Design Line: 20 – 26 May
It’s been a week of launches and losses, and Design Line has the full debrief. Adidas teams up with Prada for a range of football boots it hopes will kick it’s Yeezy woes to the curb, while upholsterers to the London Underground Wallace Sewell release their first domestic range. Meanwhile Steven Holl prepares to go to court over the case of the inaccessible stairs, and Manila grieves the destruction of its historic Central Post Office.
Adidas hopes its Prada football boots will score it a much-needed goal (image: Adidas).
A new game
Being overly reliant on one product or collection can be precarious, as Adidas has found out to its cost – about half its profits were wiped out with the collapse of its Yeezy sub-brand given the disgrace of its collaborator Kanye West. “It was a fantastic combination,” noted Adidas’s CEO Bjorn Gulden. “Unfortunately, it’s now lost, and it’s something that we need then to replace with many, many, many pieces.” This loss could have been foreseen (as an interesting new report from Bloomberg sets out), but Adidas seems to have wasted no time in announcing a new combination that is presumably one of the “many, many, many pieces” referenced by Gulden. Adidas Football for Prada is exactly what it sounds like – a new collection of three existing football boots that have been given a fashion makeover by Prada. On first impression, Disegno is struggling to see the point of it. The boots are more expensive than the mainline Adidas versions and, truth told, a bit dull – one of the pleasures of sports clothing and accessories is that they allow for bolder, more extravagant colour choices and details than their casual wear equivalents, whereas the Prada designs are far more muted and pared back (beautiful, just not much fun). Is a football pitch really the place to look for understated elegance? Still, after its recent experiences, perhaps Adidas is simply looking for a quieter life.
There are no woolly ideas in this exhibition (image: The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design).
Ecology of research
Oltre Terra, the latest exhibition from Formafantasma, opened this week at the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo, taking its name from the Italian for “transhumance”, or the moving of humans and animals from place to place, following the best pastures of the seasons. The show is concerned with the transhumance of sheep and the production of wool, but is not, crucially, a “wool” exhibition. Oltre Terra’s ambition, instead, is to examine and critique our domestication of animals; instead of dominance, Formafantasma want us to re-examine how we approach interactions with the natural world. “If you see two animals that live together, and they mutually benefit from one another, you talk about symbiosis,” points out Simone Farresin, the studio's co-founder. “With animals and humans, you talk about domestication. Why is man is a domesticator? That's a bias.” Formafantasma’s research is critical of the power structures between human and sheep, and offers thoughts to temper the biases that have grown up around the topic. The exhibition itself is presented as an open diorama, for example, where the viewer is invited into this traditionally sealed off museum display format. As such, the show aims to flip how we view our relationship and co-habitation with sheep, while also raising questions as to whether our symbiotic relationship has become exploitative. In methodology, the show is similar to the studio’s previous research project and touring exhibition Cambio, which examines the relationships between trees and the timber industry. In fact, Cambio directly inspired curator Hanne Eide to commission the studio to research sheep and the production of wool from a post-humanist perspective. As Eide described it in her introductory tour to the exhibition itself: “We like to think of this as a sequel to Cambio.”
Get that public transport thrill from the comfort of your living room (image: Wallace Sewell ).
A home away from home, in the home
In Design Reviewed 1, writer Matthew Turner ran the rule over the new design by Map Project Office, in collaboration with Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby, for the carriage interiors of London’s Elizabeth Line trains. Exploring writer Edwina Atlee’s notion of “strayed homes”, spaces in which the domestic has bled into the public realm, Turner praised the new design as having “all the ingredients in place to be a Tube icon and a strayed home”, of which no small part was the work of textile designers Harriet Wallace-Jones and Emma Sewell, who designed the train’s distinctive purple moquette. Wallace Jones and Sewell founded their textile practice, Wallace Sewell, more than 30 years ago, but this week saw them launch their first ever upholstery collection for homes and interiors. It is a domestic collection that has been a surprisingly long time coming, given that the studio’s designs have been appearing in strayed homes for years. Alongside their work on the Elizabeth Line, the studio has also created moquettes for the London Overground, the Bakerloo Line, Croydon Tramline, and assorted galleries and hotels – their work is part of the material fabric of London, bringing elements of comfort and domesticity to spaces that could otherwise be distant and impersonal. It is a pleasure that the studio’s new collection – which includes two fabrics called Sycamore and Hornbeam – will allow the studio's work to stretch further than ever before. The strayed home, it would seem, is making a long overdue return home.
