Temperature Rising

Next up is the always incredible Artemide. I've long been a fan of their work, and I actually have an Artemide sconce, this one, "Icaro":

I don't have any place for a wall fixture in my current apartment. Besides, it's a bit too high-tech for my aesthetic now, which is much more warm and earthy. I still love the fixture, though.

They have a couple of amazing new pieces this year by designer Ross Lovegrove, namely, the Aqua Cil line, here's table and floor:

Most astonishing, though, was this one, "Mercury":

Don't ask me why for their glamour shot they used this image where somebody bumped the camera. But anyway, I could see this from way down the aisle and made a beeline for their booth to see what it was. It's absolutely breathtaking. I said that to the booth rep and remarked that it looked like drops of mercury floating in space. She smiled and said "that's what it's called, 'Mercury!'" Sharp as a tack, I am. That's the ceiling version, here's the suspension:

Not at the show, clearly related, but not seemingly part of the same line is this one, "Droplet," where the circular aluminum plate has ripples in it like the surface of a lake:

The ripples make this a far more interesting piece, the texture is amazing and obviously the result of some advanced machine technologies. But there aren't enough droplets in this one. The circular plate is too large and they end up feeling lost. I definitely think their best bet would be to combine these two together, in other words, "Mercury" with a complexly rippled plate. In any case, the polished chrome reflectors are uniquely beautiful and cast the most interesting quality of light, exactly what a brilliant light fixture should do.

©2009, Ryan Witte

Circle of Firsts

To finish off my discussion of this year's BKLYN DESIGNS show is a designer I've posted about before, Takeshi Miyakawa. He was showing a number of new pieces that were all very cool. The one I wanted to talk about, though, is a sort of shelving installation piece called "Rite of Spring":

Click for larger.

The more I continue to study the History of Music over the past 500 years, the more I grow to see just how very few true revolutions there have been. Igor Stravinsky's 1913 ballet was, I believe, one of them. To this day, I can't listen to this masterpiece without chills running from my head to my toes and having a difficult time breathing. Not that what he did to music came out of nowhere, quite the contrary, but I consider this piece to the the birth of Punk. Certainly many more things would have to have happened before 1976 would be possible. But the power that music has to not only rile its audience to emotional heights, but to also scandalize the listener into a profound, riotous fury was suddenly proven by The Rite of Spring. After this point, it would happen over and over. This reconstruction of the original ballet also shows the unbridled genius of Sergei Diaghilev:

One can only hope and pray that for the hundredth anniversary of The Rite of Spring four years from now, New York City Ballet, arguably the step-grandchild of Diaghilev's Ballet Russes, will gather together all the greatest artists at its disposal and unveil a startling new production of it.

I think what I love most about Miyakawa's work is that, whether or not it does explore complex mathematical principles precisely, it often looks like it does.

And with a mystical kind of reverence for mathematics: there's the spot in the middle of the upper and lower sections where the box resulting from the steadily diminishing size has just...disappeared. It's as if the formula dictating the size of the boxes eventually divides down to zero, leaving an empty space where the box should be in the center. It's the same reverence one might have for how a circle, in some ways the most perfectly self-contained of all geometric shapes, gives rise to Pi, which is presumably unsolvable and infinite.

Although this new piece is stunning, I think I'd like to see Miyakawa push this a step further and start exploring more complex geometries. For instance, I'd be interested to look at the ways that nature uses geometric rules with the flexibility to produce similar but only ever utterly unique individual objects and organisms, or explore geometries that appear chaotic from one vantage point and very strictly ordered from another. Nevertheless, this is a designer whose work I believe is going in a very exciting direction, and I intend to keep my eye on what he's up to.

©2009, Ryan Witte

Amped Up

(NYIAS)

Another thing to be excited about was at the booth for Chevrolet, and no, I don't mean that Bumblebee made an appearance to introduce the Camaro.

Although that was very exciting.

It was really their introduction of an ostensibly viable electric car, which they claim is officially going into production for 2011, the Volt. Here it is as a concept vehicle:

This is a seriously hot car. Why they felt the need to bash it with an ugly stick before putting it into production, I have no idea. Here's what they had at the auto show:

Don't get me wrong, it's not that bad. But it just doesn't have the boldness or confidence of the concept version.

Here's the thing: car design generally wallows in this luke-warm stylistic middle ground. In the one direction, you have the design of, say, Japanese motorcycles, which have consistently had some of the most mind-boggling design of any kind of object. The distinction I'm making with the Japanese offerings is from the Harley-Davidson sort of American cruising bikes, which, though gorgeous, are a completely different animal. But the motifs of motorcycle design not only have to connote high technology, power, and speed, but their design has something even on the sports cars, in that it also speaks much more of adrenaline-soaked rebelliousness. So all the elements of their design are pushed to the most radical extreme. Cars, however, are typically more expensive, more of an investment, more of a risk, and are purchased for quite a few reasons other than weekend jaunts out on the highway. Their design, therefore, has to be safer and appeal to a much lower common denominator.

In the other direction, there's an art form like architecture. Architecture has to be ridiculously safe because, unlike cars which would seem to have a stylistic shelf-life of around five years, buildings need to stand and remain more or less relevant for as long as thirty years, in most cases much longer. But buildings, first of all, are just iconic inherently, due to their sheer size. Secondly, because they do typically have such a long lifespan, there's a responsibility for them to be beautiful, even if boringly so. This is why the ugliest architecture arises from situations where there's neither the need for personal or institutional identity (like suburban tract housing that has to appeal universally to the broadest section of potential buyers, or the offices of companies for which corporate branding is largely unimportant), nor the likelihood of required longevity (mid-size companies enjoying steady growth that expect to move to a more profitable or respectable location or physically outgrow their current building before it becomes obsolete).

Mass-produced, moderately-priced automobiles seem to be able to fully enjoy none of the phenomena that facilitate design innovation in other products. It's unfortunately much more restricted.

In any case, I'm still very happy the Volt is becoming a reality, whatever it looks like. I mean, for how many years have vehicles in Science Fiction movies been making that electric humming noise? Thirty? It's true GM had come out with the first electric car, the EV1, years ago and it got dumped, but luckily I think the timing is a great deal better now for this to finally take off.

It was Chevy's booth rep on the Volt turntable, in fact, who I asked what difference it makes that your car is electric if your home's power supplier burns fossil fuels, and she didn't seem to have a very good answer for me. If you drive only forty miles at a time, though, you'll never need a single drop of gasoline. The Volt does have a combustion motor, but it's not a hybrid engine. Instead, the gas powered motor is a back up, running a generator to recharge the battery if you exceed the forty-mile limit. It seems to me that it would be strangely inefficient to burn gas to run a generator to recharge the battery to power the electric motor to move the car, rather than just having a hybrid engine, but I suppose the difference is that for the first leg of a journey, you're not burning any gas, at all. And the fact remains that before recharging stations become commonplace, fears of being stranded with a dead battery will be a major hindrance to the success of electric cars.

©2009, Ryan Witte