25 Kvadrat - Malmö

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On Friday 24 April an exhibition opened at the Form Design Centre in Malmö with drawings and models by 25 architects for garden pavilions, log cabins, a mini villa and even a triumphal arch that were all inspired by a change in Swedish planning laws from the Summer of 2014 which now allows for the construction of buildings without requiring planning permission if they are 25 metres square or less and have a ridge height of 4 metres or less. These buildings are called Attefallhus after the housing minister Stefan Attefall who took through the legislation.

In many countries in northern Europe there is are strong, well-established traditions for building compact, semi-permanent buildings that can be used for living in for a few days or longer in the summer from mountain huts used by farmers practicing transhumance, to substantial garden buildings on Dutch allotments, or small summer homes by the lake or sea shore, including beach huts in England, although these are rarely used overnight.

However there is now growing pressure for compact, well designed permanent housing for other reasons. 

With climate change and political upheavals there is huge pressure on resources. Clearly the primary human rights are for food and water and then for freedom but with the mass migration of people from the country to the city and from one country to another in search of work the next most important human rights are presumably for light, clean air, space and secure domestic accommodation. As land becomes more expensive and in big cities scarce, there is clearly huge pressure to design and build compact domestic accommodation.

Obviously, the schemes shown here in the exhibition are from and for an affluent European country and clearly some of the buildings are pure follies and some are designed for the new ‘pressures’ felt in first World countries to provide self-contained accommodation for children if they return home after university or for elderly parents to move into or even for guests. But many of the ideas shown here could be used for effective temporary accommodation after natural disasters or to cope with mass migration to escape war … after all these ideas are in many cases about managing to fit self-contained accommodation into as small an area as possible.

In fact, many of the ideas for specific details could be used in compact houses and apartments anywhere … for instance narrow doors that concertina back to give easy direct access to a terrace and shutters that hinge upwards to create a clearly defined outside space to make the small interior space seem less constricted.

 

A log cabin or hide, Arvet from Trigueiros Architecture, has a very clever arrangement where the plan and arrangement of furniture is neatly square … the tight use of neat geometry is one way to keep a space appearing to be larger than it is … while the logs or timbers forming the sides of the building are laid at a slightly different angle at each stage to form a spiral. Windows have a deep reveal that respect the floor plan in their alignment and one contains a mattress that fills the sill for a bed. The hide has a roof light - like many of the projects. The smaller the space, the more important good natural lighting is to reduce a feeling of claustrophobia.

 

 

One design, Hundra Kubik by Arkitektstudio Widjedal Racki is shown being transported to its site on the back of a low loader. It is one of the most elegant designs and provides accommodation for four with sleeping platforms within a low mezzanine. It has several clever ideas to expand the space so one end hinges out to enclose in part a terrace to make an outside room to expand the living accommodation and at the other end the end wall itself and short lengths of the front and back wall with it slide out like a drawer to form an enclosed area but without a ceiling for an outdoor shower.

 

With pressure on land in even well-established cities, the ideas here for building kitchens in the smallest possible area or fitting in toilets and showers in little more than a cupboard are a real lesson in compact living. Maybe too compact - as one scheme by Belatchen Arkitekter called 20/25 has bedrooms or ‘private’ spaces for twenty students housed in a series of squat cubicles like drawers on either side of a narrow corridor that includes a kitchen and bathroom.   

Ateljé 25 from Waldemarson Berglund Arkitekter has a pitched roof with a full-height window/door with a roof light up the slope of the roof in line to create as much light as possible without loosing too much wall - crucial for fittings in such a small space. Several alternative plans were shown with either just a kitchen and living area or in others with a bed and a bathroom included so this seemed to be a design for a very elegant holiday lodge.

One design is for a complete folly - Triumfbågen by Tham + Videgård -  a triumphal arch in front of what is itself a relatively small house. The archway has arched openings on all four sides so relatively narrow piers at each corner … one containing a toilet, one with a store for garden tools, one for a store for bottles of wine and the fourth with a tight winding stair up to the flat roof which is clearly a viewing platform or a deck for sunbathing and the point of the building. It has over the entrance arch the inscription VENI VEDI VICI.

 

The architects who participated include:

Earth's architects, Bornstein Lycke Fors, Dinelljohansson, Vision Division, Kolman Boye Architects, Happy Space, Wingårdhs architectural office, Nordmark & ordmark architects, Belatchew Architects, Jägnefält Milton, Marge Architects, Architect Studio Widjedal Racki, Okidoki! Architects, The Commonwealth Office, Johannes Norlander Architecture, Marx Architecture, White Architects, Elding Oscarson, Waldemarson Berglund Architects, In Praise of Shadows, Testbedstudio, Petra Gipp Architecture, A blast, Trigueiros Architecture, Tham & Videgård Architects.

