Merci Boutique Paris

When I was recently in Paris for New Year, I visited this boutique called Merci, and ended up wondering how I had never discovered this trendy hang-out and concept store before. Housed in the cool Oberkampf neighbourhood, the store is laid out on three floors in a former sun-lit warehouse loft- very New York. The store has only been open two years and has a philanthropic message behind all the designer gladrags- profits made by the store are donated to organisations fighting child poverty, particularly in Madagascar. It's more open, cosy and welcoming that the usual designer store- the staff are friendly and the wares are laid out akin to a vintage or second-hand shop. There is also a cafe with a lending library of books and comfy chairs to lounge in with a fresh mint tea and nibbles of lemon and orange cake. 

Images: IT Hunter

Happy 100th Birthday Ray Eames

To celebrate what would have been Ray Eames' 100th birthday, here is a review of the film Eames: The Architect and the Painter, originally published in Blueprint Magazine on May 25, 2012. The film shows that the furniture designer, who died in 1988, was often overshadowed by her husband Charles Eames. Proving that the times are changing, and to celebrate her 100th birthday, Vitra has renamed a street at its Basel Campus after her. This new addition matches the already existing Charles Eames street. Vitra will also be screening a special edition of the film at their VitraHaus, the Herzog & de Meuron designed building on their campus in Basel.

It all began with the moulded plywood chair. Voted by Time Magazine as the greatest design of the 20th Century, and conceived for a competition at MoMA in 1940 with Eero Saarinen, Charles and Ray Eames attempted to reinvent the very idea of the chair. They wanted to mass-produce compound curves without any upholstery, for which they first experimented with plywood splints for the wounded military during World War II. A new film has been released, produced by Jason Cohn and Bill Jersey and narrated by actor James Franco, that is the first to document their life and work since their death. It was created as part of PBS’s American Masters, an award winning biography series that celebrates arts and culture with documentary film profiles. The film also begins with the moulded plywood chair, but goes on to tell a far more complex story, as I found out at the UK premiere held at the Vitra showroom during Clerkenwell Design Week.

Charles and Ray Eames weren’t just furniture designers; they were also artists, photographers and filmmakers, and most crucially, a couple. These weren’t job descriptions to them; they were a way of life. Charles and Ray were experts in creating an image of themselves; they became a cultural symbol of the ideal modern couple through their use of eccentric clothes and playful photographs. The film strips back these smiling publicity images with the help of lost love letters and archived material, to reveal the highs and lows of a couple bonded by both love and work. Accompanying interviews with family members and junior designers at “The Eamery” as they nicknamed it, give an intimate and candid view into the husband-and-wife team of 40 years.

The film focuses on 901, Washington Boulevard; the Eames’ unconventional studio conceived in a warehouse off Venice Beach, California. Described by former employees as a ‘circus’, the fascinating archival footage shows an informal environment with every kind of object on every kind of surface. Charles and Ray advocated ‘take your pleasure seriously’, a maxim that carried through their design process of learning by doing, but never delegating understanding. They sought to ‘make the best, for the most, for the least’, a design ethos concerned with a way of thinking and living, that soon became embodied in their marketing campaigns for their furniture.

This was the time of Mad Men and archaic sexual politics, when the feminist consciousness hadn’t found a voice. In interviews, we always see Ray quietly stood behind her partner, despite Charles’ emphasis on their collaborative effort. The film challenges the assumption that Charles was the main designer by successfully documenting the frustrations of authorship and control, both with Ray and the other designers at the Eames office. The documentary highlights that it was precisely because they collaborated together as a couple that they were so successful. As is evident in the ironic title and also in the narration of the film, it is impossible to separate the two and their different roles in the design process. Charles was an architectural school dropout who never got his licence, and Ray was a painter who rarely painted. Instead, they became a brand, designing large-scale exhibitions and shooting quirky films, making a name for Boeing, IBM, Polaroid and Herman Miller in the process. As the narrator, James Franco says, ‘they wanted to work for the Google of their time’.

Now on DVD at First Run Features.
All images courtesy of Eames Office, LLC.

Assemble & Join: making manufacturing cool

Head over to BDonline to see an article I wrote on the Assemble & Join team in Lower Marsh, London. See it here, or read it below. The video on BDonline (filmed by @annawinston) is also well worth checking out.

Could one CNC machine finally launch the maker movement in the UK?

The maker movement has been taking America by storm. Make magazine was launched in 2005, followed by the first Maker Faire in California in 2006. It attracted 20,000 attendees, a figure that doubled the year after. And ever since, the hungry self-producing start-ups have been steadily multiplying, hammering, building and carving their way to success.

The UK has been a little slower on the uptake. But now a group of young architects and graphic designers have come together to pioneer “making”, all with one cacophonous CNC machine in a former cafe kitchen.

Sited on one of London’s last thriving independent high streets, GD/hta, Tom Tobia and Christopher Jarratt have opened a community micro-manufacturing workshop. The Assemble & Join team, sited on Lower Marsh behind Waterloo Station, will collaboratively design, manufacture and build their ideas on site with the community.

And it’s certainly shaken up the community’s curiosity. When BD visits on a typically rainy afternoon, the door is constantly opening and closing. As the CNC machine starts up its dull groan, ears prick up in the peaceful bookshop next door (despite layers of sound insulation) and the shopkeeper comes in to find out what’s going on. Everyone on Lower Marsh seems to want to know what this strange new pop-up is and how they can get involved.

