DESIGN NEWS
A selection of news related to interior design, architecture, product design and art, from a wide range of international publications.
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ARCHITECTURE
Part good neighbor and part recluse, N is a house with a split personality. The latest from Tokyo architect Jun Aoki.
from Wallpaper
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INTERIOR DESIGN
Fasano Hotel by Philippe Starck. The revamping of an icon in Sao Paulo - Brasil . from Interni
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DESIGNERS
Vico Magistretti. The real genius. This is an interview from March 22, 2000. Magistretti passed away last year.
from designboom
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ART
Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990–2005
March 1, 2008 — May 25, 2008
For decades, Annie Leibovitz has artistically captured the icons of popular culture with her award-winning photography. Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990–2005 looks at 200 of these photos as well as those she has taken of her family and close friends, and thus views a full “photographer’s life.” As Leibovitz says: “I don’t have two lives. This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it.”
Included in this exhibition are portraits of the pregnant Demi Moore, Nelson Mandela in Soweto, and George W. Bush in the White House; searing photo-journalism from the siege of Sarajevo; haunting landscapes from the American West and Jordan; and personal photos documenting the birth of her three daughters and other scenes of private family life. Legion of Honor
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BOOKS
Mateo Kries and Alexander Von VegesackJoe Colombo: Inventing the Future
This is an unbelievably beautiful catalog of the work of a very proficient designer who, unfortunately, died "before his time". Long overdue! The illustrations are gorgeous. Most of the illustrations are in color. The book's "housing" is certainly in his "style".
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EVENTS
Brussels, until 9 Mar, Civa - Centre International pour la Ville, l'Architecture et le Paysage (55, Rue de l'Ermitage) presents a major exhibition on the first Italian museum devoted to contemporary creativity. The show, entitled MAXXI musée Rome: Zaha Hadid Architects, narrates through images, photographs, videos, projects and models, the entire complex history of the Museum, from its conception to its imminent opening (in 2009): from the competition announced in 1998, to the finalists, to the winning project by Zaha Hadid; from the hyper-technological worksite to the activities already in progress and the collections already acquired. And the scenarios for the future. www.civa.be
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DZINE FLOOR SAMPLE SALE
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This month we want to focus on one of the most creative designers who ever lived, Joe Colombo. Paolo Boffi describes him as the "most unexpected" designer he ever worked with. Gae Aulenti said of him "he was someone who shouldn't have died young, because he could have accomplished so much in his life".
Don't miss the side links to view a very interesting house by Japanese architect Jun Aoki and Hotel Fasano in Sao Paulo by Philippe Starck.
In 1954 Colombo was put in charge of an exhibit of ceramics from the International Meetings at Albisola for the 10th Milan Triennial. He also built several "television shrines" for the Triennial which were open-air environments for showcasing television designs. In the late 1950s he went to school at the Faculty of Architecture and designed his first project, a condominium, in 1956. In 1962 he opened his own studio in Milan designing architecture and furniture. In 1964 he was awarded an IN-Arch prize for the interior of a hotel in Sardinia. The landmark feature of the design was a double ceiling illuminated from within and broken up on the exterior by protruding prisms that reflected and refracted the light. |
Joe Colombo - Inventing the future
Joe Colombo (1930-1971) was born in Milan, Italy and went to school at the Brera Academy of Fine Art where he studied painting and sculpture. He entered the avant-garde art scene of the early fifties as part of the "Nuclear Movement" of painters who sought to break down the formal, static boundaries of painting with more organic images bursting out of the growing international anxiety about the nuclear bomb. This was the perfect environment for Colombo to begin germinating his philosophies on designs for the future. His sketches and plans for underground "nuclear cities" included airways crowded with space shuttles and rockets and a subterranean metropolis with layers for storage, transportation and living. Throughout his professional life he would focus some of these more outrageous visions into a design aesthetic built on the theory that, "we will have to make the home live for us, for our needs, for a new way of living more consistent with the reality of today and tomorrow.
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During the sixties, and until his death in 1971, Colombo produced an extraordinary number of furniture and appliance designs. Among some of his best known appliance designs are the "Optic" alarm clock (1970), an air conditioner for the company Candy, and the lighting fixtures "Spider" (1965) and "Circlope" (1970). His furniture designs from this period championed plastic as a viable modern material. His "Universale" chair (1965) was a single piece of plastic that was highly successful as was his "Boby" trolley (1970).
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Colombo also began working in plastic with self-contained units that provided all the services of a room. He believed that "all the objects needed in a house should be integrated with the usable spaces; hence, they no longer ought to be called furnishings but 'equipment.'" These "dynamic pieces of furniture" were useful because "habits change, the interior of rooms has to change with them." Some of his more interesting examples of this theory are the "Mini-kitchen" (1963) and the "Total Furnishing Unit" (1971) which breaks domestic living into a simple set of functions carried out within a modular Kitchen, Cupboard, Bed and Bathroom.
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Colombo believed that the designer was the "creator of the environment of the future" and he was completely committed to building a new language of interior design by creating entire, seamless environments for living rather than individual pieces of furniture. His progressive work was driven by the desire to create an object that was "autonomous, independent of its architectural container, and that can be coordinated and programmed to adapt in any spatial situation, in the present or future."
A drawing of the Total furnishing Unit. |
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Newly reissued by Boffi, the Mini Kitchen by Joe Colombo in white Corian, below. Above, the original version in wood from 1963.
The total furnishing unit circa 1971/72 also manufactured by Boffi.
Images and text courtesy of www.joecolombo.com and www.designboom.com. |
