Sophie Lovell interviewed Dame Zaha Hadid for uncube magazine no. 37 in September 2015. It turned out to be one of the last published interviews with the architect before her untimely death in March 2016. uncube dedicated an entire issue to the controversial architect whose work undisputedly pushed the technical and formal boundaries of building: “To mark the occasion of her 65th birthday, we have consciously put aside for a moment the headline news fodder about working conditions in Qatar, Tokyo Stadium mudslinging and interview fiascos that you can read about everywhere else, to focus on the actual architecture. Issue no.37 is a portrait of a singular architect whose star has burned a glorious path from her birthplace in Baghdad, through the unbuilt/unbuildable wilderness years, to running a 400-strong office translating her unmistakable forms into the built environment all over the planet.”

Sadly, uncubemagazine.com is no longer online, but here is the full interview:

HADID

Waiting for Zaha is what happens to many who come into her orbit. She is, after all, an international figure heading a global concern operating dozens of projects worldwide. But as much as she is a leading starchitect, she is also someone who polarises opinion like no other – and far beyond the realm of architecture. Why is that actually? In seeking to find out, uncube’s Sophie Lovell’s patience paid off, and she encountered a reflective architect deeply involved in her work in all its facets.

Sophie Lovell: All high-profile architects experience criticism at some time or another, but do you feel you have had more than your fair share? Do you feel you are sometimes misunderstood?

Zaha Hadid: I’m a woman. I’m an Arab. I’m an architect. Biology and geography define the first two; the third has taken forty years of hard work. But hard work is not always enough. For a large part of those forty years, some of the biggest difficulties that I faced were brought about not by my work, but by my existence as a woman, or as an Arab, or indeed, as an ‘Arab Woman’. Ignorance and injustices, large or small, blatant or subtle, deliberate or – and perhaps worse – casual, not even recognised by their perpetrators.

I’m Iraqi; I live in London; I don’t really have a particular place, and I can say from my personal experience, it is actually very liberating. Perhaps it was my flamboyance rather than being a woman that was the reason I didn’t fully fit into the culture at hand. I think, on one hand, it’s made me much tougher and more precise – and maybe this is reflected in my architecture.

SL: Looking at your work, the diligence you apply in preparing by hand, in terms of sketches, drawings, or paintings for each new project, has been particularly noticeable. Do you have a routine or a regular path that you follow when approaching each new project concept?

ZH: Painting formed a critical part of my early career as the design tool that allowed us the intense experimentation in both form and movement – leading to the development of a new language for architecture. The painting was always a critique of what was currently available to us at the time as designers, as 3D design software didn’t exist. There has been a complete shift in the last, say, thirty years, to now doing some projects only on the computer.

My paintings really evolved 30 years ago because I thought the architectural drawings required a much greater degree of distortion and fragmentation to assist our research, but eventually it affected the work, of course. I’m not a painter – I have to make that quite clear. I can paint – but I’m not a painter – as the paintings we created were always part of the research for our architectural projects. The paintings I’ve done are very important to me, and if I did them again, I’d do them in a very different kind of way, but they were very important at the time.

In the early days of our office, the method we used to construct a drawing or painting or model led to new discoveries. We sometimes did not know what the research would lead to – but we knew there would be something, and that all the experiments had to lead to perfecting the project. And these are the journeys that I think are very exciting, as they are not predictable.

SL: The design processes in your projects over the years could be seen to have shifted from extremely warm, visceral, hands-on skills to a colder, machine-calculated and drawn, hands-off discipline. Would you agree? How does one maintain the warmth and vivacity in parametric design?

ZH: It is a different kind of operational psychology today.

Previously, in an architect’s office, you’d have each individual do almost everything: make a model, design, answer the phone or make a slide presentation. Now, you have people who specialise in all the different aspects of the design and construction process, so we’ve worked hard to establish a collective research culture in our office where many talents can feed off each other’s ideas and experience.

The developments that computing has brought to architecture are incredible, and as such, the work can handle the much greater complexity and flexibility that clients require today. Computing has enabled an overall intensification of relationships – both internally within the buildings as well externally with the context.

I am, however, concerned that no one today really knows how to draw a plan. It took me 20 years to convince people to do everything in 3D, with an army of people trying to draw the most difficult perspectives, and now everyone works in 3D on the computer – but they think a plan is a horizontal section – it’s not. The plan really needs organisation via a diagram.

SL: You had an exhibition entitled “Form in Motion” in the US in 2012. Can you explain how important motion is to you in your work and how it differs, say, from the futurist notion of the representation of “speed”?

ZH: I’ve always been interested in how our movement through space affects architecture. As in the frames of a film: not seeing the world from one particular angle, but having a more complex view. We view the world from so many perspectives – never from one single viewpoint – our perception is never fixed. This movement through space is very critical in all buildings, which also impacts our perception of time and the relationships we establish with our built environment. It differs from the pure perception of speed.

For example, in our Kartal masterplan design for Istanbul, located in a large derelict industrial area to the southeast of the city on the Marmara coast, we established a fluid grid which builds up over time. Sections of the grid develop as an entire plot or only at the intersections; it is fluid in that it changes in time, programme and space. This gradation allows a process of ‘incomplete composition’, where a project grows organically over time, but looks and feels complete at any given point in its evolution.

SL: You are mostly famed for your stand-alone cultural projects, but more recently, I notice, there are housing projects as well, such as the new development in Milan. What, in your view, is the extent of responsibility for an architect in terms of where their building ends and the surrounding urban, rural or social fabric begins?

ZH: Architecture can carry within it an inherent sense of vitality and optimism; the ability to connect communities and build their futures. Ecological sustainability and social disparity are the defining challenges of our generation, and an architecture of inclusivity offers solutions to these key challenges.

As an architect, your client is no longer a single person or type of person; your client is everyone. All buildings should have a civic component. Even a commercial high-rise building should offer a civic programme – public spaces in which people can connect with each other and use as their own. Developers in both the public and private sectors must invest in these public spaces. They unite the city and tie the urban fabric together.

SL: What else needs to change?

ZH: There has been a move in many of the world’s cities over the past years towards walled, private spaces. As architects, we must react to this. Over many centuries, architects have been trying to liberate the city, to open it up, to make our cities more porous and accessible. Building these gated communities within the city, like mini Kremlins, is a huge step backwards; it is a very archaic way of living.

Part of architecture’s job is to make people feel good in the spaces where we live, go to school, or where we work – so we must be committed to raising standards.

There’s enough total wealth today that all people should have a good home, not just the very rich.

SL: How important is it for you to consider the entire lifecycle of your buildings – where materials come from and where they go after their natural life is ended, and how do you feel about the idea of your buildings being adapted and changed in the future?

ZH: We certainly consider the requirements of adaptability for the long-term use of any project. We cannot predict the future, but we can always try to anticipate it.

Architecture does not follow fashion, political or economic cycles – it follows the inherent logic of cycles of innovation generated by social and technological developments. Contemporary society is not standing still, and its buildings must evolve with new patterns of life to meet the needs of its users. I believe what is new in our generation is the much greater levels of social complexity and connectivity.

Contemporary urbanism and architecture must move beyond the architecture of repetition and compartmentalisation, towards an architecture of flexibility that addresses the complexities, dynamism and densities of our lives today.

SL: You have an extraordinary way of pushing not only forms, but materials as well to their limits. Have you at times had to wait for material development to catch up in order to realise what you really want to do?

ZH: We have a whole section of our office researching new design and construction techniques. The office maintains this ongoing research and experimentation, and there is always a lot of collaboration with engineers and with people doing experiments with materials to work on new discoveries and push them into the mainstream for the wider benefit. What is interesting now is a new worldwide collective research culture in architecture that allows many diverse talents and innovative ideas to feed into each other’s ideas and disciplines.

SL: What recent material breakthroughs particularly excite you, and which ones are you still waiting to happen?

ZH: One such innovation would be sophisticated architectural skins that can take almost any shape and have the structural, weatherproofing, and insulation properties compressed into a single layer and can be easily fabricated and assembled anywhere.

3D printing is also opening a totally new universe of possibilities: complexity will no longer be restricted by the need for simplification or design rationalisation – enabling the cost of a wall to be defined by its volume and weight, and not its shape (building a curved wall will be no more expensive than building a straight wall), allowing the architecture to be much more articulate and rich.

Applying 3D printing in the construction industry can greatly reduce the energy consumption of a build. The energy used to transport construction materials to the site and material waste on-site are considerable. By 3D printing only the material we need, there will be no offcuts and no excess of materials. The designs will also be more sustainable. For example, potentially adding shading where needed, and calibrating windows and openings to give the best possible performance. We already address these aspects of sustainability in design, but requirements to minimise costs often demand repetition and standardisation. In the future, with 3D printing, such constraints will no longer be necessary.

