BCNDesign

La cuarta noche de Pecha Kucha se celebrará en uno de los lugares más auténticos y creativos de Barcelona, el Palo Alto de Poblenou. Gracias a la Fundación Palo Alto, celebraremos el Vol.4 en su Nave XYZ el día 6 de Febrero. Apertura de puertas 19.30. Inicio de las ponencias 20.20.

Mercedes Quevedo, illustrator
Guim Valls Teruel, Electric Bicycle World Tour
Cristina González Gabarró, photographer
Xavier Font Sola, structural engineer
Patricio Abreu, Vaho recycled design
Niall O Flynn, industrial designer
Ignasi Pérez Arnal, sustainable architect
Marcus Willcock, designer & researcher
Stijn Ossevoort, fashion designer
Bailo + Rull, ADD Arquitectura

Pecha Kucha Vol.4
Palo Alto, Calle Pellaires 30-38, Poblenou
Metro: Selva de Mar (L4)
Apertura puertas: 19.30h
Inicio: 20.20h
Cierre: 23h
Foro limitado, ven pronto!
Entrada: 5€ (incluye 1 bebida)

I told you about the video game The Wheelman in an earlier post. It’s the one where Vin Diesel trashes everything and everyone in sight in “exotic” Barcelona. It’s due out anytime soon, we’re being told, and while we wait with bated breath we’re being teased with a new trailer. What I’m really liking about this game, is that for once a global product that commercialises the “Barcelona Brand” shows us something other than the usual suspects. There are plenty of those (Sagrada Familia, Plaza Real, waterfront and palm trees), but thanks to the exacting requirements of the script, bursting with car chases and criminal behaviour, we are paradoxically offered a more realistic version of the city, which includes nail-biting ring-road action, dreary mass-housing neighbourhoods, dusty parking lots and abandoned construction sites. Now there’s a Barcelona I can recognise!

I’m heading back to London town later today, for a few welcome weeks of intensive Anglo culture top-up and a good healthy dose of miserable British winter weather. I’ve missed watching multi-tasking Londonerettes gracefully catching a bus on their stilleto heels while drinking a cappuccino, listening to their iPod, chatting on the mobile, paying the bus fare and wiggling their family-size handbags through the packed doors. I’ve missed marvelling at the Northern fortitude of young London men walking down the street in near-sub-zero temperatures in a t-shirt and saggy jeans. And I’ve missed packed sandwiches. Seriously. There’s nothing much to miss generally in British non-ethnic food, but as far as packed sandwiches go, the Brits are way ahead of the game.

So I’m excitedly looking forward to hitting the nearest ASDA shop and getting hold of the above gorgeous boxes, designed by Emma Smart. I can’t work out if they’re on the shelves already or only at the development stage – but I’m up for a bit of fieldwork.

To celebrate both its 25th anniversary and the festive season, 4th estate publishers (a division of HarperCollins) has commisioned a short stop-motion animation film produced by Apt, a London-based design and marketing consultancy.

This Is Where We Live, is the wonderful combination of a love for books, a love for urban life, and the work of  ‘an insane bunch of animators’ – their words, not mine. Created entirely with actual, physical books published by 4thEstate, the film projects a charming, somewhat romantic vision of the city, and a great sense of humour in its linking of the titles, and sometimes the narratives, to London. The Greenwich Observatory, for instance, is made out of Dava Sobel’s Longitude, while the West End Cinema is made of books that have been turned into films.

This Is Where We Live from 4th Estate on Vimeo.

Pza. Lesseps, Barcelona. Under construction.

Will it ever look any better than this?

Update 23 November 2008:

An interview with Plaza Lesseps’ architect Albert Viaplana in EL PAIS of 18.11.08 (in Spanish).

spain emotion exhibition at the Spanish Embassy in Roppongi, Tokyo.

Designboom offers images of a collection of furniture designed by ex-designer Martí Guixé for
Barcelona furniture label, ‘Mixing Media‘, on show at the Claska Hotel’s gallery as part of Tokyo Design Week 08.

The Spanish presence in Tokyo this year included Jaime Hayón‘s latest porcelain designs for Lladró, which (dis?)graced the boutique’s windows on Ginza. Around these and other presentations, a series of talks, rather stereotypically entitled spain-emotion, took place under the auspices of the Spanish Institute for Foreign Trade, ICEX. Their centerpiece was the exhibition of the same name curated by Hector Serrano at the Spanish Embassy in Roppongi, showcasing the best of current Spanish design.

It was really great to see such a solid and well-represented Spanish presence in Japan. But my take on the best of Spanish design in Tokyo last week? The brash, wonderfully colourful appearance of our beloved Chupa-Chups, as shown in these pictures I took in Ginza:

The International Herald Tribune has featured Barcelona’s shared-bike system, Bicing, as an example of a strong trend in major European cities to offer bicycles as an alternative method of public transport.

On my regular visits to Barcelona while I lived abroad, I noticed an increasing presence of bicycles on the streets, especially over the last four years or so. Since Bicing was launched in early 2007, they seem to have taken the town over. One reason, no doubt, is the increasing concern about sustainability and the urban environment (and Barcelona’s pleasant weather). But I suspect that another very strong asset of the system has to do with the flexibility it affords its subscribers to get hold of a bike at one end of town and leave it at the other. If you travel across the city from the Tibidabo mountain towards the sea, you’re on a lovely downhill ride. Trekking uphill the other way, however, is an entirely different matter. Luckily for Bicing-ers, the City Council has lots of trucks picking up bikes downtown and dropping them off again at the top of the hill. Woo-hoo!

