Archive for March, 2012

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March 21, 2012

Gerrit Rietveld

Schröder House, Utrecht, The Netherlands

Gerrit Rietveld (1888-1964)

Dutch minimalist architect and designer Gerrit Rietveld was a member of the De Stijl movement. Significant for his work is how he pared his design down to basic cubist elements and often used primary colours to emphasise the different planes. Most of his furniture was designed and manufactured to accompany his architectural commissions.

His lengthy career began already as a young boy in his father’s carpentry shop in Utrecht. The shop, catering to the bourgeois taste of the local clientele, produced quality period pieces of furniture. He left the shop in 1917 to set up an establishment of his own. This move marked a definite break with the traditions of his father’s work.

His first attempts in search of his own artistic line, were influenced by the Amsterdam School. Rietveld re-invented the structure of chairs and other objects and built them as constructivist sculptures. In 1918 he designed an early version of his legendary Red and Blue Chair. It was published in the De Stijl Magazine, the magazine of the movement of which he became a member in 1919. In this way Rietveld came in contact with various architects associated with the modern Dutch movement. They were all looking for a way to purify their work, to remove all remnants of past styles and influences. As the fame of De Stijl rapidly spread, Rietveld’s reputation grew from that of a local craftsman to an architect recognized in avant-garde circles across Europe. While working on the Schröder House, built in 1925, he left his furniture workshop with his long-time assistant, Gerhard van der Groenekan. Most of Rietveld’s furniture designs were sold at Metz & Co, a Dutch department store.

Rietveld’s career proceeded uninterrupted until 1943. He then was subsequently barred from practising as an architect, due to his refusal to join the Nazi-controlled Kulturkammer. After the war, the country and Rietveld gradually returned to normality, and Rietveld continued his work until he died at an age of 76.

Among his numerous furniture models, The Zig Zag chair, The Red and Blue Chair, the Schelling and Military series remain as eternal design icons. Gerrit Rietveld’s designs are to be found in the most important museum collections over the world.

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March 20, 2012

Pierre Paulin

“A chair should be more than simply functional. It should be friendly, fun and colorful.”
- Pierre Paulin

Pierre Paulin Born in Paris in 1927,

Paulin had a French father and a stern German-speaking Swiss mother. He grew up in Laon in the Picardie region of northern France, and greatly admired his uncle, Georges Paulin, who designed cars for Panhard, Peugeot and Rolls-Royce Bentley, patented the first power-operated retractable hardtop in 1931, and was a hero of the Resistance. He was executed by the Nazis in 1942.

Paulin failed his baccalauréat and trained as a ceramist in Vallauris on the French Riviera, and then as a stone-carver in Burgundy. An injury to his right arm in a fight put paid to his dreams of becoming a sculptor and he attended the Ecole Camondo in Paris, where later designers such as Philippe Starck also studied. He had a stint with the Gascoin company in Le Havre and developed a keen interest in Scandinavian and Japanese design as well as the functional furniture created by Charles and Ray Eames, Florence Knoll, Herman Miller and George Nelson in the US.

Paulin first exhibited at the Salon des Arts Ménagers in 1953, which lead to his work appearing on the cover of the magazine La Maison Française. The following year, while employed by the Thonet company, he began using swimwear material stretched over traditionally made chair frames. But he really found his forte when he joined the Maastricht-based Dutch manufacturers Artifort and came up with the Mushroom chair in 1960.

The French designer Pierre Paulin created eye-catching, convivial, comfortable chairs shaped like mushrooms, oysters, tongues and tulips, and attracted the patronage of presidents Georges Pompidou and François Mitterrand, who asked him to redecorate parts of the Elysée Palace in the Seventies and Eighties.

Built from metallic frames and rubber webbing padded with foam, and covered with stretchable material in a variety of bright colours, his simple, hard-wearing, affordable chairs, divans and sofas caught the mood of the freewheeling Sixties and sold in huge numbers. They became so iconic that they are now in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.

Paulin’s mushroom, tongue and tulip chairs were runaway successes, admired for their clear lines, the sensual feel of their material or just simply for the way their shapes cradled the body. In 1969, he won a Chicago Design Award for his Ribbon Chair. By then, he was involved in the renovation of the Denon Wing of the Louvre Museum. In 1971, he redecorated the living, dining, smoking and exhibition rooms of the Elysée’s private apartments for Pompidou.

After years with ADSA, the industrial design agency of his second wife Maia Wodzislawska, he launched his own consultancy in 1979 and worked for Calor, Ericsson, Renault, Saviem, Tefal, Thomson and Airbus.