This interview with the architect Zaha Hadid by Sophie Lovell was for uncube magazine issue no. 37: “Zaha”, September 2015.

“Where Potsdamer Platz has its glass corporate towers, shopping centre and nondescript gastro offerings, Checkpoint Charlie is littered with fast‑food chains, souvenir stalls and vacant shopfronts: little more than a deconstructed gift shop selling a deconstructed history.”

Sophie Lovell revisited Checkpoint Charlie in her hometown of Berlin for the “Borders” issue of the Architectural Review. Now a cluttered tourist trap facing fresh waves of development, the former border crossing between East and West Berlin sits uneasily between disneyfication and memorialisation – always becoming, never being.

Article link here.

“45 years after completion, this crazy superstructure works because it is modest by design and because it has been continuously cared for. It’s Big Housing meeting Big Car without a pile up because its architects did their research; because they believed their primary social responsibility towards quality of life; and because their clients continue to carry that through.”

I wrote about the Schlangenbader Straße Estate in Berlin for June 2025 “Roads” issue of The Architectural Review  The “Schlange” (snake), as locals call it, is a late 1970s superstructural landscape by Georg Heinrichs, Gerhard Krebs and Klaus Krebs, with a motorway running through it that is not as well-known as it probably should be. With new photography by the excellent Felix Koch.

Article link here.

The functionalist design philosophy of Dieter Rams and his colleagues in the 1960s was a direct response to the dark horrors of totalitarianism and fascism. It grew out of a strong belief in designing a more democratic, more egalitarian world within, full of light and labour-saving devices for ‘users’ (not ‘consumers’) – products that gave people the freedom of choice in the interiors of their homes to complement the rise of democracy without.

Read Sophie’s opinion piece on the (mis)use of Dieter Rams’ designs as signifiers in the TV series “Severance” here.

“The word “iconic” is representative of a toxic, destructive paradigm. It belongs to a mindset of dominance over people and nature, where humankind is perceived to be discrete from nature, not part of it, and where some people are more equal than others.”

Read the full article here.

“Trompe is mega-mannerist. Haut faux. It went so well with the rise of Neo-Liberalism in the 1980s. It makes perfect sense to revisit trompe in this era of snake oil salesmen, war criminals and fake news. It’s fake and it’s ostentatious but it’s also all about skilled sleight of hand, and strategic trickery. Take a step to the left and you will see it for the empty façade it really is.” Brief musings on trompe l’oeil for For Scale

Design thinking should be substituted for “food thinking” to enable humans to create properly holistic systems that no longer cause ecological chaos, writes Sophie Lovell.

“What if there was another, more relational way of approaching the design process? One that is based not on things or problems but on building and maintaining healthy relationships instead? A non-binary approach that is adaptive, and embraces context, equity and equality, allowing for even contradictory interests of myriad stakeholders. One that is less causal, more entangled….” Read the full article here.

“In the face of REALLY BIG UNSOLVABLE PROBLEMS, you can “lie down, curl up, try not to cry, cry a lot” in your shapeless DIY pillow fort. Or you can embrace your fear, hug it close, and whisper in its ear: “Shhhh, I own you now”. Putting your arms around the “radiance of a thousand suns” and making it your bitch is the vibe for a grown-up Bond villain lair. What’s not to love about a cuddlable nuclear floof that’s all BLOFELD’S KITTY ADORBS VIBES with just a hint of shag pile about it?”

Exposure Therapy: The Atomic Cloud as Décor

In a mood almost definitely triggered by THE 96TH ACADEMY AWARDS (2024), let us discuss the relevance of “atomic mushrooms” in décor.

Here we are again in one of those moments of massive apocalyptic angst, reminded of nuclear ARSE-nals thanks to OPPENHEIMER and the Atreides stockpile on D. VILLENEUVE’s Arrakis, not to mention the RIDICULOUS NUMBER of REAL, cartoonish Bond-type villains queueing up to conquer the world right now.

And yet, the “atomic mushroom” for the home we are talking about is not menacing. It is “HUGGABLE”:

The atomic mushroom in question is one of the Huggable Atomic Mushrooms by designers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby feat. Michael Anastassiades. They made two: Priscila, which is in the MoMA, and then the other, less-known one – which is ten times more gorgeous because IT’S SO FLUFFY – called Seminole (after the eponymous 13.7 kiloton Enewetak Atoll nuclear explosion of 1956^[1]) and is a “therapy object” from their superbly titled series of DESIGNS FOR FRAGILE PERSONALITIES IN ANXIOUS TIMES from 2005. (How naive we all were; how prescient they were.)

It took almost two more decades for home therapy décor to really become a thing. During the Pandemic, lockdown loungers stuck at home all day busied about coddling themselves in comfort nests. Pillow forts became de rigueur. Giant bean bag dog beds for people made from washable plush appeared unironically in our feeds. As the anxious times increased, loungescape trends began to morph more and more towards kindergarten-coloured, round-cornered, chubby furniture. A veritable “childlike” design fest of regression instead of retro.

One could view a white mohair huggable atomic mushroom designed in 2005 as some kind of precursor to all this whimsy, but as a paragon of conceptual/speculative design, there is so much more to read into “Seminole” as a home décor object. This is not comfort décor, it is therapeutic decor. Subtle difference.

In the face of REALLY BIG UNSOLVABLE PROBLEMS, you can “lie down, curl up, try not to cry, cry a lot” in your shapeless DIY pillow fort. Or you can embrace your fear, hug it close, and whisper in its ear: “Shhhh, I own you now”. Putting your arms around the “radiance of a thousand suns” and making it your bitch is the vibe for a grown-up Bond villain lair. What’s not to love about a cuddlable nuclear floof that’s all BLOFELD’S KITTY ADORBS VIBES with just a hint of shag pile about it? Don’t be shy, embrace the evil.

“END TIMES CORRESPONDENT” IN THE FIELD

I, personally, got to cuddle one of Dunne and Raby’s Huggable Atomic Mushrooms once because I featured the one and only “Seminole” ever made in an exhibition called “FREAK SHOW” (2010) at the now-defunct Helmrinderknecht gallery in Berlin. RESULT: I can vouch for the queasy haptic deliciousness of the experience: somewhere – appropriately – around the level of snuggling with a “LET THE WORLD BURN” silver Persian.

Freak Show

“FREAK SHOW”, the exhibition, was named after a 1991 interactive CD-ROM by LOUISIANA ART-ROCK BAND “The Residents”. The whole thing was about speculative design without mentioning the word “speculative”, which is understandable because it was 2010 and ATOMIC PILLOW-makers Tony and Fiona hadn’t coined the term yet, as they later would. Instead, my “FREAK SHOW” catalogue notes waxed lyrical about “context” and “conceptual design” and how the designers in this exhibition^[2] were the designer “freaks” – freaks being crucial to design and interior décor because they don’t easily get embarrassed and can produce many absurd things without concern for the market, children of Gaetano Pesce that they were (“Fly my pretties”), AND YET, in a typical Capitalist twist, the market did, in fact, FIND (some of) THEM.

In a thoroughly anti-market mood, I intended to ask some “WHAT IF?”s about design FREAKdom with this exhibition, but Fiona and Tony put it much better in the preface to their book “SPECULATIVE EVERYTHING” (2013, ISBN: 978-0262019842) which included in its subtitle the exceptional phrase “SOCIAL DREAMING”:

“In a consumer society like ours, it is through buying goods that reality takes shape. The moment money is exchanged, a possible future becomes real. If it did not sell it would be sent back, becoming a rejected reality. In a consumer society, the moment we part with our money is the moment a little bit of reality is created. Not just physical reality or cultural but psychological, ethical, and behavioural. This is one of the purposes of critical design – to help us become more discerning consumers, to encourage people to demand more from industry and society as critical consumers.”

I would love to say the Huggable Atomic Mushroom series went into production. Every home should have one and that’s the truth. But Priscila remained a limited series and Seminole a one-off. They didn’t even reach heady design art market prices in the boom years despite having a shitload more shaggy depth and decor comfort value than, say, one of Ron Arad’s veritably VICIOUS and bloody uncomfortable Tempered Chairs.

Back in 2007, when I was writing a book on Design Art called Limited Edition, the year before the bottom began dropping out of all sorts of markets, the New York designer Marcus Tremonto told me that the Huggable Atomic Mushrooms were “at the more difficult end of the market” and selling for just 2,000 GBP a pop – a pittance in “Design Art” terms. But the Huggable Atomic Mushrooms are not Design Art, they are the best of what design could be. They invite fear into the domestic space and play with it.

