Lidia Gasiorek

In this post I will look at the work of two notable Danish Designer, Borge Mogensen​ and Ole Wanscher​.

Borge Mogensen (1914 – 72)

Borge Mogensen was an important Danish furniture designer who helped to make the concept of ‘Danish Modern’ known throughout the world​, and garnered international respect for Danish furniture design​. His simple and functional designs have for more than half a century enjoyed worldwide demand​.

Mogensen studied furniture design at the Danish School of Arts and Crafts in Copenhagen from 1936 to 1938​. His furniture was strongly representative of his training as a traditional craftsman. He created classical designs, while subtly incorporated new ideas into his revisitation of traditional forms​.

Ole Wanscher (1903 – 85)

Ole Wanscher was a furniture designer and one of the leading figures in the Scandinavian Design movement when Scandinavian Design achieved worldwide popularity. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Wanscher, working with master joiner A. J. Iversen, produced dozens of designs that are now seen as modern classics​.

He was influenced by a variety of sources, from 18th century British design through the furniture design of Ancient Egypt​. One of Wanscher’s most famous pieces was his so-called “Egyptian Stool” of 1960. He was also influenced by Greek and Chinese design​.

 

Modular Wave Sofa and Chaise Longue, Giovanni Offredi (1970s)

A modular sofa designed in the style of a wave by Giovanni Offredi for Saporiti Italia Furniture. Anodised flat steel frame with two or three seats, or chaise longue, complete with polyurethane injected cushions. It is still one of the “classics” of the Saporiti Italia collection, pictured here in a tan leather. The 3-seater sofa measures 73 x 290 x 105cm, larger than most typical modern 3-seater sofas.

Schiffini Kitchen, Vico Magistretti (1970s)

Schiffini is a leading manufacturer of high-end kitchen furniture renowned worldwide, established in the 1920s. In the 1950s Schiffini re-oriented itself toward the kitchen furniture industry and became the first Italian company to start the series production of modular kitchens. Particularly significant to Schiffini’s history is the relationship with Vico Magistretti, which influenced and renovated significantly the company’s image and thinking. Initiated in 1965, this collaboration led to numerous and fortunate intuitions that gave rise to kitchen models, still “classics” of modern-day production.

Emilio Ambasz and Giancarlo Pireli, Lambert Bank

Emilio Ambasz and Giancarlo Pireli, together with Gianni Cicorella, restructured the Milan branch of the Lambert bank. The bank was housed in a late 19^th century building, and was decorated in styles ranging from High Renaissance on the ground floor, Mannerist details on the mezzanine, and culminating in a grand hall or mirrors on the top floor. The decorative complex was left as found, in order to make it a subdued background foil against which the new installations were contrasted.

Radio City Music Hall ladies Room (NY), Evelyn Hofer (1978)

The women’s lounge on the first mezzanine at Radio City Music Hall, New York, was designed by Evelyn Hofer. The painted wall decorations are by Japenese artist Yasuo Kuniyoshi. Built in 1932, the Radio City Music Hall is a prime example of art deco architectural style that has withstood the test of time The venue is complete with plenty of gold, reflective surfaces and geometric design.

Lighting, Lisa Johanssen Pape

Lisa Johansson-Pape (21 January 1907 – 5 October 1989) was a Finnish designer, best known for her work in lighting. She was the most significant Finnish lighting designer in the second half of the 1900s. Her priorities were first about the functions then the design. In addition to the famous Milan Triennial exhibitions, Johansson-Pape represented Finland in venues around the world. She provided the lighting fixtures for the Finnish display at the New York World Fair in 1939 and the Design in Scandinavia exhibition that travelled to multiple museums in the US in the mid-1950s. She also organised a Rya textile exhibition, which debuted in Helsinki in 1956 before it toured the Nordic countries and the rest of Europe. In 1960, her solo exhibition Light—Glass—Metal opened in Helsinki, followed in 1966 by a joint exhibition with friend and textile artist Dora Jung in Stockholm.

Prefabricated House Bedroom, Giotto Stoppino

Stoppino’s design for this bedroom in an IACP prefabricated house attempts to create a unified layout. By removing one partition wall, he has created a sleeping section that is not divided into separate rooms. All the rooms have also been fitted with the same furniture to create a coherent design scheme. Stoppino was interested in creating spaces that gave a freer way of living, and he was thus challenged by the impossibility of modifying the layout of these IACP prefabricated houses. His use of black, red and white creates a bold interior that oozes confidence despite the restrictions Stoppino faced as a result of the architecture.

