More random snippets including details of our forthcoming trip to Cape Town for Design Indaba, news on Hussein Chalayan’s next collection and Nazi propaganda ceramics…
>> Dezeen heads for South Africa next week for the annual Design Indaba conference. We’ll be bringing you regular updates from Cape Town, where speakers including Jaime Hayon, Hella Jongerius and Jasper Morrison will be speaking (see the full speaker list here).
Dezeen editor Marcus Fairs will be chairing the Architecture Indaba mini-conference on Friday 23 February.
>> Dezeen is taking part in the Script debate at the Design Museum in London tomorrow night. Marcus is on the panel discussing what a design museum should be in the 21st Century.
The debate is part of Design Overtime – the museum’s first ever late-night opening. The museum will be open from 6.45pm to 10pm, hosting a range of talks and happenings and offering the last chance to see the hugely popular Alan Fletcher exhibition.
Script starts at 7.15pm in the Design Museum Space. Tickets are available from the admissions desk from 6.45pm.
>> The Swarovski Crystal Palace show at Milan this year will feature new designers including Fredrikson Stallard, whose design involves crystals that move around thanks to computer-controlled motors. Fredrikson Stallard currently have an installation at London’s Design Museum (see our story here).
>> Designer-engineer Moritz Waldemeyer is busy working on fashion designer Hussein Chalayan’s autumn/winter 2007 collection, which shows in Paris on 28 February.
Following the success of their collaboration last autumn – Waldemeyer provided the electronics for Chalayan’s motorised dresses – the two have teamed up again. This time, Waldemeyer has been asked to cover two dresses in thousands of LEDs, turning the entire garments into display screens.
>> Spanish designer Jaime Hayon is now a Londoner. He moved to the city from Barcelona before Christmas with his girlfriend, photographer Nienke Klunder. He was spotted in the Mint design store on Wigmore Street shopping for new furniture, where he apparently picked up a few pieces by Maarten Baas.
>> Stuart Haygarth is also moving back to London after a two-year stint in Berlin. You can see Haygarth’s latest work in our recent story here.
>> Has Ron Arad finally handed over his Royal College of Art professorship to Jurgen Bey? Arad hasn’t been seen at the college for several months, while Bey is now installed in his own office. But a tutor on the course confessed to us he had no idea who was now in charge.
Last year, Arad announced he was looking to appoint a successor as head of the Design Products course, and Bey started teaching at the college in the autumn. But as recently as last month, Bey was heard expressing frustration that he hadn’t yet formally taken over the role.
>> Fashion designer Paul Smith is designing the central bar at next month’s FORM art and design fair at Olympia in London.
>> Russell Sage selects Alan Titchmarsh’s jumpers. The interior designer and former fashion designer is stylist to the telly gardener, dressing him for screen appearances and photo shoots.
Sage revealed the surprising fact at last night’s Pecha Kucha event at the ICA in London, where he also confessed that he had recently styled a new living room for the Queen of England.
>> Former Blueprint magazine deputy editor Henrietta Thompson has joined Tyler Brûlé’s creative agency Winkreative as an editor.
>> Tyler Brûlé’s Estonian grandmother was guest of honour at the launch of his new magazine Monocle last night (we’ll be posting a story on the magazine really soon). The 89-year old was flown over to London from her home in Canada for the party at Claridges, where she sat elegantly on a sofa eating nuts.
>> Designer Tom Dixon has been appointed creative director of London trade show 100% Design.
>> Dezeen jobs: Design Week magazine is looking for a new features editor as the current incumbent, John Stones, joins icon magazine as deputy editor next month.
Incidentally, the latest issue of Design Week has an interview with Marcel Wanders plus more images of his Mondrian South Beach project.
>> More dezeen jobs: Rotterdam-based designers demakersvan are looking for interns, according to their website.
>> Looking for a designer or architect for your company? Let us know and we’ll mention it in ‘dezeen jobs’ in our next update. This service is free (for now…)
>> The annual I Salone presentation in London is always good for a laugh. Last year, the big cheeses from the Milanese organisation, which runs the city’s annual furniture fair, managed to put their feet in it when the launch of an exhibition dedicated to domestic design – and curated solely by female artists and designers – led to a number of predictably un-PC comments about women’s role in the home.
This year’s presentation, held at the Design Museum last week, turned into a bizarre anti-Chinese rant when, entirely unprovoked, Salone bigwigs took turns to compare Chinese design exports to “burgi” (junk food) and repeatedly declaring: “We’re not worried about China.” They’re obviously worried about China, then.
>> London Design Festival still hasn’t officially told anyone what its plans are for this September but we’ve learned that they’re taking over the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank.
>> Ceramicist Bodo Sperlein tells us the astonishing story of how the Nazis used ceramics to create a fake history of the Aryan race. When he was studying his degree at Camberwell College of Arts in London, he wrote a dissertation on how the Nazis used ceramics for propaganda purposes.
According to Sperlein, they used to plant ceramic objects in archaeological excavations to prove the German race was more sophisticated that it actually was.
“The technical ability to produce something out of ceramics automatically classifies you as a high culture,” Sperlein tells us. “So they had false excavations and ceramics played a very, very important role. And all of a sudden the most bizarre objects would come out of graves, which had swastikas on.”
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Posted by Marcus Fairs
