The first experiments with 4D printing may have started in more recent months, but in the last few years many of us have been busy familiarising themselves with 3D printing, a technology that has been pervading different fields and professions.
Dedicated projects in art, architecture, interior design or fashion have proved 3D printing can definitely help developing new and experimental shapes, high-performing parts or optimized products. Yet for most of us this technology and the possibilities offered may still be difficult to grasp. Hod Lipson and Melba Kurman come to our rescue in the recently published volume Fabricated (John Wiley).
The book subtitle - The New World of 3D Printing - though generic, perfectly hints at the wider scope and applications that this new technology may have. The volume - divided in 14 chapters - opens with a brief history of 3D printing that dates the first experiments around the mid-'80s. The authors then focus on explaining the different methods, families of printers and materials, while also analysing design software and design optimisation, and the advantages this technology may offer in fields like medicine, medication, food, design and fashion (readers of this site will rediscover in the book Kerrie Luft, Hoon Chung and the Continuum Fashion duo).
The most interesting chapters look at the impact this technology may have on our lives if we ever managed to print human organs or foods with specific dietary requirements, but the financial aspects are also tackled in several parts of the books analysing customisation and personalisation processes and the consequences of 3D printing on the labour market.
Yet Lipson and Kurman do not make the mistake of seeing everything through rose-tinted glasses: while in one chapter their tone may be more optimistic, in another they remind us about legal problems linked to 3D printing, from health and safety standards to issues regarding property law and copyright infringement or even criminal law (think about recent issues about downloadable designs for weapons, or the consequences of managing to use a 3D printer to create a new breed of chemical drugs).
The authors also tackle the green issue: discarded prototypes littering university laboratories or design studios will turn into a new threat to the environment if we don't start developing more eco-friendly materials like the desert sand employed by Markus Kayser for his "Solar Sintering" design project. So, while 3D printing may be the future, keeping on experimenting is definitely the path forward.
Some issues the authors look at in the volume - illustrated by a lot of black and white pictures and a few ones in colour, but written in an extremely accessible language and therefore ideal for everyone, from students to teachers (a lengthy chapter analyses the benefits of letting a 3D printer into the classroom) and researchers, but also amateur 3D printing fans - may find a solution soon, others are instead set to generate wider debates on a technological, but also on a moral and ethical level in the next decade. In the meantime, if you want to know more about the magic and the perils of 3D printing, you should definitely pick a copy of Fabricated.
Self-assembly - that is the spontaneous association or formation of molecules into organized structures under a defined condition - is a key scientific principle of disciplines such as nanotechnology. The fascinating idea of applying the self-assembly concept to other fields, structures and materials is currently being investigated by a dedicated experimental unit, the Self-Assembly Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Part of MIT’s Center for International Design, the Lab, founded and led by architect, designer, computer scientist and artist Skylar Tibbits, reunites a variety of professionals from multi-disciplinary environments, all focusing on analizying the possibilities offered by self-assembling structures on different scales. This is actually the most revolutionary aspect of Tibbits' research, creating self-constructing and manufacturing systems for large-scale applications or transformable and reconfigurable structures that could improve our lives.
Tibbits developed projects revolving around three principles - programmable components, simple design sequences and energy. Working with molecular biologist Arthur Olson and in collaboration with Autodesk Inc. and experimenting with 3D printing and embedded magnets, Tibbits created molecular structures trapped into glass flasks that would self-assemble when energy was added by shaking the flask (Chiral Self-Assembly project at Autodesk University 2012, Las Vegas, NV).
The same principle was applied to "The Self-Assembly Line", a large-scale and interactive installation activated by stochastic rotation presented at the 2012 TED Conference in Long Beach, CA.
Further exciting projects focused on transformable 3D shapes and self-foldable 4D printed surfaces. 4D printing, developed in a collaboration between Stratasys’ Education and R&D departments and MIT’s Self-Assembly Lab, explores the pure programmability of materials and the possibility of embedding transformation from one shape to another, using only water as its activation energy.
While certain aspects of forming unique structures with programmable self-assembly systems still need to be investigated, it is exciting to think about how they may revolutionize certain industries. It is even more intriguing to think that self-assembling furniture or buildings may be a future - but not so distant - reality and that a new and self-assembling world is not only possible, but may be soon at hand.
How did you come up with the concept of self-assembling structures in the first place? Skylar Tibbits: Self-assembly is a fundamental principle in many different disciplines, from physics to biology, chemistry, material science, computer science and robotics and many other people came to this topic from the biology side, I came instead from an architecture background. Then I came to MIT and did Design Computation and Computer Science, so I came to the world of self-assembly and programmable materials through the computer science and robotics side.
Can you introduce us to the Self-Assembly Lab at MIT? Skylar Tibbits: I set up this research laboratory that falls within the architecture department. The goal of the laboratory is to study the principles of self-assembly and programmable materials in a cross-disciplinary environment, understanding the fundamental knowledge, pushing that forward and discovering new scales of application, while working on applied research and collaborating with industry leading companies in various sectors, and scales. The people within the lab are very much cross-disciplinary people with various backgrounds - from mechanical engineering, computer science, architecture, design and media.