 

a book of the designs, 25 Kvadrat by Eva Wrede and Mark Isitt
was published by Max Ström in November 2014

the exhibition continues at Form Design Center in Malmö until 7 June

 

CrossRoads - an exhibition of the work of Vibeke Rohland

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Superobjekt Gallery from Borgergade

Vibeke Rohland talking to a visiting art group on the day after the opening

 

 

 

An exhibition has opened at the Superobjekt gallery in Borgergade in Copenhagen showing recent works by the artist and designer Vibeke Rohland. 

Normally, I do not post about artists or about art gallery exhibitions on this site - trying to keep up with design and architecture is enough of a struggle for me without getting distracted, however pleasant or interesting that would be - but the meeting point of art, design and craftsmanship is incredibly important. And that is exactly what you can see in the Crossroads exhibition.

Marketing men and accountants, I am sure, see the different ‘disciplines’ in different boxes but one of the huge strengths for Nordic design in general and for Danish design in particular, is that the separation of roles in academic training and in professional practice is blurred. In Denmark many furniture designers have trained initially as architects, product designers come through a craft background as makers, designers appreciate that they have to understand the craft techniques as the starting point for commercial production and, through a long well-established tradition, many classic pieces of furniture have been produced by a close collaboration between the designer and cabinet makers. 

However, even in my own mind, it is difficult to define clear boundaries. At one end of the scale a unique piece, signed and often dated because it can be seen as part of a sequence in the development of an artist’s work over the years, is clearly ART and at the other end of the scale something produced in a distant factory and shipped back for sale is product design. Between though is the problem. A potter or glass maker might make a one-off piece for an exhibition; a set of matching pieces - a series of handmade pieces - for a client and then a related design for mass production by a well-known design brand. So one unique piece is a work of art, a set is crafts-made, and more than ten? more than twenty? several hundred? several thousand? becomes a product run? And how should artists, makers and designers interact? Surely they have to! Surely a designer needs to check back in to making something by hand every now and then and a craftsman could benefit from the occasional fee of a commercial run.

Vibeke Rohland very clearly and deliberately breaks through these boundaries. Here, at the Superobjekt gallery, many of the large and unique pieces are actually produced over commercial fabrics that Vibeke designed and that are made by Kvadrat. Even the techniques shown here are a beautiful subversion. Many of her pieces with a limited-run as well as the commercial designs have been produced by silk screen printing so always with slight variations because it is not, strictly, a mechanical process.* Here, for  the largest pieces in this show, the dye has been laid on and taken across the fabric using a squeegee but without the screen and its mask as the control or intermediary. Each area of colour therefore is and has to be a unique area of the overall work. There can, obviously, be no precise repeat pattern. The colour appears to be built up in layers and that is exactly what has happened.

 

 

 

A recurrent theme of Vibeke’s work is using what appear to be simple repeats of pattern but with complex overlays of colour using intensity of colour to create changes in the depth, light and space within the pattern. A series of grid or cross-hatched designs, some framed and included here, and experiments she has produced with large wheels or circles as the underlying form, created with broad cross spokes, uses the same approach ... being apparently very bold but actually creating a finished piece that is incredibly subtle in it’s use of colour and it is the variations in the intensity of colour or variation in the thickness of pigment which create the sense of depth. Another series uses strict repeats of large but simple shapes like crosses or dashes but on a huge scale to undermine the viewers judgement of distance from the work. The repeat becomes a texture but again not something mechanical because it is slight but deliberate changes or slight differences in the units over a surprisingly large repeat making up the pattern that bring the design to life.

 

 

 

Again, this same approach to colour and pattern can be seen in the commercial designs by Vibeke for Kvadrat. Her commercial woven and printed textiles use small points or fine lines of colour to build up pattern and form and shadow so it actually comes as a surprise when you see the large overall size of the repeat of the pattern. In the same way that the layers of colour on the pieces in this show build up to form a complex and large-scale work, the small points of colour and the very very careful combinations of colour in the furnishing fabrics are used to create depth and an effect of shadow to build up the final bold overall pattern.

The works on show here are amazing but it is also worth tracking down the commercial designs from Vibeke Rohland that have been produced by Georg Jensen Damask, Bodum, Hay and Royal Copenhagen. Spend time looking at the on-line site from Kvadrat to see the designs for fabric there - including Map, Satellite, Scott and Squares - with a wide range of colours in each design. The small sample at the start of the Kvadrat page reduces these textiles to a simple small area of dots or graph-paper grids but clicking through and moving out to the broader view these become complex patterns that are again both bold and subtle ... that same effect as you move close up to and then further back from the pieces in the gallery.

