Tabla de contenidos para #13 en Design Anthology, Asia Pacific Edition

The annual pilgrimage the international design community makes for Milan’s Salone del Mobile and Design Week is unlike any other. More than 370,000 visitors pour into the city each April for the fiera alone, not to mention the increasingly important satellite events that populate the city for a week. Each year the event seems to be even bigger and more spread-out than the last, forcing journalists and editors like myself to literally run between events, appointments and interviews. Spending time in the backs of taxis or squeezed into the metro, though, can mean missing out on one of the simple pleasures of Milan — la passeggiata. The relatively small and intimate city is truly best experienced on foot, and especially so during the pleasant spring weather we were blessed with…

With Design Shanghai now firmly established on the international design map, Design Anthology sat down with the event’s co-director Ross Urwin to discuss how far the show has come since it began in 2014, where it’s going next and what has been most surprising along the way. Design Anthology: Design Shanghai keeps growing and expanding with each successive show, and this year included a number of satellite events around the city.Tell us about those and the strategy behind them. Ross Urwin: It’s always been a part of our mid-to long-term strategy to make Design Shanghai a cultural event on Shanghai’s calendar.The city is so vibrant, design-savvy and hungry for innovation, inspiration and unique experiences. Design has always been an innate part of the city’s DNA. Last year we launched the…

‘We’re artists visiting the design world,’ laughs Deborah Moss about her studio practice. ‘It’s like that Groucho Marx saying where he never wanted to belong to any club that would have him as a member.’ Straddling multiple worlds, Moss & Lam indeed defies categorisation. Known for intricate, large-scale installations and elegant artworks, the two have been described as ‘the hidden hands behind spectacular rooms and works around the world’, and since its early days, the studio has been called upon by leading interior designers including Yabu Pushelberg, David Rockwell and Tony Chi to infuse warmth and personality into hotels, restaurants and retail spaces. Moss established the studio in 1987 with her husband Edward Lam, a fellow art student. ‘When we started, we never thought it would be a business,’ recalls…

In Tamil Nadu in southern India, extravagant and eclectic mansions rise like mirages from the semi-arid landscape. Ranks of palatial houses stand sentinel in dirt-paved villages, many seldom used and in crumbling condition — though a few have been carefully restored. This is Chettinad, home to the Chettiars, Tamil traders and financiers who, at the peak of their business acumen across Southeast Asia in the 19th and early 20th centuries, brought home wealth to build monumental mansions for their families. They also brought rich building materials: teak from Burma, satinwood from Ceylon, marble from Italy, tiles from Japan, cast iron and steel from Great Britain, chandeliers and glass from France and Belgium. Drawing heavily on European architectural influences, the Chettiars blended in traditional Tamil elements and crafts such as…

Palm Springs is an otherworldly place of low-rise casitas, bulging citrus trees and a hardscrabble mountain backdrop that looks almost as though it was cut out with scissors. Recreation and relaxation is the name of the game, and splashing sounds from a motel pool party are never far away. The Hollywood elite have flocked to Palm Springs ever since film studios began enforcing the ‘two-hour rule’ in the 1920s, requiring actors to stay within two hours of Los Angeles during their contracts. The desert city became the preferred escape for the likes of Cary Grant, Loretta Young, Charlie Chaplin, Elizabeth Taylor, Bob Hope, Ann Miller, Humphrey Bogart, Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, many of whom commissioned architects to build extravagant holiday hideaways in the desert resort some 180 kilometres east…

Gallery ALL is a new exhibition, events and gallery space established by husband-wife duo Yu Wang and Xiao Lu with locations in both Los Angeles and Beijing. Design Anthology caught up with Wang to talk about the gallery’s mission, some of his thoughts on design and the role Gallery ALL will play in a globalising art and design market. Design Anthology: How did you decide to become a gallerist? Yu Wang: I was educated as an architect and have always been fascinated by architecture and sculptural objects in general.When I began visiting the design and art fairs years ago, contemporary Chinese and Asian designers were rarely represented. At the same time, Chinese design shows were dominated by crafty, smaller objects or Western furniture designs from big brands targeting a mass…

Australian architect Kerry Phelan certainly knows how to make an entrance. In this Drumalbyn Road family home on Sydney’s south harbour, a herringbone-patterned American oak front door with a roughcast brass and marble handle is only the beginning. Inside, a double-height travertine entrance hall is headlined by a sinuous, sculpted stairway complete with brass detailing and flanked by Anish Kapoor and Wolfgang Tillmans artworks. ‘We felt that the curved nature of the staircase was really important in a building that’s otherwise quite linear,’ says Phelan, who splits her time between Melbourne and Hong Kong. ‘The marble, stonework and textured materials that we chose were part of the original intention for the design, and travertine, when used as a wall cladding, has a gorgeous formality to it as well, which…

The West Kowloon Cultural District has been described in many different ways: a much-needed infusion of arts facilities, a US$3 billion boondoggle, a political hot potato. But there’s another way of looking at the enormous waterfront project. Spanning 40 hectares on the shores of Victoria Harbour, this is the last large chunk of land to be developed in the heart of Hong Kong, and it’s an opportunity to rethink the way the city manages its urban space. There is already a roadmap in place, thanks to Foster + Partners’ master plan, which was popular with the general public for its large park and car-free pedestrian streets. (Motorised traffic will be relegated to a massive basement.) Beyond the 17 cultural venues, there will also be shops, restaurants, offices and apartments. But…

