BCNDesign

Fundación Signes is promoting a campaign to save old shop signs that are at risk of disappearing. They are encouraging people to send pictures and note the exact locations, and have started building an online collection which already has some beautiful examples. It’s a great initiative and a particularly urgent one in cities like Barcelona, whose obsession with urban face-lifts and modernisation is creating an increasingly sterile environment. My recurrent nightmare, after a few months back in Barcelona, is that very soon there won’t even be a stretch of pavement left that is older than a decade or so. What this city needs is a Campaign for the Preservation of Grime and Urban Patina.

Another wonderful ongoing online project is José Antonio Millán’s Abecedario Industrial y del Comercio, which showcases hundreds of images of letters taken from commercial signs around Spain (mostly in Catalunya). Millán’s selection showcases the best – and worst!- of anonymous design’s creative drive, highlighting letters that try to represent the objects and services advertised. A fantastic overview of outsider typography.

Interior - Dining room. Enciclopedia de la Decoracion, Centro de Estudios CEAC, Barcelona, GERSA, 1963, vol.4, p.25

I mentioned in my previous post the forthcoming symposium on turn of the century interiors in Barcelona. If you’re interested in that kind of thing, I thought I might also point you to the Domestic Interiors Database, DIDB.

I coordinated that project over three years while at the AHRC Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior, based at the Royal College of Art in London.

You can see part of my own research contribution to the database here, in this case a few pages of results with many images coming from the photographic archives of the Amatller Foundation, which have never been published before. There are some spectacular 1900 Barcelona interiors for you to enjoy. There’s also, should you prefer technicolour to black and white, some really cool pictures from a 1963 Encyclopaedia of Interior Decoration published by CEAC in Barcelona.

The online DIDB offers over 3,000 representations of domestic interiors from 1400 to the present day, in Europe and North America. It was one of the major collaborative research outcomes of the AHRC Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior. Textual sources in the database cover novels, poetry, manuscripts and inventories, diaries and correspondence, accounts, trade literature and advertisements, periodicals and advice manuals. Visual sources extend from Renaissance paintings to eighteenth-century graphic satire, from nineteenth-century design books and popular magazines to dolls’ houses, from twentieth-century photographs and computer stills to interior design drawings.

Have fun!

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

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.

Second Life architecture

I’ve just come across a fascinating article by Tyler Pace on the Design Philosophy Politics website: ‘Digital life identity crisis: tales of security and sustainability’.

While the issue of sustainability is a pressing one and is now solidly embedded in contemporary design thinking, it is still rare to find an article such as this one, which carries over the issues into what we are still calling the ‘virtual world’. Pace’s comments make it clear that we are using an incorrect, and misleading, terminology. There’s no such thing as a virtual world, there’s just the world. Here’s some food for thought:

Linden Labs, producers of the popular social virtual world Second Life, expressed their consumption problems in 2006.

“We’re running out of power for the square feet of rack space that we’ve got machines in. We can’t for example use [blade] servers right now because they would simply require more electricity than you could get for the floor space they occupy.”

Identity information in Second Life is more complex than a traditional web application as “residents” of Second Life own clothing, chairs, cars and pretty much anything else you can imagine. All of this accessory information becomes part of the identity maintained by the Second Life servers, thereby requiring vast amounts of electricity. Popular technology blogger Nicholar Carr calculated that Second Life avatars consume as much electricity as the average Brazilian citizen.

On a parallel tack, I’ve received a very interesting call for papers sent out by the online journal Design Philosophy Papers, on the need for design history to address sustainability as a historical and historiographical issue. Full details below.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Design History Futures – Sustaining What?

to be edited by Karin Jaschke, Paul Denison and Tara Andrews
in association with Anne-Marie Willis

SUMMARY:
Modern lifestyles and material cultures made possible by design are now being seen as so deeply implicated in unsustainability that a re-writing of design history seems inevitable.

Conversely, a revitalised, critical design history could play a major role in providing an intellectual framework for new, redirective design practices.

How does awareness of sustainability and unsustainability affect design history?
What does this mean for specific areas of research: histories of product design, architecture, fashion, graphics, material and visual cultures, etc.?
What part has design history itself played in the development of unsustainability?

Submit 200 word abstracts by 12 Dec 2008 to:
Anne-Marie Willis, Editor, Design Philosophy Papers  amwillis@teamdes.com.au

FULL TEXT:
Design history has evolved over recent decades through engagement with matters of concern like class, gender and the postcolonial. In turn, critical design histories have contributed to new ways of understanding the world around us. Today, the matter of concern is sustainability: an issue that is almost too large in its implications to be grasped outright. It presents a challenge that is new in scope and kind. Design history cannot remain unaffected by this.

Design historians are well aware of the role design has played in making the modern world. Yet the modern lifestyles and material cultures made possible by design are now being seen as so deeply implicated in unsustainability that on these grounds alone a re-writing of design history seems inevitable. Modes of practice and thought, social and economic contexts, and the ideological premises of past design practice need to be addressed anew.

At the same time, this raises the question of design history’s own disciplinary past, present, and future. Design histories have used and perpetuated ways of thinking that have fed directly into current, unsustainable design practice, including notions of progress, newness, and obsolescence, ‘iconic design’, and the star-designer or ‘starchitect’. Historians of design thus need to consider the implications of their value-systems.

Climate change, resource depletion, and pollution will lead to major changes in modern lifestyles in the near future. Design has a major ethical and professional stake in this transition and the direction it will take.

We propose that a revitalised, critical design history could play a major role in providing an intellectual framework for new, redirective design practices. Thus we ask the following questions, and invite papers that address them:

•       How does awareness of sustainability and unsustainability affect design history?

•       What insights could be gained by re-reading design’s past through perspectives of sustainability and unsustainability?

•       Could design history contribute to a more developed understanding of sustainability and unsustainability?

•       Are there past writers who have already done this? Is their work relevant to today?

•       Have we overlooked historical subjects that are of importance to the sustainability debate?

•       What part has design history itself played in the development of unsustainability?

•       Do we need radically new ways of thinking to understand the role that design has played in bringing about the present unsustainable state of the world?

•       What does this mean for specific areas of research: histories of product design, architecture, fashion, graphics, material and visual cultures, etc.?

•       Is there an ethical imperative for historians to reconsider their disciplinary approach with view to sustainability? Does this imperative undercut notions of impartiality?

•       Where are the blind-spots in design historiography that may hinder a real rethinking of design history?

•       What methods and approaches from other disciplines or traditions of thinking could offer ways of understanding our unsustainable past that might be relevant to the historical study of design?

SCHEDULE
Abstracts (200 words) due by: 12 Dec 2008
Select and invite full papers by: 19 Dec
First drafts of papers due by: 13 March  2009
Papers refereed by: 3 April
Final drafts due by: 24 April
Publication online by: 22 May

SUBMIT ABSTRACTS TO:
Anne-Marie Willis
Editor, Design Philosophy Papers
amwillis@teamdes.com.au
www.desphilosophy.com <http://www.desphilosophy.com>

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.