CrossRoads continues at Superobjekt Gallery
 Borgergade 15, København until 2 May 2015

Vibeke Rohland

Kvadrat

 

* And yes ... I know that screen printing can be incredibly precise when used as a commercial process. Many years ago I went to the Sanderson factory in west London and watched the hand printing of fabric that was 1.5 metres wide with a 900 mm repeat with men on either side of a screen printing alternate sections down a massive length, loading the dye by judgement and experience and taking the squeegee backwards and forwards between them and then returning down the length printing the gaps and it was impossible to see the joins ... but an important quality of screen printing on a textile that itself may have blemishes because it is organic rather than mechanical gives the finished textile its character and warmth. Perfection can be really dull.

The Rain is Coming

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The Rain is Coming - a major exhibition at the Danish Architecture Centre about climate change - shows how urban planning and the design of buildings and hard landscaping have to adapt now for changes in weather patterns in the future.

Looking up from my desk, as I’m writing this morning, it is raining but it’s really the sort of shower that anyone would expect at this time of year … late March so Spring in north-west Europe. This is not the sort of weather the exhibition is talking about but then back last summer, just a couple of weeks after I moved into this apartment, Copenhagen had one of the flash rain storms that are becoming more frequent here. There was torrential rain for several hours and the street drains could no longer cope and pools of water started to form across the road and pavements. Like many apartment buildings in the city, we have a basement where residents store boxes and bikes and so on. I had a phone call to say the basement was flooding, because the pump had failed, and was told that if I wanted to save or salvage my things down there I should do it right away. It was hardly a disaster for me - I lost a couple of cardboard boxes - but further along the street several businesses in semi basements, four or five steps down from the pavement, had much more serious problems. Industrial pumps were called in but most of those businesses had to shut for several months as floors and electrical systems were dried out or replaced. Six months on and at least one business has still not reopened.

For a city like Copenhagen, new developments with ever denser building with more and more ground covered with tarmac or hard surfaces, designed to drain quickly, it actually means there could be dramatic consequences if these sudden rain storms become more frequent as predicted.

And these storms are dramatic. On the 2nd July 2011 there was a rain storm in Copenhagen where a fifth of the normal annual rainfall fell in just three hours. Neighbours have told me that whereas this time I had to move my things out of less than 10cm of water, on that day the basement rooms filled right up to the ceiling. In the city underpasses and road tunnels were flooded and closed, utility services were lost and the extent of property damage was phenomenal.

 

Having said all that, the exhibition is not all about doom and gloom. In fact far from it as the real message is that we have to accept that these changes are coming and therefore we should start to adapt our construction methods and planning to make appropriate changes now. Simply planning for an emergency response, for if and when, is not a sensible approach. By starting now we can be in control and there will be gains because making changes in advance “presents us with a unique opportunity to improve our cities and create greener cities with more open spaces where rainwater can be handled and urban life can thrive.”

 

The first part of the exhibition shows with excellent graphics how much more of the city is now built over so the natural process of water soaking into the soil or running away along natural drainage channels is no longer possible. In the past rain water and dirty waste water … so everything from water on the roads contaminated with oil from traffic to sewage has been dealt with through the same system of drains or, where there are separate storm drains and household drains, these often back up and contaminate each other when the system is under pressure when there is a sudden storm.

There is also a stark lesson to be learnt from the past about what happens when you prevaricate. By the 19th century Copenhagen was densely built up with houses and businesses tightly packed around narrow streets and courtyards. Then the problem was not surface drainage but dealing with human waste. There was no sewage system in the city and in 1835 a cholera outbreak killed thousands of people and started a discussion about the need for drains. Political differences, problems with financing such extensive work and potential disputes dealing with individual land ownership stymied any progress until the 1850s when a second major outbreak of cholera killed 5,000 people in the city. Even though work then started on clearing slums and improving the drains it was not until the 1880s that Charles Ambt, the city engineer, began to draw up detailed plans for the necessary engineering works including a scheme to take sewage out through a tunnel under the harbour and out into the sound. The Nordic Exhibition in Copenhagen of 1888 showed the citizens all the wonders that were then available for modern plumbing and sanitation but even then the first street to have water closets was Stokholmsgade in 1893, nearly 60 years after that first cholera outbreak, and it was not until 1901 that Copenhagen completed a full sewage system and paved the streets in the city. To be blunt, the point here is that this time, facing climate change, we cannot afford to take sixty years to decide what to do and start the work.

The second part of the exhibition shows a number of completed or ongoing or planned projects that are designed to cope with the anticipated increase in the number of rain storms. These are presented as opportunities rather than enforced and expensive solutions that will be necessary if we wait until we have to do the work.

