The Design Line: 25 June - 1 July
New month, same Design Line, with news this week from New York, where there’s moving and shaking at The Met, London where the Olympic legacy is casting a long shadow, and Accra, where there’s a political scandal brewing over David Adjaye’s cathedral.
Claire Pondard & Léa Pereyre's Anima II, so good they awarded it twice (image: Grégoire Couvert).
A clean sweep
For talent spotters, the annual Design Parade competition in Hyères, France, is a fine place to start. Each year the festival brings together 10 young designers to exhibit their work (although the festival is billed as international, it might be better described as domestic+: outside of France and Switzerland, entrants are few and far between), with a panel of leading designers and curators assembled to ultimately select a winner. It is a festival of no small pedigree – past participants include now established figures such as Dimitri Bähler, Laureline Galliot, Julie Richoz, Brynjar Sigurðarson and François Dumas – although its competition aspect is, admittedly, odd: according to what criteria are participants being judged when the designs put forward are wildly disparate? As such, previous years have often seen discrepancies between the festival’s Grand Prix du Jury and its Grand Prix du Public: the former frequently rewarding research-based practice, the latter forms of design that are more immediately graspable or visually spectacular. This year, however, opinion converged, with Claire Pondard & Léa Pereyre's Anima II project claiming both awards. Developed with Zurich’s Robotics Aesthetics and Usability Center, the project presents a series of laser cut plastic sheet forms that, thanks to motors which react to the presence of visitors, are pulled into a serious of shapeshifting forms whose motion recall underwater life. Beautiful, technically ingenious, and conceptually interesting (finding relatable physical forms for technological complexity is a timely topic), Godard and Pereye’s project seems a well rounded winner – one that ticks all the boxes.
Unprotected data
A dark era has dawn in America with the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 case that until last week had guaranteed a constitutional right to abortion. Trigger laws in many states went into immediate effect, causing clinics to stop treating patients instantly. People need abortions, even when it’s illegal, but a new hurdle for Americans dealing with this grim reality is the prevalence of Big Data. Activists are imploring people who menstruate to delete their period tracking apps and have warned against using search engines to try to access resources. With abortion-seekers criminalised, technology companies may be subpoenaed to disclose defendants’ search histories, while lawmakers have warned that technology giants’ trade in user data opens up abortion-seekers to surveillance. Google promised its staffers they could apply to relocate out of states where abortion is illegal, no questions asked. Apple said its health insurance would cover out-of-state travel for treatment, as did Netflix and Amazon. If you work for a tech company you may be able to retain the right to bodily autonomy, but if you’re just a user then you’re more in danger than ever.
When two become one?
The Met in New York has had an unusual structure of late. Typically, a museum is led by one person: a director who is responsible for the institution’s curatorial direction as well as its overall operation. Until 2017, the Met had just such a person, Thomas P. Campbell, but he subsequently resigned under pressure after criticism of his financial management and the museum's rapidly rising deficit. Yet rather than seek a new Campbell (albeit perhaps one with a better handle on the figures), the Met took the step of splitting the role. The museum’s president and chief operating officer Daniel H. Weiss was promoted to become its president and chief executive, and subsequently tasked with helping to appoint a new director: Max Hollein. Yet while Hollein would, traditionally, have expected to lead the institution wholesale, he was instead briefed to simply run the Met’s programme and to report in to Weiss (a sign that in the world of contemporary museums, curatorial is perhaps secondary to fundraising). Now, however, Weiss has announced his departure from the museum, with a planned exit date of June 2023. So, with Weiss on the way out, what becomes of the Met's forked structure? The experiment in splitting responsibility has, at least from the outside, proven successful: Weiss balanced the museum’s $310m budget and oversaw a host of infrastructure projects, while Hollein has received recognition for the Met’s early efforts to grapple with the colonial histories present within its walls and to diversify its programme, collections and staff (with one notable project explored here). So, will the Met stick or twist? Search for a new Weiss, or return fuller control to Hollein (who has experience serving as a director and chief executive from his tenure at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco)? “We’re about to start on that,” the museum’s co-chairman Hamilton E. James noted enigmatically, “thinking about the right leadership structure, should there be a president and if so what is the definition of that role.”