Giving comfort in anxious times by helping to overcome residential fear should be every home improver’s goal: Décor for EMPOWERMENT, not regression. It’s time to gear up.

Riveting Sidenote

Design Art was perfect for all those nouveau cash-riche collectors of the noughties who’d made bucketloads in over-pumped markets. It represented accessible art investment, so you didn’t need to know much about it or buy into the whole old money thing to splash out. If it went with the living room décor in your Aspen retreat, you acquired it. All you had to do after that was remember not to sit on it.

I’m allowed to hate on Design Art because I wrote BOTH the books (EXPERT remember?) The other one is Furnish: Furniture and Interior Design for the 21^st Century (Gestalten, 2008) – and I’m talking about it here because it gives the context in which the “Designs For Fragile Personalities in Anxious Times” came about.

2005, when the Huggable Atomic Mushrooms were made, was right at that peak capitalism, peak Glasnost moment in which Design Art blossomed. It was exemplified by the auction price jumps for Marc Newson’s RIVETING late ‘80s, limited edition, Lockheed Lounge. (You know the one, it’s the shiny piece of furniture Madonna is balancing awkwardly on at the start of her 1993 “Rain” video.) Marc Newson made the Lounge in an edition of 10+2. In 2000, Christie’s sold one at auction for 105,000 USD. In 2006, Sotheby’s sold one for 1 million USD, which was then sold privately for an estimated 2.5 million shortly afterwards, and so on. Eternal growth: design for profit’s sake.

For T-1000-style chaise longue fans with compromised (or frozen) asset portfolios, Vitra’s functionally pointless, decorative Nippes (German word, look it up, Deepl is wrong, it doesn’t mean nipples), 1:6  SCALE miniature of the Lockheed Lounge is currently on offer online at the reduced price of 1097 Euros. It will, of course, NEVER give you the comfort of a Huggable Atomic Mushroom. It’s not at all fluffy, but it could, at a pinch, serve as pet décor for a very small pet.

You can’t really blame designers for trying to make a buck in the auction house back then, what with dwindling royalties and job security. Being a designer was starting to get really stressy too, because design was suddenly supposed to step up and solve all the world’s problems instead of just making nice things for the home like most people expected. It’s hard being misunderstood, so making hard-to-sit-on furniture was a logical retaliation.

For Scale is authored by David Michon

For Scale and Sophie Lovell go tone to tone on the topic of beige.

“Beige is the ULTIMATE symbol of end-stage capitalism… It is the most dangerous colour of all. In the 2020s, beige sofas started to wriggle like articulated maggots across interior shots: all rounded edges for people who don’t want to adult. Beige-in-beige lounges are a desert landscape. A sterile void. It’s beige as denial, a massive, pouty, self-indulgent sulk in the face of change. It’s an end-of-days attitude loaded with indifference.”

Read the full debate here.

“This is hephaestian furniture crafted to endure industrial-strength wear and tear with a half-life that could reach into millennia. It is both a direct contradiction of the planned obsolescence of our age and a metaphor for the Anthropocene – we can never, ever, throw away all the things we have made.”

Sophie Lovell was asked by designer /artist Philippe Malouin and The Breeder, Athens to contribute her essay “When You Cut into the Present, The Future Leaks Out” to Philippe’s “Steel Works” book alongside an interview by Felix Burrichter and Drew Zeiba and another critical text by Maria Cristina Didero.

From 1999, Sophie Lovell was Germany Correspondent, then Germany Editor at Wallpaper* magazine. During that time she brought and covered many features, profiles and news items to the magazine’s pages as well as online. From interviews with the likes of James Turrell, Virgil Abloh, Jonathan Ive, Dieter Rams, Stephen Burks and Konstantin Grcic to editing the Germany Supplement she accompanied the development of the magazine through its first four editors-in-chief until moving on to focus on her projects with studio_lovell in 2022.

Hans-Gerd Grunwald is a true design aficionado who, parallel to and following a demanding career in the automobile industry, has devoted more time than most postgrads deep diving into his chosen field of investigation: German post-war design. His dedication and expertise led him to become a tour guide for one of the world’s leading applied arts museums, where he shares his delight in industrial design and stories about what happens behind the scenes in the creation of everyday appliances.

Grunwald was born in 1960 in Leverkusen, West Germany. His visual memories from his youth, like many of his generation, were marked by the powerful, democratic German design expressions of the time, as exemplified by the 1972 Munich Olympic Games and Braun household products. After leaving school, he went on to study technical drawing and technical product design. Much of his working life since has been spent at BMW, where he worked as a quality engineer accompanying all areas of the design and development process of automobiles up to production. BMW Group’s parent plant is located in Munich and so for the last 25 years, this city in Bavaria has also been Grunwald’s primary home.

Three years ago, Grunwald had the chance to take early retirement from the automobile industry and focus completely on his first great love: design. He had always had a keen interest in the history of design and product development and became something of an expert in the field in his own time through correspondence courses and his own research. After BMW he was able to turn what was essentially his hobby of giving guided design tours of the area and museums to friends and acquaintances, into becoming a specialist tour guide at Die Neue Sammlung – The Design Museum in Munich, which is one of the largest and most important museums of applied art in the world.

Grunwald’s particular area of interest is in the HFG Ulm (Ulm Design School), which operated from 1953-68. It was founded by Inge Aicher-Scholl, Otl Aicher and Max Bill (a former Bauhaus student). During its short existence, the school was ground-breaking in its rational and systems-thinking approach to industrial design and visual communication. It is also where most of the designers came from that pioneered the revolution in design that took place at Braun in the mid-1950s, and strongly influenced a young Dieter Rams in his design approach. One of the first products that really made Rams’ name at Braun was the SK 4 Radio-Phonograph from 1956 that he collaborated on together with Hans Gugelot, who was a tutor at HFG Ulm and a key designer of many Braun products at the time.

Hans-Gerd Grunwald moved into his current, modest, two-roomed apartment in the Schwabing district of Munich in 2016. It was almost a matter of course that his keen interest in the rational, functional, modular design of the “Second Modernism” as practiced at the Ulm School led him to choose Dieter Rams’ Universal Shelving System to house his extensive industrial design collection. “I developed an interest in having good furniture and started to collect things with a design approach around 25 years ago”, he explains, “that was when I bought my first Wassily chair by Marcel Breuer. Then came scale models of cars, and an AEG electric kettle by Peter Behrens from 1909 that I found at a local flea market (see image L7). I also have a collection of 1:6 scale miniature furniture pieces from Vitra. I don’t have the space in my two-roomed flat for all the furniture that I like, so sometimes I buy a model instead.”

Through his work doing the guided tours for the museum, Grunwald also moved towards buying vintage Braun products, such as hairdryers, cameras and shavers. “I have all their shaver models from 1950 up to the ‘Sixtant’ of 1962”, he says, “because it is interesting to see, through them, the development of a product. Sometimes when I do a tour I take a shaver with me and open it to show how it is made and the intelligence of the design.”

A new favourite piece of Grunwald’s is a 1953 compact Rangefinder Werra camera made in VEB Carl Zeiss Jena in the GDR. (see image L5 on right hand side) “What I like about it is that the design is really, really simple. It looks like a Braun object – like it could have been designed by Dieter Rams or Otl Aicher or Hans Gugelot –but it was designed two or three years before the start of the design studies at HFG Ulm by Rudolf Müller. For me, its extraordinarily clean, puristic form, the golden section of the front and the shutter release as just a single control element on the top – kind of like a ‘home button’ – make it a thing to fall in love with. The rest of the controls are protected from the rain and visually tidy on the underside and the protective cap can also be used as a lens hood.”

The story behind Grunwald’s fascination with this camera started with a new app introduced by the Neue Sammlung last year called “The Sound of Design” [“Der Sound des Wirtschaftswunders”], which allows visitors to listen to the sounds of appliances from the 1950s and ’60s on display in the museum. In this collection, there are about ten different objects from the GDR and the Werra camera is one of them. “It came as quite a shock to me”, says Grunwald, “I was born 60 years ago in West Germany and for the first 30 years of my life I lived in a divided Germany. After a further 30 years of living in a united Germany, I realized I could tell you a lot about Scandinavian or Italian design but knew next to nothing about GDR design and production. So I did some research in the museum library and found out more, also about this camera, and thought ‘I must have it, it’s a really important object’.”

