront until the buildings turned to residential homes. The vibes were similar to Como, and after sitting on the water for a few minutes, I turned around to see what was further in the city.
The streets were narrow and lined with shops from the north end of the lake. I peeked into the gelato shops as I walked past hoping to find blatant signage that read “vegan”, but I didn’t have any luck. I came to an old church with open doors, peeked inside, then ducked around the side where I could see a pedestrian way. It wrapped around to the back of the church and turned into a suspended walkway over a calm river of clear water.
The River – I tried to find the name but it’s not even on google maps.
When the suspended walkway ended on land, I followed the fork toward an iron gate and discovered a park called Parco Della Fantasia. Some kids were playing on a small zipline, there were brutalist planters over 10 feet tall, and an large eclectic building. The building held Omegna’s Museum of Art and Industry. On one side of the building, I was able to pay 2 Euros and then walk to the other to enter the museum.
Kids playing on the zipline
The museum was empty (I was literally the only person — there wasn’t even anyone to check my ticket) and I walked through the permanent collection of designed object which were manufactured in the area. One room was full of coffee makers, toasters, and other industrial goods with googly eyes tacked on. The second floor was dedicated to manufacturing processes and I was able to see how moka pots are forged and how table-ware is formed.
Products with googly eyes!Industrial Processes ExhibitIndustrial Processes Exhibit
The overnight train from Paris was packed; six travelers stacked into 6 bunk beds for 11 hours with frequent stops and persistent blue light. Barely enough space for my body, I arrived in Milan exhausted.. Milano Centrale welcomed me at six in the morning with a vegan brioche and a soy cappuccino. I started my sketch notebook and noted the the travel mishaps and the surprises of Paris in the days previous.
Overnight train from Paris to Milan.
Discussing the Futurists this week led me to examine my own past. As a teenager, I was inspired by similar propaganda which called for a break with history, though strongly against the misogyny and nationalism of the Marinetti. Looking back at the writings from one of the manifestos from my teenage years, I found writings in accordance with the Futurists, with the same sense of urgency as the Futurist Manifesto.
“It is thus that each of us is dominated by history: the past lies upon us like a dead hand, guiding and controlling as if from the grave. At the same time as it gives the individual a conception of herself, an “identity,” it piles weight upon her that she must fight to shake off if she is to remain light and free enough to continue reinventing her life and herself. It is the same for the artist: even the most challenging innovations eventually become crutches and clichés. Once an artist has come up with one good solution for a creative problem, it is hard for her to break free of it to conceive of other possible solutions. That is why most great artists can only offer a few really revolutionary ideas: they become trapped by the very systems they create, just as these systems trap those who come after. It is hard to do something entirely new when one finds oneself up against a thousand years of painting history and tradition. And this is the same for the lover, for the mathematician and the adventurer: for all, the past is an adversary to action in the present, an ever-increasing force of inertia that must be overcome.”
And so I’ve found myself suspended between the overwhelming presence of design in the city and the gritty underbelly of radical politics. Professor insists that design is a means to a political end, but I’m still trying to figure out how design, which is typically reserved for turning materials into commodities, can be related to the things I care about. Regardless, I’m excited to be in Milan, surrounded by both well-considered chairs and insurrectionary graffiti.
Tear down the prisons and the world that creates them.
—————
Aside from the big ideas of design and revolution, I’ve taken a few moments to find the city on my own. The ossuary in the middle of the city was a literal tower of bones and skulls of the poor who died in the local hospital. It’s only a few blocks away from the Duomo, off to the side of another cathedral.
San Bernardino alle Ossa
A quick train ride brought my housemate Robert and me to Genoa, home of Christopher Columbus and focaccia. We left the train station and ducked into a narrow alley which climbed up a hill. “There must be a castle at the top, right?” I asked Robert when I realized I was already drenched in sweat. There was in fact a castle at the top, and we visited the collection of an Italian colonizer who had collected artifacts from all over the world.
Castello D’Albertis Museum of World Cultures
Descending back into the port city, we grabbed some food from the grocery and sat on the stairs leading up to the Cattedrale di San Lorenzo, a surprising building from the 12th century made of black and white checkered marble.
