I’ve added a new page to this blog – it’s called ‘The work’. It lives on the right-hand sidebar, alongside ‘the author’, ‘the blog’ and ‘the book’.

It has a selection of links to some of my writing, as well as a few downloadable PDF files. There’s writing on Barcelona, including a full chapter of my book La Barcelona del diseño. Many of you have been asking if it was available in English – not as yet, but here’s a taster.

There’s also links to online excerpts of other things I’ve written about: old American cars in contemporary Cuba, TV makeover shows and domestic interiors, the challenges of historical research in archive-averse environments, or the relationship between footnotes, chairs, and cities.

Go have a look – the goods are in The Work. There are texts in English, Spanish and Catalan, so there’s something for everyone!

Ulysse Nardin Chairman Mechanical Smartphone

I’ve been following the Steampunk phenomenon with fascination. It’s a stylistical branching out that makes perfect sense to me, bringing as it does the formal exuberance of 19th century excitement at the technological wonders of the industrial revolution, its heavy mechanical seduction, its steam and coaldust manliness, onto the flat, bland and opaque physicality of our own turn of the century electronics: Steampunk is hard at work trying to turn Bill Gates into Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

Until now, Steampunk has been a somewhat tribal affair, developed by cyberpunk geeks intent on beautifying their gear, a labour of love and tinkering. Well, Steampunk is finally crossing over into mainstream consumer electronics – I was wondering when – and with the support of The Long Now Foundation no less… It makes perfect sense. The Ulysse Nardin Chairman hybrid smartphone’s unique selling point? It’s powered by a mechanical thingy that charges its battery through the users’ movements, just like self-winding wristwatches do. And it looks pure Steampunk.

I leave you with a couple of Steampunk beauties, in the hope that I will get a few of you hooked onto the trend.

Laptop by Datamancer

Brass USB stick

Steampunk'd desktop computer

And of course the most spectacular of them all, Paul St George’s Telectroscope that linked London and New York, the twin capitals of Steam and Punk, in the summer of 2008.

The Telectroscope, London end.

For the Greenest Office, Buy Vintage. Buy Thrift. Recycle.

With all the hubbub about green products, the point that everyone seems to miss is that the greenest move of all is to buy used stuff. Variously called “vintage,” “thrift,” or “second hand,” its updated name might simply be Cradle-to-Curb-to-Cradle. Stylewise, there doesn’t have to be any trade-offs, as this clever new office redesign by I29, a young architecture firm, proves. All of the pieces were sourced from local flea markets in Amsterdam; they were then given a contemporary, oh-so-Dutch look using environmentally friendly spray paint. The design fits the client—an ad agency called Gummo—pretty well…

(from Fast Company)
Posted in consumer culture, design, iLike, vintage design ]]> http://bcndesign.narotzky.com/2009/06/07/go-green-shop-vintage-buy-thrift-recycle/feed/ 0 VN http://bcndesign.narotzky.com/2009/06/02/summertime-vintage-design-auctions-season/ http://bcndesign.narotzky.com/2009/06/02/summertime-vintage-design-auctions-season/#comments Tue, 02 Jun 2009 12:03:21 +0000 Viviana Narotzky http://bcndesign.narotzky.com/?p=498 ]]>

LUIS BARRAGAN (1902-1988) A Sabino and Leather 'Barcelona' Chair, 1959. Estimate $20,000 - $30,000. Christie's Important 20th Century Decorative Art & Design, 2 June 2009 New York, Rockefeller Plaza.

With the month of June comes the yearly round of summer 20th Century design auctions at all the major auction houses. Sotheby’s ‘Important 20th Century Design’ of June 12 is offering lots for a total lower estimate value of $3.7 million – $5.4 at the highest estimate. This kind of money won’t save GM from bankruptcy, but it still is a hell of a lot of cash. Despite the recession, the relatively young 20C and contemporary design market has been holding its own remarkably well, even if its meteoric rise through to 2007 has been somewhat dampened in the current climate.

Christie’s and Phillips de Pury are also holding June auctions, as are Wright and  Quittenbaum, both specialist 20C Design auction houses. The latter holds a treat for all of you who are interested in Spanish 20th Century design: Andre Ricard’s rare 1973 lamp for Metalarte (pictured below), which I mentioned in an earlier post, is up for grabs at an estimate of €1200. Catch it if you can!

And if you happen to come across other pieces of Spanish design in the auction catalogues, let me know!

The Osborne group has announced that it will stop using the black bull as its corporate logo. The Sevilla-based group wants to signal its shift from being mostly a brandy and sherry producer to its current emphasis on products such as water, fruit juices and Iberico ham. It has commissioned a new corporate logo from a Madrid design studio, which is still under wraps and will be launched later this year.