It’s not just objects that are close to Grunwald’s heart, but their context too: the stories and circumstances that surround them. Through context, objects acquire meaning and the user greater understanding. When the Neue Sammlung asked him to do his tours, they liked the idea of having someone from industry to explain industrial design from a completely different point of view from that of an art historian, he says. “When you talk about objects there is the big story relating to the historical style on the one hand, but there are also a lot of small stories from the people who designed and made it on the other. With art, for example, you have one artist that painted a particular picture. With design it doesn’t work like that. An industrial design object is never invented by one person alone. Take the Braun Sixtant shaver I mentioned earlier, which is famous for its black and silver colour combination. It has this colour because Ewin Braun and Fritz Eichler [Rams’ predecessor as head of design at Braun] really liked some Scandinavian cutlery design from the 1950s that was silver with black plastic handles. So Eichler suggested to Hans Gugelot, the ‘designer’ of the SM 3 Sixtant, together with Gerd Alfred Müller, to try that combination with a shaver. After Müller left Braun he went to work for the pen-makers Lamy where he used the same colour combination for his designs there. A product never stands alone. This is what I try to share with my tours.”

The arrangement of Grunwald’s collection throughout his home is very specific and clearly a lot of thought has gone into where each object is placed. “When you start your professional life with technical drawing, you have to be precise, so yes part of me does like precision”, he says, adding: “It’s a gift but also a burden sometimes. It’s about how I see things and aesthetic compositions. I was always fascinated by Wassily Kandinsky’s work – not so much his paintings as his theoretical works on form such as Point and Line to Plane – because it showed me that there was a concept behind why things work one way and not another. So over the years I have developed an eye for arrangements. Graphic design for a book, for example, is all about how you arrange things. It’s the same exhibits in a museum or for the contents of your shelves at home.”

Although some of the objects in his collection look factory-fresh, despite their age, others bear the marks of years of use. Dieter Rams is very keen on the traditional Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi, which is all about transience and imperfection – it is the idea that an object becomes beautiful through time and use. It might seem a contradiction to apply this term to an industrial object, as against one that is crafted by hand, but what they have in common is that they are both tools for the user. Grunwald explains: “My SK 4 radio-phonograph, for example, is old but it looks new, like fresh from the factory, because it has been repainted over the years. I chose this one because it is a big piece and I wanted to have the same feeling that people must have had in the 1950s about having what was really the first technical object, as against a piece of furniture, in their living spaces. On the other hand, I have a 1955 Braun SK 1 radio, designed by Fritz Eichler and Artur Braun, where you can really see the traces of use over the years and the plastic has discoloured in places. I like this too, precisely because it has been used. It’s 65 years old and has done what it was made for. For me it is a balance, I can live with both of them.”

The precision curation of the contents of Gerhard’s shelves extends to his kitchen as well. Even the food packaging appears to be a considered part of the aesthetic. “I did actually buy a whole bunch of Bärenmarke condensed milk cans, which have a distinctive light blue graphic design on the tin, because they contrasted so nicely with the orange wall behind”, he admits. His kitchen shelves are also home to a collection of coffeemakers, including the Moka Express first designed by Alfonso Bialetti in the 1930s, as well as Richard Sapper’s 9090 Espresso maker for Alessi alongside some Braun kitchen appliances, like the coffee grinder by Reinhold Weiss. “All of them look really new”, he says, “but I use them, they are not just for display.”

There are two designers in particular whose work runs like threads through Gerhard’s collection and his research. The first of them is the aforementioned Hans Gugelot (1920-1965), one of the least-known greats of his profession and professor at HFG Ulm, who was stopped short in his prime by a heart attack at the age of 45. “If he had lived longer I think we would have known much more about him and he would have achieved so much more” says Gerhard. He was incredibly important for the Ulm Design School. The product design there was much more impressive than that of the Bauhaus in my opinion –­ much purer, much more methodical – and he was responsible for that. He also influenced many students of product design, including Reinhold Weiss and Richard Fischer who went on to Braun. Gugelot was certainly known for his contribution to Braun design, but I think it is a pity that he is not more known more for it. The SK 4 again is a good example for context in this respect. The design is not just Rams, it is not just Gugelot, and it is not just Rams and Gugelot either. It also an idea by Fritz Eichler, it’s a system from Wilhelm Wagenfeld and Gerd-Alfred Müller, it’s a layout from Otl Aicher…there are seven or eight different people who made their contribution to it. That is how industrial design is. Nobody mentions my name when talking about a BMW, or the name of the engineer who designed part of the engine.”

The other important person in Gerhard’s life is the graphic designer and typographer Otl Aicher (1922-1991), so much so that the entire colour scheme of his apartment derives from his work. “As a child I remember Otl Aicher’s designs for the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich being pretty much omnipresent, but it wasn’t until much later that I learned the story behind them”, explains Gerhard. Aicher was a school friend of Werner Scholl, the brother of the German anti-Nazi activists Hans and Sophie Scholl, who were executed by the Nazi regime in 1943. Aicher too was strongly opposed to the Nazis and deserted the army and went into hiding at the Scholl’s family home towards the end of WWII. He later married their older sister Inge Scholl and they both, together with Max Bill, founded the Ulm Design School. “When Aicher became the lead designer for the 1972 Olympics he wanted to create something as far as possible from the Berlin Olympic Games of 1936 under the Nazis, so the colour scheme does not include red, for example, which he felt was the colour of dictators.

“What really fascinated me about his work for the games was this combination of his knowledge and skill in graphic design and the content, or intention behind it – that his decisions were not just aesthetic ones. The 1972 Olympic Games were about showing another kind of Germany to the world. I spent a lot of time researching Otl Aicher, looking through the HFG Ulm archives and talking to people who had worked with him. So when I moved into my apartment, which incidentally is only a few hundred metres away from where Aicher’s design studio was and from where Hans and Sophie Scholl used to live, I decided to make the connection I also have in my heart to his work to the walls of my home by painting each room one of the colours from the Olympic Games: orange for the kitchen, blue for the living room, green for the bedroom/office and silver in the hallway. Silver was the celebratory colour used instead of gold. I also have pictures of some of his early designs on the walls, including one of the Olympic torch relay that I like very much because on one hand all the colours meet in it and in the other hand because he took this thing that the Nazis introduced (the torch relay) and completely changed its representation, stripping it of all the mystification and symbolism the Nazis tried to imply with it.”

So Grunwald’s choice of domestic colour scheme was not just an aesthetic, but a political and ethical one as well.  It’s an unusual way to choose the paint for your apartment. But it brings in a lot of layers of context, which is totally in keeping with this design expert’s ethos:  the colour scheme, together with the furniture and the objects on display, complete the interior decoration of his flat as a collaboration across time with most of the greats of German post-war design in a precisely perfect way.

An exclusive interview with designer Virgil Abloh and Gorden Wagener, chief design officer of Daimler AG for Wallpaper magazine, ostensibly about their G-Wagen artwork collaboration but also about waning aspirations of ownership, the meaning of luxury and how recent global events have affected their perspectives as designers. Abloh also designed the limited-edition cover of the issue.

“At the beginning of 2020, Mercedes-Benz offered Wallpaper* a preview of a new collaborative art project it was working on, due for launch later this year. The raw material was its four-decade-old, classic SUV series the G-Class, or G-Wagen, as it is also known. The collaborators were Gorden Wagener, the brand’s chief design officer, and Virgil Abloh, the designer, architect, entrepreneur, DJ, artist, artistic director of Louis Vuitton menswear and CEO of his own fashion label, Off-White.

This collaboration is quite a coup for the carmaker. The resulting piece, to be unveiled this autumn, is called Project Geländewagen (Geländewagen is German for ‘terrain vehicle’, from which the G-Wagen gets its name).

Abloh has become one of the world’s hottest designers in recent years. Originally trained as an engineer and architect, he works across a whole range of media, but specifically with brands, their products and where they interact with popular culture. He has been called an ‘arch appropriator’ and indeed he does specialise in editing existing objects or tropes. Give him the core parameters of a brand, product, object or form typology and he will deconstruct and realign their narratives, making them ‘of the now’ by endowing them with new context – both historical and contemporary. This is not so much appropriation as an understanding and continuation of the cultural fractioning that defines our post-postmodern world: editing and remixing what went before. Brands such as Nike, Evian, Ikea and Vitra love Abloh for this fluency, not to mention the potential access he brings to a younger global generation also adept at growing new contexts from fragmented sources and re-expressing them in a language of emojis, memes, acronyms and filters.

This is a generation that, despite its love of appropriation and its ease with commodification, is becoming increasingly distanced from aspirations of ownership of large possessions – such as cars…”

Read the full article here.

What is the role of language in contemporary design? Orlando Lovell has recently teamed up with her mother, the design writer, editor and curator Sophie Lovell, to form the intergenerational studio_lovell. In DAMN° magazine issue no.47 they discuss language, design and system change from their respective perspectives.

