Check out the amazing documentary Eames: The Architect and the Painter, about Charles and Ray Eames. Its a fascinating look into the evolution of their designs and the process behind their collaboration. The husband-and-wife team of Charles and Ray Eames were America’s most influential and important industrial designers. Admired for their creations and fascinating as individuals, they have risen to iconic status in American culture. ‘Eames: The Architect & The Painter’ draws from a treasure trove of archival material, as well as new interviews with friends, colleague, and experts to capture the personal story of Charles and Ray while placing them firmly in the context of their fascinating times.
Source: Vena Cava
Post by Coco Pastis
Last week the village of Hyères at the French Riviera hosted the 27th International Festival of Fashion & Photography. In the impressive decor of the Villa Noailles young artist pave their way to international succes. It’s a very avant garde festival, a bohemian home where trends are set, where open minds come together to look at the future. No better location than this one, visited by many great names.
Villa Noailles is an early modernist house, built by architect Robert Mallet-Stevens for art patrons Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles, between 1923 and 1927. It is located in the hills above Hyères, in the Var, southeastern France.
Charles de Noailles was born in 1891, and his wife Marie-Laure was born in 1902. They were married in 1923. Before their marriage, they became friends of artist-filmmaker Jean Cocteau, and Noailles commissioned a portrait of his wife by Pablo Picasso in 1923.
In 1923, they signed a contract with the architect Robert Mallet-Stevens to build a summer villa in the hills above the city of Hyères. Construction was underway for three years, and eventually also included a triangular Cubist garden designed by Gabriel Guevrekian.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the couple were important patrons of modern art, particularly surrealism; they supported film projects by Man Ray, Salvador Dalí, and Luis Buñuel; and commissioned paintings, photographs and sculptures by Balthus, Giacometti, Constantin Brâncuşi, Miró, and Dora Maar. Villa Noailles features prominently in Man Ray’s film Les Mystères du Château de Dé.
Source: The Red List
Post by Coco Pastis
When a collection of furniture reminds you of the hit 1980s game show, Blockbusters, you know you’re onto a winner.
But the Rayuela stools from Spanish furniture designers Alvaro Catalan de Ocon, are of course so much more than that.
A repeated tile pattern is what makes these pieces so successful as the designs can be infinitely produced. Using the humble rhombus as a starting shape, three are combined to make a hexagon which, according to Alvaro Catalan de Ocon, is the best way to cover an area.
Matt surfaces with textured grain work extremely well together, with the designer’s mixing waxed oak, walnut and maple to form this unusual, graphic optical effect due to the different colours. As a single stool or a tessellated collection of them, they’re strong simpleness demonstrates why the range is at Milan this year.
source: It’s Nice That
post by Coco Pastis
The upcoming Important Design Auction at Wright includes this rare lamp, designed for the 1958 Venice Biennale. This example comes from the collection of Maruizio Albarelli, the director of Vetri Seguso d’Arte. Sold with original framed drawing and framed vintage photograph of this work.
Floor Lamp, by Flavio Poli, Exhibited: Venice Biennale, 1958, Italy, Estimate: $20,000–30,000, Auction at Wright
source : tintr.net / Thanks for sharing Hans!
NOWNESS invited Finland’s top contemporary design talent to showcase their work in the home of the country’s greatest most celebrated aesthete, Alvar Aalto. Today preserved as an
atmospheric museum, the Alvar Aalto house, which was the architect’s domicile and studio from 1936 until his death, is an intimate memorial to the modernist master. The clean lines, functionality and unpretentious nature of classic Finnish design pioneered by Aalto, Ilmari Tapiovaara and Kaj Franck still permeates much of the work by the discipline’s current stars. Here we select our top Finnish designers for further scrutiny.
Jussi Takkinen “Untitled” folding chair and “Osio” wall clock, Matti Syrjälä “Riuku” stool and “Loiste” storm lantern, Hannu Kähönen “Kapeneva” bench, Ville Kokkonen “White 4″ table lamp, Ilkka Suppanen “Kaasa” lantern, Klaus Haapaniemi “Rabbit Throw”, Marko Nenonen “Lounge Chair”, Harri Koskinen “Remain in Light”
source: dailyicon.net, nowness.com
While i was browsing a 1969 magazine i founded a set of pictures with some known and unknown designers. Most interesting to me where 2 two last pictures of a chair that was created by J. Gardel for d’inox-industrie.
The 1st picture of the coffee table is a design by François Monnet. Also check out the picture with the desk and wall sculpture it was originally produced by Mobilier national and presented at the SAD 1968. According to the information on the site of Suzanne Demisch demischdanant.com Lesetre went on to make about 10 of these desks, each in a different color or finish. The elegance of steel is present in each of these objects.
source : old 1969 magazine / demischdanant.com
Anyone who has yielded to the luxurious embrace of an Eames lounge chair is well acquainted with its sensual and aesthetic pleasures but Charles and Ray Eames, the husband and wife team behind the enduring classic furniture designs are less familiar.