 

With adventurous and imaginative schemes the people who live in the cities and in the suburbs are getting new facilities and renewed urban areas at little or certainly reduced direct cost; the city councils are getting a renewed infrastructure at markedly less cost than by waiting until works are absolutely needed after a major and destructive storm and the utility companies, who have to provide solutions and have to deal with any failures in the system, can actually often introduce smaller local schemes on private or city land as long as the owners see a gain which is much much cheaper than the company having to buy land for the construction of mega solutions.

 

Simple schemes shown include designs for permeable pavements and surfacing to deal quickly with surface water but without overwhelming the drains. On a larger scale there are several proposals shown to build underground tanks to hold water from flash floods so it can be dealt with slowly over the following days and weeks. More natural-looking options - rather than hard engineering solutions - include schemes with planting or new ponds and drainage channels or well-planted temporary flood plains. New artificial surfaces can be installed for sports facilities that keep the surface dry but take rain water down to permeable sub structures.

 

So, at Gladsaxe new sports facilities for the Gymnasium have been built around and over ponds and canals for a new drainage system that holds back flood water so it can be dealt with locally by the system over a more reasonable period. For this project costings have been given to show how the different parties have benefitted financially. A traditional project with an underground storm basin would have cost 102 million DKK. The completed project with surface solutions cost 72 million DKK. The municipality has influenced the project and gained financially by providing advice and expertise that was financed from the project costs. The citizens of Gladsaxe saved 30 million DKK on supply expenses and they gained sports facilities, playgrounds, nature trails and new urban spaces.

At the headquarters of Nordisk a nature park of 31,000 square metres has been built with half laid out across the roof of car parks. Covered with grass and meadow plants, it absorbs rain water rather than having it run off the alternative of hard roofing into drains and provides a pleasant new facility for staff and visitors to the company.

In Middlefart management of water is seen as an opportunity to create a Climate City to turn 450,000 square metres into a greener and healthier neighbourhood. 

In Køge there is scheme to establish new green spaces and rain water from roofs will be cleaned and returned for washing clothes and flushing toilets.

In Viborg a large new park is being laid out with lakes that retain water that can be cleaned and returned to the water system. Again there is considerable gain from such careful management of storm water … the utility company gains access to a large space where it can manage and clean the water, the municipality can influence the design from the start and gets a new park and the citizens are protected from flooding caused by a sudden cloud burst and gain a new recreational space.

Not all the schemes are on such a large scale. Helenevej in Frederiksberg is the first climate street in Denmark with a permeable surface that absorbs large amounts of water when there is a cloudburst and at Vilhem Thomsens Allé in Valby, rainwater is handled within the courtyard of the housing scheme creating a recreational space and reducing water bills as retained water is now used rather than metered water for watering the planting. The utility company gains financially because it does not have to construct new pipes to take rainwater away from the area.

If people still need to be convinced about the need for such schemes, the exhibition has stark figures for the financial cost of wasting water. An average Danish family uses 40 litres of water per person each day for flushing toilets and for washing which is roughly the amount of rainwater that could be collected from a roof surface of 40 square metres so if water could be stored until it is needed then the roof on a house, on average 200 square metres, could provide all the water needed for washing clothes and flushing toilets rather than the family using drinking water … with a potential saving for a family of 5,000 DKK a year in water charges.

 

The Rain is Coming - how climate adaptation can create better cities

Danish Architecture Centre until 6 April 2015

 

skuffer, skabe og skrin - cupboards, cabinets and chests

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In part, this exhibition about furniture for domestic storage at Designmuseum Danmark in Copenhagen was planned to redress a slight imbalance in the permanent collection at the museum that has tended to concentrate on the history of chair design. Early chests on display here and fine pieces of furniture from the 18th and 19th centuries have been in the collection for many years but some of the new  storage pieces, from designers working now, have been added recently to extend the collection.

Many of the historic pieces in the exhibition are what might be described as virtuoso furniture that used expensive woods and were produced by master cabinet makers requiring time and skill. Many of the pieces have elaborate carvings or intricate inlay. “The top pieces in this exhibition, therefore, represent the very best and most unusual of their time and not the ordinary or commonly used.”

It is not easy to imagine these pieces in the context of a room and in some cases the precise function is no longer clear … or rather today it is rare to need a cabinet for curiosities, a casket for valuable jewellery - now more likely to be kept in a wall safe - or a press for fine linens.

Clearly, elaborate furniture for storing valuable possessions, mark changes over the years in what was collected or what was deemed important to keep and protect. In the medieval and early modern period chests were used to protect deeds and papers proving ownership of land - obviously no longer necessary - and we would think it odd now to have specially made and locked containers for salt or tea or table knives but all those things, at some point, were so expensive that they were, generally, locked away.

