Inspired By Ugliness

Konstantin Grcic was born in 1965 in Munich but was brought up in Wuppertal, a city in the industrial part of Germany. The city is considered to be one of the ugliest cities in the whole country. “Growing up there created an awareness in me that there is beauty in ugliness” as Mr. Grcic describes it. 

During the 1980s he studied cabinet making at Parnham College in British Dorset after which he continued studying Industrial Design at the Royal College of Art in London and worked for a while with Jasper Morrison. In 1991 Grcic went back to his home country to start his own design studio, Konstantin Grcic Industrial Desig, in Munich. Throughout his career Grcic has been fascinated by the industrial process following the footsteps of designers like Marcel Breuer, Vico Magiatretti, Gerrit Reitveld and Achille Castiglioni. 

The Chair One was designed for the Italian design company Magis in 2004 and is a great example of Konstantin Grcic’s approach to design. 

The Day of Waffles

In Sweden, the day of Annunciation is called Marie Bebådelsedag, (Mary’s Annunciation), or Vårfrudagen (the Day of our Lady). Vårfrudagen pronounced quickly became Våffeldagen, meaning Waffle Day, and all of a sudden this Christian celebration became a very secular waffle feast instead. At least that is the commonly accepted theory. 

Waffles came to Sweden from Germany during the 17th century and have been enjoyed by Swedes ever since. Considering how expensive a waffle iron was in the olden days it remained a treat for the upper class for a very long time. 

The first time waffles became associated with Annunciation was in 1867, in the region surrounding Gothenburg. It seems to have been a bit of a joke connecting the two, even from the beginning and the rather more plausible reason for the waffle feast was that it was a holiday and during holidays everyone tends to treat themselves to something nice.

Sixten Sason is one of Sweden’s most recognized industrial designers, mostly known for his streamlined designs for the Saab 92 and Saab 99. He also made several products for the kitchen ware company Husqvarna, amongst others the Waffle Iron, designed in 1957. 

The Shaker That Conquered the World

The Alessi company was founded in 1921 by sheet metal worker Giovanni Alessi Anghini who set up shop in Omegna, not far from Milan. The company started out making tableware in copper and brass but they soon expanded to coffee pots, trays and other household products. In 1938 Alessi introduced stainless steel and after the war this entirely replaced brass in the production. From the 1930s until the ’50s Carlo Alessi, the son of Giovanni, was head designer but when his younger brother Ettore joined the business in 1945 he made Carlo realize the potential in hiring external designers. One of the first project being designed outside the family was the incredibly successful Shaker 870, created by Carlo Mazzeri and Luigi Massoni in 1957.

Carlo Mazzeri was born in Oleggio, Italy in 1927 and studied architecture in Venice. Just a year after graduating in 1956 he designed the shaker for Alessi with Luigi Massoni. During the 1960s and ’70s he kept working for Alessi alongside Anselmo Vitale, designing a series of products for the hotel industry. Working with industrial construction, Mazzeri also made the new Alessi plant in Omegna in the 1960-1971.

Luigi Massoni was born in Milan in 1930 and this is where he studied at the “Collettivo di Architettura”. One of his first major designs was the Shaker 870 but he continued working with Alessi, creating the Serie 5 containers. Massoni wasn’t just working as an architect and designer, he was also a freelance journalist and in 1959 he founded “Mobilia” a center for the promotion of Italian design. Through the years Massoni kept designing for the home and kitchen working with Boffi and Guzzini.

Through the years Alessi has worked with designers like Achille Castiglioni, Patricia Urquiola, Zaha Hadid, Jasper Morrison and Philippe Starck.

A Designer of Everything

When the SAS Royal Hotel in the Danish capital was finished in 1960, it was a marvel. It was Copenhagen’s first skyscraper and it is considered to be Arne Jacobsen’s principal work of architecture. The building was designed with two separate sections with different functions. The 22 story tower contains 275 hotel rooms and the lower horizontal building held the hotel foyer, a restaurant and a conservatory. Regardless of the fact that the building was situated in the center of Copenhagen, 14 kilometers from the airport, it was also an airport terminal. Here SAS passengers could check in their luggage and wait in the stylishly furnished lounge for the SAS airport shuttle to whisk them away to their flights. 

In the end, the most remarkable result of the project wasn’t the building itself but rather the furniture that Arne Jacobsen designed for the hotel. Not only did he create the Egg, he also designed the Swan chair and the Drop chair as well as a wide range of other custom furniture, glass wear, textiles, cutlery and more, specifically for the hotel. Just like Gio Ponti in Italy, Arne Jacobsen preferred to design all aspects of a project himself. From the structure to the furniture and down to details like door handles. 

