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With his controversial new design for the Italian manufacturer, Konstantin
Grcic aims to topple the regime of consumer-friendly minimalism.
By Christopher Hawthorne
April 2003
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Chair One, 2003
Konstantin Grcic's first project with Magis--a family of aluminum designs--includes
this aesthetically controversial, technically demanding chair, which he
keeps in his studio.
Ralph Hargarten/Bransch
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About three years ago Eugenio Perazza, the intense and animated founder
of the Italian furniture manufacturer Magis, convinced Konstantin Grcic
to begin working on a coordinated group of chairs and tables for the company.
The arrangement was a long time in coming: Perazza had been bugging the
Munich-based designer for a few years to agree to a collaboration.
"Magis is a pull for many designers doing so many different things,"
Grcic says. "I wasn't sure that I would be able to create a niche for
myself within the company." He was also reluctant because he was growing
tired of designing products in plastic, the material that Magis has long
been known for.
But Perazza "kept ringing me, saying, 'When can we work together? When
can we work together?'" Grcic recalls. When Perazza mentioned his desire
to try some furniture made of aluminum, the designer was intrigued: breaking
away from plastic might offer a direct way for him to stand out in the Magis
stable--and to turn a corner in his own work. In a phone call in August
of 2000 Perazza, sensing that Grcic was softening, pounced. "He asked
if I would be in my studio the next day. When I said yes, he said, 'Great.
I'll be there tomorrow.'"
The first product of their collaboration is called Chair One. When
it was shown at last spring's Salone del Mobile, the giant annual furniture
fair in Milan, the chair was among the most polarizing items there. Although
it earned some instant fans, Grcic recalls, "A lot of people hated
it too. They said it was ugly, that it was uncomfortable, even that it was
aggressive."
There's no denying that Chair One, which will be made commercially available
later this year and will probably retail in the United States for about
$200, moves directly against the grain of most high-end contemporary design.
For the last several years many of the best-known designers in the world,
including Grcic, have been producing furniture and other products that are
minimalist and optimistic, with liquid curves in bright colors.
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Bombo Stool, 1997
Stefano Giovannoni's revolving stool is one of the company's
best-sellers. It has a strong height-adjustable ABS plastic seat.
Courtesy Magis
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Grcic's aluminum chair for Magis would seem immediately out of place in
a living room full of those smooth designs. It has an angular, skeletal
look, as if its flesh has been torn away; Perazza describes it as "the
bones" of a chair. It balances on four straight legs, though it can
also be ordered with a concrete base. The chair looks like a spiderweb with
hard, geometric lines--as imagined by Buckminster Fuller and then produced
in a factory.
The charged reaction to Chair One in Milan pleased Grcic because he wanted
the design to help mark a shift in his career. He admits that he had grown
frustrated with consumer-friendly minimalism, and perhaps even more of his
own reputation as a purveyor of that style. "I decided that, in a way,
I had to be more extreme for a while, that I couldn't go on being pleasing
to everybody," Grcic says.
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Alo Chair, 2002
Karim Rashid's elegant design has an aluminum front and a polypropylene
back.
Courtesy Magis
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One nonaesthetic reason that Chair One looks less than plush is that it's
designed for public seating--outdoors in public squares; inside in cafés,
museums, and other settings. "It's not an office chair or a dining
chair that you'll sit in for hours," Grcic says. "It's designed
to be used in a waiting situation--for five, ten, twenty minutes at
a time."
At the same time Chair One's severe look reveals a lot about the company
that produced it. Magis is known for its perfectionism--for going through
as many versions of a piece of furniture as an obsessive writer goes through
drafts. It is also known for producing furniture in much greater quantities,
and at a generally lower retail cost, than some of its boutique competitors.
But to pay the same kind of obsessive attention to Chair One--a piece of
furniture whose mass appeal is far from immediately apparent--is a different
story altogether.
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Clino Once Again, 2002
Originally designed by Mario Mazzer in 1984, this wall-mounted folding
table was re-released by Magis in 2002.
Courtesy Magis
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Magis occupies a low-slung concrete building in Motta di Livenza, a small
town reached by driving about 30 miles northeast from Venice, passing through
cornfields and vineyards along the way. There is a showroom and a workshop
on the ground floor, divided neatly by a stair leading to an upper
floor of bright offices filled with chairs by Jasper Morrison
and other Magis regulars. The building is smaller than you might guess because
though Magis is well known in the design world as a manufacturer, it actually
operates as a middleman, working with designers on one hand and suppliers
and factories on the other. Many of those factories are either in Motta
di Livenza or close by: the town is at the center of a tiny design node
that produces some of the most influential furniture in the world.
The company that fabricates Chair One, Zin--located about an hour from Magis
headquarters in Grisignano del Zocco--makes aluminum engine blocks for automobiles
and aluminum chair parts for Vitra.
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Dish Doctor, 1997
Mark Newson designed this dish rack, which has an internal reservoir, for
kitchens with small sinks.
Courtesy Magis
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Since its founding in 1976 Magis has been run by Perazza, a driven but friendly
man of 62 who wears glasses with blue plastic frames that are often pushed
up onto his forehead, and who over the years has gathered an almost encyclopedic
knowledge of furniture-design history. He tells an amusing story about why
he decided to leave his job at a big furniture maker to start Magis. One
day, Perazza explains, he walked by a bookshop that had a book in its window
whose cover showed an image of Harry Bertoia's famous wire chair. Intrigued,
Perazza later bought one of the chairs for about $250, delivered it to his
company's head of manufacturing, and asked him how much a chair like it
would cost to produce. The answer was $5.
"This is a big difference, no?" Perazza deadpans in solid but
heavily accented English. He tried to interest his boss in commissioning
a series of products from the English designer Richard Sapper (who has in
the years since become a Magis stalwart). But his boss didn't go for the
plan for two reasons, according to Perazza: he was uneasy about working
with a foreign designer he didn't know personally, and he was convinced
that commissioning work would be more costly than copying designs and marketing
them more successfully than the original companies. Perazza calls this second
attitude the "Me Too" approach to furniture design: whatever you
can do, I can do more cheaply.
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Alo Chair, 2002
Karim Rashid's elegant design has an aluminum front and a polypropylene
back.
Courtesy Magis
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In a way, the boss's two concerns were one and the same, reflecting
a reluctance to trust the power of design itself. They suggest that the
best designers are too costly to work with, and that consumers can't tell--or
don't care about--the difference between the work of a very good designer
and a pretty good plagiarist.
"For a long time," Perazza says, "the success of companies
was thought to be in the hands of the finance people, then the marketing
people. But now people are realizing that for a company like ours it is
in the hands of the designers--and that will be the case in the future too."
Yet it would be inaccurate to say that Perazza is a fan of name-brand design
per se. "One of my favorite shopping experiences is to go to some inexpensive
low-level shop and find something that's really well designed and really
pleasing to the eye," he says. "If you pick it out yourself, without
some salesman or the price tag telling you it's good--this is a very great
satisfaction. And this is how we want Magis to be: we want people to buy
the product because it's good, not just because it's Magis."
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