Through the late 19th and the 20th centuries new and specific types of storage furniture appear, though not necessarily for possessions of exceptional value, but including furniture such as writing desks, cocktail cabinets and more recently cupboards or shelving for electronic equipment from televisions, to music players and computers. Through the centuries, storage furniture with a specific function changes as people see different things as important or valuable that they want to be protected or stored carefully.

It is ironic that for most of these pieces of furniture in the exhibition, the contents have long been lost, sold or dispersed and it it is now the container, the storage furniture itself, that has value and is cherished and preserved.

Specialised storage in the exhibition includes caskets, chests, wall cupboards and free-standing cupboards, glass fronted cabinets, bookcases, writing boxes, a bureau or desk, travel boxes for toiletries, wash stands, chest of drawers and wardrobes.

The exhibition shows above all how furniture was used to indicate the wealth and status of the owner by using valuable materials and expensive craftsmanship.

 

the exhibition continues at Designmuseum Danmark
 until the 6th September 2015

Fur - An Issue of Life and Death

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At one extreme you get people whose whole life revolves around design - names, companies, styles, the latest and the best - and at the other extreme people who insist that they know nothing about design - state categorically they are not interested in design - and normally finish by saying that they simply know what they like.  Curiously, it is often those very people, the non-designers - who are wearing the latest and the best training shoes and judge people they meet by the label on the jeans they are wearing. Fashion is the one discipline of the design World that people who do not work in the design World actually do often know about. 

Although I like buying good clothes and despite spending much of my time thinking about design, I’m not actually that interested in fashion - the reason why posts here about fashion are few and far between. I’ve never been to a fashion show and I can only recognise the most obvious designers if shown an outfit. For that reason, and also because I do have misgivings about fur used for fashion, I had not been to the current exhibition at the Nationalmuseet in Copenhagen - Fur - An Issue of Life and Death.

I was at the museum on Sunday in the shop trying to track down a book I wanted. Half way out of the door I thought that as I was there I might as well have a quick look at the exhibition and actually I was very glad that I did.

 

 

This is a beautifully presented and very clever and thought-provoking exhibition.

The two main displays face each other across the space with a curve of mannequins wearing traditional clothing from Greenland, North America, Siberia and Scandinavia facing an arc of figures wearing ‘fashionable’ clothing in fur.

 

 

At the centre - between fashion and tradition - are very informative displays about the raising of animals for pelts and about traditional methods of hunting and preparing the skins. The labels are completely unbiased, non-political, simply presenting the information and statistics without comments … for instance there is a straightforward map of Europe that shows which countries allow farming of animals for fur and those countries where it is banned.

 

 

Interactive displays around the edges are, in some ways, more interesting, encouraging people to decide. There are panels where you can feel samples of fur and have to guess if it is real or fake before lifting the flap to reveal the answer; there are interviews with people on the street asking them about what they think about fur for clothing and asking them why they are wearing natural fur or why they are wearing fake fur and there is one area where visitors can try on a range of fur coats and stand in front of a large projected image to take a selfie but by swiping a touch screen they can select different backgrounds for their photos from a grand interior - suggesting curiously that maybe fur was OK for grand people living in grand house? - to a fashion cat walk to an image that puts you in a fur coat standing in front of an anti fur protest.

The use of new technology here for information and for labels is superb - I particularly liked the use of a thermal imaging camera where you can hold in front of yourself or wear coats in different fabrics and in fur to see how much or how little body heat escapes - and fur does do a very good job of keeping you warm.

The traditional costumes are amazing both for their diversity and for the incredible craftsmanship. And there the ethics question is maybe easier because fur is a natural material and was all that was available. 

If you don’t want to confront your own political and ethical views about the use of fur for fashion clothing it is still well worth going to see the exhibition just look at those traditional clothes. 

 

 

the exhibition is at the Nationalmuseet / The National Museum in Copenhagen
and continues until 22 February 2015

 

Biography by Elmgreen & Dragset

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Yesterday I went back to take another look at the installations by Elmgreen & Dragset at the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen … I had been thinking about my first visit and wanted to look at the pieces again before the exhibition closes on the 4th January.

The three large-scale installations, under the general title Biography, feel initially very different in atmosphere and feel very different in the way the viewer looks at each one. The main work, The One & the Many, has been erected in the entrance hall of the gallery and is the representation of a stark, three-storey apartment building. There is an entrance door but it is locked so we are kept out and, as on any public street in any town or city, our view in is restricted to what we can see through windows. The rooms we can see into are completely realistic using appropriate furniture and curtains and personal possessions to make the viewer feel, almost too easily, that they can understand the ‘back story’ of what appears to be the sad, lonely and alienated lives of the tenants of the block. What is surreal is our position … we are outside and when we take our noses away from the window glass we are suddenly back in an art gallery.

