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A first-of-its-kind exhibition will be unveiled at this year's International Contemporary Furniture Fair (May 15-18), in New York. ICFF Raw: The Next Generation will highlight 15 to 20 of the compelling designs and radical ideas entered in Metropolis's first "Next Generation Design Competition." A joint production of the ICFF and Metropolis, the show will be curated by Marco Pasanella, whose design career was launched at the ICFF in 1990 with the immediate success of his sideways rocking chair.
Our recent competition called on emerging designers to submit a "Big Design Idea" that would benefit people and the environment. Though only one firm received the grand prize-$10,000 seed money to invest in their idea-the call for entries attracted an array of innovative proposals.
Pasanella's own selections for the 2004 ICFF special exhibition include the very first entry we received-a tattered handwritten proposal to convert parking garages into homeless shelters-which may just have been sent in by one of New York City's homeless. "It was an interesting contrast from the rest," Pasanella says. "Just having that piece of paper as the entry represented, to me, the real spirit of raw. It's just this idea thrown out there."
Other innovative ideas that will premiere in ICFF Raw incl
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Leonardo da Vinci is revered around the world as a master of Renaissance painting and an ingenious engineer, but few have thought of him as the father of the modern car.
But on Friday, the Museum of History and Science in Florence unveiled the first "automobile" built based on some of the sketches from da Vinci's famous notebooks. "This has been a big adventure which has also helped us to develop tools to help people unaware of Leonardo's scholarship understand this complex device," said Paolo Galluzzi, director of the museum.
The primitive-looking contraption runs on springs instead of petrol and was probably intended to produce special effects at courtly events, but it was still the world's first self-propelled "vehicle," the experts said.
The "automobile" - which in fact looks more like a wagon - is by no means the first invention discovered in da Vinci's mysterious manuscripts, which include flying machines, helicopters, submarines, military tanks and bicycles.
Born near Florence in 1452, da Vinci is thought of as the original "Renaissance Man" - a talented painter, sculptor, engineer and musician.
In 1905, Girolamo Calvi, one of the pioneers of da Vinci studies, noted the links between da Vinci's designs a
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Karim Rashid, almost bigger than life (were that possible), sells Mikasa from a poster in midtown Manhattan. A debonair Michael Graves shows up in nationwide TV ads for Target. Designer celebrity is not exactly new. But recently it has become more official with the advent of Shirley Liao's Designstars Trading Cards. Featuring a headshot on the front and vital stats on the back, Liao's cards are made for playing with the who's who of the design world. The slick styling and glamorous portraits suggest that certain designers have become so recognizable as brand names their identities can literally be bought and traded.
Liao, 29, a second-year 3-D design major at Cranbrook, introduced the brightly hued, baseball-card-size packs last year in a student exhibition at Milan's furniture fair. The project grew out of a free-form class assignment on the theme of "pop life."
"I examined the trend of commodifying identity as exemplified by Martha Stewart, Madonna, and other cultural icons," she says. "Then, realizing that successful designers also mold and market their identities, I created a physical product related to that idea."
Of the original set's 20 designers, 18 are men-including Konstantin Grcic, Philippe Starck, Ross Lovegrove, and Karim Rashid. The two wome
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Sir Terence Conran, on last week's letters page, took me to task for my scepticism over the commercial value of good design. Of course, good design is important for business. But my definition of good design is probably different from Conran's. If he means products that function well, are user-friendly, don't go wrong, age well and can take the knocks of modern-day living, all for reasonable cost, then I agree. If he primarily means products that meet his personal views on aesthetics, I don't. There is a difference between good design and mere fashion.
It is because the design industry and the judges of design awards are too interested in appearance and other surface qualities, rather than substance, that the shops are full of overpriced tat. The problem is summed up by the industry's gushing approval for Philippe Starck's famous lemon squeezer - attractive maybe, but almost impossible to squeeze lemons with.
It gives me no pleasure to say so, but Conran's hero, Vittorio Radice, is already discovering that the British shopping public isn't so far buying in to his particular design revolution. Radice, the former Selfridges boss brought in by Marks & Spencer to head its homeware division, has produced poor sales figures - down every quarter in the past year and slump
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For the last couple of years, designers at the Salone Internazionale del Mobile here tried various ways to tweak or even subvert high-end minimalism, which has enjoyed a long run as home decor's default style.
At this year's furniture fair, which ended Monday, some of those strategies were still in evidence. Attention-grabbing figures like Philippe Starck and the Dutch group Moooi archly undercut the smooth look with baroque decoration, blasts of color and pattern or razor-sharp edges. At Edra, there were chairs and sofas that seemed happy to take on any form, from tangled to crinkled to lumpy, as long as it was not a streamlined one.
A more surprising and compelling challenge, though, came from designs with a sensibility reminiscent of Sofia Coppola's film "Lost in Translation": genuine and even sweet, but with more than a touch of wistfulness. Brightly colored odes to childhood and fantasy-filled displays that used new technologies and materials to look low-tech drew the most attention, along with designs that sought to provide a bit of refuge or calm. Irony or too-clever posturing seemed to hit the wrong note.
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