JEANNE GANG
JEANNE GANG
ISSUE 138 MAY 2017
THE DESIGN ISSUE
IDEAS IN DESIGN
IDEAS IN DESIGN
Jader Almeida. (OPPOSITE) Inside
STUDIO VISIT
Jader Almeida Almeida’s space.
Jader Almeida invites us into his seaside home and showroom on the Brazilian island of Florianópolis.
INTERVIEW BY SILAS MARTÍ PHOTOS BY MARCO FAVERO
Seeing your work set up around the studio, one notices a dynamism and a rhythm when looking at all of these pieces together. Is there a single quality that unites them?
Pieces talk to each other, but also to their environment, whether it’s a TV or other things in a room. You see it and understand that dialogue. My inspiration comes from everything—not just from graphic or industrial design. The behavior of people is an element for me, how they use a chair, how they talk while sitting at a table. This is my alphabet, and it’s my goal to develop an object thinking of this. I’ve always thought your work balances strong, robust structures with other more delicate, even frail elements.
My work has a combination of lightness and strength. Sometimes I put mass where it is necessary and subtract it from where it is not so necessary. I take out decorative elements, for example. It’s all about essentials. Essential forms, essential materials. The thing about furniture is that it’s not just about how it looks. It’s about how it’s used. When you sit on a chair, you feel it—not just the
SURFACE
36
way your back rests against it, but you feel it in your hands, as you run them along its surface, its sides. There is no one way of discovering a piece. It’s not just aesthetics—it involves more senses. Sometimes even the smell is important, like the smell of wood. What are you working on right now?
We just completed the Celine armchair, which launched this year in Milan. It celebrates what it means to be handmade today, with production techniques that combine state-of-the-art machines and very skilled workers. The design follows organic forms, and when you sit down, it’s as if the chair embraces you, like a custom shirt or suit. Another piece that you often mention when speaking about your work is a sinewy wooden coatrack called Loose Hanger. Why is that a touchstone?
For me, it translates the style of Brazil—its way of life. It’s a useful piece, but it still has a very sculptural form. It relates to the heritage of modernism in Brazil. >
37
IDEAS IN DESIGN
IDEAS IN DESIGN
All of your work was created and developed here in the south of Brazil, yet you always mention how Scandinavian designers have been a major influence. How do these traditions come together in your work?
Beautiful things are about proportion. It’s not about a trend, or being Scandinavian, Japanese, or Brazilian. It’s about human design. When I first saw the work of Scandinavian masters like Arne Jacobsen, it looked like [that of] Brazilian modernist Joaquim Tenreiro. It’s not about tropical versus European. It’s a way of thinking. I don’t see my relationship with Scandinavian modernism from a distance. Like our modernism here in Brazil, it came from a time when people were looking for essentials. Your work ends up in a lot of different contexts, especially since you’ve been collaborating with Artefacto, out of Miami. What are the challenges or advantages of being a designer here in Florianópolis, far from the major centers of the industry?
I don’t have a need to be in São Paulo, New York, or Milan. Nowadays, globalization works to our advantage. We have shops in Australia, New Zealand, and Europe, but Miami is our door to America. When we opened our showroom there, it was surprising because people accepted it immediately. There was no resistance to our furniture and our pieces. It has been a good way to reach buyers in New York, Los Angeles, and other parts of the United States. Being a designer today is exciting in that you get to work with a lot of people all over the world. It also comes with a lot of responsibility because we make objects that will have a relationship with many different people. My work doesn’t all come from my imagination. It’s about curiosity, research, and thinking of materials, trying to get another sense of people’s relationships with objects. How do you see your work developing in the future?
I have won awards and we are successful commercially, but what I want for the future is that every piece, in the end, will be able to solve problems. I want the work to be better than it is now. My goal— and my challenge—is to remain curious and keep on discovering new ways of making. I really like my work to reflect a balance of time, something aware of the past, made in the present, but looking forward to the future. Silas Martí is a journalist and art critic based in São Paulo, where he is the visual arts columnist and arts, architecture, and design staff writer at the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo.
(THIS SPREAD) Scenes in Almeida’s showroom, featuring pieces he’s designed for Artefacto.