Tall, distinguished, and elegant with his silvery hair, Paulin saw himself as “un marginal”, an outsider. He remained modest about his achievements and deplored the cult of the star designer. “Objects should remain anonymous,” he argued. “It’s extremely dangerous to give too much importance and status to people who are only doing their job. Working for the enjoyment of the greatest number is very gratifying, much more so than any official honour.”

Paulin’s forward-looking, innovative designs influenced many, including Olivier Mourgue, whose futuristic Djinn chairs featured in Stanley Kubrick’s classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Fifteen years ago, Paulin retired to the Cévennes in southern France but still came up with new designs, while several of his iconic chairs and sofas remain in production. Last year, an auction of 76 of his original pieces attracted many impressive bids.

Most of all, Paulin was an intuitive designer. “I had an uncanny ability to picture tri-dimensional objects. I could think up a shape and make it spin in my head like a sculptor or an architect would,” he said. “I made the most of that gift.”

Pierre Paulin, designer: born Paris 9 July 1927; twice married (three children); died Montpellier 13 June 2009.


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March 14, 2012

Charlie Harper

Charley Harper (August 4, 1922 – June 10, 2007) was a Cincinnati-based American Modernist artist.  He was best known for his highly stylized wildlife prints, posters and book illustrations.

Born in Frenchton, West Virginia in 1922, Harper’s upbringing on his family farm influenced his work to his last days. He left his farm home to study art at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, and won the academy’s first Stephen H. Wilder Traveling Scholarship. While at the Academy, and supposedly on the first day, Charley met fellow artist Edie Mckee, whom he would marry shortly after graduation in 1947.

Charley Harper returned to the Art Academy of Cincinnati as a teacher and also worked for a commercial firm before working on his own. He and his wife worked out of their Roselawn and Finneytown homes, and later, with their only child Brett Harper, formed Harper Studios.

During his career, Charley Harper illustrated numerous books, notably The Golden Book of Biology, magazines such as Ford Times, as well as many prints, posters, and other works. As his subjects are mainly natural, with birds prominently featured, Charley often created works for many nature-based organizations, among them the National Park Service; Cincinnati Zoo; Cincinnati Nature Center; Hamilton County (Ohio) Park District; and Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Pennsylvania. He also designed interpretive displays for Everglades National Park.

The first exhibition of his works in Germany took place in 2011 at Kunstverein in Hamburg in Hamburg.

Charley Harper had an alternative way of looking at nature. His serigraphs are large expanses of rich color which give the viewer a very different perspective on the animal kingdom. A conservationist as well as an artist, Harper revealed the unique aspects of his wildlife subjects through highly stylized geometric reduction. Harper said he is “the only wildlife artist who has never been compared to Audubon,” yet his wildlife art is just as instructive—the only difference is that Harper laced his lessons with humor. Harper believed that humor makes it easier to encourage change in our attitudes and awareness of environmental concerns.

In his artwork, Harper imaginatively investigated the similarities between human and wild animal behaviors, but completely without anthropomorphism. “I learn as much as I can about the creatures that interest me, and they all do. I observe them and find out how they interact with each other and their environments and ask myself, ‘What if?’”

In a style he called “minimal realism”, Charley Harper captured the essence of his subjects with the fewest possible visual elements. When asked to describe his unique visual style, Charley responded:

When I look at a wildlife or nature subject, I don’t see the feathers in the wings, I just count the wings. I see exciting shapes, color combinations, patterns, textures, fascinating behavior and endless possibilities for making interesting pictures. I regard the picture as an ecosystem in which all the elements are interrelated, interdependent, perfectly balanced, without trimming or unutilized parts; and herein lies the lure of painting; in a world of chaos, the picture is one small rectangle in which the artist can create an ordered universe.

He contrasted his nature-oriented artwork with the realism of John James Audubon, drawing influence from Cubism, Minimalism, Einsteinian physics and countless other developments in Modern art and science. His style distilled and simplified complex organisms and natural subjects, yet they are often arranged in a complex fashion. On the subject of his simplified forms, Harper noted:

I don’t think there was much resistance to the way I simplified things. I think everybody understood that. Some people liked it and others didn’t care for it. There’s some who want to count all the feathers in the wings and then others who never think about counting the feathers, like me.