The second gallery space is completely the other way round in that there is absolutely no sense of an exterior. There is a corridor and we have a choice of which way we turn but in the end we come back to the same point anyway.

There is a suggestion that this is a characterless, everyday, scruffy and barely maintained government department or local council office with waiting rooms, ticket offices and even a toilet but there are no staff … no signs to tell us we have come to the right place.

This is the extreme of de-personalised public space but everything is surreal. Everything is wrong and frustrating: one door has hinges and handles on both the left and the right side so could not open; another door opens to reveal another locked door immediately behind it; the basins in the toilet have the most weird plumbing and so it goes on. Again the sense is of alienation but this time ours on entering this parallel world.

 

The third gallery appears to be a continent away … Las Vegas, the ultimate city of escape and dreams ... a Las Vegas night … a fire escape with a bored teenager sitting there high up with his legs dangling over the edge … a mobile home broken by a fallen sign … and … most disconcerting of all … the swimming pool of a motel beyond a chain-link fence … guarded by a snarling dog throwing itself at the fence … and with the body of a man floating face down. These are the images of a fractured and alien world … or at least alien to Copenhagen. I know Nevada fairly well and this violence and darkness is not so implausible there. For someone coming from western Europe then arriving in California, Nevada, the Mid West it can feel as alien and surreal as this. 

 

What has all this to do with a blog about design?

That’s why I went back.

On my first visit I looked at the installations as I would many art exhibitions … as a fascinating insight into the view point of the artist and as an interesting comment on contemporary life … 

Then thinking about it I realised that much of the impact of the show and the way the artists get us to look and think is to view modern architecture, modern graphics, everyday furniture, popular taste and style, with the clinical, detached observation of a cartoonist or a satirist. Their view is not harsh or unsympathetic - in fact just the opposite - but never-the-less they are detached and frighteningly analytical.

Each room in The One & the Many has an inherent coherence that allows us to guess at the age, sex, character of the tenant. The wallpaper is right for the character they have created, the style of furniture or lack of furniture, the books and magazines or the lack of books and magazines, the pictures on the walls are all the things that character would have chosen … or rather … because the artists chose them we project onto the rooms our preconceptions about what a person like that would be like. That’s fine. We are above that out here in the real world outside the art gallery. We don’t judge a person on their clothes. We don’t judge people for their taste in carpets. Fine.

But actually look around you right now. Look at what you have bought recently.

In those rooms in The One & the Many even the food packaging, the typography of the books and magazines, the colours chosen were all consistent and are all so revealing. Do we really expose so much about who we are whenever we choose one product over another? Facebook and Google would like to think so.

Aldi or Irma, IKEA or Illums Bolighus, Berlingske or Politiken all judge us … and chose the typefaces, the colours, the sizes, the options and variations they choose to offer us … because they know us … or think they know us … or hope they know us … their core audience.

So is successful design about anticipation and manipulation? 

Is good design the design of an object that will end up in a museum collection? Or is good design the design that sells and allows the manufacturer to survive if not thrive? Is good design what we like or what a marketing man thinks we will like? Is good design the design of an object we see and decide we really must buy or is good design the object we buy because we have seen the ad that makes us realise we want it? Is good design the object that looks amazing or the object that works day after day in the background?

And finally - to flip it around - if we put up with bad design or, come to that, choose to buy something that we accept is badly designed ... what does that say about us? Generally I guess it is usually that we don't have the time, or the money or the energy to search out the alternative. In part, what Elmgreen and Dragset are saying is that as life becomes more difficult and people become more isolated then clearly good design or any choice between good or bad design becomes less and less relevant.

And on a lighter note I missed an amazing photo opportunity yesterday as I stood in the gallery looking up at the figure of the boy sitting high up on the fire escape wearing his hoodie and jeans and trainers. A teenager came into the gallery wearing a hoodie and jeans and trainers plus a baseball cap on backwards and he walked or rather scuffed along under the fire escape and peered through the wire fence at the body floating in the pool; shrugged; turned and scuffed out without looking up at the boy, or the representation of a boy about the same age above him. I didn’t get the lens cap off my camera quickly enough to capture the moment. It was surreal. I felt old and tired ... alienated … an observer.

 

Biography, by Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

continues until 4 January 2015

Reprogramming the city

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Reprogramming is defined in the exhibition as “… expanding the functionality of a structure or system beyond its prescribed role; enabling urban assets to become agile responses to changing urban needs.”

So here, essentially, this exhibition is about adapting the infrastructure of the city for new roles and new demands.

In the past, generally, extensive and expensive infrastructure has been constructed to respond to a demand and solve a specific problem, so for instance, building a transport system to cope with large numbers of people moving between where they live and where they work, but the suggestion here is that imagination and innovation might change not only what we do and how we live but we could do many things in a very different way … and this has become more urgent because the pressure for change is increasing as cities and towns are expanding so rapidly. Basically, it is important to not just wait for the problem to arise and only then try to come up with a solution. 

