This week's lesson on Disegno Daily: The Olivetti Valentine Typewriter

I'm delighted to have written this week's lesson on Disegno Daily. See it here, or read below..

“Dear Valentine, this is to tell you that you are my friend as well as my Valentine, and that I intend to write you lots of letters,” says the user guide of the familiar red typewriter.

This purposefully heartwarming greeting sets the tone for Ettore Sottsass' typewriter. The blood-red Valentine was a fun, light-hearted and smooth-operating symbol of the 1960s Pop era, and its use of bright, playful casing for a piece of traditional office equipment was arguably a precursor to Apple’s 1998 Bondi Blue iMac. "When I was young, all we ever heard about was functionalism, functionalism, functionalism,” said Sottsass. “It’s not enough. Design should also be sensual and exciting."

The Valentine - created for the Italian brand Olivetti - was designed in collaboration with the British designer Perry King and entered production in 1969. It was not a commercial success. The Valentine was technically mediocre, expensive and failed to sell to a mass audience, yet still became a design classic. Valentines can be found in the permanent collections of London's Design Museum and MoMA, the typewriter being accepted into the latter just two years after its launch. The product's critical success was unhindered by its functional limitations because its design focused as much on its emotional connection to users as it did on practical ease of use.

Sottsass set out his stall early on. One of the initial advertising campaigns for the design featured posters by the graphic designer and founder of New York magazine, Milton Glaser. Glaser used a detail of Piero di Cosimo’s renaissance painting, Satyr Mourning over Nymph. In the poster, the Valentine typewriter is placed next to a red setter, an elegant, rambunctious dog; man’s best friend. The suggestion was that Sottsass' portable accessory could be just as loyal and convivial. How the product performed was arguably irrelevant. It was about how it made you feel.

Read the rest at http://disegnodaily.com/articles/the-olivetti-valentine-typewriter

Image: Design Museum

Image: Milton Glaser

Valerie Traan by LENS°ASS architecten

Valerie Traan is a stylish gallery and home in Antwerp by Belgian practice LENS°ASS architecten. So stylish, in fact, that you're not quite sure if this is a space for art or a space for living in...

Images: © verne photography

Heatherwick Studio: Designing the Extraordinary at the V&A

From tomorrow, the V&A in London will be hosting an exhibition on British designer Thomas Heatherwick as part of the museum's British Design season, which also includes the Ballgowns exhibition in the adjacent galleries. This is certainly not a retrospective by any means, seeing as the practice is still very young, but more a celebration of their studio. Making and creating are very central to the exhibition, with over 150 objects ranging from fully-functional models (the Rolling Bridge really does curl up as it does in real life, and will be demonstrated every Friday afternoon) to maquettes and test pieces that show the design process. The detail even goes down to the laser-cut labels that give off a vaguely smokey scent as you navigate the exhibition. On display is a section of a new London Routemaster bus, which recently started it's first journey on the No. 38, juxtapositioned next to a modest plank of wood that geniusly folds into pieces of furniture. The exhibition is full of contrasts; small and large, polished and rough, smooth and sharp, finished and unfinished. It's really like taking a walk through their studio. 

Rolling Bridge, Paddington Basin, London, UK 2004 © Steve Speller

 Teesside Power Station, Stockton-On-Tees, Teesside, UK 2011 © Heatherwick Studio 

 UK Pavilion Seed Cathedral, Shanghai Expo, China 2010 © Iwan Baan

New Bus For London, UK 2011 © Heatherwick Studio 

All images courtesy of V&A unless otherwise specified

Review of new Eames film on Blueprint magazine website

Check out an article on Blueprint magazine's website which I wrote after seeing a new film, Eames: the Architect and the Painter at Clerkenwell Design Week. 

http://www.blueprintmagazine.co.uk/index.php/design/review-eames-the-architect-and-the-painter/

Images: Eames office

Christian Louboutin at the Design Museum

The instantly recognisable glossy red soles of the typical Christian Louboutin stiletto reveal a creativity driven by fantasy, play, fetish and sex. The first UK retrospective of the iconic French shoe designer follows Louboutin's creative approach, focusing on the foot as an object of desire. Disrobing and nudity have become important themes, with Louboutin stressing his preference for shoes that 'undress', rather than 'dress'.

