The Milan furniture fair held each spring is, indisputably, the place to get acquainted with the latest innovations in materials, shapes, and cutting edge concepts that the best industrial designers and furniture manufacturers have to offer. It’s a setting where established design stars shine, while new ones look for inspiration. But this year a new event brought attention an aspect of design that highlighted the personal experience, the personal exchange—be it as a generational dialogue, manufacturing, or the creative spark.

Photo by Stefano Locci

Milanosiautoproducedesign (MISIAD) is the brainchild of Alessandro Mendini and a group of his peers. Together, they aimed “to promote excellence in self-produced design and small-scale productions.” This inaugural exhibition was intended to document design that is self-produced in Milan. Curated by Mendini himself, the show occupied the open spaces of the historic “Fabbirca del Vappre” and featured over 200 entries by designers like Gaetano Pesce, Jacopo Foggini, Andrea Branzi, Gaetano Pesce, Fabio Noviembre, Italo Rota, Stefano Giovannoni, Ghigos Ideas, and many others.

In line with a democratic curatorial approach, each designer was given the exact same area (1 meter x 1.5 meter) in which to showcase his creation and make a statement on the theme. Layout order was arranged alphabetically, by name.

Photo by Atelier Mendini

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As cathedrals were in the middle ages, museums are for today’s architects the grand opportunity for almost unlimited possibilities to create soaring, dramatic, sculptural design. So when the Archdiocese of Cologne decided to build a new museum to house its unique collection, it presented a rare opportunity to link the two architectural paradigms together.

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As we celebrate Mies’s 126th birthday, (March 27, 1886) we think of his legacy. If you’re a New Yorker (I mean by this more of a state of mind than regional location, really), the Seagram Building (built between 1954 and 1958) comes to mind. I first knew about that building through photographs, as an architecture student in Brazil, and admired its daringly elegant sense of proportion and its graphical quality (since that was basically what one could grasp in those days of pre-CAD animations). As students of architecture, we also knew about the radical ideas the building on Park Avenue embodied. That inspired us, as well.

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Photo by Roger Edwards

Photo by Matthew Pillsbury

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Museum design has become synonymous with iconic forms, carved with ground-breaking technology to give the institutional building a visual identity, as strong as the best corporate logos do. But in Miami a project for the new art museum (under construction and expected to open in 2013) is breaking the mold. This design is bent on reminding us that this museum’s main goal is to engage people with the art, while serving as a pivotal center for its arts community.

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It is to be expected that an event that combines top art and design galleries and the wealthy crowd that attends it, would have a high index of partying, schmoozing, late nights, debauchery, and chronic overstimulation that result in a temporary state of attention deficit disorder. I am speaking of the ArtBasel/DesignMiami cultural “all-you-can-eat-buffet ” that took place this last week at Miami Beach. But luckily, amidst the abundance of shows, talks, and other displays of distracting and senseless corporate tie-ins, we found some relief in installations that offered a chance to experience a certain quiet introspection that is more conducive to the assimilation of art and design.

“Geodese”, Buckminster Fuller

Sitting peacefully on an empty lot, next to a busy highway fly- over, Buckminster Fuller’s Geodese, is one of 3 prototypes  developed in 1961 by the visionary engineer as a new dwelling option. The 24-foot dome is now part of the Craig Robbins Collection and is, for the time being, installed in what will become a pedestrian plaza in the Miami Design District. Standing out in this unusual setting, at times unexpectedly framing a palm tree or against the back drop of colorful architecture, its still futuristic flair betrays the fact that it was designed 50 years ago. It is as inspiring as inviting. “The dome is a perfect fusion of science, engineering, architecture and art in pursuit of accomplishing more with less — a mantra I follow on my own work as well,” says local “starchitect” Chad Oppenheim. Standing inside the aptly named “Fly’s Eye Dome”  and looking up to a December blue Miami sky, you can’t but have hope for the future.

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Christopher Janney’s installation in a walkway at Miami Airport.

As Miami prepares to throw a big party for art lovers and design fans to the creative extravaganza that’s Art Basel Miami Beach and DesignMiami, visitors can expect to have memorable aesthetic experiences just by paying close attention to the city’s very public buildings. These projects, as Mies famously advocated, integrate art into architecture.

