paper, pages, pavements

Summer has arrived in London, so here’s a film about the Sun.

Eames Demetrios, grandson of Charles and Ray Eames presents a rare glimpse of the Solar Film produced by graphic designer Saul Bass. The film was commissioned in 1980 by Robert Redford.

Thanks to Xavier at Swiss Legacy for this.

Summer is here, and Arkitip keep adding to their services for Ace Hotel Palm Springs. The Evan Hecox prints were great, but check these new sneakers! Fresh kicks!

500 of these poolside summer sneakers will be available in June. Pre-order here.

After seeing the Objectified film last night, I started to think about which objects I own that have a particular personal resonance for me. The things that don’t really matter at all, but for which I hold a little fuzzy affection. The first and most apparent one is my favourite coffee mug.

My favourite coffee mug was designed by Naoto Fukasawa for Plus Minus Zero in Japan. Fukasawa is one of the key people behind Muji products and my mug fits into that whole area of Super Normal design (as Jasper Morrison describes it). High functionality and simple, elegant form, with all excesses of design and decoration removed. To appear un-designed, yet perfect. I would argue that Fukasawa’s mug is pretty much the Platonic ideal of ‘mug’, It is for me anyway. Everything about the mug is right; size, form, handle, thickness, weight. I don’t think a more perfect mug exists.

Passing the window of a cafe in Golden Square, I spot my favourite coffee pot by Antti Nurmesniemi, a Finnish design classic originally designed in 1958.

Went to the premiere of Gary Hustwits’ new film Objectified last night at the Curzon, Kings Road with Blam from Blanka and Mike and Nicky Place. Mike did the graphics for the film and I’ve been busy selling Gary’s posters, Tee’s and DVDs for a while so I was really looking forward to this. Objectified is an excellent documentary film examining the design and manufacture of of objects, from toothbrushes to software.

Dieter Rams was inspirational as ever, my design hero. Jonathan Ive’s tales of designing Apple product also very interesting, Karim Rashid was irritating as ever, and Naoto Fukasawa provided that grounded, practical design sensibility we all need to listen to. The film touched on so many different issues and had so much to talk about, it was hard for it to delve deeply into areas that need much more discussion; the tension between analogue design and digital, the massive complexities of genuine sustainability, the future of interactive design. Whereas Gary’s previous film Helvetica was a specific ‘expose’ into the strange, cultish world of the typographer, Objectified has a brief which is perhaps too broad. An excellent, well shot documentary all the same, and hopefully a film that will appeal to many people.

In the row behind us were Marc Newson, my boss Deyan Sudjic, Jonathan Ive and Stephen Fry – a rather extraordinary collection of minds in one place. After the screening, Newson and Ive joined Hustwit onstage, along with Alice Rawsthorn (previous director of the Design Museum, who very kindly gave me a job!) for a Q+A session. All are very acerbic, engaging and thoughtful speakers – Ive struck me as someone who possesses an extraordinary amount of wisdom for his age.

We then shuffled off for beer and canapes (salsa on silver spoons anyone?) afterwards and plotted clever ways to release the film as a DVD later in the year.

In the meantime, Mike’s excellent Objectified film posters are imminently available in the shop.

If you follow the curved gravel path, through the trees to the clearing on top of a hill in Poissy, France, you will find a thin, white, rectangular box. The box is raised, supported by implausibly narrow pillars. This is Villa Savoye, built in 1931 for the Savoye Family by Le Corbusier. The quintessential icon of Modernism, Villa Savoye brings the ethics of industry to the home; favouring precision engineering, functionality, science and aeronautics over domesticity and ornamentation. Inside, furniture is replaced by equipment.

Le Corbusier was asserting the aspirations of industrial modernists and bringing these values into everyday life. In Modernist terms, the definitive answer to the question of beauty in architecture was that the point of a house was not beauty, but functionality. However, despite their claims to a rigidly scientific approach to design, Modernist architects were at heart romantics; they looked to architecture to support a way of life that appealed to them. Their domestic buildings were conceived as stage sets for actors in an idealised drama about contemporary existence. This was their undoing – aesthetic interests defeated the functional approach. Le Corbusier had insisted on a flat roof for the villa, which leaked constantly, and made the house uninhabitable. The interior walls were also paper thin, and extraordinarily expensive to produce. Ultimately, the Savoye family fell out with Le Corbusier for creating a folly, rather than the home of their science-fictional dreams.

Fresh Tees by the (late) Swiss Typographer Emil Ruder. Part of Graniph‘s excellent and ever expanding range.

Nice new (bike-related) screen print about to drop this Saturday from Snowblinded. A steal at $30.

Beautiful artwork from San Francisco. An interview with the artist here.

Well, this took me by surprise! A brand new bookshop in London!…at the V&A?

A few years ago the V&A came under fire (admittedly, mostly from moody book sales reps and bibliophiles who liked to sniff around and grumble rather than buy) when they carried out their huge shop re-fit and banished hundreds of books from their store. The number crunchers had been around and surmised, as number-crunchers do; that the real profits were to be found in the higher margin knick-knack gifts and not in books. It’s always a problem when people who can only read numbers start spouting on about the ‘value’ of books; just observe the continual decline of Waterstones for evidence of that.

Anyway, good sense has returned unannounced, and the V&A are very much back with a brand new bookshop. It’s a no nonsense, straight-up library-atmosphere with a comprehensive selection of Design, Art and Textile books. They even got Vitsoe in to do the shelves: pure Dieter Rams 1960′s designed excellence.
I was impressed, but now I’m just jealous! Nice touches, very nice shop. If I had a big Philip Treacy hat, I would doff it towards whoever is responsible for making this happen. Good stuff.