It’s June again, time for the annual international gathering in Basel of lovers and dealers from the worlds of art and design. And just like every June, one if the highlights of these few days is the Vitra Summer Party in neighbouring Weil am Rhein. Usually the weather plays along and for one long, balmy summer evening each year, several thousand guests make merry on the green sward between the furniture company’s collection of exemplary architecture by exemplary architects, like ants enjoying a box of chocolates at a picnic.

This year’s party has a special guest DJ: the American engineer, architect, designer, fashion designer, artist and (is there anything he can’t do?) Louis Vuitton artistic director, Virgil Abloh. The DJ set is just a rather excellent bonus, however, because Abloh is actually here to celebrate the opening of his new installation “TWENTYTHIRTYFIVE” in Zaha Hadid’s Fire Station on the Vitra Campus, as well as unveil three new limited edition products he has been developing together with Vitra.

It is an understandable pairing: the creative world’s favourite new multidisciplinary, genre-bending deconstructor and reconstructor of narratives who says “modernity is something I believe in” meets a manufacturer with a strong modernist heritage that has a talent for identifying and embracing the avant-garde before helping it on its journey towards design classic. What is interesting is that the resulting collaboration is not targeted towards the majority of revellers on the Vitra Campus but towards “the emerging generation”.

TWENTYTHIRTYFIVE is a two-part immersive installation about how, in Abloh’s view, our environment influences our life paths and taste decisions. The first section, “Past/Present”, is about the interaction between a young person and their home surroundings. There are familiar objects here, some original like a vintage Prouvé children’s desk and Eero Aarnio’s 1968 Bubble chair. Others have been remixed, such as an Eames bench converted into a see-saw and a pair of Nike Jordans reworked by Abloh’s Off-White label. The second section, “Tomorrow”, is a speculative workshop/living environment for the same individual as an adult in the year 2035. In Vitra CEO Nora Fehlbaum’s words: “The teenager has become a creative ‘do-er’ who transforms his memories and cultural and social experiences into his own products…”

The exhibition is clearly autobiographical in nature. This borrowing and remixing that Abloh does right across his immense creative output reflects the highly eclectic nature of contemporary cultural context. Thanks to the heterogeneous worlds opened up by smart phone technology and ubiquity it becomes increasingly difficult to work out where we come from and who we are. If design is about problem-solving, perhaps the problem Abloh is attempting to solve with his work is the danger of the aforementioned emerging generation having no context, no individual narrative, and he is trying to help them construct one. But he sees the results of this heterogeneity in a positive and affirmative light: “For me, there’s a generation at hand that has a different aesthetic,” he says, “for me it’s an art movement”.

Three objects from the “Tomorrow” section of the exhibition have been produced by Vitra as a limited edition series, test runs if you like, for what looks like a bigger, more commercial collaboration to come: “Knowing our personalities”, says Abloh, smiling across at Nora Fehlbaum, who smiles back, “it would be a short conversation to open this up to not be a limited thing”, says Abloh, then adds: “if you think I just wanted to make three things, then times that by six”. There is clearly chemistry there. “I was interested in Virgil’s perspective on our collection”, says Fehlbaum, “Virgil has this access to a much wider, much younger audience than we have here with the design elite”. For now though, the editions comprise two remixes and a new piece: Jean Prouvé’s Petite Potence lamp gets a contemporary utilitarian coat of bright orange lacquer and an LED lamp in a cage. Prouvé’s Antony chair also gets and orange lacquer update (“orange is a hazard colour…you want it to punch”) and a transparent plexiglass shell-seat to draw all focus to the structure. In the installation, there is a wall of 999 hollow, glazed ceramic blocks – each one individually numbered. These too are an edition and can be bought and taken away from the show. Thus, the viewer (but only as paying customer mind) can also alter Abloh’s vision of “Tomorrow”.

Perhaps the most important result of this collaboration between the polymath from Chicago with Ghanaian heritage and this prestigious furniture manufacturer will be, as Abloh comments, that his working with Vitra “is going to open the door to a number of my contemporaries who don’t think that door is even open.”

Read article online at wallpaper.com here

“I don’t want your hope. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I do. Every day. And want you to act. I want you to behave like our house is on fire. Because it is.”

Greta Thunberg, World Economic Forum, Davos, January 2019.

Design, business, politics and economics have belonged together at the very least since the dawn of mechanised mass-production. Modernism, the Deutscher Werkbund and the Bauhaus, for example, may have been about providing a functional, modular, utilitarian living environment for ordinary people: “total architecture” filled with devices to make life easier and better for their inhabitants, but they had just as much to do with reviving economies and the rise of a new kind of political environment as they did with a radically stripped-down design aesthetic.

It is this link between design, industry and social responsibility that fed into the post-war German Economic Miracle (Wirstschaftswunder) in the 1950s where companies that pioneered that wave embraced new forms of design as well. Good design made sense socially, yes, but it also made sense commercially. This “design-driven” approach, incidentally, was picked up many years later by one Steve Jobs who used it as a template to turn around his own failing consumer electronics company Apple and make it the largest information technology company in the world.

But all this rampant growth came at a human and environmental price. By the 1960s it became clear that the Earth was sick, and our own rampant consumption and greed was the cause. On December 24th, 1968, the astronaut William Anders on the Apollo 8 mission took a colour photograph of the Earth rising behind the Moon. For the first time ever it became blatantly, visibly, clear that all human life shares this one ball with nothing but a thin film of atmosphere separating us from oblivion. In 1969, the influential American architect, designer, theorist and inventor R. Buckminster Fuller published his famous Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth in which he talks about “earthians’ critical moment” in which “All of humanity now has the option to ‘make it’ successfully and sustainably, by virtue of our having minds, discovering principles and being able to employ these principles to do more with less.” The writing was already on the wall – along with the path we needed to take for our salvation – 50 years ago, yet we were already learning to ignore it.

Not long after, at the 1970 International Design Conference in Aspen, Colorado – founded in 1951 by Chicago businessman to encourage a closer relationship between art, design and commerce – there was a clash with a new generation who, like Bucky Fuller, had a very different understanding of design and responsibility. Designers, architects and student activists disrupted the week-long event protesting against, in the words of design critic Alice Twemlow (in her 2008 essay A Look Back at Aspen): “its lack of political engagement, its flimsy grasp of pressing environmental issues and its outmoded non-participatory format.” For these protesters, Twemlow goes on: “design was not about the promulgation of good taste or the upholding of professional values; it had much larger social and specifically environmental repercussions for which designers must claim responsibility. Nor, for them, was design only about objects and structures; rather, they understood it in terms of interconnected systems and processes and specifically, within the context of the exploitation of natural resources and unchecked population growth.”

These protesters had a far more inclusive view of design, one that sees design touching on and – more importantly – having responsibility towards all humans and to the rest of the planet. In 1971, the designer Victor Papanek published his book Designing for the Real World. In it he not only called for an inclusive attitude to design, away from commercial goals, a design approach which, he believed, could help change social inequalities by designing for the disadvantaged, but he also said designers had a responsibility to think and work in this way.

But here we are it seems, half a century of further unchecked growth in all directions later, and in wanton ignorance of all warnings, we nonetheless find ourselves in the middle of the biggest crisis humankind has ever faced (or caused): one that threatens our own extinction and all life as we know it on our beautiful blue spaceship, not tomorrow or in some distant future, but now. Design has changed massively in those fifty years, as has technology and science, but our planet’s problems have remained pretty much the same. So what can designers do and what are designers doing to shoulder this responsibility they already knew they had?

The first step is to acknowledge and work with the change in parameters. Design should now be understood as a systems-based discipline, rather than an object-based one. Back in the nineteenth century, the naturalist John Muir stated: “When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world”. This means the ramifications of our actions are never isolated and often more far-reaching than we consider. It also means that the level of complexity involved in designing and finding solutions can be daunting and mind-boggling. But it also gives hope because thanks to these interconnections we do have opportunities to exert change ­no matter how vast and complex the system might be.

Human-generated complexity however is still nothing compared to what nature is capable of. So, taking ecology as a model has become an increasingly (excuse the pun) fruitful path for designers. Regenerative design, for example, uses whole systems thinking to design processes that are not only environmentally-friendly and “sustainable”, but which are dynamic, restoring and, renewing their own sources of energy and materials. It is a very different approach to “growth” in the capitalist sense in that it is at once conservative and regenerative. Regenerative design was another idea that came out of the 1970s with the idea of a sustainable, permanent agricultural system called “permaculture” developed by David Holmgren and Bill Mollison in Tasmania. The term was later expanded to mean “permanent culture” since it had social aspects and implications. Today there are entire frameworks based on the idea – particularly in the highly complex realm of building. The Sustainable Project Appraisal Routine (SPeAR), designed by the engineering firm ARUP, for example, is a complexity-managing tool to appraise architecture projects in terms of “key themes such as transport, biodiversity, culture, employment and skills” and allow for the adjustment of “project performance”.

