Design Line: 12 – 18 August
School may be out for summer, but there’s a distinctly studious air to this week’s Design Line. There’s a report with a road-map for bird-friendly architecture from Yale, a tool for mapping hot cities by Arup, and reactions to the first ever period product test experiment using real blood. Meanwhile, Uniqlo gets an ex-Givenchy artistic director on board and England moves to ban unisex toilets.
Make some Strange Friends this summer at Hauser & Wirth (image: Dave Watts).
For the love of our weird friends
Summer comes and the design news slows down as our lucky colleagues across Europe relax into month-long vacations, leaving their keyboards and screens behind and, instead, turning their attention to their friends and family. In the UK, where the event of the sun coming out (occasionally) doesn’t signal a nation-wide four week break, we continue to slog on, jealously fuming as we receive yet another out-of-office email from our EU peers. This week, though, we were pleased that some teams have continued working through the hotter months as Make Hauser & Wirth opens not one, but two, exhibitions in its London gallery. Titled Strange Friends and Connect. Reveal. Conceal., the exhibitions showcase makers who are exploring how we relate to our objects. They make a compelling case that the pieces we own and treasure can bring us friendship and joy. Strange Friends features Alice Walton, James Shaw, Nicola Tassie, Jochen Holz, Marianne Huotari, Julia Obermaier, and Jinya Zhao, a group of makers chosen for their exploration of surface texture, tactility and experimental investigations of functional forms. Their odd and enticing works encourage us to be curious about the objects we think we know well and rekindle our relationships with, and appreciation of, them. The second show (as its explanatory title suggests) looks at how we connect with, reveal and conceal our things. Focusing on textiles, with pieces by Amy Revier, Celia Pym and Donna Lynch (of Studio Ashay), the show invites us to ponder about the stories and values imbued in our garments and fabrics. Pym’s colourfully and carefully mended garments for example, prompt reflection about the level of love that causes an object to be used so much that it needs fixing in the first place. Perhaps we don’t have to go on holidays to find companionable connections after all, (it would be nice though!).
Menstrual discs came out on top in a bloody groundbreaking study (image: Patricia Moraleda via Pixabay).
An absorbing period problem
Design solutions for managing menstruation have come a long way in recent years, but there was shock and anger this week when reporting on a new study revealed that, up until now, most period products have been tested for absorption using just water and saline. A study published in the journal BMJ Sexual & Reproductive Health used actual human blood, in the form of expired batches of packed red blood cells (what’s left after plasma and platelets have been removed). They found that menstrual discs could hold up to 80mls of blood, while period underwear could only absorb 2mls. Pads and tampons generally came in at around 60mls. The study is groundbreaking, and not just for allowing people to make more informed decisions about what’s right for their body – it could also help people experiencing abnormally heavy menstrual bleeding more accurately report their symptoms to medical professionals. Diagnoses often revolve around how quickly an individual bleeds through a period product, so the right information about absorbency is important. Of course, it does beg the question: Why have brands been able to chuck some saltwater on their products, over-report their absorbency, and call it a day? According to Unicef, 1.8 billion people menstruate every month – so creating products that work is a serious design challenge.
Clare Waight Keller swaps couture for Uniqlo (image: Uniqlo).
What Clare Waight Keller did next
Fashion designer Clare Waight Keller became the first woman to be appointed artistic director of Givenchy when she succeeded Riccardo Tisci at the LVMH-owned fashion house. Now she’s been tipped by Japanese high street brand Uniqlo to create Uniqlo: C, a clothing collection launching for autumn/winter 2023 that promises 30 classic pieces including a classic trench coat and a pleated skirt in lemon yellow tones. The switch to high street style is an interesting move for the designer, who is best known for creating Meghan Markle’s wedding dress: a £200,000 gown that used custom double-bonded silk cady developed by Waight Keller herself. Designing for the non-couture price range is an entirely different kettle of fashionable fish. “When you’re working at a different price point, the way the fabric translates is very important to achieve the right silhouette, and so this was a critical part of the work I did at the beginning,” said Waight Keller. “I have to say, I’ve been very impressed. Things like the cottons, and the nylons, are of an exceptional level. They really are. So that was a nice surprise when designing the collection.” Uniqlo excels at collaborations with high-end brands such as Marimekko and Marni, and :C could fill the gap left since the final +J collection by designer Jil Sander’s dropped in 2021. How quickly the new capsule collection will sell out when it lands in September remains to be seen, but Waight Keller has reportedly already signed off a spring/summer 2024 collection.