What's the most exciting aspect of working on these projects with professionals from different fields? Skylar Tibbits: Each one brings a different experience to the table and they have different skill sets, but one of the things that we share and that crosses all the disciplines is the interest in these principles - utilizing self-assembly and programmable materials. They have become common interests in very different disciplines, trajectories and skill sets, but I think the collaboration works well for these reasons. The main collaborator on the biology side and molecular self-assembly work is molecular biologist, Arthur Olson, at the Scripps Research Institute, another one is Carlos Olguin, with his research group at Autodesk, that's more on the software side, and then we've been working with Marcus Quigley, a civil engineer at Geosyntec Consultants, on programmable water infrastructure systems.
What's the biggest challenge in these sort of projects? Skylar Tibbits: Scaling up these technologies and getting them applied and distributed into real world applications. Part of the research consists of trying to understand how do these systems can become efficient and functional, how we can scale and apply them in industries to make really impactful changes on people's lives. Another problem, or rather ambition, is to make these systems as universal as possible with the 4D printing technologies so that we can really extend the palette of these adaptive programmable materials.
At the moment there is a lot of interest in the possibilities that 3D printing can give us, what is instead 4D printing? Skylar Tibbits: The idea of 4D printing is to give the opportunity to materials to adapt and respond to how we are using them or how the environment changes around them. 4D printing is printing multiple materials that transform over time, and they can transform in shape or in properties. They could be conceived as customisable smart materials, that can be printed in any shape or configuration we want, so that they can go from one state to another state completely on their own. So while with 3D printing we are printing static objects, with 4D printing we are printing active materials.
Is it possible to create self-reconfiguring systems? Skylar Tibbits: One possible application is self-repairing systems or systems that are much more adaptable. So for example one person who's much heavier than someone who is lighter sits on a chair or you lie down rather than sitting on a chair, and that material may respond and be more resilient and break less. I think there are many applications, one of them is that, responding to the user and have it interacting with the system. Another one is self-reconfiguring applications, so if you flat pack something and have it shipped then you have active energy that transforms it in other structures or you could have one product transforming into something else when you need it or when you want it to be something else. So there are a lot of scenarios from re-configurability to construction, assembly, deployment or self-repairing.
In which kind of fields would you like to see the applications you're researching being employed? Skylar Tibbits: I'm really interested in some of the product applications, like sportswear, or responsive materials, products that could be in the consumer marketplace and that could be highly adaptive. Most of our products today have a very fixed capacity, they have one function and one lifespan and that's it. But we can imagine highly performing systems that transform as we evolve or as we have different demands.
So far what kind of materials have you employed? Skylar Tibbits: Before we did the 4D printing work, we were using every kind of material, from metal to foam and plastic or wood. We actually tried to use as many materials as possible. We can try to use a lot of different materials, it's not like we must use a high tech material, it's more about how the material responds to energy. In terms of 4D, we've been collaborating with Stratasys, the leader in 3D printing, they have a multi-material printer called the Connex and they have been developing new materials such as a synthetic polymer that extends 150% in water.
Could this be considered as a new industrial revolution? Skylar Tibbits: There is a lot of talk and research focused on these topics and many people have published articles claiming that this is a new industrial revolution. I'm not sure if I'll go all the way to say that, but there are definitely a lot of things happening at the same time in different fields and there is a lot of talk about additive manufacturing, new possibilities for customisation, and smart materials. All these things together may lead to this new industrial revolution, but, from my point of view, the focus is on how we collaborate with materials, how we can program them, how they can be smarter and assemble, reconfigure, and even replicate themselves.
Would you like to introduce your projects at international events such as the Venice Art or Architecture Biennale? Skylar Tibbits: Yes, definitely. We haven't been invited so far to the Biennale, but we come to Europe all the time to do workshops, give lectures and do collaborations. We try to look at all the different spectrums, from design to engineering, computer science, molecular biology and the art side as well, so we embrace all these disciplines.
Do you feel that the profession of the future will somehow be a combination of different disciplines together? Skylar Tibbits: I certainly think that there is a disciplinary convergence happening between some topics, specifically self-assembling and programmable materials, in some cases some disciplines seem to be merging - computer science is looking more like synthetic biology, which is looking a lot more like design or engineering. So there is a sort of fluctuation between them, the difference only stands at the scalar limits, but the principles and the topics are very similar across the disciplines. I think the interesting thing is crossing between all these disciplines that is allowing new opportunities to collaborate, and that's really exciting.
Image credits:
4D Printing: Multi-Material Shape Change A collaboration between: Skylar Tibbits, The Self-Assembly Lab, MIT Shelly Linor & Daniel Dikovsky, Education & Research & Development, Stratasys Carlos Olguin, Bio/Nano Programmable Matter Research Group, Autodesk
In between one thing and the other I've been playing a bit with Processing and wondering if one day we will be able to apply specific patterns created with such programmes in the textile industries. While my doubts remain, I'm posting here the fruits of my session of Processing brainstorming. Enjoy!
“The Missoni myth is one of normality. They are the gods of knitwear, of pullovers, of simple dressing for everyday life, however costly. They are husband and wife. He's tall and she's small; he's very good-looking and she volitive: they're like a couple out of a fifties musical. They've been together for ages; in fact they're getting on, they've got grown up children, they're grandparents (…) Normal, thoroughly normal, a real treat: just like you and me. The Missonis have taken years and years to create their myth,” The Italian Look Refected by Silvia Giacomoni
In the early '60s, Luis Hidalgo, buyer at La Rinascente, suggested Italian fashion journalist Maria Pezzi to go and meet Ottavio and Rosita Missoni, definying them as "the three G's: gentle, genial and generous". Pezzi agreed and was fascinated by the husband and wife team and by their colourful knits with zigzag patterns. Rather than using words, the late Pezzi claimed, it would have been better to draw the knitwear they produced to give a better idea of the graphic and geometric effects the duo created with their looms. Yet fashion was just one side of the family: the history of the Missonis was indeed told throughout the years also in different contexts: Italian sport journalists like Gianni Brera often wrote about the atheletic career of Ottavio, who died on Thursday in his home in the town of Sumirago.