SURFACE
38
39
IDEAS IN DESIGN
EXHIBITION
“Monobloc: A Chair for the World”
UP AND COMING
Studio Gorm
John Arndt and Wonhee Jeong-Arndt, the duo behind Gorm’s breakthrough project, Furnishing Utopia, developed a fascination with the objects in 2013, in the course of their research at the University of Oregon, where they teach product design. Eventually, they successfully invited 11 other studios from around the world to join them at two historic Shaker sites in New England, and now make work inspired by the religious sect’s austere style. The more than 30 pieces that resulted debuted as the inaugural Furnishing Utopia collection in 2016 at Sight Unseen Offsite, and the novel concept didn’t go unnoticed. This year, Studio Gorm returns to New York as the winner of Wanted Design’s American Design Honors. Simultaneously, a new Furnishing Utopia collection will be presented at Design Within Reach’s SoHo Studio, now featuring four additional contributors, and showcasing designers’ creations alongside the Shaker artifacts that informed them. Since they founded Studio Gorm, in 2007, the two designers have always been receptive to ideas derived from rigorous academic research. “We enjoy looking at how basic design problems have historically been solved,” says Arndt, who met Jeong-Arndt while they were students at Design Academy Eindhoven. “We rethink that for a contemporary context.” For Wanted Design, a major installation will place site-specific elements alongside older works, including unfinished prototypes that reveal the team’s approach. “Logical construction is key for us,” Arndt says. “The forms come out as pragmatic and functional—not overly slick or cold. We don’t want to design objects that people think are fancier than they are.” —Allie Biswas
SURFACE
40
PHOTOS: (FROM TOP) JÜRGEN HANS (HENRY MASSONNET, “FAUTEUIL 300” 1972). COURTESY STUDIO GORM.
One plus one makes infinity if it’s a Monobloc, that familiar chair of white plastic, produced in one step and with one material. A paragon of modern simplicity in postwar Europe, it went global. In “Monobloc: A Chair for the World,” on view at Vitra Design Museum (through July 9), its story is told through 20 objects, from predecessors, like the Panton chair of the late 1950s and ’60s, to contemporary riffs, such as the Campana Brothers’s 2006 plasticand-wicker “Café Chair” parody (pictured at right). The classic version arrived in 1972 as the Fauteuil 300, invented by the French engineer and entrepreneur Henry Massonnet, who had devised its highly cost-effective, under-two-minute production cycle at his plastics factory. By the 1980s, the price had climbed to the range of much nicer furniture. “One reason, back then, was the fascination with the novel technology,” says the show’s curator, Heng Zhi. But the egalitarian aesthetic was apparently due for a backlash, and plastic furniture has since come to be seen as cheap, disposable, and even worthy of banishment in some European cities. Zhi’s takeaway is more forgiving: “It’s a controversial everyday object that reflects the complexity of global material culture,” she says. Fetishized or maligned, the Monobloc continues to multiply. —Rachel Small
IDEAS IN DESIGN
LIMITED EDITION
Lee Broom’s Time Machine
A marble grandfather clock adds an enigmatic touch to Lee Broom’s Time Machine collection. Its debut coincides with the 10th anniversary of the British designer’s studio, and, always one for theatrics, Broom unveiled the collection on a white carousel in a derelict vault in Milan’s central train station, part of Ventura Centrale’s presentation during Salone.The grandfather clock stood alone, at the back of the cavernous space. Like everything in the collection, it comes (appropriately) in an edition of 10— but, whereas the other objects are revivals of Broom’s past hits, the grandfather clock was built from scratch. Carved out of separate blocks of marble, which members of Broom’s team handpicked from a quarry in Carrara, Italy, no two display the same pattern. As a whole, however, the design resonates with Broom’s memory of a grandfather clock, that, as a boy, he discovered in his grandparents’ home. “I was sort of in awe of it because it was so statuesque and oversized and imposing,” he says. “There was almost something kind of terrifying about it, but very beautiful at the same time.” His preoccupations for the next 10 years will be more prosaic: In addition to opening more stores globally, he says he’d like to design a hotel. —Alina Cohen
TRAVEL
Studioilse For Cathay Pacific
PHOTOS: (FROM TOP) ARTHUR WOODCROFT. COURTESY CATHAY PACIFIC.