Group Chair-table (GTS), Centro Progetti Techno (1970s)

This Group chair-table (GTS) was designed by Centro Progetti Techno Co., an industrial and communication design work company run by Osvaldo Borsani and Marco Fantoni. The formation of the Tecno Design Centre confirmed a decision that had already been taken within the company: that future designs should be presented as group creations, with a clear and easily identifiable communicative style. The GTS was fitted for classrooms or conferences. The tops were either black or white laminate, while supports were fixed to the floor. The seat ‘Modus’ was hinged to a rotating support of the table, and some inner springs allowed automatic recovery of the seat.

Kitchen Block ‘Mono’, Augusto Savini (1960s)

For limited space and mini-kitchens, Augusto Savini designed two cupboards containing all the equipment needed for cooking. Given their small size, the intention was that they could fit into any environment. A two-door kitchen-block was produced in lacquered metal. The container was also provided with a flab table, a roll-of-paper holder and an exhaust fan. It was produced by Sabo, Sola Predosa (Bologna) and measures 249 x 104 x 61cm.

Phonogram International Amalialaan (The Netherlands), Olanda Architects (1971 – 3)

Olanda Architects designed the Phonogram International offices in Baarn, the Netherlands, a Dutch record company established in 1971. Acoustic panels in sloping parts of the ceiling gave almost the same effect as a ‘baffle ceiling’. A monochrome environment using only sand colours to dark brown tones was utilised, paired with all edges, skirtings, door handles and the staircase in stainless steel. The only real aesthetic luxury was the main staircase area that connected all floors, which had Kees Fransse’s apple relief at the groundfloor, and a block print on silk by Carl Visser on the first floor.

‘At the heart of the whirlpool is a great silent place where all the energy is concentrated. And there, at the point of concentration, is the Vorticist.’

Wyndham Lewis, 1914

In 1914, artist and writer Wyndham Lewis formed Vorticism, a new London-based modernist art movement comprised of geometric forms and harsh lines. Lewis aimed to create a new form of art for a changing, vibrant modern world, encapsulating the energy and movement of city life dominated by the fast pace brought on by the industrial revolution. The term ‘Vorticism’ was coined by American poet Ezra Pound, for whom the vortex was ‘that point in the cyclone where energy cuts into space and imparts form to it… the pattern of angles and geometric lines which is formed by our vortex in the existing chaos.’

For Lewis, the vortex becomes the point of maximum energy that his painting seeks to reflect, giving form to the whirlpool or ‘chaos’ in the form of hard-edged abstraction. His and other vorticists’ ensuing work therefore both resembles and depicts that chaos, and draws the viewer’s attention directly to a central point in the canvas. Lewis publicly launched the movement through his radical journal Blast.

In his painting the Workshop above, Lewis uses bold angles and diagonal lines to evoke the geometry of modern buildings. Bright pinks and yellows are juxtaposed with earthy, neutral tones, perhaps to reflect both the intensity and vitality of London life as well as the monotony of machine-driven industry. The work is thus also an image of industrial England – indeed Britain was commonly referred to as ‘The Workshop of the World’ at the time. Black lines emphasise the sharp edges of the work, adding to the painting’s dynamism, and draw your eye to the central point. This dark blue form roughly in the centre of the frame is suggestive of the night’s sky, just visible above the mass of buildings that bear down on the city-dweller.

Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson’s The Soul of the Soulless City (‘New York – an Abstraction’) completed in 1920, above, has many similarities in style to Lewis’ vorticism. His scene shows the energy of the modern metropolis, with two railway lines converging to a central point flanked by slightly abstracted skyscrapers that rise right up to the top of the canvas and again enshroud the viewer. However, despite befriending Lewis upon graduating from the Slade School of Art, the pair immediately fell out when Nevinson referred his art to Futurism. It was in fact after this point that Lewis founded ‘Vorticism’ with other ‘rebel’ artists, from which Nevinson was then excluded. The darker colour, more monochrome colour palette differs from Lewis’ work, although brighter shades of orange are still evocative of the city’s vigour.