Born in 1921, in Dubrovnik and growing up in Zadar, at the time part of the Italian territory, Ottavio "Tai" Missoni studied in Trieste and Milan, even though, as he recounted in his biography published in Italy in 2011, he preferred sport to studying. In the late '30s he was already a student champion and recordman. The war and four years of imprisonment in Egypt interrupted his career that he soon resumed at the end of the conflict.
In 1948, he took part in the Olympic Games in London as a member of the Italian 400m hurdles team. In London he met Rosita Jelmini who was studying there and in 1953 they got married, starting their adventure in knitwear. Ottavio already had some experience in garment manufacturing as he had been producing since 1948 in Trieste the trademark knitted "Venjulia" tracksuits also adopted by the Italian Olympic team.
The duo set up their first factory in the basement of their home in Gallarate, producing garments for Biki and, in 1958, colourful stripy shirt dresses for La Rinascente. Little by little, they developed new methods, working with different materials and multiple colours, coming up with a new concept of elegance based on individualism.
In the '60s the Missonis collaborated with Christiane Bailly; in 1964 the duo visited Paris and asked Emmanuelle Khanh to do a collection together. The French designer saw this opportunity as a chance to inject her fresh and young ideas into Missoni’s advanced knitwear and very gladly accepted. The results of this collaboration were presented in 1966 at the Gerolamo Theatre in Milan with a fun catwalk show.
A year later the Missoni team presented at the Pitti tradeshow their new collection. At the very last minute, Rosita realised the models’ underwear didn’t match with their futuristic and thin lame knits, so she sent the girls out without anything underneath, causing a little scandal while anticipating the "nude look". Scandalised, the organisers decided not to invite the couple at the next Pitti, but by then the fashion critics and buyers were hooked and success arrived also thanks to innovative catwalk shows such as the one at the Solari swimming pool in Milan with models floating on the water sitting on inflatable armchairs and sofas (by Quasar Khanh) pushed around by swimming champions.
American buyers dubbed Missoni's creations as "put together" designs, to highlight how the garments allowed customers to freely create their own style: the wearers could indeed pick and mix jumpers and trousers, skirts and tops, and create perfectly coordinated or uncoordinated outfits following their personal taste. The confirmation of their success, supported by prominent fashion editors such as Anna Piaggi (Ottavio stated about her: "Anna is a great character; she has very sensitive antennae, is professional to a degree, is always open-minded") and Diana Vreeland, arrived in 1973 when Tai and Rosita received the Neiman Marcus Fashion Award.
“We weren't born as designers, but as people who did things. They called us 'stilisti', designers, because they recognised a style in our products. We were only aware of creating fashion when people started to talk about it, after Anna Piaggi came to see us because she'd noticed some of our things at La Rinascente. Only later did we realise what was happening in the fashion world, what problems there were to do with image. We tried to learn, and we coped as a result, but always on our own. I used to do up the parcels and keep the accounts, but when I realised that the main thing was creativity, that the company worked because of the type of product it was manufacturing, I threw myself into that side of things, and so did Rosita,” Ottavio Missoni, 1984
When Missoni appeared on TV he never played the part of the designer; both Tai and Rosita also refused to do television adverts and publicity in certain newspapers and magazines. In the '80s, as the brand expanded also in other sectors through licensing deals, critics stated that the Missonis had done for knitwear what Le Corbusier did for concrete and Pucci did for prints - they gave it personality and autonomy.
Wool, mohair, silk, cotton, elasticised and Lurex yarns were employed to create herringbone-like motifs, abstract designs, asymmetrical decorations or zigzagging stripes, at times applied on pieces layered one on top of the other.
Ottavio and Rosita's vibrantly pictorial graphic effects called to mind dynamic and bright paintings such as those created by Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni and Carlo Carrà, artists belonging to the Futurist movement. A first exhibition featuring Missoni's work analysed from an artistic point of view was organised in the '70s in Venice; their creations were then presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1981 Ottavio's patchworks were also exhibited as innovative tapestries first in Milan and then at the Berkeley Art Museum, University of California.
In the meantime, while the company expanded into interior design founding the MissoniHome brand, directors and costume designers started turning up in Sumirago to pick up pieces for their films: Burt Lancaster donned Missoni cardigans in Luchino Visconti's Gruppo di famiglia in un interno; Mariangela Melato appeared in patchwork jumpers in Mario Monicelli's Caro Michele; Henry Fonda was pictured in a Missoni sweater when he got an Oscar for his final film role in On Golden Pond and Missoni's designs reappeared on Maria Schell in Hugh Brody's Nineteen Ninteen.
Nino Manfredi became a puzzling case also for Tai: the Italian actor wore in the film Nudo di donna a Missoni cardigan that soon became a Manfredi trademark. The actor regularly appeared in a Missoni jumper at festivals and on TV adverts (Tai joked in interviews saying that Manfredi had got a Missoni tattooed on his skin...) and was even buried in a Missoni design.