Cathay Pacific’s new airport lounges are designed to calm the loopy circadian rhythms and general malaise that can set in between flights. Around the world, the airline’s collaboration with the London-based designer Ilse Crawford has brightened the prospect of the layover. “We want people to feel at home and looked after,” says Crawford, whose firm, Studioilse, unveiled the first edition at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport in 2014 and went on to realize others in Hong Kong, Manila, Bangkok, and Taipei. Last spring, the design landed in North America by way of Vancouver, where the blueprint of soft lighting, live plants, and warm wood walls is coupled with views of the distant coastal mountains. The latest, at Heathrow’s Terminal 3, features rooms wrapped in natural cherry wood, arrangements of Crawford-designed Solo chairs as well as classic Womb chairs, and work by Chinese artist Han Feng. At the Noodle Bar, diners can slurp bowls of dan dan, noodles in a spicy peanut soup, at a counter lined with jade-green tile. Thoughtful touches such as ergonomic charging stations and walk-in rain showers stocked with Aesop products could appease even the most bleary-eyed traveler. Just don’t miss that connection. —Kate Donnelly
SURFACE
42
IDEAS IN DESIGN
RETAIL
Dakar Collection
BOOK
“The Book of Circles”
If there is a universal building block, it’s probably round. In The Book of Circles: Visualizing Spheres of Knowledge (Princeton Architectural Press), out this month, data visualization designer Manuel Lima shows how the circle has shaped human cognition. Its physical omnipresence would surely have impacted our ancestors, who must have wondered about the celestial spheres overhead. Fittingly, the book depicts hundreds of drawings, renderings, and other imagery derived from the mind, and the selection is, to say the least, wide-ranging. Transcending chronology, subject matter, and historical context in general, the evidence is categorized according to its broader graphic typology (e.g., “Rings & Spirals; “Wheels & Pies”). Presented with prehistoric petroglyphs, renaissance maps, computer-generated images, and more, it’s easy to underestimate the purported common denominator. Through such juxtapositions, however, Lima dares us to deny that circles are vessels for human knowledge. One would think that the Large Hadron Collider and the Basilica of Superga couldn’t be further apart—before seeing the bigger picture. —Chloe Foussianes
SURFACE
44
PHOTOS: (FROM TOP) COURTESY DAVID WEEKS STUDIO. COURTESY PRINCETON ARCHITECTURAL PRESS.
In early 2016, David Weeks was thousands of miles above the Atlantic in a plane bound for Dakar, the Senegalese capital. Armed with a street address, he was en route to see the artist and designer Abdou Salam Gaye, whom he had met only once before. Weeks arrived around lunchtime. “By the end of the day, we had built a chair,” he says. Eventually, the collaboration became the Dakar collection, which debuts the David Weeks brand’s Lower Manhattan storefront during NYCxDesign this month. The eight hand-woven pieces share the fabric of Dakar, literally: The material, nylon cord, can be found in the nets of local fishermen. The spools were bought “off the shelf,” says Weeks, and the collection’s table, chaise, chairs, and pendant lighting retain the original near-fluorescent or glossy black coloring. The spiraling orange-and-pink pattern of the Amaca chair—which Weeks thinks is “probably the funkiest in the whole collection”—also recently made an appearance at Salone del Mobile in Milan, where it was featured by Moroso in the Italian company’s new M’Afrique collection. Indeed, it’s the product of an improvisational streak that might give some industrial designers anxiety. “That’s one of the great things,” Weeks says. “No straight lines or exact measurements.” —Jonah Inserra
IDEAS IN DESIGN
Lascaux IV
In 1940, a group of teenagers in southwestern France discovered a cave containing thousands of paintings and engravings, created 20,000 years earlier. Their now-famous find, at Lascaux, provides a glimpse into life at the dawn of civilization. Thanks to a clamoring, highly curious public, officials restricted access to the cave in 1963 due to preservation concerns. It’s remained in the dark— until now. Beginning this spring, visitors can witness this treasure at the new on-site museum, Lascaux IV: International Centre for Cave Art. Designed by Snøhetta, the building blends into the hilly terrain of Vézère Valley, save for a concrete facade that sticks out like a gaping crack. The architects approached the project with understandable humility. “In a way, it’s connecting contemporary man directly to the prehistoric artist,” says Snøhetta’s Rune Veslegard. Inside, down-to-the-millimeter replicas of the cave’s painted walls are presented as multimedia installations, devised by the London scenography firm Casson Mann, in a space that’s a contemporary imagining of subterranean twists and turns. “It’s an abstract interpretation of the spatial qualities that can be found in caves,” says Veslegard, “without trying to copy the cave itself.” —David Basulto, founder and editor-in-chief of ArchDaily
SURFACE
46
PHOTOS: (FROM TOP) BOEGLY +GRAZIA. ERIC SOLÉ.