The results are bold, colorful, and often whimsical. The designer Todd Oldham wrote of Harper, “Charley’s inspired yet accurate color sense is undeniable, and when combined with the precision he exacts on rendering only the most important details, one is always left with a sense of awe.”  Charley, on numerous examples, also went outside the medium of graphic art and included short prose poems for the artwork he made.

Posted in Art & Design, Illustrator, Kid's Stuff, Landscape, Painter | Comments Off

March 2, 2012

Toyo Ito

 


The Main Stadium for the World Games 2009 in Kaohsiung



The Sendai Mediatheque received international acclaim for its innovative structural system, which included angled tubes that provided vertical support as well as daylight and, in some cases, vertical circulation.


Envelope and structure merge at the Tod’s Shoes building on Omotesando Avenue in Tokyo, where treelike concrete elements wrap around the exterior.

Ito and Cecil Balmond designed the Serpentine Pavilion in 2002, also using the skin of the building as its structure.


n 2004, at Grin Grin Park, on a small island in Hakata Bay, Ito created a rolling artificial landscape with planted areas on its roof and inside, too. Enormous skylights bring daylight inside so trees and other plants can grow.



 

At the Kakamigahara Crematorium in Gifu, of 2007, he also used poured concrete to create a man-made topography and explored structure in terms of its section.

 

Toyo Ito  born June 1, 1941 in Keijo (Seoul), Japanese Korea. Ito is a Japanese architect known for creating conceptual architecture, in which he seeks to simultaneously express the physical and virtual worlds. He is a leading exponent of architecture that addresses the contemporary notion of a “simulated” city, and has been called “one of the world’s most innovative and influential architects.”

Ito was born to Japanese parents in 1941 . Ito graduated from University of Tokyo’s Department of Architecture in 1965.

After working for Kiyonori Kikutake Architect and Associates from 1965 to 1969 (alongside Itsuko Hasegawa), in 1971 he started his own studio in Tokyo, named Urbot (“Urban Robot”). In 1979, the studio name was changed to Toyo Ito & Associates. Throughout his early career Ito constructed numerous private house projects that expressed aspects of urban life in Japan. His most remarkable early conceptual contributions were made through projects of this scale, such as White U (1976) and Silver Hut (1984).

With the Pao for the Tokyo Nomad Girl projects in 1985 and 1989, Ito presented a vision of the life of an urban nomad, illustrative of typical lifestyles during the bubble economy period in Japan.

Tower of Winds (1986) and Egg of Winds (1991) are interactive landmarks in public spaces, resulting from a creative interpretation of contemporary technical possibilities.  Whilst their function is in fact exhaust air outlets for the underground system below, their significance lies in Ito’s treatment of their opacity, one of the hallmarks of his work. Whilst appearing solid during the day, the perforated aluminium structures “dissolve” at night through the use of computer-controlled light systems which form an interactive display representing measured data such as noise levels in their surrounding vicinity.

Toyo Ito’s office is known as a training ground for talented younger architects. Architects who previously worked for his office include Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa (SANAA), Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham (KDa), Katsuya Fukushima, Makoto Yokomizo, and Akihisa Hirata.

The work of Toyo Ito is often said to have affinities with the ideas of philosophers such as Munesuke Mita and Gilles Deleuze.

Ito has defined architecture as “clothing” for urban dwellers, particularly in the contemporary Japanese metropolis. This theme revolves around the equilibrium between the private life and the metropolitan, “public” life of an individual.

The current architecture of Toyo Ito expands on his work produced during the postmodern period, aggressively exploring the potentials of new forms. In doing so, he seeks to find new spatial conditions that manifest the philosophy of borderless beings.

The work of Toyo Ito has been exhibited widely.

In 1991 Ito used 130 video projectors to simulate the urban environment of Tokyo for the Visions of Japan exhibition at The Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

In 2000, the Vision and Reality at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art also became a traveling exhibition. Toyo Ito similarly exploited the effect of video projection as a medium with which to exhibit architecture.

In the Blurring Architecture exhibition, initiated at the Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum in Aachen and traveling to four other cities (Tokyo, Antwerp, Auckland, and Wellington between 1999–2001), Ito attempted to reveal the virtual presence of architecture in the human mind.

Ito designed the Berlin-Tokyo/Tokyo-Berlin Exhibition (2006) at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin. The design featured a smooth, undulating landscape that occupied almost the entirety of the museum’s main exhibition space.

This exhibition, in collaboration with the Mori Art Museum, was one of the largest undertakings in the museum’s history. A major retrospective of Ito’s work was shown at the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery in 2006 as Toyo Ito: The New “Real” in Architecture.

 

 

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