Charlotte Rampling got married in a design by Missoni, while Rudolf Nureyev's long and colourful knitted coat was often showcased in quite a few exhibitions about the dancer's costumes (and Nureyev in turn also became an inspiration for some of the house collections).
"We buy raw yarn and we dye it. We have hand-looms for making models and normal knitwear looms - I say normal, but actually our fabrics are so complicated that it takes an hour to make one metre. You have to realise that in one collection I may use up to fifteen or twenty different yarns, each one the result of perhaps thirty dyes; and in one garment there may be three different types of yarns, each one in different shades," Ottavio Missoni, 1984
Tai often claimed he was amazed by the fact that people working in very different fields, from actors and actresses to athletes, liked their designs as some deemed them elegant, others found them extremely comfortable. Yet the Missonis' favourite link outside the fashion industry remained the one with the stage.
In 1983 the company created the costumes for Donizetti's "Lucia di Lammermoor" at Milan's La Scala. The opera took pace in Scotland, a place the Missonis naturally considered as the perfect location for their wool designs. For the occasion they dressed the entire choir, producing all the costumes in Sumirago and following all the rehearsals in Milan.
Further collaborations followed: the Missonis dressed two youth orchestras, Claudio Abbado's and Gino Negri's, and created the golden fleece for the "Medea" ballet (1990) with costumes by Franca Squarciapino. One of the most important events that reunited fashion and sport and to which the family collaborated was the opening ceremony for the 1990 World Soccer Championships. The house made for this occasion colourful costumes representing Africa (documented through Maria Pezzi's drawings).
In the '90s the brand also created costumes included in "Step Into My Dream" for The Parsons Dance Company and, a few years later, the knit space-dyed stretch suits for the acrobatic performances by the Aeros company.
Rather than surviving the crisis, the main goal of the most recent years for the Missonis was how to preserve the image of products originally made on Coperdoni looms in Sumirago, while innovating the brand, that in the meantime kept on being honoured through awards (Rosita won Elle Decoration UK's "Best Fabric Award" in 2003 and Elle Decor International Design Award in 2005 and she was also elected Createur 2007 for Maison et Objet) and exhibitions such as "Workshop Missoni: Daring to be Different" (the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, London, 2009).
While the company extended the brand to Missoni Hotels in Edinburgh and Kuwait, it also launched collaborations with Havaianas, Converse, and Target, while turning to experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger to shoot the advert for the A/W 2010 collection.
Missoni was born as a family business and family remained central in all their ventures and activities: Ottavio and Rosita's three children all work for the brand while granddaughter Margherita, Missoni's accessories designer, is also the label's ambassador. To strengthen the idea of the brand being a family business, all the members often appeared in advertising campaigns such as the one shot by photographer Juergen Teller at James Brett’s Museum of Everything.
In more recent years, Ottavio dedicated himself to painting and tapestry, publishing his autobiography, Una Vita sul Filo di Lana (A Life on the Woollen Thread) in 2011. Last year during the London Olympic Games, his sport achievements were remembered through dedicated window shops and unofficial music tracks.
In January 2013 eldest child and company chief executive, Vittorio disappeared with his wife and four others while flying in a small plane over the coast of Venuzuela. The missing group remains presumed dead. Ottavio, who often remarked in interviews that he himself was amazed at the fact that, from a sportsman and athlete, he had turned into a successful fashion designer, is survived by his wife Rosita, his two other children, Luca and Angela (who has designed the ready-to-wear collections since 1996), and grandchildren, who seem to have inherited his passion for life.
In a 2009 interview Margherita stated: "My grandparents and my mother Angela taught me everything I know for what regards this industry, but they also taught me to distance myself from the fashion universe. A great passion for our job runs into the family, but we do also know that this is not the most important thing in the world, so we live our lives with lots of irony and detachment, since, after all, it’s just clothes."
Innovating tradition and doing so in a sustainable way is one of the key themes tackled by many professionals in different disciplines. Portuguese architect and product designer Pedro Campos Costa has tried through some of his projects based on interdisciplinary researches to explore this topic: his "Casa Não Casa" (House-non-House) is an experimental structure with mirror-like surfaces covered in photovoltaic cells that make it invisible within the landscape in which it is situated; his LOW Bar features a large multi-purpose cardboard wall-piece assembled without any gluing.
Tonight Campos Costa will be taking part in a lecture entitled "(R)innovate Tradition" at Macau-based architecture and design studio Lines Lab (some readers may remember previous posts about the studio).
The lecture is also a product launch to celebrate Campos Costa's new piece, a lamp made with cork, a material often employed in the construction industry especially for its insulation properties, that the architect and designer already used in different projects, including the "13 longue chair" installation during Milan's Salone del Mobile.
What does it mean to you "(R)innovate Tradition"? Pedro Campos Costa: To be true to tradition, intending this word in some cases as the material or the technique or technology employed to make something, and creating through it a building chacterised by contemporary and modern design or a product for modern needs. I think there is an interest for this kind of projects and concepts and that renovating traditions through new and modern ideas is something that works well not only for a smaller product, but also for our cities. As an architect I do apply these concepts to city scales, master planning and objects of design, looking at the past and reinterpreting it.
What fascinates you about cork? Pedro Campos Costa: It's a very Portuguese material, since we have a lot of it in Portugal, but what truly fascinates me about it is the fact that cork is a truly amazing material with a lot of properties: it is waterproof, and recyclable so you can destroy it and endlessly rebuild with it a new product; it's light, flexible, and doesn't burn; it's very good for acoustics and insulating and it is allergy-proof. This is why I find it extremely exciting working with it.