ARCHITECTURE
ISSUE 138 MAY 2017
THE DESIGN ISSUE
IDEAS IN DESIGN
IDEAS IN DESIGN
Jader Almeida. (OPPOSITE) Inside
STUDIO VISIT
Jader Almeida Almeida’s space.
Jader Almeida invites us into his seaside home and showroom on the Brazilian island of Florianópolis.
INTERVIEW BY SILAS MARTÍ PHOTOS BY MARCO FAVERO
Seeing your work set up around the studio, one notices a dynamism and a rhythm when looking at all of these pieces together. Is there a single quality that unites them?
Pieces talk to each other, but also to their environment, whether it’s a TV or other things in a room. You see it and understand that dialogue. My inspiration comes from everything—not just from graphic or industrial design. The behavior of people is an element for me, how they use a chair, how they talk while sitting at a table. This is my alphabet, and it’s my goal to develop an object thinking of this. I’ve always thought your work balances strong, robust structures with other more delicate, even frail elements.
My work has a combination of lightness and strength. Sometimes I put mass where it is necessary and subtract it from where it is not so necessary. I take out decorative elements, for example. It’s all about essentials. Essential forms, essential materials. The thing about furniture is that it’s not just about how it looks. It’s about how it’s used. When you sit on a chair, you feel it—not just the
SURFACE
36
way your back rests against it, but you feel it in your hands, as you run them along its surface, its sides. There is no one way of discovering a piece. It’s not just aesthetics—it involves more senses. Sometimes even the smell is important, like the smell of wood. What are you working on right now?
We just completed the Celine armchair, which launched this year in Milan. It celebrates what it means to be handmade today, with production techniques that combine state-of-the-art machines and very skilled workers. The design follows organic forms, and when you sit down, it’s as if the chair embraces you, like a custom shirt or suit. Another piece that you often mention when speaking about your work is a sinewy wooden coatrack called Loose Hanger. Why is that a touchstone?
For me, it translates the style of Brazil—its way of life. It’s a useful piece, but it still has a very sculptural form. It relates to the heritage of modernism in Brazil. >
37
IDEAS IN DESIGN
IDEAS IN DESIGN
All of your work was created and developed here in the south of Brazil, yet you always mention how Scandinavian designers have been a major influence. How do these traditions come together in your work?
Beautiful things are about proportion. It’s not about a trend, or being Scandinavian, Japanese, or Brazilian. It’s about human design. When I first saw the work of Scandinavian masters like Arne Jacobsen, it looked like [that of] Brazilian modernist Joaquim Tenreiro. It’s not about tropical versus European. It’s a way of thinking. I don’t see my relationship with Scandinavian modernism from a distance. Like our modernism here in Brazil, it came from a time when people were looking for essentials. Your work ends up in a lot of different contexts, especially since you’ve been collaborating with Artefacto, out of Miami. What are the challenges or advantages of being a designer here in Florianópolis, far from the major centers of the industry?
I don’t have a need to be in São Paulo, New York, or Milan. Nowadays, globalization works to our advantage. We have shops in Australia, New Zealand, and Europe, but Miami is our door to America. When we opened our showroom there, it was surprising because people accepted it immediately. There was no resistance to our furniture and our pieces. It has been a good way to reach buyers in New York, Los Angeles, and other parts of the United States. Being a designer today is exciting in that you get to work with a lot of people all over the world. It also comes with a lot of responsibility because we make objects that will have a relationship with many different people. My work doesn’t all come from my imagination. It’s about curiosity, research, and thinking of materials, trying to get another sense of people’s relationships with objects. How do you see your work developing in the future?
I have won awards and we are successful commercially, but what I want for the future is that every piece, in the end, will be able to solve problems. I want the work to be better than it is now. My goal— and my challenge—is to remain curious and keep on discovering new ways of making. I really like my work to reflect a balance of time, something aware of the past, made in the present, but looking forward to the future. Silas Martí is a journalist and art critic based in São Paulo, where he is the visual arts columnist and arts, architecture, and design staff writer at the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo.
(THIS SPREAD) Scenes in Almeida’s showroom, featuring pieces he’s designed for Artefacto.