The A&J team first set about refurbishing a former cafe on Lower Marsh into a temporary pop-up when they were awarded a three-month contract from Lambeth Council. Initially commissioned through a competition to design public art for the high street, A&J proposed reversing this idea and getting the community to create the art themselves. They then purchased a bespoke CNC machine from a family-run business in Devon to fit into the small galley kitchen on Lower Marsh high street.

The entrepreneurial young team includes GD/hta — a core team of graphic designers supported by architecture practice HTA — and product designer Christopher Jarratt. The team is also supported by Tom Tobia, who works as a designer, setting up community centres, designing museum exhibitions and even has the Guinness World Record for designing and building the world’s largest bee hotel. They work full-time in Assemble & Join two days a week and squeeze their day jobs around the workshop.

They now have an open-door policy, where anyone from the local community can step into the workshop to create a variety of objects, from bird boxes, Christmas trees and plant pots, to tactile shops signs, childrens’ jigsaws and small pieces of furniture. Everything is slot jointed, meaning no screws or glue, just a mallet and a bit of muscle power.

When BD visited the team, A&J was in the process of creating a death wheel for the retro clothes shop down the street, as well as bespoke flower-holders for the local flower stall. The shop was littered with handmade stools the local Coin Street art group had recently made at a workshop and small wooden mice for local school children.

Through free workshops and drop-in centres, A&J hopes to get the community absorbed in their high street and inspire them to be creative. What is great about the workshop is that it is accessible to all ages, and all skill-sets, you just need a bit of imagination. As Ben Derbyshire, managing director at HTA, told BD: “The informality of a pop-up creates an atmosphere of engagement and social interaction that really lifts the spirit.”

Images: Assemble & Join

London Design Festival: Ropero Wardrobe System by Hierve & Matthew Zorpas at designjunction

Boutique design consultancy Hierve, based in Mexico City and London, has teamed up with The Gentleman Blogger Matthew Zorpas, to create the Ropero Wardrobe System, which was showcased this week at designjunction as part of the London Design Festival. Ropero, which translates into 'wardrobe' in Spanish, immediately caught my eye as part-traditional wardrobe, part-glass cabinet. Add to this, the live outfit changes taking place today by Matthew Zorpas himself, and it is no wonder they've had a successful year at IMM Koln Furniture Fair and Salone del Mobile in Milan. 

Ropero is a modular freestanding wardrobe system that comprises a series of stackable modules and bases that can be arranged into a variety of possible configurations and colour combinations. As well as being functional in the sense that there are different compartments for the storage of clothing, Ropero is also a bit of a show-off. This is the kind of storage system you might find in a trendy Manhattan loft, designer wares on display through the glass windows. Nevertheless, it is the adaptability of the different components to suit the user, and the eye-catching Pantone colours that make this product interesting. 

Images: courtesy of Hierve

In-situ at designjunction. Images my own

London Design Festival: Bench Years in the John Madejski Garden at the V&A

London Design Festival has collaborated with the British furniture and lighting producer Established & Sons to create a series of one-off benches by ten different designers. Each bench is made with a different material and exhibited in the gardens at the Victoria and Albert Museum for the duration of the ten-day festival. The Bench Years aims to free designers from the usual constraints of designing urban furniture, for example, the over-cautious regulations for safety and vandalism. Instead, the group of ten benches, celebrating the ten years of the Design Festival, challenges the assumptions of the humble street bench. Here, you certainly won't see a standard wooden bench with arm and back rests.

 Bench of Plates by AL_A

London-based Amanda Levete Architects, collaborating with Ceramics Cumella have created a bench inspired by the V&A's extensive collection of ceramics. The glazes create a spectrum of earthy colours that reference the domestic crockery that has served dinner tables for years. The individually hand-made plates slide together and stack one on top of each other to create a sweeping curve. 

A-Bench Metal by Felix de Pass 

An original design from 2011, for a similar bench by Felix de Pass for Established & Sons, has been updated for the Festival. Simply made from folding sheet metal, the bench has punched holes to allow water to drain and an angled seat to create a comfortable place to sit. 

Tube by Alexander Taylor

This stainless steel tubed bench is inspired by felled woodland logs, though finished with a simple, mirror polishing finish to leave the material in its most natural, reflective state. 

Pier by Konstantin Grcic

German designer Konstantin Grcic collaborated with leading producer of glass mosaics, Bisazza to create a simply formed bench, which shows-off the small pieces of red, cream and grey glass. 

Western Facade by Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby

This was one of my favourites, by Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby. Western Facade appears to be a rather simple monolithic block of marble, however, the random apertures refer to the V&A's Exhibition Road facade which is marked by shrapnel damage from the Second World War. The holes actually run through the whole length and width of the marble, never intersecting, but making the material more translucent. 

Pe de Porco (Pig Foot) by Fernando Brizio

As you can probably notice, this bench takes the form of a pig's trotter. Portuguese designer Fernando Brizio collaborated with Amorim to create a bench made of cork oak from forests where black pigs forage for acorns. 

Infinity Bench by Martino Gamper

Italian designer has created a hard-wearing bench celebrating the different colours and textures of hardwood. With the support of the American Hardwood Export Council, Gamper created a thermally modified hardwood for durability and stability

Images my own

London Design Festival: Mimicry Chairs, by nendo at the V&A

Dotted around the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington, and part of London Design Festival, Japanese design studio nendo have created a series of white chairs that mimic the different areas of the museum. At each site, the chair is modified to reference the space; in the lobby, a single chair hangs ghost-like above visitors' heads, elsewhere, one balances on the stairs with different length legs. In the galleries, the chairs take on the shape and form of the arrangement of paintings, a mêlée of sizes quietly occupying the gallery space. 

 Images my own