As a result of this better understanding of complexity, there are now many branches and sub-categories of designers from biosynthetic designers, reverse-engineering nature, to virtual reality designers creating entire new worlds. Many thousands of solutions will be needed to change the world for the better, and many millions of people to design and make those changes. The “swarm intelligence” of the planet is required, not just to design solutions but social, political, behavioural and technical as well.

In real terms this means that we are not going to change the refugee crisis by designing, producing and selling flat-pack temporary housing, for example, if we do not change the system that generated and perpetuates the refugee crisis. And we are not going to solve the world’s dependency on fossil fuels by designing and selling cars that run on alternative fuel sources without changing the system and lobbies that perpetuate and profit from fossil fuels – or changing the behaviour of car users. So this means that designers need to engage with the bigger “ecosystems” related to design, connect politically, professionally and socially to design alternative systems in an interdisciplinary fashion. Common examples of such systems on a local scale are new forms of exchange such as time banks, neighbourhood tool-sharing platforms or car-pooling and car-sharing. Also, fair and direct trade networks between producers and consumers of certain goods which can allow greater consumer choice on the ethical and environmental aspects of the products they do buy because they have increasingly less trust in “brands” to do it for them.

The majority of these systems are concerned with rethinking the idea of ownership and how “value” is recognised and socialised.   One recent example is a group called Phi from the Strelka Institute in Russia who are using a combination of peer-to-peer blockchain technologies and speculative design to imagine a new, decentralised model for generating and sharing energy rather than having to rely on governments and monopolies to provide reliable and affordable energy sources.

Perhaps instead of asking: how can design improve our lives, we should ask how can design change our behaviour? Tim Brown, CEO of the global design company IDEO believes strongly in the value of using design to change behaviour. Whether it be reducing child respiratory disease by getting children to wash their hands more often or putting the tools for change in the hands of the users in the form of data and analysis apps for example. But changing behaviour to promote more ethical behaviour patterns within social and environmental contexts begs the question: whose values are we promoting and who will benefit from those changes?

Also, fixing behaviour alone will not be effective if we do not change the overriding system governing human activity on this planet – and that system is, like it or not, late capitalism. In his 2013 book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the French economist Thomas Piketty argues that the problems of inequality and unequal distribution of wealth that have come with the global capitalist system are not temporary but are the result of structural flaws in and the effect of the system itself. If he is right, we can change behaviour all we like, but if we do not change the system as well, then the overall global situation will not improve.

In April 2018, when the world watched US Congress grilling the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, on the subject of data misuse, it was interesting to witness a) the spectacular degree of ignorance amongst national government politicians as to how social media actually works and b) that that same government, seemed to expect a for-profit corporation to legislate and lead the way in setting its own ethical standards and policing itself. It felt like witnessing the final abdication of the world’s most powerful nation state from the responsibility for the moral and ethical welfare of itself and its citizens.

The speculative architect Liam Young recently advocated the dissolution of the term “architect”, saying that an architect’s skills are wasted on building buildings – on creating objects ­– and that that is a good thing: “It means that the profession can find traction in other fields: the architect as a strategist, as politician … as activist or storyteller. Finding ways to operate in other disciplines just gives us more agency.” We all, not just architects, need to push beyond the outdated apparatus of our professions. Although appearances may be to the contrary, we do not need more houses, we do not need more objects, we do not need more stuff. We need new systems. Urgently. And it is agency that designers need to cultivate in these times when trust in our established systems is failing and the environment is in crisis. Designers are, first and foremost, problem-solvers. They need to show politicians, industry and consumers how their skills can be used to solve problems.

It is both bizarre and terrifying to think that the survival of the Earth could lie in the hands of the executive directors of the world’s leading companies, rather than governments. Interesting because at this point in time they seem to have the better potential for more concerted rapid change in terms of products, production, logistics, waste and energy than many governments and because consumers may still just about have the potential to influence them by voting with their wallets. Terrifying because this kind of power is anything but democratic.

At the 2019 World Economic Summit in Davos there was again strong protest about climate change and wealth inequality, but unlike the 1970 protest at Aspen, it was much broader in scope, extending to the outmoded, non-participatory format of the way our governing, economic and commercial systems are structured. There may not have been much change in the damage we are doing to our planet, but there has been a global perspective shift since then. Design also still has just as much to do with reviving economies and the rise of a new kind of political environment now as it did at the beginning of the twentieth century. But now the situation has turned inside-out. Change is not being directed top down, it is being demanded and directed from the bottom up.

Designers need to exercise their agency to change perspectives and come up with solutions and convince decision-makers of the value and potential of new system designs within a holistic, regenerative and social and ethical framework. Designers have a responsibility, as we all do, to convince politicians, employers, clients and consumers that making less, but better, stuff and changing their systems to ones that are more robust and self-sustaining can bring value and growth of a more durable kind. It’s a big ask. But what is the alternative? If we continue on as blindly as we are doing, trying to stick band-aids on a sinking ship, then it doesn’t matter how many billions your net worth is or what your Forbes list rating is. We are all going down together.

For his latest documentary “Rams”, “Helvetica” director Gary Hustwit has turned his lens on reluctant design hero Dieter Rams. Sophie Lovell, who interviewed Rams when he was one of our inaugural guest editors in 2007 and participated in the film, picks up the thread.

Sophie Lovell spoke to Georgian artist Andro Wekua for Wallpaper magazine about war, work and wandering.

‘Andro Wekua’s Berlin studio is located on a curve of the river Spree near the Tiergarten park behind the KPM porcelain manufactory headquarters. This used to be quite a backwater, a bit of an ignored unspace until recently, but escalating property prices and proximity to the river have turned it into prime real estate turf. The studio is in the remains of an old red brick building, a surviving wing of a larger industrial complex, its original intended context obliterated during the war. It is surrounded by seven construction sites with billboards advertising future coworking spaces and relocation invitations. As he shows me up to his atelier on the second floor above a small printing works and opposite Angela Bulloch’s studio, Wekua explains he doesn’t expect to be here much longer: “the owner is here almost every day with potential buyers”, but he doesn’t seem unduly concerned.

The inside of the studio is quite a surprise. I’ve been invited to interview an artist with three upcoming solo shows in The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Sprüth Magers Berlin and the Kunsthalle Zurich respectively. Wekua is just 40 years old but has been well known in the art world since his early twenties. The New York MoMA and the Saatchi Gallery have several of his pieces and he is represented internationally by both Sprüth Magers and The Gladstone Gallery. He may not be a top gun quite yet, but he is not far off.  Other big-name artists based in Berlin, such as Tomas Saraceno, Ai Weiwei or Olafur Eliasson have giant studio factories with dozens of staff, but the main work room here is almost empty save for a number of modestly-sized paintings in progress propped against the white walls and a couple of tables covered in half squeezed tubes of oil paint and colour smears. The air is thick with the comforting aroma of turpentine. There are two chairs, which look like they came out of a skip, and a crate of bottled water. There are no assistants scurrying around, no sign of hectic preparation for the shows, just the artist on his own, offering a glass of water and apologising for not having anything else to drink. The word “spartan” comes to mind.

Wekua explains, almost apologetically, that this isn’t his only studio, just the one that he paints in at the moment and that he has sent his two assistants home for the day. His sculptural works are all made at the Kunstbetrieb workshops in Basel and his films in anther specialist place Zürich. He seems to be constantly on the move, dividing his time between Berlin, Basel, Zürich and, more recently, his country of birth: Georgia. I ask him which place feels most like home for him and he answers: “So far I have had no problem living in different places with but I am starting to realise it would be good to decide – not geographically, but so I am not scattered all over the world the whole time. As you get older you start to get a bit tired and it is difficult for the people working for you. Also when the kids start to go to school you have to make decisions.”

Perhaps this state of permanent transit is why the studio space feels rather impersonal, more like a hotel room than a home. He has personalised it only with the coloured oily tracks his fingers have smeared on the walls around each unfinished artwork. The dozen or so paintings, on the other hand, seem deeply personal, portraits mostly, bursting with vibrant yellows, reds, pinks and blues. He explains to me his work process for them: “I collect personal photos or ask friends for them – this is of someone I knew; this is me when I was young – but it doesn’t matter who they are, they may as well be strangers.” Wekua then sketches in collage using the photos along with coloured paper, cut and torn. “An aspect of collage that I find fascinating”, he explains, “is that I believe that time is not necessarily a linear thing. The elements within them stem from different times and different places, but one can still depict them in an integrated way.” When he is happy with the result, he sends the images off to a screen printer who scales them up and prints them on canvas or, in the case of the pictures here, sheet aluminium and the artist then works over the prints in oils, adding and subtracting and overpainting until he is content. Wekua again emphasises his distance from the subject matter, most of which look extremely intimate somehow, like family portraits: “it does not play a big role for me who they are”, he says, “these are not portraits, they are figures. There is a hardness about them, but it also interests me that there is a deeper narrative quality too”.