And, instead of being pessimistic about change and expansion, the message is to be optimistic because urban space can adapt and there are huge opportunities if we are flexible and imaginative.

One major conclusion is that “The existing stock of the city is a vastly underutilized resource. By realizing the potential stored within the city’s structures, systems and surfaces, we have the ability to solve some of the most pressing urban problems by using what we already have in new ways.”

 

The exhibition consists of a number of case studies and trials that have been implemented in various cities and with some interesting results. For instance in Umeå in Sweden the bus company installed anti-SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) bulbs in the shelters at bus stops and bus use in the Winter doubled.

In Austria it was clear that the need for public telephone boxes has declined, as a large proportion of the population now has mobile phones, so Telekom Austria is experimenting with a scheme to convert its network of telephone boxes into charging stations for electric cars.

As transport infrastructure in some cities has become redundant, through the construction of alternatives, it does not have to be demolished but can be given a new use that can revitalise an area. The most obvious example of this is the High Line Park in New York but other schemes are shown here where spaces under bridges in Stockholm and redundant bridges from the old trolley-car system in Milwaukee could be adapted for new uses. In Copenhagen the DFDS terminal for the ferries to and from Oslo has been moved to the north harbour and the area of the old terminal, immediately north of the Royal Danish Theatre, is to become a new public square by the water.

One interesting and important point made about the relationship with the infrastructure of a city is that, however large the buildings and however complex the road and rail systems, the structures that surround them have to remain at a human scale … simply a post box in scale with the building it stands next to would be unusable ... so the infrastructure is physically the link between the people and the space and the buildings. We may feel swamped by the numbers of people crowded into an urban space but bus stops, traffic signs, seats, steps, and so on all have to remain at a “recognizable” and useable human scale. That might seem obvious but governments, particularly, autocratic regimes do get scale wrong.

One clear message of the exhibition is to urge cities to not be constrained by simply accepting a conventional view of buildings and spaces and how they should be used. One section looks at the roof of Nelleman House in Æbeløgade that is now a large garden used for growing food and there was a proposal in 2002 from the architectural practice BIG to convert the roof of the department store Magasin into a large new park but, unfortunately, not realised.

The main message is to unlock the potential in urban structures and spaces because the alternative, demolishing a structure and building something else, might not be the best way forward.

There have been a number of events connected with the exhibition including an installation on the square in front of DAC.

The exhibition was curated by Scott Burnham and was first shown in Boston in 2013 but has been expanded for Copenhagen.

the exhibition continues at the Danish Architecture Centre
 from 1 October 2014 until 4 January 2015

The One and the Many by Elmgreen & Dragset

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If you visit Statens Museum for Kunst - the National Gallery in Copenhagen - the only way that you can avoid looking at The One and the Many is by not actually going inside the building as this colossal installation fills the entrance hall. 

That hall rises up through two storeys with a high domed ceiling and substantial galleries running around it with a prominent modern staircase but this work, from the partnership of Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, dominates and fills the hall and pushes visitors to the edges of the space.

It is a stark, dark, grey, concrete cube representing a four-storey apartment building for social housing or, to be more straightforward, what in England would be called a council block. There is an entrance door on one side with bells and name plates but you cannot get in because there is an answer phone and no one is in apart from a young man on a mattress on the floor in his room dead to the World or worse.

Some rooms are lit and let you look into the interior through the windows … not just at the ground floor but at the upper levels from the galleries. Each room, or cell, belongs to a different tenant and each room, from its contents and furniture, hints at a back story but above all show you, the voyeur looking in, that the tenant is trapped. Not trapped in the room for only one room is actually occupied, but trapped in a life they are surviving or facing or coping with by dreaming or denying.

There is the room of an old lady, or I presume an old lady, which is spotlessly clean with carefully-washed net curtains and her knitting only just abandoned on the armchair; there is the sitting room of a man escaping by watching football on his TV with the coffee table covered in empty beer bottles and cigarette ends; a neighbour has a room set out with bland good taste but, needing drama or whatever, has the TV tuned to X-factor and, heart-wrenchingly sad, the kitchen of an immigrant from the far east with the poster of the woman they would like to be or want to look like and surrounded by everything that can be bought that is pink. Not pretty, soft pinks but harsh strong pinks.

Like a Flemish or Dutch still life, you are drawn further and further in to the scene to look at the details.

