BCNDesign

Luis M. Feduchi & Javier Feduchi. Room of Hotel Castellana Hilton, Madrid. 1953.

The Madrid Architectural Association COAM has a great resource for mid-century Madrid design: Catálogo de Muebles – Madrid de los 50 y 60. The online catalogue of images is based on the research carried out for two exhibitions on 1950s and 1960s design respectively, curated by Pedro Feduchi, which took place in 2005 and 2006. The images come from periodical publications such as Revista Nacional de Arquitectura, Hogar y Arquitectura, Nueva Forma, Temas de Arquitectura, and furniture manufacturers’ catalogues of the time period.

The database is organised by designers, pieces, interiors and trade catalogues, and there is also a keyword search option. The interface is not particularly smooth or user-friendly and it’s time-consuming to have to click on every individual entry to see a thumbnail of the image. Searching by item typologies seems to be the most effective option, as thumbnails are supplied. In any case the collection is structured in a clear way and the material is worth the effort.

[Thanks to Jordi Esteve].

Side-chair. Jose Dodero, 1961.

Side-chair. Miguel Fisac, 1960.

T.D.C. Catalogue, 1956. Designs by Fernando Ramon Moliner.

Fernando Alonso Martinez & Francisco Muñoz Cabrero. Ceiling light, 1955.

Reading lamp for the Instituto Eduardo Torroja. Commercialised through Darro. 1959

Surtido* presenta la exposición Surtido de Revolución; una muestra de los resultados del primer workshop de la plataforma, en íntima colaboración con el taller de cerámica Apparatu.

*La plataforma efímera e independiente para los jóvenes diseñadores del país

Inauguración 6 de mayo 19:30, Espai Rubik – c. Planeta, 5

todos los detalles acerca de la expo aquí.

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)

Wedgwoodn’t ceramic tureen created by Michael Eden with 3d RP technology.

Fabbaloo, the blog devoted to all things fabbed (as in fabricated, 3d printed and desktop manufactured) offers this roundup of the field’s trends in 2008:

• The rise of sophisticated specialized printing services. Let’s face it; there have been 3D print services around for quite a while, but it’s only this year that a few breakthrough companies began applying advanced Web 2.0 approaches to the problem. Companies like Ponoko, Shapeways and others are breaking new ground and beginning to gather a large audience that will eventually become the personal manufacturers of the future.
• The increasing capabilities of large-scale 3D printers. Increased build chambers, more colors, new and unusual print media and multiple media printing were all introduced by the major equipment vendors, Z Corp, Stratasys, 3D Systems and Objet. More, please!
• We’re still waiting for the price breakthrough. The “Apple Laserwriter moment” has not yet arrived, but it’s surely coming. Equipment such as MCOR’s paper printer and Desktop Factory’s sub-USD$5,000 device should be generally available in their initial incarnation in the coming year. Meanwhile, we await an inexpensive device to really blow open the market.
• The creativity unleashed by personal manufacturing. One can only look at Ponoko’s library of designs to see what is beginning to happen; nothing less than Web 2.0 for manufacturing.

I have no doubt that 2009 will be a turning point for Rapid Prototyping and desktop manufacturing – it will be the year when everyone gets extremely excited about its possibilities, and realises that there’s really a Second Industrial Revolution in the making.

I just got an email about the Reactable project:

It’s a bit late but, Reactable Systems are running a competition to design an identity for themselves and the reactable. It would be great if more designers in Spain got to hear about this.

Well, the deadline is January 11th, so yeah, it’s a bit late!

Still, it’s worth giving this a shout-out, if only to get you to check out the Reactable project, which is truly magnificent and has gathered a long list of awards, including the Ars Electronica Prix and two D&AD prizes in 2008. It’s an exciting interaction design project that brings together engineers, computer scientists and musicians, based at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona.

In 2007,  Gary Hustwit directed Helvetica, a small budget, feature-length documentary about the 50-year old typeface. A niche film with an undeniably nerdy topic, Helvetica soon became a global phenomenon. One of the film’s greatest achievements was the way in which it managed to convey both Helvetica’s extraordinary designer status and its truly impressive universal success as possibly the most ubiquitous and generic typeface in common use.