Painting is only a part of Wekua’s oeuvre. His powerful sculptural work often features life-like, life-sized androgynous adolescent figures made of wax and other materials. One piece for his upcoming shows (he has as yet to decide what pieces will go where) is of teenaged-looking figure with a huge black wolf nudging at her shoulder. Another is of a figure standing in a 3 x 5 metre pool with water circulating through her and coming out of various body parts, such as shoulder and hands, like a fountain.Wekua also makes films, the most well-known of which, Never Sleep with a Strawberry in Your Mouth (2010), features yet more uncanny, android-like figures, this time played by humans, in a strangely magical realist domestic setting. Then there are the architectural models, seemingly accurate but constructed partly from memory, of buildings from his former hometown. What appears to connect them all is a strong sense of intensely personal storytelling.

I ask him about the girl and the wolf, a theme that repeats itself in his sculptures. I explain that, for me and perhaps many others it is a motif dripping with storytelling symbolism: Little Red Riding Hood, Studio Ghibli’s Princess Mononoke or one of the Stark children from Game of Thrones. The figure is both innocent and warrior. But Wekua is adamant that storytelling is not his intent: “They stand for something, but not someone. It is a feeling about a universal condition that moves me and is what I want to represent, so I express it in one or another form. But that is not a story. If viewers want to make stories out of my work or see stories in it I think that is of course cool, but it would be great if they could get a sense of that condition as well.” He does not go on to elucidate what that condition might be.

More tellingly perhaps, Wekua’s own back-story is always related in articles about his work and by his galleries. It is as if his refusal to admit to a narrative in his work, automatically drives others to forcibly attach his own one to him.  He was born in 1977 in Sukhumi, by the Black Sea in Georgia, a region riven by war, civil war and occupation. In 1989 his father, a political activist was killed by Abkhaz nationalists during the Sukhumi riots. His family fled the city and at the age of 17 he was sent on an exchange to an anthroposophic school in Basel, Switzerland. “It was during the 1990s. Those were bad times in Georgia. After the collapse of the Soviet Union there was huge chaos. Nothing functioned anymore. Nevertheless, it was still a good time for me, I had a lot of fun and was outside a lot. But for my mother and others if there was a chance to get out and go somewhere else, it had to be taken. I did not want to leave.” Switzerland was a culture shock, “especially after all that chaos. It was quite depressing for me at the beginning and I was really alone.”

Wekua says he did not actively choose art as a profession either: “I never knew what I wanted to be. I drew a great deal as a child, so when I was 11 or 12 my father took me to a painter friend of his in Georgia who had a great studio, just like you imagine an old-fashioned atelier to be. I ended up going there twice a week. When he painted, I painted as well. It all sort of just came together. I did not set out to become an artist”.

We move on to talk about in-between spaces, like the location of his Berlin studio. He once stated that he is are interested in the “blurry material that holds things together”. In a city such as Berlin, it is precisely such in-between spaces that have allowed the creative scene to grow and evolve. They fall between the rules as well, so there is freedom to invent, to create something new.  I ask if that is what drew him to the city and again he replies in a self-contained manner: “For me it is the spaces in between that are important, but I can make my space anywhere because I carry everything I need with me.” But what, I ask, of the non-physical gaps? The spaces where emotions and memories and dreams exist? The human mind has a fantastic ability to imaginatively fill in the spaces left by its often-flawed sensory system. “Where I grew up in Georgia,” he answers, “it’s very different now from what it was. War and civil war and occupation have changed it massively and much of what I knew in my childhood is not there anymore. Also, you imagine things differently to what they were. You fill in the gaps with your imagination. My work is about closing these gaps.”

When he is working, the names for Wekua’s pieces come last of all. At the time of writing two weeks before the first of the three upcoming shows, most of the works for them are still nameless. By naming them he will be ascribing potential for meaning and he seems reluctant to do so: “Then there is no going back”, he says, “I think names are important. But then again some of my works don’t have a name even when they are done, even though I have tried to give them one.”

Despite his self-professed aim to close gaps, there is one yawning chasm he opens up between himself and his works when they are completed: he says he detaches himself from them completely. “As soon as my work is exhibited somewhere then that is where the relationship stops”, he explains. “The work is not an ambassador for my ideas, it becomes autonomous. When I see my work in an exhibition, I am just as much an observer as you are. If the work is not able to take on a life of its own and if I don’t feel like an observer, then it doesn’t leave the studio.”

Most interviewers tend to ascribe an air of mystery to Andro Wekua but in our meeting he comes across as an intelligent, contemplative person struggling a little to express himself, quite understandably, in what is his third or fourth language. Which artist likes to answer the question: what is your work about? Or: what was your intention? Wekua is an explorer examining the gaps between the perceived and the all too real. Memory, time, and the non-linearity of how it is stored are all of interest to him. Yet he has experienced family loss at a young age, war, loss of homeland, culture shock and loneliness and his work also reflects a great deal of processing. His professed disinterest in the protagonists in his works, his dismissal of the autobiographical and his ultimate detachment from his creations may be self-protective but it seems more likely that he does not want his work to be defined by his own circumstances by western critics constantly flagging up his migrant, warzone background. So he is guarded and careful and rightly so.

But Wekua is an artist, and an increasingly famous one at that. As such he has willingly entered a realm where feelings and thoughts become, by definition, public property because he is putting them on display. Gallerists, journalists and fans alike pick him and his work apart for every scrap they can get. Perhaps, being so wrapped up in the creation of his art, he genuinely cannot see what he is revealing with it: alienation, melancholy, loneliness, isolation. Like when you have a strong dream and it fills your head so much with the feeling of having experienced a cinematic fairy tale of epic proportions. But the moment you wake up and try and tell someone your dream, the magic disappears: it becomes an analysable set of images and symbols spouted by your subconscious – and it allows the person you tell it to read you, to interpret you. When the interview is over, we start to chat about lucid dreaming and his eyes light up.’

Since the fall of the Wall, the city has transformed itself from a divided, stagnant anomaly into one of the most exciting capitals in the world, writes Sophie Lovell.

“When I moved here from London twenty-three years ago, Berlin was still very much two cities: the former West, for all the infrastructural investment in the ‘50s and ‘70s, was little more than a provincial lacuna notable for its sleepy suburbs and rather dated commercial infrastructure. Much of the Mitte district, the capital’s former heart and then in the former East, along the former border, was a backwater; the Palast der Republik and other representative buildings of the former GDR stood empty or were quietly being demolished. The neoclassical masterpiece by Schinkel, Stüler, Messel et al. that is the Museum Island was shabby and dirty, its walls pockmarked with the scars of snipers’ bullets and shrapnel from the war and the bombed-out ruin of the Neues Museum sported full grown trees where its grand entrance hall once stood.

During the Second World War, 50 percent of the city’s fabric was destroyed and in the form East this was still painfully, yet rather beautifully, obvious. The neighbouring area around Hackescher Markt was a combination of crumbling, gap-toothed, eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth-century street fronts and despondent-looking GDR prefabs. Jungles of weeds and yet more unchecked trees filled the empty plots between the buildings. Makeshift metal doors concealed basement entrances to semi-illegal clubs, bars and galleries. On autumn mornings in the Scheunenviertel (the former Jewish quarter), the foggy air was thick with the smell of coal smoke from the stoves heating the old buildings and the pavements were so bad that negotiating them in high heels was a high-risk venture. Finding a decent sandwich at lunchtime was an impossibility and buying anything more adventurous than an avocado involved a trip to Kreuzberg or Schöneberg in the former West…”

Frei association: bionics, parametrics, morphogenics and more with Jan Knippers, Achim Menges, Werner Sobek and Arnold Walz by Sophie Lovell. In 1964, the pioneering structural engineer and Head of the Institute for Concrete Structure, Fritz Leonhardt, lured Frei Otto to the University of Stuttgart to be the professor of a new research department. Otto followed an illustrious roll call of pioneering structural engineers there – but as an architect, his arrival marked an extraordinary flowering of new interdisciplinary research-driven innovation. Sophie Lovell spoke to four of Stuttgart University’s leading engineering and architecture professors about Frei Otto’s impact there, on how his symbiosis of architecture and engineering has continued to develop since, and where it’s headed next…

FREI DAYS AT STUTTGART

Stuttgart is famous for being in Germany’s engineering heartland: the cradle of the automobile industry and other precision engineered manufacturing, like Daimler, Porsche and Bosch. The University is renowned as a centre for automotive and aerospace engineering – areas where “lightweight” was already of primary concern. As an investigative architect, Otto brought his interdisciplinary thinking into an environment ripe for pushing boundaries.