More widely, the ‘vortex’ could also be seen as a metaphor for artistic and intellectual activity in London, and several of the Vorticists were, like Lewis, writers as well as artists. Jessica Dismorr was one such member of the group, who also contributed to the movement’s journal Blast. She exhibited as part of the group’s exhibitions, and was one of the group’s core members. Alongside Helen Saunders, it was striking that the pair were included, as female artists. Dismorr’s work has more depth that some of the other, more traditionally ‘flat’ vorticists, setting her style apart. Her work above depicts a series of shapes suggestive of arches and other elements of supportive infrastructure, floating in a dark, undefined space.

Despite the vorticists’ links to Italian Futurism, they were determined to be set apart. Lewis and others did not share the futurists’ emphasis on speed, or their romanticism of technology. Their paintings do not show the machine-age in a celebratory way, but are marked by a rather more matter-of-fact attitude. In contrast to the futurists, the vorticists do not seek to glorify modernity but rather to simply represent it, its energy that is simultaneously its chaos.

The sharp, angular forms found in Vorticism can also be linked to the modernist architecture that developed in the early twentieth-century. Harsh materials such as steel, concrete or glass are utilised, with designs creating minimalist buildings marked by structural, angular elements as a backlash to ornament and decorative architecture. Modernist architecture continued to develop over the following decades and became dominant after World War II, and was followed by brutalist architecture that emerged in Britain in the 1950s, which was further inspired by utilitarian, low-cost design.

Francis Bacon’s (1909-92) obsession with the beastial, primal aspect of humanity is at the core of his paintings currently showing at the Royal Academy of the Arts, London.

“I want to nail down reality so that it can be returned onto the nervous system more violently”.

Francis Bacon

As an openly gay man when homosexuality was illegal, and cast out by his father at the age of just 16, much of Bacon’s work reflects feelings of anger, pain, anxiety and instinct. Upon walking into a sombre inky black room at the RA, the first of a series of dimly-lit galleries containing Bacon’s paintings, these themes are immediately clear, including the cruelty of life, movement and the body.

As a former interior and furniture designer, it is interesting to note the backgrounds of the paintings above. The room in which the figure slumps suggests an opulent space that creates a striking juxtaposition with the dreary clothes and ghoulish skin. Blank picture frames often appear behind the subjects, as well as other ‘trapping’ devices – in this case an umbrella in Figure Study II – that further serve to pin the subjects in position and add a further dimension on unease for the viewer.

In many of his paintings, architectural lines are used to suggest the outline of a room as a blank box, often smaller than it would be in reality. Again this device emphasises entrapment and suffocation, as well as lending a subtle architectural quality to his work.

For me, this technique is a great example of the power of suggestion by omission – the ‘room’ becoming all the more oppressive for the lack of real dimension and walls that blur in and out of the painting’s surrounding background colour.

It comes as no surprise that Tonkin Liu’s innovative Sun Rain Rooms have swept up numerous accolades. Since the project was unveiled in 2017, awards include the BD House Architect Award 2019, Don’t Move, Improve! First Prize 2018, and the RIBA London Award 2017.

Tonkin Liu’s design sees the garden of the architects’ Grade-II Listed Georgian townhouse transformed into a two-storey extension that serves as both a studio for the practice and a home for the partners’ family. The ground floor boasts a concealed kitchen, workshop, potting shed, store and deep planter for the small trees in the green roof above, and offers a meeting space or seating area beside the patio garden. The basement further offers a bedroom with en-suite closet space and bathroom, a second bathroom, and an enlarged plant-filled light-well.

Sun Rain Rooms
shaped by the arc of the sun,
a coffered roof encircles an open patio,
falling from the sky,
a rain shower fills the tank then the patio

tonkinliu.co.uk

Perhaps the extension’s most exciting design, however, is the central patio, which can transform into a pool at the touch of a button; rainwater falls through a winding pipe that follows the curve of the plywood roof and collects in a harvesting tank, which floods the patio to form a reflecting pool when desired. The roof is also curved in plan and section to allow maximum light into a patio garden, while round coffered skylights echo the wave pattern of raindrops landing in the pool.

What is particularly striking about the Sun Rain Rooms is its inversion of traditional perceptions of indoor and outdoor. By turning the garden space into a hybrid living-working space, Tonkin Liu’s Sun Rain Rooms are transformative in more ways than one. As well as creating a shift in how we perceive the separation between ‘in’ and ‘out’, the architects’ design is itself in continual flux, changing with the weather and with the seasons, hence the title of the project.

Despite establishing these shifts away from typical ideas of ‘house’ and ‘garden’, the Sun Rain Rooms do not completely abandon the notion of having some outdoor space. I have already explored the patio or ‘pool’ within the design, which it the only part of the extension that remains exposed to the elements. Seen from above, however, the planted roof, together with the bedded plants beside the patio, maintain the illusion of a more traditional garden.