Some of the shapes you create through your projects are very fluid, do you employ any kind of computer software to design them? Pedro Campos Costa: Cardboard projects such as the LOW Bar or the stand for the environmental agency were laser cut using a CAD CAM system, but usually I already know what I want to do and where I want to get before sitting in front of a computer. My process is not completely computer-based as I'm more interested in designing and using the computer as a tool. So I usually design a project and then I move onto the computer, using it as a pencil.
Do you consider your architectural practice as something separate from your interior design projects? Pedro Campos Costa: All the projects I do are related one to the other. For example, while doing the cardboard project for the Low Bar I developed specific skills that I then decided to apply to other projects linked to product design. In my case usually the product directly derives from my architectural practice, nothing happens casually, but every piece of work is a continuation of my research.
What plans do you have for the future? Pedro Campos Costa: I have an exhibition in Hong Kong closing today, but in the next few months I will keep on promoting the work I've done so far in different places. In September I will be in Milan to present my products in a shop and we're also planning some small exhibitions in Paris and Berlin.
"(R)innovate Tradition", a design talk by Pedro Campos Costa, Manuel Correia Da Silva and Nicola Borge-Pisani, is at Lines Lab, Calçada da Igreja de São Lázaro No.8-A3, Macau, China, 10th May 2013, 6.30 p.m
Architect Louis Isadore Kahn (1901-1974) is celebrated today in the town where he studied and worked, Philadelphia, with the Louis I. Kahn Memorial Lecture featuring Ted Flato of Lake|Flato Architects (6:30 p.m. at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology).
Kahn first studied architecture at Philadelphia's Central High School and at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1932, Kahn and Dominique Berninger formed the Architectural Research Group, an association of progressive-minded young architects.
The association dissolved in 1933, but Kahn continued to support its ideas and its social preoccupations about "group housing", becoming actively involved in the housing reform movement and supporting communitarian ideas, sharing the belief with many thinkers and writers that there was a need for a civic architecture that could instil in people a sense of common purpose and democratic participation. During the '30s he worked as a consultant to the Philadelphia Housing Authority and, in the '40s, he focused on the design of housing developments in other parts of Pennsylvania.
Kahn founded his own studio in 1935, and also worked as design critic and professor of architecture at the Yale School of Architecture and later on at the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania.
He developed his style in his fifties, also influenced by his residence at the American Academy in Rome that allowed him to travel throughout Europe and study monumentality, light, and form from ancient buildings and sites.
Inspired by ancient ruins and by Piranesi, the architect created heavy buildings characterised by a monumentally monolothic style. Up to then architecture had been about shifting aesthetics and choices, but with Kahn it turned once again into a discipline based on masses, elemental geometric solids and the weight of bricks.
Piranesi inspired him the Roman crypto-portici and the underground passages of the fortress-like National Assembly Building in Sher-e-Bangla Nagar, Dhaka, Bangladesh, characterised by what Kahn defined as "servant spaces", that is stairwells, corridors, restrooms, storage spaces or mechanical rooms and made with bricks, bare concrete and travertine marble, materials that could protect from the sun and the rain (while circulation of air was provided by huge geometric openings).
One of the most striking features remains the fact that the National Assembly was conceived as a majestic concrete mass and does not include any single columns, but hollow columns, parts of space enclosures, were adapted as structural supports.
Kahn influenced many architects from Tadao Ando to Renzo Piano and Norman Foster, leaving behind seminal works such as the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut (1951-1953), with its concrete tetrahedral ceiling that allowed him to eliminate ductwork and reduced the floor-to-floor height by channeling air through the structure itself; the Richards Medical Laboratories at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (1957-1965), with their trademark severe towers that hosted stairwells and airducts and that embodied the "served Vs servant spaces" dichotomy; the laboratories of the Salk Institute, La Jolla, California, and the National Assembly in Dhaka, that he described "ruins in reverse" and that, according to the legend, were spared bombing during the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971, since they were taken as an ancient historic site.
Fashion-wise Kahn's monolithic masonry is evoked in the solid silhouettes created by Damir Doma in his Pre-Fall 2013 collection that features designs - including oversized coats and jackets with cocooning shapes, sleeveless dresses and sweaters with geometrical embossed motifs - characterised by the same sinister aura that at times surrounds Kahn's buildings.
Kahn is worth being rediscovered for many reasons, in particular for his obsession with solid geometric forms that is at the base of fascinating modern production processes such as 3D printing.
His teachings could also be applied to other disciplines, fashion included: if stuck for inspiration, he once told his students, ask the material you want to use for advice (see video emedded at the end of this post), a principle that should prompt us all to familiarise with and get to know our materials before deciding what to do with them.
If you're gonna miss the Philadelphia lecture, don't despair: the retrospective "Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture" is at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany, until 11th August and next year it will move to London to mark Louis Kahn's 40th death anniversary. Until then listen and enjoy the chamber opera "Architect" inspired by Louis Kahn and written by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Lewis Spratlan in collaboration with Jenny Kallick and John Downey.
Throughout the decades artists and landscape architects produced a rich body of work that directly moved from the many personal and collective meanings the landscape inspires us. It is indeed not surprising for specific landscapes to often hold a strong grip on the artistic consciousness and some artists - including George Inness, Childe Hassam, Christo and Richard Estes - often employed the landscape as their muse. Land Art is the starting point behind the womenwear's collection of Finnish designer Satu Maaranen.