While the fearsome 14-meter high bulls will remain dotted around the Spanish countryside, they will be even further divested from meaning. One more nail in the coffin for this iconic piece of Spanish advertising design, created in 1956 by Manuel Prieto of the Azor agency. The first bull, 7 meters high and made of wood, went up near Madrid in November of 1957. From the early 1960s the bulls were made of metal sheet and were 14 meters high. By the 1970s there were more than 500 bulls across Spanish territories, not just on the Iberian Peninsula but also in the Canary Islands, the Balearics and North Africa.

In 1988, new national transport legislation makes publicity billboards that are visible from the roads illegal, and the word Osborne that was written in red across the existing bulls is removed. By 1994 the Spanish government wants to bring them all down, but many autonomous communities, municipalities and pressure groups fight to save them. In 1998, the Supreme Court grants them mercy, stating that the Osborne bulls have moved beyond their original advertising meaning, having become part of the landscape and a Spanish cultural icon.

The Osborne bull has also left an interesting trail of political associations. As an icon of Spanishness it has been taken over by the conservative right, and prompted the design of  an alternative animal national icon by Catalan nationalists, in the shape of the Catalan donkey. No Heritage listing in sight for that one!

It was also used by Spanish soldiers posted in Irak, both on the national flag and to decorate the barracks.

There are currently 97 bulls left. And now that they are one of the great stories of Spanish graphic design, declared objects of National Heritage, film icons (in Bigas Luna’s 1992 Jamón, Jamón, the bull shares screen time with Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz),  Osborne wants to give them up, because they link the group too closely to its past as a sherry wine producer. Would Nike give up the swoosh? Would Macintosh give up the Apple? And all for the sake of branding bottled water and fruit juice?

La Vanguardia has a nice video with interviews of some of the donors who explain their relationship to the objects they have given. But I can’t embed it so go watch it here.

The research group Gracmon, Research Unit on History of Contemporary Art & Design based at Barcelona University’s Department of Art History, and the Fundació Institut Amatller, organise a symposium on turn of the century Barcelonese domestic interiors that will take place throughout the month of March 2009.

Here’s the programme:

Dimarts 3 de març

Gaudí i la superació de la tipologia residencial de l’Eixample: de la Casa Calvet a la Casa Milà

Joan Molet, professor titular d’història de l’art i pertany al GRACMON de la UB

Dimarts 10 de març

Les cases singulars de la “Mansana de la Discòrdia”: Casa Amatller, Casa Lleó-Morera i Casa Batlló

Santiago Alcolea Blanch, director de la FIAAH

Dimarts 17 de març

A casa dels poetes Apel.les Mestres, Alexandre de Riquer i Joan Maragall

Teresa-M. Sala, professora titular d’història de l’art i pertany al GRACMON de la UB

Dimarts 24 de març

Com s’hagués viscut al Park Güell?

Mireia Freixa, directora del departament d’història de l’art i pertany al GRACMON de la UB

Dimarts 31 de març

Audició íntima a les golfes de la Casa Amatller

Maria Luisa Muntada (Soprano) i Albert Romaní (fortepiano)

Lloc:

Casa Amatller

Hora:

19h

Preu:

Conferències i audició: 60€

Amics de la Casa Amatller i estudiant: 45€

Cicle de conferències: 30€

Informació i reserva:

Truqueu al telèfon 934 877 217 o amatller@amatller.org

Places limitades

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.

Disechos 08. Meeting about design and creative recycling, Valencia.

Disechos 08 is kicking off in Valencia today, a week-long exploration of low-tech sustainable design, through exhibitions, workshops and panel discussions. Disechos 08 incorporates the work developed by design studio Flou Flou through their ongoing MAKEA project, which explores recycling ideas by co-ordinating the contribution of outsider or non-professional design.

In July 2008, participants of Makea Tu Vida (Makea your life) spent two days roaming through the streets of the Raval and Eixample districts of Barcelona. They re-arranged and marked all the discarded furniture and assorted objects they could find with the MAKEA ‘brand’, as a sign of the need to recycle and re-use objects and make the consumption cycle more sustainable. Check out some great pictures of their street installations here.

There’s been a lot of water under the bridge since the heady days of Naomi Klein’s No Logo. Lately, the general trend in cutting-edge consumer culture business thinking has been that the new generations of consumers are a savvy bunch, tricky to reach and brainwash, highly articulate in the art of navigating safely the stormy seas of corporate branding without getting their gear wet.

Rob Walker begs to differ. He has been writing the ‘Consumed’ column for the New York Times magazine for the last few years, a clever and perceptive take on 21st century consumer culture. His work has been described as a mixture of cultural anthropology and business journalism. His latest book, Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy And Who We Are, explores the industry’s response to try and reach the post-No Logo crowd, a subtler, more insidious technique that Walker calls ‘Murketing’: murky marketing. So if you’d like to get updated on what’s been going on since viral marketing was the latest thing (1997!), this is probably worth reading. In any case, Walker’s book is set to become the latest pop-psychology business bestseller – we’re so beyond The Tipping Point.

You can read the Introduction here, courtesy of Random House.