Now Hustwit is at work on stuff. Moving from graphics to objects, his next project, due to premiere in Spring of 2009, is aptly called Objectified. Here’s how the Objectified website describes the project:

Objectified is a feature-length independent documentary about industrial design. It’s a look at the creativity at work behind everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets. It’s about the people who re-examine, re-evaluate and re-invent our manufactured environment on a daily basis. It’s about personal expression, identity, consumerism, and sustainability. It’s about our relationship to mass-produced objects and, by extension, the people who design them.

And here’s the trailer:

Objectified looks set to become another runaway success with the design crowd, but the trailer really makes me wonder whether it will manage to provide us with any interesting views on our everyday relationship with things – with generic things. The beauty of Helvetica was that through the passionate and obsessive following of one font, the film took us deep into what most of us experience daily as no-design-land, the land of cinema tickets, road signs, TV news – just life, no designer tag. Objectified seems more concerned with designers and their creative process, a hardly innovative approach to the world of objects that yields little real insight into the average human relationship with manufactured goods, but lots of talk about ‘good design’ and ‘user needs’. But I might be mistaken. I really hope I am. I guess I just didn’t like the trailer. That’s funny, because I thought I did.

From the Delta Awards website:

The Association of Industrial Design ADI-FAD calls for companies and designers from Spain and other countries to take part in the Delta Awards with products that are distributed in the Spanish market. The purpose of this competition is to encourage public recognition of those products which stand out because of their innovative character, for their conceptual originality, the response among the public and their environmental impact, as well as their design and their manufacturing quality.

The Delta Awards have been open to international participation since 2007. The aspiration to reflect the current situation of the market has meant that the 2009 Delta Awards are open to products designed and produced by companies and designers within Spain or other countries, as long as these products are widely distributed in the Spanish market.

Applications deadline 15th March 2009. has been extended to April 30th 2009.

The Jury for the ADI-FAD Delta Awards 2009:
Uli Marchsteiner ADI-FAD board of directors
Luki Huber Industrial designer
Konstantin Grcic Industrial designer
Luc Donckerwolke SEAT
Javier Nieto President Santa & Cole
Dr. Ramon Folch Estudi Ramon Folch – Gestió i Comunicació Ambiental, S.L.
Luisa Bonchietto President of ADI Italy
Monica Gili Director of Gustavo Gili Publishing S.L.
Florian Hufnagl director of “Neue Sammlung”

More information is available at www.delta-awards.com.

Lamp by Andre Ricard for Metalarte. Spain, 1973.

I find browsing through the catalogues of 20th century design auctions pleasantly addictive. I particularly enjoy the idea of many of those objects having the possibility of an extended real life out there in someone’s home, eventually. Of tables supporting piles of half-read magazines and traces of fresh coffee stains, consoles being scratched by bunches of keys every evening, lamps being turned on and chairs creaking as people sit at the dinner table. When I come across a piece of vintage furniture I really like,  a whole room seems to grow around it in my mind. A very expensive room, as many of these objects have been going for pretty steep prices – at least until fairly recently. The 20th Century Design antiques market hasn’t been immune to the global economic meltdown, although it has held up surprisingly well, especially at the higher end of the market.

The vintage design scene is dominated by five main players, in terms of where the pieces come from and the most valued historical periods. Germany (Bauhaus designers), Italy (pretty much everything), France (Prouve of course, Royère, Mategot), Scandinavia (Aalto, Jacobsen, Panton) and US Mid-Century Modern (Eames, Nelson, Nakashima). Just to name a few. Then there’s everybody else, from the Czech Republic to Brazil. And, on rare occasions, Spain.

Fase 520c lamp in TV series House M.D., episode 4x11, "Frozen".

Late 1960s lamp by Fase, Madrid.

