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Barcelona Postcard
by Amos Klausner
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Greetings from Barcelona,
where the weather is hot, hot, hot and the city is celebrating the
Any del Disseny 2003, the year of design. Recent reports
touting this cosmopolitan coastal capital of Spain's Catalun region
as the new Paris may have been greatly exaggerated. Nonetheless,
Barcelona continues to coalesce and magnify the best in design that
Spain and the continent have to offer. A well-deserved trip during
the steamy, dog days of summer brought it all into focus, from architecture
and industrial design to interiors and graphics.
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This year FAD, the Foment de les Arts Decoratives (Promoter of
Decorative Arts) is celebrating its one-hundredth anniversary and
has, with the assistance of the Catalan Regional Government and
the Barcelona City Council, marked its centenary as the Year
of Design 2003. Along with this come a dizzying number of lectures,
conferences, exhibitions and celebrations throughout the city. FAD
was founded in 1903 as the first association of decorative arts
in Spain at the same time that modernisme, an offshoot of the art
nouveau movement, was gaining prestige through the work of architects
like Josep Caldafach, Lluis Domenech i Montaner and of course Antoni
Gaudi. Today FAD is a conglomeration of seven professional associations
representing industrial design, architecture, graphic design, arts
and crafts, contemporary jewelry, fashion and accessories, and audio-visual
communications. Each offers member services and a superb line-up
of design related events and programs (regardless of the year).
Housed in the four hundred year old Convent dels Angels and beautifully
renovated by Lluis Clotet and Ignacio Paricio, FAD entreats you
to immerse yourself in design by taking in one of several ongoing
exhibitions. Grafica Reactiva, a colorful look at contemporary
Mexican graphic design was recently on display. An entire room of
the show was dedicated to the socio-political and often humorous
work that can be seen in the book Sensacional, Mexican Street Graphics. The publication
includes forewards by newly anointed graphic designer and longtime
musician David Byrne and design historian Steven Heller. FAD is
also a great place to enjoy a simple lunch in their busy café,
set directly across the plaza from the whitewashed walls of architect
Richard Meier's stark and beautiful Museum of Contemporary Art.
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Walking the streets of Barcelona's hip and fashionable Eixample
or El Born districts you can't help notice the plethora of showrooms
angling for the attention of the design cognoscenti. From Vitra
to Vincon you can fill your carry-on or your bedroom with the best
in international product and furniture design. One of the best showrooms
in town is BD Ediciones de Diseno, founded by the same Lluis Clotet
of the Convent dels Angels renovation. Clotet is no stranger to
industrial design, having produced a series of trays and bowls for
Alessi in the mid 1990's. Tucked into the back of BD, in a mock
outdoor space plastered with advertising posters, is a new line
of outdoor furniture designed by
Ross Lovegrove and produced by BD called Transit. Lovegrove got
his start working on products for Sony and Apple. He has since opened
Studio X where he fuses advances in materials and manufacturing
with an attention to ecology in the creation of soft and gentle
forms. A hit at the 2002 Milan Furniture Fair, the Transit pieces
are made from rotation molded polyethylene. They are 100% waterproof
and dyed during manufacturing to ensure that the pieces are fade
resistant. The collection is marketed under the BDLove name and
includes a super-swoopy bench, a planter/seat combo, a light and
a garbage bin. The furniture can be filled with sand or water to
secure them in place.
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North of Avenida Diagonal, the wide boulevard that cuts the city
into equal halves, is Santa & Cole, a cool and classy showroom
dedicated to lighting design. With two shops at street level in
a quiet residential neighborhood Santa & Cole has ample space
to display a wide variety of hanging and table lamps, floor lamps,
sconces and more. One of the most dramatic pieces they carry is the Zettel'z series of
hanging lamps by Ingo Maurer. The iconoclast started his career
as a graphic designer and created his first piece of lighting in
1966. Since then his work had been exhibited at the Museum of Modern
Art in New York, the Cartier Foundation in Paris and the Stedelijk
Museum in Amsterdam (to name a few). The Zettel'z is an explosion
of paper, metal and light. Taking equal parts kitchen note pad,
graphic design and lighting technology Maurer allows us to make
a personal connection to his lamp the way we might with a family
photo album.
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If you are hungry to see the Zettel'z illuminating another stop
on the Barcelona design trail, then forget the tapas and head to
El Japones, a busy sushi restaurant run by Grupo Tragaluz. Known
for establishing restaurants where the food is great and the interior
design is even better, three of their eight restaurant properties
as well as the new and highly anticipated Hotel Omm (opening fall
2003) are within a few city blocks of one another. Much of their
success rests on the shoulders of interior designers Isabel López
and Sandra Tarruella who are responsible for El Japones as well
as Tragaluz, and Principal. For El Japones they mixed traditional
Asian inspired woodwork including a long cherry wood sushi bar squeezed
between walls layered in metal shingles on one side and delicate
metal mesh on the other. Their work for Principal won them the Saloni
Award for Interior Architecture, a 30,000 euro prize offered by
the ceramic tile manufacturer. For Tragaluz, which translates as
"light swallower", they worked closely with Javier Mariscal, a renowned Barcelona based graphic designer
and creator of Cobi, the 1992 Olympic mascot. For this project he
designed the chairs, lamps, and fittings for the glass enclosed
dining area.
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Barcelona's own salute to the roots of the international style
gained ground in 1986 when the finishing touches were made to a
reconstruction of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's German National Pavilion.
The pavilion was first designed and built for the 1929 Barcelona
International Exhibition held at the foot of Montjuic, the rocky
mountain in the heart of the city (best known for hosting Olympic
competition in 1992). When the exhibition ended, Mies' pavilion
was disassembled. The importance of the project was recognized and
remembered in the early 1980's. With the help of architects Ignasi
de Sola-Morales, Cristian Cirici and Fernando Ramos, who researched
and documented the original design, the pavilion was cloned and
reborn. Today it is an ocean of tranquility and a monument to modern
architecture.
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Another oasis awaits visitors further up the slopes of Montjuic.
Past Gae Aulenti's renovation of the National Art Museum of Catalonia
(with its quirky frescos salvaged from the region's oldest rural
churches) and Olympic venues designed by Arata Isozaki, Santiago
Calatrava and Ricardo Bofill is a former illegal garbage dump that
has been transformed into the new Barcelona Botanic Gardens. The
tangled web of geometric walkways and buildings that define this
steep hillside setting were designed by Carlos Ferrater, Jose Luis
Canosa and Isabel Figueras. Using a repeating pattern of triangulation
and materials like cement edged with oxidized corten steel, they
have been able to give order to the natural rhythms and distinct
differences found within this Mediterranean garden.
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The most interesting new structure in Barcelona is French architect
Jean Nouvel's Agbar Tower. Currently under construction in a small
park pressed close the sea, the oval building is a reinforced concrete
patchwork of over four thousand irregularly shaped and seemingly
haphazardly placed window openings. When complete the skeleton of
the building will be wrapped with a multi-colored glass skin inspired
by the work of Antoni Gaudi. To watch the pierced concrete core
rise into the Barcelona skyline is amazing, and it's a wonderful
tease for a finished building that will stand like a mirage, reflecting
the water, the mountains and the urban fabric of the city.
Even as summer starts to cool, the Year of Design is still
adding heat to Barcelona's atmosphere of creativity. It's too bad
these post cards are so small. With such a profound history and
so many tantalizing projects starting to take shape on the Barcelona
horizon it might be best to switch to an aerogramme.
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Amos Klausner is the director of the San Francisco chapter of the American Institute of Graphic Arts.
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