Entitled "Garment in Landscape", the collection is a mix of art, camouflage and abstract Finnish prints and Haute Couture. The designs included in the collection invite the wearer to enter in communion with the landscape and become part of it through bright colours, surface elaborations, thick paint brush strokes and oversized wide-brim yet linear hats calling to mind the horizon. Some garments are characterised by atmospheric effects that the designer charged with a panoply of visual, physical and emotional experiences. Maaranen won with this collection the Grand Prix du Jury Première Vision at the 28th International Hyères Festival that took place last month.
Can you please introduce yourself? Satu Maaranen: I grew up in Järvenpää, a city nearby Helsinki. I'm a graduate of Aalto University. I've studied art since I was 6 years old and later on studied art pedagogy. During my studies in fashion I did internships for a 200-year-old textile house, Erica, in Italy, and with designer Christian Wijnants in Belgium as well as a textile trainee program in Netherlands. I now work as a freelance designer based in Helsinki.
Is there a designer you particularly like? Satu Maaranen: I really like Celine, Hermes and Kenzo, to name a few.
How was taking part in the Hyères Festival and winning the Grand Prix du Jury Première Vision? Satu Maaranen: It was amazing. Just being one of the finalists was already an honor and gave me good connections to established people in our business. Winning a competition like this means getting appreciation and being acknowledged. Naturally, I feel happy about getting the prize.
Were you excited about presenting the collection to the jury? Satu Maaranen: I was excited and also a bit nervous. After the presentation the jury members visited our showrooms and I got to chat with all of them a little. The female members of the jury also tried on some of my garments and that felt special. It was great getting feedback from them and I'm glad they liked what they saw.
Will you integrate some of the motifs/ideas from your collection in more commercial outfits for Petit Bateau since the award gives you the chance to collaborate with this brand? Satu Maaranen: I might. The idea of bows and ruffles could be really cute in this context as well.
Can you tell us more about the inspirations behind this collection? Satu Maaranen: I wanted to create a collection that took into account the surrounding landscape, where the garments could be in total harmony with the environment or in total discordance with it. I did research about land art, the camouflage phenomenon and the revolutionary print design in Finland during the '60s. When everybody else was making petite floral prints, Vuokko Nurmesniemi and Fujiwo Ishimoto, who designed for the Finnish textile and fashion house Marimekko, did something abstract and raw, almost primitive. The inspiration for the silhouettes and cuts came from traditional Haute Couture, but I wanted to create an experimental and young atmosphere. In this particular collection the "architectural" shapes are influenced by traditional Haute Couture, like Givenchy and Balenciaga. I guess sometimes architecture itself inspires me as well. I do work a lot with very three-dimensional shapes.
In which ways is the collection informed by art? Satu Maaranen: I was inspired by both camouflage artists as well as land artist. The camouflage artists photograph themselves wearing clothes that perfectly reproduce a wall behind them, or a bench on which they are sitting. I was also intrigued by the astonishing works of many land artists in which the environment has an important role. Therefore I coated some of my fabrics with grass, sawdust or sand. And I also created digital prints of these surfaces. The spontaneous open silkscreen prints resemble different elements and moments in nature, everything from the movement of the sea to the northern lights and summer sunsets.
What kind of materials did you use for your collection? Satu Maaranen: I used textiles such as cotton, silk and viscose. I coated some of them with sand, sawdust or grass; I handprinted or digital printed others. The collection withholds both stiff and thick fabrics and some very delicate and light silk organza. Some of the fabrics are very wearable and washable while others call to mind art pieces.
Will you be taking part in any fashion events soon? Satu Maaranen: Due to winning of the Grand Prix du Jury Première Vision, I will be taking part in Berlin Fashion Week this summer with an extended version of my winning collection. Later on I will show my collection in both New York and Paris.
What are your future plans? Satu Maaranen: I would like to work for a big fashion house somewhere in Europe to learn more and become an even better designer, and then someday maybe launch my own brand.
All images courtesy of Satu Maaranen
With thanks to freelance fashion designer Sofia Järnefelt for facilitating this interview.
Even as a young child, Ludovic Houplain's life was ruled by logos: his father worked as a racing driver and his uniform and car were covered in logos of various sponsors; his grandfather owned a factory in which everything, from the letterhead to the door, was emblazoned with the company logo and he had a puzzling fascination with the Carrefour sign that he encountered every day on his way to school.
As he grew up, Houplain found himself surrounded in a world made with logos while working on different projects. Logobook (ed. by Julius Wiedemann, Taschen) is the story of his passion for logos, but also of the making of the Oscar-winning short movie Logorama by H5 (2009).
In 1999 Houplain made a film for Alex Gopher entitled The Child that was set in a typographical environment in which words represented the urban environment. After developing projects based on logos for music videos that were never released for legal reasons, Houplain realised that logos had become for him "Lego bricks", as he states in the volume, and that time had come to work on a bigger project.
Together with H5's François Alaux and Hervé de Crécy, Houplain started developing the background research for a film entirely based on logos. The team went through a painstakingly long process, doing a sort of "casting" of logos, listing which ones would have been better for characters, objects, animals or vehicles and which ones could have been used as props.
The result was Logorama, a 16-minute thriller full of car chases, shootings, kidnappings and apocalyptic adventures in an imaginary world created employing around 2,500 logos. The film treated logos in an ironic way, using them for their merely aesthetic function rather than as cult objects.