Their partnership and multifaceted careers — they’re credited with both reinventing the concept of the chair and putting the playfulness back into modernism — are explored in Eames: The Architect and the Painter, Jason Cohn and veteran broadcast producer Bill Jersey’s well-crafted, straightforward and insightful documentary. A must for those with an interest in modern design, the film’s portrait of an unconventional marriage during the 1950s, and the alchemy that fueled a professional collaboration between intensely creative personalities, who perfectly complemented one another, should extend its appeal beyond the ranks of subscribers toArchitectural Digest and Dwell.
Narrated by James Franco, the First Run Features doc opens theatrically in New York and L.A. November 18, and will have its broadcast premiere December 19 as part of the PBS American Masters series.
Described by those who knew them as a union between “a painter that didn’t paint and an architecture school drop-out who never got his license,” the pair initially dedicated themselves to a utopian vision of promulgating beauty to a broad audience through high quality, low cost, mass produced furnishings. Together they helped transform 20th century design in the post-war era.
A photographer, furniture designer and a filmmaker who made over 100 shorts including the much imitated Powers of Ten, Charles was a charismatic, workaholic visionary driven by a voracious intellectual curiosity. Their Venice, California studio, likened to a circus and Disneyland by those who reminisce about working there, was built on the model of Renaissance art studio with the master at the top of the pyramid and a host of talented assistants executing his vision.
Not surprisingly, Charles often overshadowed his wife but the film goes to some lengths to correct the misperception that he was the only Eames who counted. A painter with a keen design sense, exceptionally gifted in the realm of color and a notorious perfectionist, Ray’s aesthetic contributions to the design process were crucial to their success, a fact not lost on her husband who once acknowledged, “Anything I can do, she can do better.”
She was also an obsessive collector and maker of notes on cigarette papers. Her illustrated letters to Charles, along with some 350,000 photographs and voluminous documents archived at the Library of Congress, and shared with the filmmakers, are a delightful reflection of a teeming creative mind.
The doc incorporates archival photographs, television appearances, clips from Eames’ films as well as footage of the futuristic IBM Pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair and the couple’s trendsetting Pacific Palisades home, perched on a bluff overlooking the ocean and filled with fine art and an evolving collage of objects and contraptions that caught their eye. Family members, historians, critics and fellow artists, who worked with or simply admired them, add pertinent commentary, while editor, Don Bernier, smoothly integrates a wealth of material and contributions by multiple lensers.
Venue: Mill Valley Film Festival (First Run Features) Director: Jason Cohn, Bill JerseyScreenwriter: Jason Cohn Producer: Jason Cohn, Bill Jersey Executive producer: Shirley, Kessler, Susan Lacy Director of photography: Ed Marritz, Jon Shenk, Tom Hurwitz, Ulrich Bonnekamp, Thad Wadleigh, Brian Wingert, Andrew Dryer, Petr Stepanek Production designer: none listed Music: Michael Bacon Costume designer: none liste Editor: Don BernierNo Rating, 84 minutes
source : hollywoodreporter.com / imdb.com /
director : Jason Cohn, Bill Jersey
Buy this DVD on Amazon
More than half a century after its debut, Chris Bangle, former chief of design at BMW, reviews the Bisiluro, the legendary but ill-fated racing car designed by Carlo Mollino for the 1955 Le Mans 24-hour endurance race.
They say that the earliest design language for the primitive is that of repetition and symmetry. Regarding the design of “things that move”, history gives us quite a catalogue of proposals to improve the breed by echoing a form across some sort of bridging element. With names like “twinpod”, “twin-boom”, “twin-fuselage”, “doublehull”, or “catamaran”, the designer’s fascination with mirroring a good idea has been around ever since the Garden of Eden, when God decided two breasts looked seriously cooler than one.
Car Designers owe the origins of their craft to the hull-lofting techniques of naval architects, and while it is true that for centuries there have been parallel-hull designs for boats (from a Tahitian out-rigger to a divided hull that Da Vinci sketched), the real inspiration for modern twin-fuselage wheeled machines are the aircraft of World War II. (To be fair, the twin-boom Fokker M.9 was of World War I vintage.) Pilot and aircraft aficionado engineer Mollino must have been highly influenced by innovations from the War, and perhaps he knew that German engineers had prototyped a Messerschmitt Bf 109Z-1 “Zwilling” with a single pilot flying a two-fuselage fighter. Certainly, the sexy Lockheed P-38 inspired his generation of Car Designers as did the F-82 “Twin Mustang”, which was built from 1946 to 1953.
Read more at domus: The Asymmetric Racer by Chris Bangle, Bisiluro Racing Car, by Carlo Mollino, for the 1955 Le Mans 24-hour Endurance Race.