If this sounds grim it isn’t. If it sounds pretentious that’s my fault because of the way I’ve written about it. Everyone who lives in an apartment or is worried about ending up in a flat if they have to 'down size' or has aspirations to get away from mum and dad and get some independence should see this work. Anyone who tries to claim that they are not, above all, defined by what they own, should look carefully at this piece and then look around when they get home.

At some stage it is also important to watch the film in a side gallery for an interview with the artists because there you begin to understand their observational skills and the way they use what is, essentially, the stripped-back but laser-sharp viewpoint of a cartoonist but with a very real sense of humanity to create the narrative for their tenants. In doing that the artists make the viewer take stock. At one point in the film they admit that they feel as if they are outsiders but surely it takes an outsider to see what is happening in this way?

Visitors to the gallery eagerly look in through the windows or read the name plates on the entrance bells and laugh nervously about the piles of junk mail inside that no one has bothered to clear. One of the mail boxes has been forced open and left bent and un-lockable and that is in part what is brilliant about this work because just two years ago my mail box in the apartment where I was living then was broken into in just this way … it is that classic ‘shock of recognition’ that makes you feel that art has a strong message.

 

This is parody and there is real gentle, and mocking humour running through the ideas but what is haunting is that there is no hint of a future. That is what is grim. One window has no light but has a sign to show it is to let so new people will arrive. Is this The Hotel California? The style is hyper realism but stripped back and thin, lean and almost hungry … or is that trying to read too much into it?

I spent a lot of time watching people’s reactions. Watching parents lift up children to look in through windows, trying to judge their reactions, but who was watching me?

 

The One and the Many was created in 2010 and was shown at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo.
It will be at SMK until 4 January 2015 and is shown with two other major installations by Elmgreen & Dragset under the title Biography.

 

Summer sunshine and dark clouds

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A new exhibition opened in the castle in Malmö on the 11 October 2014. Called Summer sunshine and dark clouds, it marks the centenary of the Baltic Exhibition that opened in Malmö on the 15th May 1914 and ran through that summer until early October. 

A new park, Pildammsparken, out to the west of the old city and a couple of blocks south of the castle, was created specifically for the 1914 exhibition, with substantial temporary buildings and pavilions as well as fountains and sculpture. It was primarily a trade fair but, like most trade fairs of the period, contained exhibitions of art (in this case some 3,500 artworks) and there was music, a Baltic Games with swimming events over 12 days, fairground attractions including a roller coaster and three large lakes with boats and pleasure steamers. The park is still there but few of the buildings survived.

A contemporary film of the Baltic Exhibition shows the visit by Gustaf V, the Swedish king, with the citizens of Malmö, dressed in smart hats and their best clothes, seen walking around the park. Then, of course, the motor car that the king arrived in and the film camera itself were relatively novel and were, clearly, the subjects of much interest. 

The aim of the exhibition was to promote the manufacturing companies of Sweden, Denmark, Germany and Russia, the main countries around the Baltic, and there must have been a strong sense of the promise of a new age and a new future with the new century well on course. What makes the film sad and poignant is that all those people would be thrown, just two months later, into the turmoil of the First World War. All that finery of top hats and elegant summer outfits were not celebrating, as they probably thought, the start of a new future but marking the real and complete end of the previous century and its sense of order. By the end of the war Europe was a very different place.

One of the biggest single displays of art in 1914 came from Russia. The paintings were bright and novel, and probably, at that time, seen as slightly outrageous and certainly challenging. At the outbreak of the war in July 1914 both German and Russian officials withdrew from the Baltic Exhibition but the Russian art remained and with the upheavals of the war and then the revolution in Russia in 1917 the works were not reclaimed and still form a substantial and important collection in Malmö city art gallery. 

The present exhibition includes the Russian art that remained in Malmö with displays highlighting the novel attractions of the Baltic Exhibition, including a passenger lift that took visitors up to an observatory, and there are costumes and displays of furniture and household items that show how different levels of society lived in Malmö in 1914.

The exhibition in 1914 came at the end of a period of rapid growth and rising prosperity in Malmö. Between 1900 and 1915, the population of the city increased from 60,000 to 100,000 people and the wealth of the city then can be seen in the large number of imposing buildings from the period around 1900 that survive in the streets and squares of the city now.

There are also important parallels to be made with the situation now … with the apparently strong growth of middle class wealth in the city: just look at the new apartment buildings around the west harbour and the major office buildings under construction west of the railway station.  There is the potential for sustainable growth in Malmö based on a growing population and the revitalisation of the city's infrastructure with the building of the road and rail bridge to Copenhagen and the extensive upgrading of the railway system. That growth is or should be reflected in a new demand for more housing and for furniture and household goods to fill all those new apartments. 

 

buildings in the centre of Malmö from around 1900

 

Summer sunshine and dark clouds,
Malmö Museer, Malmöhus Slott 

11 October 2014 until April 2016