Another innovative feature of the Sun Rain Rooms is its curved design. Free from the standard square rooms of the main house, the garden space is a blank slate that allows the designer to create a non-linear plan. This opens up unique possibilities that result in an incredibly smart layout, with space for two bathrooms neatly tucked around the bedroom space as well as a quasi walk-in-wardrobe. The beautiful symmetry in the design must also be noted, with the bedroom area following the curve of the patio pool, which in turn allows even more natural light into what would otherwise be a fairly dark basement.

For me, the Sun Rain Rooms are an architectural feat of ingenuity. They cause the viewer to question typical perceptions of what constitutes interior and exterior space, and how that space could be transformed, yet without becoming utterly ‘other’. While upon first glance the Sun Rain Rooms struck me as completely futuristic, and something I had never seen before, after studying the space it feels much more accessible, realistic (with a million dollar budget, sure), and simply downright clever design.

Completed in 2020, local architects NC Design and Architecture’s VIP Lounge in a luxury shopping centre at the heart of Hong Kong’s busiest shopping district sent ripples through the industry. Nelson Chow’s (Founder, NCDA) design is a subtle yet striking 200 square metres of undulating curves and organic forms that create an inviting, soothing escape from the outside world.

Chow’s brief – to create a relaxing getaway – is certainly achieved. Taking inspiration from the forms and sensibility of traditional Japanese Zen gardens, the design evokes an airy garden-like yet contemporary landscape comprised of sinuous, cocooning forms and natural materials that is at once comfortingly recognisable and opulently futuristic.

Named ‘The Garden Pavilion’, the project re-invents the concept of a private lounge as a sensual and serene experience whose sculptural design is a paradigm of discrete luxury.

Yatzer.com

The project is comprised of two separate areas, both united by the same ivory colour palette and winding, natural motifs. The first is a ‘sculptured garden’ that is accessible to all visitors, which includes a concierge, florist and exhibition space for seasonal displays; the second is a private VIP pavilion. For Chow, both zones ‘were conceived as an abstract echo of nature’ that draw on curved, flowing forms and ignore a more traditional architectural reliance on linearity. The furniture, most of which was designed especially for the project, follows this same design language and tucks neatly into the space’s rounded silhouettes.

For me, this design is successful on many different levels. Firstly, it is a brilliantly subtle design that is instantly memorable despite its simplicity, both in its use of colour and form. The muted beige, earthy hues are easy – even calming – on the eye, while the natural curved walls, pillars and furniture seem to simply blend into their environment. Unlike the extravagant, sci-fi-esque forms found in many of Zaha Hadid’s designs that immediately grab the viewer’s attention, Chow’s unique shopping getaway is a restful retreat for the mind (and body), that is nonetheless just as striking.

Another impressive element of the Garden Pavilion is its evocation of nature through pure form alone. While many designs seek to create an ‘outside-in’ atmosphere through the use of plants and even whole trees, often to great effect, Chow has managed to create a natural landscape with organic curves and bespoke furniture that could almost have sprung from the ground up. Tables recall overgrown bonsai trees and voluptuous seating areas snake their way around pockets of greenery in perfect harmony with their surroundings.

Despite the Garden Pavilion’s naturalistic interior, the space also feels futuristic. I briefly mentioned this earlier in this post, but I wanted to dwell on this slightly further. For me, the use of organically curved forms in architecture immediately makes a space feel more modern. This is something we are seeing in design more and more, particularly in furniture design and decor which has been dominating design trends for some time. I wonder if this is also a product on continual technological advancement and innovation, which is making the construction of non-linear forms not only possible but incredibly successful, as we see in Chow’s design.

In my own design work, I have found myself increasingly drawn to rounded spaces and imperfect shapes. This has been an area I have been seeking to explore over the past few months, working with undulating forms from windows to product design, as I have been creating spaces for a textile designer client and have been inspired by the the flowing forms fabric creates as well as exploring the architectural properties of fabric to create soft silhouettes in a space. You can read more about this in an upcoming post.

Reflecting on the use of curves and natural shapes in design, it is the overall coherence and continuity of the Garden Pavilion – its oscillating, flowing, enveloping design language, woven from floor to ceiling, at once rich and simplistic – that makes Chow’s shopping centre such a triumph.