The show starts at Miami International Airport (known for its top quality art program). Michelle Oka Doner’s amazing terrazzo floor, inlaid with bronze fossil like ocean flora, makes the long walk to ground transportation enticing. The water theme continues at the next terminal, where your eyes dive into “Waterspace” , a photo mural and oversized photos installation by artist Petra Liebl-Osborne that turns the usually sedate airport walls into an under-water world. ” Initiatives like this one are very important and needed - they give people that normally might not venture into a museum or gallery a chance to connect with  art”  says Petra.

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We live in a time of unsettling opposing forces. A time when conflicting interests suggest a hopeless point of no return. But here, in the heart of New York City, Dror Benshetrit has been putting out designs that tell us something different: If applied properly, opposing forces can be a source of power and beauty.

His office is embedded in the chaotic nexus of the Garment District, Bryant Park, and Times Square with all its glare and megastores, mass retailing and marketing, old fashioned clothing production, and a piece of perfect green urbanity. Nestled quietly above all this, the studio absorbs the best of this complex setting, putting out designs that blend all these elements, seemingly perfectly. How?

The Tron chair is a good example of Dror’s design vision and openness.

What started with an informal conversation about a chair concept with Giullio Cappellini, ended up as a proposal for Walt Disney Signature in partnership Cappellini, to create popular and innovative furniture design. The ‘TRON Armchair” , inspired by Disney’s “TRON: Legacy” (the feature film that speaks of the human aspect of virtual living), fits perfectly with Dror’s ability to combine dualities like a juxtaposition of voluptuous curves and hard angles to express the thriving digital-analog world we inhabit today. The result? An exclusive product that acquires mass appeal through popular culture, bringing the design far beyond the reach of high-end, to-the-trade showrooms. Product development, both through digital and traditional hands-on-craft, took place in Dror’s workshop located a stone’s throw from the architect’s desk. Read more…

If you want something well done, do it yourself, so the saying goes. That is exactly what Etel Carmona ended up doing some three decades ago when she started designing furniture pieces and couldn’t find anyone to make them the way she envisioned them.

She earned a reputation for sophisticated craftmanship as accolades piled up about her elegant, modern designs where nothing is superfluous and all parts contribute to the whole. Soon other designers were coming to her and asking for assitance on getting their projects built, making her company the place of choice for Brazil’s top ranking furniture designers including Claudia Moreira Salles and Isay Weinfield. In addition to new designers, those who were already known for their classic modern works sought her out to bring back their once popular designs; Gregori Warchavchik, Jorge Zalzupinm, and Oswaldo Bratke among them. This venture has created a veritable time capsule of the very best in Brazil’s history of furniture design. Read more…

Sao Paolo, Brazil

A few years ago (truthfully, more than a “few”) I had formed an idea of Sao Paulo, based on a visit to a project by Lina Bo Bardi, the late Brazilian modernist architect. I was a student of architecture at the time and had made a point of visiting work that caught my attention in the magazines. Bo Bardi’s SESC-POMPEIA complex was one of these. That early architectural pilgrimage (among the first that became a life-long habit) left me with two distinct impressions: how incredibly talented and original Lina was, and how disorienting Sao Paulo was. Coming from Rio, where between Sugar Loaf and the Christ statue above the harbor, and the ocean helped you orient yourself, there were no such landmarks in Sao Paulo. As the bus meandered through the vertically-charged blocks, I was completely lost in that bland labyrinth. Ever since then this  vast placelessness has been my main memory of this megalopolis.

Last week, the SESC-POMPEIA again fulfilled its role as the city’s “ambassador”, but this time it left quite a different impression.  Immediately after landing at Guarulhos International Airport I was driven to the Bo Bardi designed culture/entertainement/sports complex SESC-POMPEIA to attend the launch of an art project that will take place in another iconic project of hers, the CASA DE VIDRO (Glass House) in September 2012. This art project will bring an international group of artists and designers together to create art work for an exhibit in the house. Introduced by the curator of the project, Hans Ulrich Obrist, two of the future exhibit participants, Rem Koolhaas and Petra Balise, were there to talk about what they are planning.

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