SURFACE
38
39
IDEAS IN DESIGN
EXHIBITION
“Monobloc: A Chair for the World”
UP AND COMING
Studio Gorm
John Arndt and Wonhee Jeong-Arndt, the duo behind Gorm’s breakthrough project, Furnishing Utopia, developed a fascination with the objects in 2013, in the course of their research at the University of Oregon, where they teach product design. Eventually, they successfully invited 11 other studios from around the world to join them at two historic Shaker sites in New England, and now make work inspired by the religious sect’s austere style. The more than 30 pieces that resulted debuted as the inaugural Furnishing Utopia collection in 2016 at Sight Unseen Offsite, and the novel concept didn’t go unnoticed. This year, Studio Gorm returns to New York as the winner of Wanted Design’s American Design Honors. Simultaneously, a new Furnishing Utopia collection will be presented at Design Within Reach’s SoHo Studio, now featuring four additional contributors, and showcasing designers’ creations alongside the Shaker artifacts that informed them. Since they founded Studio Gorm, in 2007, the two designers have always been receptive to ideas derived from rigorous academic research. “We enjoy looking at how basic design problems have historically been solved,” says Arndt, who met Jeong-Arndt while they were students at Design Academy Eindhoven. “We rethink that for a contemporary context.” For Wanted Design, a major installation will place site-specific elements alongside older works, including unfinished prototypes that reveal the team’s approach. “Logical construction is key for us,” Arndt says. “The forms come out as pragmatic and functional—not overly slick or cold. We don’t want to design objects that people think are fancier than they are.” —Allie Biswas
SURFACE
40
PHOTOS: (FROM TOP) JÜRGEN HANS (HENRY MASSONNET, “FAUTEUIL 300” 1972). COURTESY STUDIO GORM.
One plus one makes infinity if it’s a Monobloc, that familiar chair of white plastic, produced in one step and with one material. A paragon of modern simplicity in postwar Europe, it went global. In “Monobloc: A Chair for the World,” on view at Vitra Design Museum (through July 9), its story is told through 20 objects, from predecessors, like the Panton chair of the late 1950s and ’60s, to contemporary riffs, such as the Campana Brothers’s 2006 plasticand-wicker “Café Chair” parody (pictured at right). The classic version arrived in 1972 as the Fauteuil 300, invented by the French engineer and entrepreneur Henry Massonnet, who had devised its highly cost-effective, under-two-minute production cycle at his plastics factory. By the 1980s, the price had climbed to the range of much nicer furniture. “One reason, back then, was the fascination with the novel technology,” says the show’s curator, Heng Zhi. But the egalitarian aesthetic was apparently due for a backlash, and plastic furniture has since come to be seen as cheap, disposable, and even worthy of banishment in some European cities. Zhi’s takeaway is more forgiving: “It’s a controversial everyday object that reflects the complexity of global material culture,” she says. Fetishized or maligned, the Monobloc continues to multiply. —Rachel Small
IDEAS IN DESIGN
LIMITED EDITION
Lee Broom’s Time Machine
A marble grandfather clock adds an enigmatic touch to Lee Broom’s Time Machine collection. Its debut coincides with the 10th anniversary of the British designer’s studio, and, always one for theatrics, Broom unveiled the collection on a white carousel in a derelict vault in Milan’s central train station, part of Ventura Centrale’s presentation during Salone.The grandfather clock stood alone, at the back of the cavernous space. Like everything in the collection, it comes (appropriately) in an edition of 10— but, whereas the other objects are revivals of Broom’s past hits, the grandfather clock was built from scratch. Carved out of separate blocks of marble, which members of Broom’s team handpicked from a quarry in Carrara, Italy, no two display the same pattern. As a whole, however, the design resonates with Broom’s memory of a grandfather clock, that, as a boy, he discovered in his grandparents’ home. “I was sort of in awe of it because it was so statuesque and oversized and imposing,” he says. “There was almost something kind of terrifying about it, but very beautiful at the same time.” His preoccupations for the next 10 years will be more prosaic: In addition to opening more stores globally, he says he’d like to design a hotel. —Alina Cohen
TRAVEL
Studioilse For Cathay Pacific
PHOTOS: (FROM TOP) ARTHUR WOODCROFT. COURTESY CATHAY PACIFIC.