Until very recently, Spain was as entirely absent from the vintage design scene as the vintage design scene was absent in Spain. Now both are starting to rear their heads. So far, the occasional Spanish mid-century presence in the auction catalogues is limited to a couple of recurring typologies, but they are slowly becoming established. One of them is  – to the horror of Spaniards who see nothing in them but the reminder of Francoist officialdom – the pieces by lighting company FASE, manufacturer during the 1960s and 1970s of wonderfully solid and excitingly modern-looking lamps for the desks of Spanish civil servants. Ironically, designer-anonymous Fase lamps are probably the best-known items of Spanish design in the vintage world. Not surprisingly, as some of them are truly gorgeous. They have recently found their way into the latest Indiana Jones film (on Indy’s desk, no less!) and an episode of the TV series House M.D. – Hollywood production designers know a good thing when they see it.

Sunburst gilt ceiling fixture. Spain, late 1950s.

Spain, 1950s gilt sunburst mirror with scrollwork frame

Another category of Spanish mid-century design that has become extremely successful abroad is the sunburst, both as mirror and as lamp. Again, to the dismay of modernity-seeking Spaniards who see them as the epitome of kitsch and the bane of dreary middle-class late 1950s entry halls. And again, I think they’re gorgeous.

But what about ‘real’ Spanish design, designer design, the kind of stuff that was getting ADI-FAD Delta prizes in the 1960s and 1970s? The stuff by Miguel Mila and Andre Ricard and Barba Corsini? Or even earlier 1930s stuff by the GATCPAC crew? There seems to be precious little of it out there.

The Butterfly chair (known as BKF in Spain) by Antonio Bonet, Juan Kurchan and Jorge Ferrari Hardoy, is virtually the only well-known piece by a Spanish designer that has a solid, enduring presence in the vintage design auction world. And that is probably because it was designed in Argentina in 1938 (Bonet, a Catalan architect, had fled Spain during the Civil War and founded the Austral group with Kurchan and Ferrari) and later manufactured by Knoll in the US, becoming an iconic piece of mid-century modern furniture design.

Another Spanish piece that has appeared recently in auction catalogues is a splendid reading lamp by Andre Ricard, one of Barcelona’s best known designers and part of the generation that helped establish the profession in the 1960s. The lamp was commissioned for the library of the Philosophy Faculty of Barcelona University in the early 1970s. The Faculty relocated to new premises a couple of years ago and the Library is no more, so I’m glad this lamp made it into the auctions circuit, because it certainly didn’t make it into the local design museum collections. It’a a beautiful, elegant piece, which combines a 70s sensibility with a certain Art Deco flair (see picture at top of post). It was manufactured by Metalarte, and I have found another version of it in their historical catalogue, which was probably the inspiration for the site-specific Library lamp.

Low table lamp by Andre Ricard for Metalarte, 1973.

So – where is Spanish vintage design? A lot of it probably ended up in the rubbish bin a long time ago. The preservation of mid-century everyday objects in Spain has been hindered by the fact that they represented a material culture of dictatorship, national isolation and anonymous design, and by an institutional infrastructure (read Museums) that lacked the means and the will to look after the design heritage efficiently. But there are some truly great pieces out there, both anonymous and signed, and I’m sure we will be seeing more of them as the interest in 20th century vintage takes root in Spain. And that will be a good thing, because we can’t always rely on museum collections to take care of the past.

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.

The Design History Foundation is a private institution that was established last year in Barcelona. It seeks to promote, support and disseminate the work of design historians in Spain and Latin America. Its aim is to help in the establishment and development of the History of Design through  research, postgraduate and training workshops, conferences and symposia, exhibitions and publications. One of the key aims of the Foundation is to enhance the visibility of the History of Design as an area of historical studies.

The DHF has worked closely with the recently launched Barcelona Disseny Hub, curating the poster exhibition Col.lecció del Gabinet de les Arts Gràfiques, and putting together a new study collection of over 1000 Spanish posters.

I believe Barcelona’s DHF will be a great platform to promote a better understanding of design and to showcase what design historical approaches can contribute to thinking through visual and material culture. Through the Board of Trustees, we’re establishing a range of institutional links with national museums, and the Graphic Arts exhibition currently on show at the Palau del Marquès de Llió (Montcada 12, Barcelona) is its first major public outcome.