During Frei Otto’s time at Stuttgart, heading up the Institute for Lightweight Structures between 1964 and 1991, there were a number of influential professors there, besides himself, who contributed to a climate of future-oriented research thinking in the early years and a strong cross-over between architecture and engineering. Werner Sobek, Jan Knippers and Arnold Walz all studied there during this period. As architect Arnold Walz recalls: “Two people at Stuttgart had a great influence on me: Frei Otto, and Horst Rittel – who was in charge of the Planning Institute, taught at Berkeley and had been the last Rector at the HfG Ulm. What Otto and Rittel had in common was their fundamental attitude. They weren’t interested in details but in basic understanding. For Otto, it was the relationship between form, materials and construction. While Rittel was a very radical thinker: he taught me to think and not to be afraid of doubt. With these basics, you can go a long way and are more likely to create something new.”

Jan Knippers, like Otto, first studied engineering at the Technical University in Berlin and found it frustratingly conventional. He moved to Stuttgart to work with Jörg Schlaich – one of Germany’s most important engineers – and immediately encountered a totally different spirit: “At Stuttgart, engineering was very much embedded in a cultural, societal and scientific context – much more advanced and more open, with the relationship to architecture much stronger”, he recalls. The proximity for these architects and engineers to the automotive and other local engineering industries meant they were in an environment where inventiveness and economy of materials were common practice.

Werner Sobek, who studied both engineering and architecture at Stuttgart, is head of ILEK: a merging of Frei Otto’s IL Institute and Jörg Schlaich’s Institute for Construction and Design, both professorships of which he inherited from his predecessors and mentors.

“We were very lucky”, he says, “that in Stuttgart in the early 1960s there were a few professors in the Departments of Architecture and Engineering who were looking for closer cooperation. From then on there was what we now call ‘the Second Stuttgart School’, which blossomed between 1960 and about 1980. The influences emanating from this school were very important: it bridged the gap between architecture and engineering and widened the focus out into aircraft design, car body design, textiles and more.”
FIRE AND WATER

It may have been a bonding moment between architecture and engineering, but this was not without its frictions. Not least between “architect” Otto and “engineer” Jörg Schlaich. “They appreciated each other, but nonetheless each had their distinctive field of research, which sometimes seemed like fire and water”, says Sobek. It seems the main trigger for the differences between these two research institute heads was when they both worked on the 1972 Olympic stadium project – Otto as a consultant to the architect Günter Behnisch, and Schleich as a chief engineer working for the company of another legendary Stuttgart professor, Fritz Leonhardt. According to Arnold Walz, Otto was more interested in exploring the boundaries of lightweight and elasticity with the roof: “But Schlaich couldn’t deal with this. I’m not sure if it was just his way of thinking or the building regulations you had to follow at the time. He wanted to make the structure as stiff as possible, like a concrete structure. Therefore all the parts grew in size and diameter. Maybe this is the reason the roof is still there. If Otto had been allowed to do the optimisations he wanted to, perhaps corrosion or other little things might have already destroyed the structure.”

OTTO FREI STUTTGART

Jan Knippers says he had never heard of Frei Otto whilst he was studying engineering in Berlin. “But in Stuttgart, I realised how important he was, because of his impact on the interface between architecture and engineering. He was someone who had a lot of charisma and a lot of ideas that were then taken up and worked on by others. I soon realised that many of the things that were later being worked on at the ITKE institute came originally from Otto’s ideas: membranes, lightweight building, rope nets, grid shells and so on.”

“He was not an architect, but a thinker”, says Sobek, “and the only lifelong professor in the entire university who did not have to teach: he was totally free of that… He’d often surprised everyone by arriving with some biologists from Berlin, for example, to compare mussel shells with concrete shells, or human bones with steel columns. This permanent jumping over fences, or even not accepting that there was a fence between disciplines, was very important at the time. He did not just jump the fence, he tore it down.”
Achim Menges, who did not move to Stuttgart until 2008, says the effects of Otto’s presence there are still felt: “I think the main impact of his work on our approach is that he really questioned established models of design. His radical revision of the design process through what he called ‘form-finding methods’ is really something we’re trying to extend into the computational realm.”

OTTO’S INFLUENCE

“Although he built little, Frei Otto had an incredible influence on architecture”, says Jan Knippers, “because he developed a whole new approach to the idea of design. Form and structure are not defined by architects but arise through physical structural principles. And this is what we’re continuing now – but on another level. Structures and forms are now performance-driven. As in biology, there is no longer the hierarchical differentiation between structure and material.”

Achim Menges marvels at how Otto managed to extend his methodology, “of trying to find a kind of equilibrium between external boundary conditions and internal force distribution”, towards a kind of construction technology, like the Multihalle in Mannheim, “where the form-finding actually took place on-site in a construction process that employed the elasticity of the material to find a particular form: a radical rethinking of what construction and fabrication could be.”

STUTTGART TODAY
Since succeeding Otto, Werner Sobek has developed ILEK further, particularly in terms of its multidisciplinarity: its 35-strong team now comprises architects, engineers, aircraft engineers, structural engineers, ceramic engineers and biologists. ILEK is still focused on making buildings lighter but on energy-related issues and areas such as urban planning too. “We’ve dramatically widened the scope” Sobek says.
BEYOND LIGHTWEIGHT
Another visionary thinker, also fixated on the lightweight, was Buckminster Fuller who regularly asked architects: “How much does your building weigh?” But now in a new century, this question no longer addresses the complexity of the issues involved. Concrete, for example, has evolved in quantum leaps: some ultra high strength concretes now have an extraordinary strength-to-weight capacity closer to that of high-quality steel or titanium. Werner Sobek now divides lightweight in construction into three main fields: material lightness, structural lightness and a third: “the energetic part”. It is this latter area that has dramatically superseded the levels of the second half of the twentieth century.

“Nobody talked about energy then”, says Sobek, “or if they did, it was energy consumption over the lifetime of the building, not embodied energy or grey energy, which means the energy you need for the production and transport of the materials involved. For example in a newly finished residential building, this embodied energy has already added up to between twenty-five and thirty-five times the future annual energy consumption of the building for heating, cooling and cooking etc.” In talking about “lightweight” today, architects and engineers, need to consider not just structure and materials but the whole holistic minimising of embodied energy emissions.

This thinking permeates all the research at ILEK and other institutes at Stuttgart. Research is going on into such things as adding “artificial muscles” with sensors to structures, enabling them to adapt to varying loads and other environmental conditions. Other investigations are into lightweight, multi-layered textile façades capable of “harvesting” and storing energy, and into new forms of superlight concrete structural elements “foamed” inside in places – just like bones.

NEW GOALS, NEW ROLES

So where is engineering and architecture going next at Stuttgart? What can we expect for the future?

Sobek points out that purely practically, with an expanding world population in a time of growing material shortages, the focus has to be on recyclability: “This is a topic I’ve been teaching since 1992 when there was nobody out there talking about recyclability. This puts us in the pole position with worldwide research, because we’ve been doing it for twenty years. That’s why Harvard, MIT, Chicago, Moscow and Singapore universities are knocking at our door asking for co-operations.”

Walz believes strongly there is no point just playing around experimenting if you don’t know where you’re heading: “The problem generally is that the steamboat of conventional architecture chugs stubbornly on, immune to change. Productivity in the building industry hasn’t changed for the last twenty-five years. We build now more or less as we did 100 years ago with just a sprinkling of the digital here and there. Frei Otto indicated new ways, but apart from a few things like rope nets, grid shells and tents, none have had an impact on everyday architecture. What’s missing is a goal. Society has to start defining common goals again. Where do we want to go?”

Menges agrees, seeing the pivotal role of production in the future, facilitating a high level of differentiation – formally less limited and achieving high levels of adaptation – as in nature. This means no beginning or end to a building, but a constant state of growth and adaptation.

“The distinction between the digital and the physical has been eroded with their gradual integration allowing new ways to address how things are made. This will have a profound impact on architecture. Design and process will ultimately converge, meaning buildings will never reach a final stage of conclusion.”

This essay was originally published in uncube magazine issue no. 33 in 2015, celebrating the life and works of Frei Otto.