Woot Woot! An exciting step towards bird-friendly architecture
Each year an estimated 1bn birds die in the USA alone because of collisions with buildings. This staggering number is caused by architectural developments including the rise of all-glass skyscrapers, the use of curtain-walls and an increased reliance on nighttime artificial lighting. Birds bring many benefits to urban centres – controlling insect populations and rodents that spread disease, pollinating and dispersing plants, providing environmental data, generating birdwatching revenue, and singing their joyful songs, to name a just a few – and yet we have, historically, done little to protect them, despite the knowledge of how to build with bird-friendly glass existing for over a decade. But, the good news is the winds are changing. This week, a new study linking the adoption of bird-friendly glass technology and increased policy-making to the improvement of safety for birds was published by the American Bird Conservancy in partnerships with the the Law, Ethics and Animals Program at Yale University Law School. “Our hope is that this report will help local governments to pass better laws,” says Viveca Morris, co-author of the report, by offering tools and information. Protecting birds can “simple, effective, and affordable” explains the report’s other co-author Meredith Barges and therefore, in theory, easily implemented. But we shouldn’t fly too high on the nascent success of bird-friendly architecture. Barges stresses the urgency for policy making to scale up to state and federal government levels and be adopted globally to protect our feathered friends from predicted levels of extinction. “It’s hard for us to imagine a world without the song of the Wood Thrush,” she sombrely reflects, “and yet that is the reality facing us if we do not act soon and effectively to reduce the threats that birds face as they live in and migrate through the built environment.” While its a relief that the mass-death of a species being taken more seriously, it is time for architects, Disegno thinks, to also change their tune.
Oi mate, got a license for that gender neutral bathroom (image: Ted Eytan)?
Here come the bathroom police
The UK government continues to be increasingly hostile towards its LGBTQ+ population, moving to ban gender neutral toilets in public spaces. Changes to England’s Building Regulations announced this week will stipulate that single-sex toilets must be provided while mixed-sex toilets will be banned, unless they are private cubicles. It’s a thinly veiled form of hostile architecture towards trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming people, being hustled in under the guise of protecting “women and girls”. Yet as anyone who has navigated a public space or public institution in England knows, public toilet facilities are often inadequate and require waiting in long queues for the ladies loos. There have also been reports of cis women with short hair being harassed while attempting to use the women’s restrooms in public places, such as the Southbank Centre in London. The obvious design solution to dignified bathroom access to all would be gender neutral facilities separated by function for cubicles and urinals. It’s a regressive move that will also be embarrassing on the world stage. Canada introduced compulsory gender-neutral bathrooms for public buildings in 2014, China has been building unisex facilities since 2016, and in countries such as Sweden they’re already the norm. The UK has already tumbled from 1st to 14th place in the ranking of LGBTQ+ rights in European countries, which is released annually by the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association Europe (ILGA-Europe). But clearly there is so much further to fall.
UHeat maps urban hot spots in the hope of encouraging cooling measures (image: Arup).
It’s getting too hot in here
The climate crisis is well and truly here. Wildfires are decimating communities from Hawai’i to Tenerife to Canada, while global sea temperatures are rising at alarming rate. Cities are getting unbearably hot, too, and to that end engineering practice Arup has launched a digital monitoring tool this week. Urban Heat Snapshot, aka UHeat, used satellite data and AI to create models for the Urban Heat Island effect (where night temperatures remain high) during heat waves in six major cities: Cairo, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Mumbai, and New York City. The model included data around terrain, building height, population density, and the reflectiveness and imperviousness of surfaces. UHeat is designed to give more accurate readings about how hot different parts of the city feel to the people who live in them, versus standard surface temperature recordings. By identifying hot spots, Arup said it hoped mitigation strategies such as increasing tree cover, using more permeable surfaces, and establishing cooling centres could be implemented. As heatwaves continue to threaten the lives of millions, city governments will need to move quickly to make design changes that could help everyone keep their cool in a hotter world.