In any case Bicing has been an extraordinary success, with 6,000 bikes on the road and heavy daily usage. It is supported by the latest technology which makes it extremely easy to use at the pick-up and drop-off points, and which offers real-time monitoring of existing bike stands and availability, allowing users to check online to see if there is a bike available at their nearest Bicing station.

And Bicing subscribers now have even more opportunities to be sustainable in the city, with special discounts and prices in the hybrid car-sharing venture Avancar.

Saturday 15 November 2008
7:30pm to 11pm
Ticket: 5 euros (includes drink)
IAAC (Institut d’arquitectura avançada de Catalunya)
C/Pujades 102 baixos, Poble Nou. 08005, Barcelona
Metro: Línea 4 (Bogatell ó Llacuna)

http://www.pecha-kucha.org/cities/barcelona

After the success of Vol.1 and Vol.2, Pecha Kucha Night Barcelona returns, this time taking place at the IAAC (Institut d’arquitectura avançada de Catalunya). Participants will include the design studio 2creativo, the architect Ethel Baraona, sustainable design consultant Leonora Oppenheim and graphic designer and illustrator Miguel Ángel Moya.

The first Pecha Kucha Night in Barcelona took place in July at the Edificio Fórum and was followed by a second evening in September at the Maremagnum.

The Barcelona City Council has recently announced that it will request the establishment of the .bcn domain for the city. Earlier this year,  the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)  voted to approve lifting restrictions on the classification of domain names, allowing for new customized Web addresses.

In 2006, ICANN approved the .cat domain, which was subsequently launched by the Catalan Regional Government (Generalitat de Catalunya) as a new domain for websites in the Catalan language. This domain therefore was not intended to represent a specific politically defined region or nation, but a cultural and linguistic group, and had therefore from the outset a strong ideological and national-linguistic component. As explained in the .cat domain charter:

The .cat TLD is intended to serve the needs of the Catalan Linguistic and Cultural Community on the Internet (the “Community”).

The Community consists of those who use the Catalan language for their online communications, and/or promote the different aspects of Catalan culture online, and/or want to specifically address their online communications to that Community.

The success of the .cat domain has encouraged numerous applications for other top level domains centered on creating an independent internet identity for linguistic and cultural communities.

Given the weight of local identity politics contained in the .cat domain, it is no surprise that the Generalitat has reacted angrily and is firmly opposed to Barcelona’s application to have its own domain. The Regional Government’s position is that .bcn will weaken the .cat domain, and will strengthen Barcelona’s approach to presenting itself as a ‘city-state’ with the rest of Catalunya as ‘part of the Barcelona metropolitan area’, rather than as being the capital of the Catalan nation.

In the words of Jordi Bosch, the Generalitat’s Secretary of Telecommunications and Information Society:

Barcelona perdrà l’oportunitat d’exercir com a capital del país i optarà de nou pel paper de ciutat estat que no beneficia el conjunt de Catalunya [...] i es donarà un concepte erroni de la resta de Catalunya com a àrea metropolitana de Barcelona.

The Generalitat has further accused the City Council of trying to carry out a branding and marketing operation at the expense of Catalan national identity.

And so it goes.

Instances of the word 'diseño' in La Vanguardia, 1881-2008

Barcelona’s major broadsheet newspaper, La Vanguardia, has opened up its archives (Hemeroteca) and now offers free online access. The full content ranges from 1881 onwards, can be searched by keyword, topic or date and downloaded as .pdf files.

As an interesting feature to note, the results interface offers a detailed interactive visual timeline of the number of occurences of the search word throughout La Vanguardia’s archives. A search for ‘diseño’ (design), for instance, reveals a striking development in the use of the word.

Its first noticeable appearances coincide with the 1920s / 1930s and the rise of Spanish modernism, and diseappear by 1936, at the start of the Civil War. The 1950s see a very slow, small but steady return of the word, whit its use growing noticeably from the mid 1960s. Between 1976, the start of the Spanish political transition, and 1989, the surge in the appearance of ‘design’ in the newspaper is extraordinary, from 1,194 instances in 1976, to 4,670 in 1989. After a short trough, usage peaks by the late 1990s, with 5,597 appearances in 1999.  Perhaps most surprisingly, there is a very sharp drop from 2000, and current levels of usage in 2008 are only equivalent to those of 1986, the height of the Barcelona design boom.

As I’ve suggested in La Barcelona del diseño, design and the city had a special relationship between the late 1970s and the late 1990s, which seems to have now lost some of its historical relevance.

And here is some eye candy from the archives:

Advertisement for clothes and underwear manufactured with synthetic fibers. May 1952.

Advertisement for Muebles Malda, one of Barcelona's furniture retailers. June 1966.

'We can't all use the same furniture'. Advertisement for Muebles La Favorita, one of Barcelona's furniture retailers. October 1973.

The FAD Industrial Design Delta Prizes of 1976. Images of designs by Miguel Mila, Jose Bonet and Studio Per.

January 1977. Barcelona Design Centre (BCD) moves to larger premises.

Colour supplement, July 1992: ‘The Games of the imagination. The Olympic project becomes the inspiration for the design of hundreds of objects’. In the main picture, Andre Ricard, designer of the olympic torch.