Stairway to court
The $41.5m Steven Holl-designed Hunters Point Library opened in 2019 to great architectural acclaim, discribed by one critic as “one of the finest public buildings New York has produced this century”. But the project has since become mired in a controversy that came to a new head this week when news broke that New York City is suing Holl, his practice Steven Holl Architects, and a senior partner, for $10m in the New York State Supreme Court. The city’s lawyers allege that Hunters Point is in breach of the Americans with Disability Act (ADA) due to its design. Five levels of library stacks positioned along a staircase offer views of the city’s famous skyline through the cutouts, but the arrangement left the fiction section on the third level inaccessible by elevator. To mitigate this issue, the library relocated the books to another floor. A stepped area in the children’s books section that is inaccessible to wheelchair users is also raised in the lawsuit, along with a ramp to the rooftop that allegedly exceeds the maximum slope allowed and lacks handrails. Bathrooms are reportedly too small for wheelchair users to access comfortably. A first lawsuit was bought before the Federal court in November 2019 by a disability rights group, just two months after the library opened. Now the City has gone to the Supreme Court in an attempt to recoup the estimated $10m price tag of retrofitting the building to make it accessible. Steven Holl Architects has refused to comment on the “unfortunate decision” of the City to sue, but says it “intend[s] to vigorously defend against these claims”. While a design can be praised for its aesthetic choices, ignoring the needs of all people on a high-profile public project could prove an expensive mistake.
The historic Manila Central Post Office has been gutted by fire (image: via Wikimedia Commons).
Post office inferno
Architecture fans looked on in horror this week as the historic Manila Central Post Office was gutted by a massive fire. Designed by Filipino architects Juan M. Arellano and Tomás Mapúa, the neoclassical style post office was built in 1926 in the capital’s old town. The building survived extensive damage in the Second World War, when the city was bombed by the Japanese just hours after the attack on Pearl Harbour. Its defining edifice with ornate columns was restored in 1946, but now the building has suffered extensive fire damage, with its internal wooden structure having burned from the basement up to the third floor. The cause of fire, which took seven hours to bring under control and injured multiple firefighters, is as yet unknown. It could have been an electrical fault, and there is speculation that the large amounts of books and paper in the building (it is, after all, the country’s main mail-sorting hub) added to the ferocity and spread of the blaze. “It’s very saddening because this is such an important part of our history,” said Nahum B. Tarroza, director of the National Capital Region’s Bureau of Fire Protection . A valuable collection of stamps was destroyed by the fire, and the cost of rebuilding has been put at 300m PHP (£4.5m). Thankfully the post office was closed at the time of the fire, but losing a building that has stood for almost a century – and survived through so much history – is undeniably tragic.
Ear (2): Too Fast Too Nothing (image: Nothing).
Nothing comes from nothing
The London-based tech company Nothing was a breath of fresh air when it arrived in 2020: a brand that would, in the words of founder Carl Pei, combat the “slew of more and more similar products” within the world of consumer tech through the introduction of a distinctive design identity. Nothing’s chief trick was the use of transparency, creating beautiful designs for a phone and wireless earphones whose use of see-through plastic revealed the (highly aestheticised) workings within. “Transparency significantly increases the design workload,” the company’s design director Adam Bates told Disegno, but the company liked the way in which, “even if only subconsciously, it gives you a sense of what these things are actually made up of.” Nothing’s use of transparency is primarily aesthetic, but the company says that it also wishes to be more transparent in its operations, using recycled or bio-based materials and hoping to encourage an extended lifespan for its devices: “We want people to stick with this phone as long as possible,” Bates said upon the company’s launch of Phone (1) in 2022. Now, however, the company finds itself in tricky second album territory. Nothing has just launched the first new iteration of its earbuds – Ear (1) being supplanted by Ear (2) – while Phone (2) is expected to launch this summer. Technological progress is no bad thing, but Nothing – if it is to stay true to its ambitions – will need to be careful that new iterations of its products not fall into the familiar cycle of simply accelerating consumption and obsolescence of existing devices. Whether it is able to achieve this will only become clear with time.