In keeping with the design trends of the day, Arne Jacobsen was inspired by organic shapes the same way Eero Saarinen and Charles & Ray Eames were. Using the latest in materials and production technology he was able to create the remarkably organic shape of his sculptural Egg, intending to lend the visitors a calm space where the chair was placed in the bustling hotel lobby. In fact, he actually made the initial model just as you would a classic sculpture by adding and filing of material from the plaster model. 

Design For The Masses

In a way the history of the Kikkoman Soy Sauce dispenser, designed in 1961, started at the end of WWII. Kenji Ekuan was born in Tokyo but spent his early years in Hawaii. At the end of the war his family moved to Hiroshima where his father worked as a Buddhist priest. At 16 Ekuan was just released from naval academy when the atomic bomb destroyed Hiroshima and he witnessed the devastation from the train taking him back home. He lost his sister in the blast and his father became Ill with radiation sickness and died a year later.

This tragedy lead him to rethink his career. Instead of following his father’s footsteps he decided he wanted to take part in reshaping post-war Japan through design.

In a later interview he told the New York Times “Faced with that nothingness, I felt a great nostalgia for human culture”. He continued “I needed something to touch, to look at”. “Right then, I decided to be a maker of things.”

In 1952, soon after graduating from the National University of Fine Arts and Music in Tokyo, Mr Ekuan founded his design studio G.K. Design. One of his early assignments came from Kikkoman who wanted him to create a soy sauce dispenser. Up til then soy sauce was bought in big glass bottles and poured into small ceramic dispensers. Due to the particularly high viscosity of soy sauce it, more often than not, dripped along the side of the dispenser leaving a stain on the table.

Kenji Ekuan chose to make a glass bottle so you would know exactly when to refill it, and when you did you wouldn’t spill thanks to its wide mouth. The bigger problem was how to make the cap.

This part of the project ended up taking 3 years. It had to be easy to pour but yet spill-proof. After 100 prototypes Ekuan realized that the best solution was an upward facing spout. The spout design made the last drop flow back into the bottle rather than dripping onto the table.

Released onto the international market in 1961 the Kikkoman soy sauce dispenser became a symbol of new contemporary Japanese design. Ekuan’s goal as a designer was to make design solutions for the masses and with the Kikkoman dispenser he managed to do just that with an exquisite example of Japanese design spread to kitchens all over the world.

Taking Prints to the Next Level

You might not have either space nor the economy to buy an Italian design classic like Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni’s Arco floor lamp. You might not necessarily have any wall space to get a print from the Italy at Random collection either. But you probably have a sofa, a bed or a favorite chair. What makes that relaxing space even better, well, a double sided throw pillow of course.

You can now get the Random Things collection as a beautiful pillow to light up any space in your home or office, or vacation spot for that matter.

Italy at Random

In a world of Italian design mobilità studio has illustrated a series of products all being part of making Italy into the world leader in design that it is. All products are genuine design icons form the gondola bow iron first mentioned in the 11th century to Cini Boeri’s Ghost Chair made from a single sheet of glass in 1987.

On Friday April 28 you are more than welcome to join me at the Sempre Coffee Bar on Jakobsbergsgatan 7 in Stockholm when the new exhibition Italy at Random opens at 5 pm.

If you have any other designs or random products from Italy (or other parts of the world) that you think should be part of the collection please tell me and they just might find their way onto your wall, a pretty great place to enjoy world class design.

The Little Fridge Car

During the first decade after WWII, war torn Europe was slowly trying to rebuild its economies. Engineer and businessman Renzo Rivolta, the owner of Isothermos, a company that before the war manufactured refrigerators and electric heaters, saw the rising demand for a micro-car. Rivolta was also the owner of ISO Autoveicoli, at the time Italy’s third largest producer of two-wheeled vehicles. Together with two aeronautical engineers, Ermengildo Preti and Pierluigi Raggi he created the first Isetta prototype in 1952. Isetta being the diminutive form of Iso. Legend has it that they actually used a repurposed fridge door for the prototype.

As for the performance, the Isetta, equipped with a motorcycle motor, took 30 seconds to reach 50 kph. This was, however made up by the fact that it fit two adults and was perfect for use in the narrow streets of Italian cities.

To be able to fund other project, like his sports car ISO Grifo, Mr Rivolta decided to sell the license for the Isetta to other manufacturers. BMW was at the time on the verge of bankruptcy and quickly saw the potential of the micro-car. They upgraded the Isetta with a new motor, better suspension and added a sunroof making the car reach a whopping 85 kph. BMW ended up making 10,000 cars during the first 8 months making it more popular than it ever was in Italy.