Ghana drama
There comes a point in every star architect’s career, it seems, where their work becomes so synonymous with success that politicians come a-knocking with dreams of status-symbol landmarks. David Adjaye is a British-Ghanian architect with a knighthood and a plethora of projects in world capitals, including Washington DC’s much lauded Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. When he was tipped to design a new National Cathedral for Ghana in Accra, there was much excitement over a monumental project set to merge Christian iconography with Ghanaian heritage, initiated by president Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo in 2018. The project and its projected costs have always been controversial, however, and this week bought a new wave of political intrigue as opposition MP Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa called on Adjaye to give back the $21.4m fee allegedly paid to Adjaye and Associates for the project, claiming it hadn’t been fully approved by the government. Much of the fight is playing out on Facebook, where elections are (depressingly) won and lost these days. Other complaints (from the same MP) against the project include the demolition of judges' residences to make way for the religious complex. Nation-building projects may be an attractive catch, but the risk is ending up as a political football.
Is this puff puff pass into obscurity for the Juul (image: Juul)?
Up in a puff of smoke
When e-cigarette brand Juul launched in 2015, it quickly became synonymous with vaping (controlling, at one point in 2019, as much as 75 per cent of the US e-cigarette market) thanks to a canny (slash cynical) mix of marketing and industrial design that prioritised the creation of sleek, plug and play devices – the Apple Macs of vapes. “Pre-2015, no one had played up the product design of an e-cigarette in the way that Juul has,” noted the V&A’s Natalie Kane in an essay on the devices that appeared in Disegno #25, citing the pod-based design’s seductive opacity in comparison to competitor devices: “One of Juul’s overarching design features is its unapologetic inaccessibility, a complete volte-face for the community of vaping enthusiasts who have long compared handmade coils and custom builds.” Yet the mighty appear to have now fallen, with the US’s Food and Drug Administration this week ordering Juul to remove its products from the marketplace (subject to an appeal) after the company provided insufficient evidence to “assess the potential toxicological risks of using the Juul products”. In truth, however, Juul’s market share was already falling, hit by a 2020 ban on mint- and juice-flavoured e-cigarette pods. In response, teenage vapers began to shift from Juul’s pod-based devices and onto disposables from the likes of Puff Bar – devices that were, curiously, exempt from the ban. But if you live by the sword you die by the sword – Juul surged to prominence on the back of its design, now that same design may prove its undoing.
Plastic plagues
Are you more concerned about microplastics getting everywhere from the highest mountains to your own bloodstream, or about the next viral plague to sweep the planet? Well, we have good bad news for the anxious multitaskers out there – now you can worry about both, simultaneously! This Anthropocene BOGOF deal comes courtesy of intrepid researchers at the University of Stirling, who published a paper revealing that viruses can hitchhike on microplastics in water. Even after three days of sailing along, the viruses remained infectious. "That’s long enough to get from the wastewater treatment works to the public beach,” said lead researcher Richard Quilliam, with scant regard for the queasy. The scientists deduced that the viruses bond to the surface of plastic particles tiny enough to swallow. It’s the kind of terrifying, hubristic ouroboros of a plot that even a seasoned Hollywood director would struggle to dream up. Human thirst for profit pulling fossil fuels from the ground to make plastics that never decompose, but which degrade to scatter tiny poisonous particles, all the while pushing into previously remote ecosystems and upping the risk for the next zoonotic spillover event. It’s put quite the dampener on plans for our next beach holiday.
The Olympic Park legacy is turning out less Greek gods (image: Victoria & Albert Museum).
Heading out East
A shortlist of bright young architecture things has been revealed for a project to design two gallery spaces in the V&A East. In the running to make the Why We Make galleries are: Citizens Design Bureau with Hayatsu Architects, Neba Sere and Rose Nordin; JA Projects with A Practice for Everyday Life and Larry Achiampong; OMMX with HATO; Studio C102 + Mobile Studio Architects + Manijeh Verghese with Sthuthi Ramesh. The museum itself, which is due to complete in 2025, was designed by O’Donnell + Tuomey as part of a £1.1bn “cultural hub” for London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. But a decade on from the London Olympics, the promise of social and cultural regeneration for the area is wearing thin. An in-depth report published by The Guardian this week laid out how plans to use the games to bring funding for affordable housing had been de-railed by former London Mayor and current UK prime minister, Boris Johnson. Instead of prioritising homes, Johnson held a competition for a viewing tower. “Boris wanted slides, so we put some slides in,” divulged unsuccessful entrant Peter St John. “The main aim at the presentation seemed to be to entertain Boris and keep him laughing”. Anish Kapoor’s winning design, ArcelorMittal Orbit, was sponsored by the UK’s richest man (at the time); now the attraction is £13m in debt. Local businesses and people were forced out to make way for poorly planned roads and a rash of expensive apartment blocks, with the net gain of affordable homes built standing at a measly 110. You don’t know whether to laugh or cry.