While working on the film, Houplain realised that brands have overshadowed products in our world, and that logos are designed to follow fashion and trends. This is the main reason why artists were often enlisted by specific companies to design logos, adapting them to the aesthetics of the decades through which they operated.
Philosopher and sociologist Gilles Lipovetsky states in one of the essays included in the volume that we are literally bombarded with logos through different media: according to surveys, each of us is indeed exposed to 1,200 logos a day. In a nutshell, we live in the society of hyper consumption in which products are less important than the brand that offers not just goods, but the possibility of buying into a dream, a myth and an image, and this is valid in all industries, from food to fashion, from transport to computers.
Yet, Lipovetsky argues, while young people can name more labels than saints, poets and philosophers, living in a society of brands has made our buying trends unpredictable and impulsive, and, though, certain brands are exerting a greater control on consumers, the latter are actually searching for more individualistic experiences.
It's unlikely that brands will die, though, as foreseen also in the apocalyptic Logorama, and, to prove the point, this weighty tome (it's over 700 pages long), feaures an extensive survey of all the most popular logos around, arranged in alphabetical order and taken from different industries including airlines, apparel, computer software, electronics, food, music and retail, just to mention a few ones. Highly recommended if you're a graphic designer, but also if you're just an obsessed and impenitent fan of logos.
Artist and activist Ai Weiwei first met independent curator and art critic Feng Boyi after returning from New York to Beijing in the early '90s. The duo soon started working together, releasing a series of underground publications known as the Red Flag books that tried to conceptualise the practice of Chinese artists while presenting international contemporary art to China. The series proved extremely influential with Chinese artists, turning for some critics into a manifesto for China's emerging avant-garde.
As the year passed, Ai and Feng continued their research and eventually managed to shook the system with a seminal exhibition that entered history. In 2000, while the Shanghai Biennale was taking place, Ai Weiwei and Feng Boyi organised a peripheral event entitled "Fuck Off" (Subtitled in Chinese: "Ways to Not Cooperate") that featured forty avant-garde artists. The exhibition was closed by the authorities for its radical content, but, by then, many curators from other countries had already seen it, and the event had acquired cult status. A new exhibition at the Groninger Museum, entitled "Fuck Off 2" and inspired by that first milestone for Chinese contemporary art, will soon be celebrating Chinese avant-garde artists while tackling the issues of free speech, artistic freedom, censorship and democracy.
Curated by Ai Weiwei, Feng Boyi and chief curator of the Groninger Museum, Mark Wilson, the exhibition includes this time 37 contemporary Chinese artists and artist groups, and analyses the current sociological, environmental, legal, and political climate in China today.
The Groninger Museum has a special connection with Ai Weiwei since it hosted the second solo museum exhibition by the Chinese artist in 2008 and also acquired the works "Water Melons" (2007) and "Grapes" (2009) directly from Ai Weiwei for the Museum Collection. Critique against censorship is expressed by the selected artists in radically different ways: printmaker and illustrator Wu Junyong comments on politics in a style that may be reminiscent of Chinese art, while conceptual artist Zhang Dali juxtaposes enhanced and retouched photographs employed for political propaganda to the original images to spot alterations and comment about the veracity of contemporary mass media and about the "real Vs manipulated" dichotomy.
Photography is represented by quite a few young artists including photographer and freelance writer Lin Zhipeng, who created the blog North Latitude 23 and produced shoots also for creative and fashion magazines, and Ren Hang, known for carefully staged and at times ambiguous images with an exploitative and fetishistic twist about them.
In the tradition of the first "Fuck Off" event, this exhibition also features controversial works such as He Yunchang's gruesome performance "One Meter Democracy" (2010) in which he cut a one-meter long wound on the right side of his body using it as a metaphor for the control exerted by governments over people's bodies.
Some of the performances included attracted the attention of the authorities: Cheng Li's controversial "Art Whore" aimed at comparing the act of commercialising modern art with trading sex, and consisting in the artist engaging with a female partner in unsimulated sex acts before a selected group of invited artists at the Contemporary Art Exhibition Hall in Beijing, landed him a sentence to a year of re-education through labour in March 2011; "Free Sex" (2011) by sex-worker advocate Ye Haiyan, known for her campaigns to improve the conditions of China's sex workers and AIDS victims that led her to work as a prostitute in a low-cost brothel, resulted in constant pressures by the authorities, the media and even Internet hackers.
Freedom of expression remains one of the core themes of this exhibition, even though in quite a few cases the most interesting point about these artists is not just their allegiance to their practices, but also the fact that their works often have universal meanings and strong connections with global social issues, including the pursuit of identity, doubt on the truth and legality of old authoritative value systems, government control and punishment.
While introducing visitors to contemporary art from China, "Fuck Off 2" also promtps them to ponder about the real meaning of taking one's own decision, exterting one's free will and achieving freedom individually, nationally and internationally.
"Fuck Off 2", curated by Ai Weiwei, Feng Boyi and Mark Wilson, The Groninger Museum, The Netherlands, from 26 May to 17 November 2013.
Image credits:
All images courtesy of The Groninger Museum
1. Wu Junyong, Don't be Silent, 2011, Illustration
If you're a professional costume designer at the moment you're definitely not harbouring good thoughts about the fashion industry. It wasn't rare in the past for a fashion designer to provide the wardrobe for a specific actress, but nowadays cinema, theatre, opera and ballet have been consistently infiltrated by fashion houses and designers claiming of having just created the costumes for this or that production.