Apart from Italy and Germany the Isetta was also manufactured in France, the UK, Argentina and Brazil and has had such an influence on the automobile industry that it inspired the creation of the Smart Car in 1998.

Picking Italian Mushrooms

Massimo Vignelli was born in Milan in 1931. At the age of 14 he decided he wanted to be an architect and at 16 he started working as an architectural draftsman before attending Università di Architettura in Venice. Here he met his future wife and business partner Lella Vignelli, herself coming from a family of architects.

In 1956 Massimo Vignelli was commissioned by the already famous glass maker Venini to design a series of lamps. The company had already worked with Italian designers like Carlo Scarpa and Giò Ponti. This project was initially called 4040 Zaffiro a name that was later changed to Fungo thanks to the lamps mushroom shape. The collaboration with Venini lasted for a couple of years and the result was an incredible number of lamps in a vast array of colors.

In 1965 Massimo and Lella co-founded Unimark International with five other partners including Bob Noorda, famous for his Pirelli-posters. Two years later they started a branch in New York. Unimark soon rose to fame through their corporate identities for, amongst others, American Airlines, Ford, Gillette and Knoll and it quickly became one of the biggest design firms in the world. Being on top didn’t last for that long though. In 1970 the Vignelli’s left the company to start their own business, Vignelli Associate.

The Vignelli’s eventually changed focus to product and furniture design and in 1978 they founded a new company, Vignelli Designs.

During their entire career the Massimo and Lella complemented each other with Massimo mainly focusing on 2D projects like the New York subway map and corporate identities for American Airlines while Lella worked more with their 3D projects.

They both lived by the motto “If you can design one thing, you can design everything” and in the case of Massimo and Lella Vignelli they really could.

A True Design Victim

As much as it is a piece of innovative design the Up chair was also a political statement. The design was inspired by an ancient fertility goddess and the ball and chain symbolizes women being prisoners, not a victim of design. “Women suffer because of the prejudice of men. The chair was supposed to talk about this problem.”

Born in La Spezia in 1939 Gaetano Pesce went to study in Venice at the School of Architecture and then the Institute of Industrial Design. After graduating he worked with collective of young architects in Padua before focusing on design from 1962.

Endlessly researching and experimenting with new materials he started working with the trendiest material of the day, polyurethane. Standing in the shower in his Paris apartment in 1968 Gaetano Pesce got the idea to try and make a chair behave like a sponge. In his workshop he realized that polyurethane was a perfect material not only for comfort but he could actually vacuum pack his new design. Opening the four-inch-thick package his new chair would almost magically expand into its proper shape rendering its name Up. This extraordinary and irreversible performance was made possible thanks to the freon gas present in the polyurethane blend.

This easily packaged and shipped future of furniture design unfortunately didn’t last long. In 1973, after only four years of international success with the Up Chair turning up in everything from the James Bond movie “Diamonds are Forever” to photo shoots with Salvador Dalì, the producer B&B Italia removed it from its catalog. This was due to a recent ban on freon gas making the production as it was impossible.

It took until the year 2000 for the Up chair to to make its comeback. This time being made in cold shaped polyurethane foam and no longer inflating.

The Cuddle Bowl

The Brazilian-Italian architect and designer Lina Bo Bardi was born in Rome in December of 1914 as Achillina Bo. Early in her life she decided to study architecture during a time when architecture schools accepting women were few and far between. She ended up studying at the Rome College of Architecture where she graduated in 1939. After school in 1942 she opened her own office in with a school friend but with the onset of WWII there weren’t many openings for architects and she had to take on jobs as a writer and illustrator for the Italian architecture magazine Domus.

During her time at Domus she was sent to Rome to interview an art historian called Pietro Maria Bardi. Despite her being part of the resistance and Pietro Maria Bardi being an ardent supporter of Mussolini they fell in love. After the war they had no other option but to flee the country for São Paulo, Brazil where Pietro had been commissioned to head an art museum.

Coming to Brazil the couple immediately immersed themselves in the Brazilian cultural scene and Bo Bardi was enthralled by the country’s modernist architects like Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa.

In 1951 she designed and built one of her most celebrated works, Casa de Vidro (the Glass House) in the outskirts of São Paulo for her and her husband. Here she stayed until her passing in 1992.

That same year, 1951, she designed the Bowl Chair. With her own design vision calling for “a process of humanization of art” she made the chair “in relation with the proportions of the human body”. The semi-spherical seat can be moved independent of the steel frame making it recline to whatever position the sitter prefers. In 1953 it was featured in the US magazine Interiors where it was described as a “cuddle bowl”.