Fort Street Studio Artistic husband-and-wife team Brad Davis and Janis Provisor, co-founders and creative directors behind luxury rug company Fort Street Studio, take time each year for a retreat during which many of their new designs are dreamt up. One of the studio’s newest designs, Desu, for example, originates from a watercolour Provisor first painted several summers ago while on a retreat in Bali. Inspired by the mist-laden landscape surrounding their Ubud studio and its neighbouring Ayung River, the painting is named for one of the women who worked at the house and her perpetually upbeat spirit. As with all the studio’s designs, Desu is the result of a collaborative effort — in this case, Provisor created the original artwork while Davis transformed and manipulated it digitally to create a…

The launch of a new furniture brand is a rare occasion in Japan. The only one within the last decade,MEETEE,started out strong, collaborating with world-renowned designers such as Claesson Koivisto Rune, but never managed to gain global recognition much less widespread distribution. A new contender on the scene, however, is ambitiously presenting itself to the world. Launched at last year’s International Furniture Fair Tokyo, TAIYOU&C. is the brainchild of interior architect Mikiya Kobayashi. Focusing on the soothing properties of wood and essential forms, the brand has teamed up with two of the best wood manufacturers in Japan, Fuji Furniture and Takumi Kohgei, to provide contract furniture that blends well into any space, explains Kobayashi — ‘and particularly public space’. ‘Before I started my own design studio, I was always searching…

Designer and design educator Hans Tan works a lot with porcelain, but he’s no expert on the material. ‘I can’t turn on the wheel or cast a piece of ceramic well,’ he confesses. ‘My work contends with issues concerning capital goods, such as ideas relating to heritage and mass consumption. But I’m particularly interested in porcelain by virtue of it being a material that we interact with daily.’ From another perspective, Tan is a designer who works with porcelain from the outside in. Take Striped Ming, for example — a series of porcelain vases featuring a dynamic play of lines. Deadstock that Tan found in a store, the vases were treated with a resist blasting technique in which their surfaces are first masked with a motif — in this case,…

Democracy and accessibility are hardly new concepts to the design world.Those ideals surfaced in Europe in the early 20th century with the birth of Constructivism, then more explicitly with Bauhaus before taking hold in post-war Modernism. None of this is lost on Karin Gustafsson, creative director of Swedish high-street fashion retailer COS, nor on the young creative duo with whom the brand chose to collaborate for this spring’s edition of Salone del Mobile in Milan. That duo — British artist Alexander Groves and Japanese architect Azusa Murakami — is Studio Swine. Despite the otherwise open brief given to the pair, there was a mutual understanding that the installation would at its most elemental be experiential and inclusive. The decision to work with Studio Swine was an easy one for Gustafsson…

Hong Kong artist Samson Young rose to prominence in 2015 when he won the inaugural BMW Art Journey prize with a searing proposal that sought to explore the sounds of war. A century earlier, futurist Luigi Russolo had created noise machines to simulate the din of the industrial age and the blasts of warfare, establishing a form later taken up by the Dadaists that would come to be known as sound art. Its roots may be 100 years old, but the unconventional art form has been enjoying a revival over the last decade or so. In London, that resurgence peaked in 2010 when Susan Philipsz won the Turner Prize for a sound installation — making her the first artist in the award’s history to win for an aural work. In…

Following the river line through a city is revealing. At riverbank level, the flotsam and jetsam strewn on the mud look isolated, lost and random; the view from street level is often the same. Look east along the route that follows London’s meandering Thames, and steel and glass towers rise in single starkness or in clusters, breaking the sightlines in unexpected places. Some, such as Renzo Piano’s The Shard at London Bridge, have a spiralling commercial life, while others are part-formed, their emerging bulks occluded by behemoth construction sites. Walk west and a bulk of building sites on the south side of the river at Nine Elms interrupts the path. It’s one of London’s biggest and most ambitious regeneration schemes, including the US Embassy, New Covent Garden Market and the…

Biomorphic Structures by Asterios Agkathidis (Laurence King Publishing) Nature is by no means a new source of inspiration to designers, who often look to organically occurring shapes, proportions and structures for a heady influence on their own work. Biomorphism, then, is the creative synthesis bridging the gap between surrealism and abstract art with design — and particularly architectural designs. This pocket-sized reference book surveys a range of contemporary biomorphic techniques through 13 case studies divided between three categories: water, earth and geological formation; plants and branching systems; and animal structures and properties. The book is richly illustrated with drawings, models and photographs that draw out the translation of organic forms into visual models. In this increasingly techno- and robocentric era, it’s refreshing to revisit natural forms from snakeskins and bird’s…

Naoto Fukasawa ‘The idea for this design is to sculpt a form out of this material as if I was making a sculpture out of Carrara marble blocks’ Japanese designer Naoto Fukasawa continues his collaborative efforts with innovative Italian manufacturers B&B Italia. Produced with the latter’s revolutionary injected-foam production methods, the Harbor chairs (right) are ergonomically designed with relaxation in mind. Two chairs and a small footrest have swivel bases and removable covers. Fukasawa also worked with Thai ceramics brand COTTO this year to curate their space in the Lambrate district, pulling together products by several designers, including the young Thai designers of THINKK Studio and Nitsan Debbi, who designed the HINOKI collection (top right). Kengo Kuma ‘Our intention was to introduce the warmth of wood as a material to…