Cathay Pacific’s new airport lounges are designed to calm the loopy circadian rhythms and general malaise that can set in between flights. Around the world, the airline’s collaboration with the London-based designer Ilse Crawford has brightened the prospect of the layover. “We want people to feel at home and looked after,” says Crawford, whose firm, Studioilse, unveiled the first edition at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport in 2014 and went on to realize others in Hong Kong, Manila, Bangkok, and Taipei. Last spring, the design landed in North America by way of Vancouver, where the blueprint of soft lighting, live plants, and warm wood walls is coupled with views of the distant coastal mountains. The latest, at Heathrow’s Terminal 3, features rooms wrapped in natural cherry wood, arrangements of Crawford-designed Solo chairs as well as classic Womb chairs, and work by Chinese artist Han Feng. At the Noodle Bar, diners can slurp bowls of dan dan, noodles in a spicy peanut soup, at a counter lined with jade-green tile. Thoughtful touches such as ergonomic charging stations and walk-in rain showers stocked with Aesop products could appease even the most bleary-eyed traveler. Just don’t miss that connection. —Kate Donnelly
SURFACE
42
IDEAS IN DESIGN
RETAIL
Dakar Collection
BOOK
“The Book of Circles”
If there is a universal building block, it’s probably round. In The Book of Circles: Visualizing Spheres of Knowledge (Princeton Architectural Press), out this month, data visualization designer Manuel Lima shows how the circle has shaped human cognition. Its physical omnipresence would surely have impacted our ancestors, who must have wondered about the celestial spheres overhead. Fittingly, the book depicts hundreds of drawings, renderings, and other imagery derived from the mind, and the selection is, to say the least, wide-ranging. Transcending chronology, subject matter, and historical context in general, the evidence is categorized according to its broader graphic typology (e.g., “Rings & Spirals; “Wheels & Pies”). Presented with prehistoric petroglyphs, renaissance maps, computer-generated images, and more, it’s easy to underestimate the purported common denominator. Through such juxtapositions, however, Lima dares us to deny that circles are vessels for human knowledge. One would think that the Large Hadron Collider and the Basilica of Superga couldn’t be further apart—before seeing the bigger picture. —Chloe Foussianes
SURFACE
44
PHOTOS: (FROM TOP) COURTESY DAVID WEEKS STUDIO. COURTESY PRINCETON ARCHITECTURAL PRESS.
In early 2016, David Weeks was thousands of miles above the Atlantic in a plane bound for Dakar, the Senegalese capital. Armed with a street address, he was en route to see the artist and designer Abdou Salam Gaye, whom he had met only once before. Weeks arrived around lunchtime. “By the end of the day, we had built a chair,” he says. Eventually, the collaboration became the Dakar collection, which debuts the David Weeks brand’s Lower Manhattan storefront during NYCxDesign this month. The eight hand-woven pieces share the fabric of Dakar, literally: The material, nylon cord, can be found in the nets of local fishermen. The spools were bought “off the shelf,” says Weeks, and the collection’s table, chaise, chairs, and pendant lighting retain the original near-fluorescent or glossy black coloring. The spiraling orange-and-pink pattern of the Amaca chair—which Weeks thinks is “probably the funkiest in the whole collection”—also recently made an appearance at Salone del Mobile in Milan, where it was featured by Moroso in the Italian company’s new M’Afrique collection. Indeed, it’s the product of an improvisational streak that might give some industrial designers anxiety. “That’s one of the great things,” Weeks says. “No straight lines or exact measurements.” —Jonah Inserra
IDEAS IN DESIGN
Lascaux IV
In 1940, a group of teenagers in southwestern France discovered a cave containing thousands of paintings and engravings, created 20,000 years earlier. Their now-famous find, at Lascaux, provides a glimpse into life at the dawn of civilization. Thanks to a clamoring, highly curious public, officials restricted access to the cave in 1963 due to preservation concerns. It’s remained in the dark— until now. Beginning this spring, visitors can witness this treasure at the new on-site museum, Lascaux IV: International Centre for Cave Art. Designed by Snøhetta, the building blends into the hilly terrain of Vézère Valley, save for a concrete facade that sticks out like a gaping crack. The architects approached the project with understandable humility. “In a way, it’s connecting contemporary man directly to the prehistoric artist,” says Snøhetta’s Rune Veslegard. Inside, down-to-the-millimeter replicas of the cave’s painted walls are presented as multimedia installations, devised by the London scenography firm Casson Mann, in a space that’s a contemporary imagining of subterranean twists and turns. “It’s an abstract interpretation of the spatial qualities that can be found in caves,” says Veslegard, “without trying to copy the cave itself.” —David Basulto, founder and editor-in-chief of ArchDaily
SURFACE
46
PHOTOS: (FROM TOP) BOEGLY +GRAZIA. ERIC SOLÉ.
ARCHITECTURE