Louboutin was born in 1964, the son of a cabinetmaker, and as a child recalls seeing a sign to a Museum of African and Oceanic Art showing a high heel shoe crossed out by a vivid red line. This is a lasting influence that seems to have inspired both the slender silhouette of the heel, and the erotic restraint of his work; particularly evident in his 2007 'Fetish' exhibition at the La Gallerie Du Passage in Paris. The collaboration of photography with artist David Lynch showed footwear that was near impossible to walk in; there was even a 'mono-shoe' consisting of two shoes glued together. From the age of 14, Louboutin was a regular visitor to the Paris nightclubs and cabarets, and in 1980 was offered a job at the famous Parisian music hall, the Folies Bergere. This dramatic element of theatre  and flirtation can be seen as a strong recurrence in his work; where the front of the shoe is plain like the dancer's body, but the back is a bouffant of detail like the showgirl's tail of feathers. 

It must be incredibly hard to create an exhibition of shoes without reducing the content to the appearance of a shoe shop. This has been successfully avoided at the Design Museum, with the use of fragmented rooms exploring Louboutin's design process. Perhaps the piece de la resistance of the whole exhibition is the 3D hologram of American burlesque dancer, Dita Von Teese, by multimedia projection specialists Musion (well known for their recent resurrection of Tupac for the Coachella Music Festival). Taking centre stage above a red display platform mimicking the red sole of a Louboutin, the hologram morphs a shimmering stiletto into the seductive silhouette of Von Teese. 

Images: top three, middle three, bottom two

Bauhaus: Art as Life at Barbican Art Gallery

At the weekend I paid a visit to the Bauhaus exhibition at the Barbican, probably the biggest exhibition solely dedicated to the pioneering German art and design school in recent history, and a substantial delve into the school's turbulent pathway from 1919 to its final closure in 1933. This is a vast exhibition, with over 400 works; starting with ceramics and textiles from the school's arts and crafts beginnings, to Bauhaus's move in 1925 to the industrial city of Dessau and a purpose-built campus designed by founder Walter Gropius. The exhibition design, by architects Carmody Groarke, guides you chronologically through the works, revealing not only the huge output of works; buildings, painting, sculptures, but also life backstage at Bauhaus, with black and white photographs of the studios and revealing images of the students and professors. 'The freedom from all conventions to liberate their creative potential" carries through their way of living as well; a playful portrait marks a case in point- Marcel Breuer standing next to three delectable ladies with the title of 'Marcel Breuer and his harem'. Another room documents Josef Albers' simple but delicate preliminary course for his students, whilst another portrays the school's parties, including one 'white party' in which everyone was instructed to appear in costume '2/3 white 1/3 dotted, chequered and striped' and dance to the music of bells, eerily played through the exhibition space. 

This exhibition is primarily for the design conscious, but even if you are a Bauhaus novice, it provides a jam-packed educational road through a school thought to be the driving force in modernism. Bauhaus: Art as Life on at the Barbican Art Gallery 3rd May 2012 till the 12 August 2012, standard ticket £12, concessions £8. 

 Back cover of the brochure Bauhaus, 1929 by Hannes Meyer

 Stone sculpture workshop, 1923

 Work by Farkas Molnar (above) and Alexander (Sandor) Bortnyik (below)

 Tea infuser by Marianne Brandt

 Bauhaus books 1-14, 1925-30

 Masters on the roof of the Bauhaus building, 1926. 

 Children on the balustrade of a master's house, 1927

 Students on a balcony at the Prellerhaus, 1932

 The jump over the Bauhaus by T. Lux Feininger

 Marcel Breuer and his Harem, 1927 taken by Erich Consemuller

 Portrait of Ellen Frank by Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, 1929

 Gunter Hirschel-Protsch, The Olympic Master Cactus, 1929

 Exercise from Josef Albers's preliminary course 1929-30

Neue Sachlichkeit Party, 1925

Images my own taken from the accompanying catalogue Bauhaus: art as life. 

Home of interior stylist Emma Persson Lagerberg photographed by Petra Bindel

This beautiful Malmo home of interior stylist Emma Persson Lagerberg was recently featured in Elle Decoration. Simple, Scandinavian and just the right amount of my favourite colour grey!

Images: Petra Bindel