Since Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby premiered a few days ago in New York and while movie fans await its arrival in Cannes, features about Miucca Prada's costumes for the film multiplied.
The latest news about costumes mainly focused on Givenchy's Riccardo Tisci working on the new production of Maurice Ravel's "Boléro" at the Opéra de Paris with choreographies by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Damien Jalet, and Marina Abramovic as set designer.
In the meantime, Joseph Altuzarra's costumes for the New York City Ballet’s spring gala (with choreographies by Christopher Wheeldon) will debut next week.
All these costume news proved a good excuse to recap further collaborations that happened in more recent years including Rodarte's tutus for Black Swan; Stella McCartney's costumes for her father's first ballet, "Ocean's Kingdom" (2011), and Jean Paul Gaultier's for "Le Nozze di Figaro" at the Opéra National de Montpellier last year; Valentino's gowns for the New York City Ballet, and, more recently, Vivienne Westwood loaning some of her Spring/Summer 2013 looks to the English National Ballet for the company's new campaign.
Lacroix's costumes for Bizet’s "The Pearl Fishers" for the Opéra National du Rhin in Strasbourg wil debut this May, while he's still working on the ballet costumes for Balanchine’s "The Crystal Pavilion" for the Paris Opera Ballet (to be staged next May).
In some cases such as Vivienne Westwood for the English National Ballet, famous fashion designers were enlisted to attract a younger audience or renew the image of a company; in others, directors and producers set on specific designers who have some connections with dance or theatre or a long-standing tradition of working for the stage. For example, Thierry Mugler was a dancer, Altuzarra studied ballet, while Christian Lacroix started working for the theatre in 1986 and designed costumes for productions both in France and abroad, winning twice the Molière Award, France’s national theatre prize for Best Costume Designer.
Yet there is one basic problems with all these contemporary designers and fashion houses suddenly turning costume designers: in most cases the designers do not have any passion for what they are doing or any basic knowledge of the disciplines practiced on that stage or behind that camera. An admirer of Maurice Béjart, the late Gianni Versace was one of the most prolific designers and creator of costumes, but we all know that his sister Donatella doesn't have the same passion or skills.
Designing a costume as we learnt from previous posts on this site is a radically different art from creating a fashion collection. A costume is an exercise in theatricality that must also take into account the movement, gestures and comfort of the wearer; a fashion collection is mainly a commercial exercise, the result of a series of factors, from trends to desirability.
While some designers lack the skills and humbleness to work for the stage, the main problem at the moment is that, rather than designing from scratch, most of these designers are mainly adapting costumes borrowing from their previous work.
Miuccia Prada's Great Gatsby costumes reference recent collections: the infamously famous chandelier dress seen in the film's trailer is for example taken from Prada's Spring/Summer 2010 collection.
Tisci adapted his Autumn/Winter 2010 collection for Givenchy with its memento mori themes in the costumes for Ravel's "Bolero", coming up with a flowing nude silk tulle skirt with underneath skin-tone tulle bodysuits covered in embroideries that imitate bones and reproduce the outline of a skeleton.
Apparently the main aim of the choreographers was pushing the eleven dancers - all wearing the same costume - to abandon themselves to the rhythm of the music, symbolically shedding their skins and turning into moving skeletons. This is why during the piece, from twirling dervishes in tulle skirts they become theatrical incarnations of Kriminal (ah, if only we could ask certain dancers or actors what they think about their costumes...).
One of the critiques moved to such famous collaborations focuses on the fact that a ballet, an opera or a theatrical piece shouldn't be about the costumes, since, unfortunately, in some cases the coverage given to costumes unfairly overshadowed the performance. Yet there is also another problem with these recent examples.
Recycling such themes and inspirations denotes a lack of imagination and of artistic vocabulary, something that became quite clear in 2011 when, interviewed by Newsweek about designing the costumes for her father's first ballet, Stella McCartney stated "I do performance wear and these dancers are athletes, so I have an understanding of that. And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that you have to use stretch materials if you're working with ballerinas."
In a nutshell, clad them in Lycra and you're done, this is probably why you expected some of the dancers in "Ocean's Kingdom" to start singing "Jellicle Songs For Jellicle Cats" any minute, their tight suits confusing the boundaries between ballet and musical (yes, there is a difference there).
Talk to different costume designers and they will tell you amazing stories about finding a solution for a specific material, playing with metres and metres of plastic, spending entire weeks trying to turn pasta shapes and pan sponges into glamorously grand jewels.
Costumes create a theatrical illusion for the audience, help giving life and a personality to a character but also free the costume designer's imagination. Think about Bernard Daydé's PVC and lurex costumes for "Bacchus and Ariadne" (1967): they did echo in some ways the space age fashion trends so popular at the time, but they weren't borrowed from a specific fashion collection (and look at the details included in the sketch and at the notes of the designers).
According to reports, Tisci said he had made one of his dreams come true, "It is one of the dreams of a designer to design costumes for a ballet." You wonder why if it's your dream to become a costume designer you don't study for such a career. But then we all know that nowadays many careers aren't built on talents, skills or studies, but on connections and on the celebrities you know.
If you're a costume designer, don't despair, you will have your consolation one day: costumes made decades ago are still touring museums and being showcased at special events all over the world. After generating buzz, attention and advertising opportunity, contemporary costumes tour the windows of flagship stores, but, in thirty years' time, they will doubtfully be exhibited in contemporary art museums. After all Prada is not Umberto Brunelleschi.