A baseball glove for a chair, films and performances as new forms of communication in architecture, modules for creating entire interiors, underground cities, illuminated plastic snakes, a habitat in a car, a cloud making for a ceiling luminaire… – the collection exhibited in 1972 at New York’s MoMA was not just a hodge-podge of shrill new creations from a bunch of crazy young Italian designers. Rather, the legendary exhibition “Italy –The New Domestic Landscape” curated by Emilio Ambasz showcased the Italian artists’ ideas to epitomize a generation of designers caught between conformism, rebellion, and utopias of the future. It came at the right time, for it evidenced the renouncing of the lofty ideals of functionalism while welcoming the merry and colorful possibilities afforded by the new plastics, the utopias of new forms of cohabitation, the critical stance taken by the recently formed eco-movement, a young generation’s euphoric mood and skepticism.
Groups such as Superstudio and 9999 exhibited their critical alternative designs as they redefined the relationships between product, architecture, and urban space. A new type of designer – epitomized by Ettore Sottsass – presented itself to the world. Films and environments were created exclusively for the exhibition. Everyday objects came to be interpreted as “micro projects”, architecture and design as socio-critical commentary. With designs located between marketability and utopia, between Bel Design and Radical Design this spectacular exhibition of Italian design can be conceived of as one of the most important design exhibitions in the 20th century, which took a key role in establishing the design and architectural scene in Italy: The grand masters of today – from Aulenti to Bellini, Colombo, Mari, Pesce, Sapper and Sottsass to Zanuso – were there at the time. For decades to come, “Italian design” was synonymous with the design avant-garde. The exhibition featured as a benchmark long after it finished, and its title is still being referenced today. The exhibition catalog, the original of which has long since become a collector’s item for bibliophiles, is there for all those who sadly missed the exhibition at the time. It still succeeds in conveying this spirit of departure and the critical spirit of the time, of a creative stance, even, that took social responsibility as second nature.
If nothing else, the loose cut-outs of objects dancing around in the transparent jacket were a clear indication that things got moving. An armchair no longer had to comply with traditionalists’ or functionalists’ ideas, but was free to take on the shape of an enlarged meadow made of polyurethane foam, such as the “Pratone” chair designed by the Strum group. There were luminaires in the shapes of pills, while a table no longer resembled the modest piece of wooden furniture that was made to last but a somewhat shrill and more transient item of bright red plastic. The role of furniture was no longer simply representative, but intended to enable new ways of living as flexible modules. The “new landscape of the home” had indeed become enriched by a number of typologies, leaving behind some archetypes while consciously picking up others and pushing them into the absurd.
That said, the catalog did not simply reproduce the objects by these young and more or less rebellious architects and designers (as we would find in today’s books about emerging talents). It moreover evaluated and grouped them according to their key aspects, formal and technical significance and “socio-cultural implications”, according to greater flexibility of use and relevance as regards different “environments” and “counterworlds”. The items were juxtaposed with more than a dozen articles: “Historical essays” illustrated the connections with Italian Art Nouveau as they did with the futurists, while “critical articles” placed design and architecture in a social and economic context, portraying them as an expression of new ways of life and social utopias.
Today, to some readers the book may amount to no more than a compilation of old and familiar “design classics” that have adapted effortlessly to the world of long-established items and luxurious goods. However, if we use the texts to allocate the designs within their historical contexts, they will as before reveal to us the ideas of social change, of future visions and utopias, something that was particularly evident in architecture and design. The new shapes of products and innovative forms of living are an expression of the search for a new society – a far cry from the mere desire to shop or copy the latest trends. The issues concerned revolve around questions such as how people might live together in a rapidly changing world, how we treat nature and handle resources or how we deal with social responsibility, issues that to this day have remained – or have again come to be – surprisingly topical.
For that which we today describe using trendy buzzwords such as “sustainability” and “social design” has by no means been invented recently, for it concerns essential features of design, such as can be found in the early days of the discipline as well as in the socio-critical designs displayed in the MoMA exhibitions. A legendary snapshot of the history of design, “Italy – The New Domestic Landscape” is a well of inspiration for what is now the third generation of designers, as it detects the essence of utopia in the designs and presents them as examples for what design can best achieve. It provides encouragement when it comes to shedding the ballast of that which has become obsolete and to discuss the social relevance of one’s own work, while at the same time pushing to achieve highly expressive and emotional designs.
In the spring of 2009, an exhibition and a symposium held at New York’s Columbia University devoted itself entirely to the legendary exhibition, prompting witnesses or protagonists of that time to evaluate the events from today’s point of view and seeking to compare and contrast the groups and tasks at that time with those of today. To this day, the exhibition is regarded as having spearheaded a period of change and new beginnings, as an entire generation of designers freed itself from the shackles of dogmas and constraints, and – still considered a strong point in today’s designers – reconceptualized many things, lending new materials, changed values and a new spirit of life an adequate form of expression. Almost 40 years following its publication the accompanying catalog to the exhibition “Italy – The New Domestic Landscape” still makes for a striking example that such a creative stance can indeed culminate in designs that are not only a clear expression of the ideas of their time, but can likewise morph into trailblazing typologies that are here to stay.
source : stylepark.com
