As technology surges ahead, our ability to adapt it to our lives and living spaces often lags behind. For us, enamored with our new gadget, what it is often takes precedent over where it goes. A good example of this incongruity is the proliferation of personal computers in contemporary kitchens.
In many homes, the kitchen has become the social hub, and since computers support every facet of our daily lives, the overlap is inevitable. So what can a kitchen computer do? For starters: Online cookbooks replace their printed ancestors; video conferencing with family and friends reinforces and enhances the social nature of the space; music software eliminates the need for audio players; and web browsers provide access to information and entertainment, making TVs superfluous. The kitchen and the computer are an ideal match, but their pairing remains as awkward as sushi and milk.
Attempts at integrating the computer into the kitchen have yet to produce sophisticated results. In 1969, Honeywell offered a kitchen computer with a binary interface for $10,000 from Neiman Marcus. It’s unclear if any were ever sold. More recently, specialized kitchen computers built onto refrigerator doors may allow you to keep track of your grocery list, but they have little regard for spatial planning. Their only reason for appearing on appliances is because appliance companies developed them. The niche market for a kitchen-specific computer may never justify the research and development that a desktop computer does, so the latter will remain a better choice. The immediate problem is that kitchens are poorly designed to accommodate our regular computers.
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Introduction to the catalogue of Design Real
A presentation of contemporary design at Serpentine Gallery curated by Konstantin Grcic
Koenig Books London
2009
Photo © Getty Images
Last June I attended a plastics trade fair in Chicago. Walking through a stadium-sized hall filled with the wares of mould manufacturers, I became lost in a maze of production tools and as a result it took me two hours to find the plastics companies I had come there to see. In a second hall I found hundreds of booths selling a host of bizarre metal gadgets and tubes, which I learned are the components that make the moulds themselves. Many of today’s products are created with the help of hundreds of other inter-dependent manufacturing products. I left the fair with the dizzying realisation that the metal-gadget industry is built around the mould industry, which is built around the plastics industry, which is built around other industries like the automotive or furniture industry, which are built around real people’s needs.
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April, 2009
Nitzan Cohen called to ask if I would write a text for the catalogue of his new collection of wooden furniture for the Italian producer Mattiazzi. I spent a few days considering the work, and replied with this email.
NC,
I find several points of interest in your project for Mattiazzi.
The masculine-feminine variation between HE SAID and SHE SAID reminds me of Mickey and Minnie Mouse. Aside from their clothing, the differences between them are subtle – Mickey’s nose is slightly bigger and Minnie has eyelashes, HE SAID has protruding, aggressive armrests, while SHE SAID’s curve down gently. It’s strange that chairs haven’t always had masculine and feminine variations, when so many other products do. In Freudian analysis, knifes are male and spoons are female. The best sets of cutlery have great tension between the knife and spoon and I can see a similar tension between HE SAID and SHE SAID. Distinguishing chairs in this way re-imagines their role, introduces a new dynamic between chairs, and a new form of product development for them.
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Big-Game
Design Overview
Stichting Kunstboek
2008
A book retracing BIG-GAME’s work since 2004, with contributions by Pierre Keller, Françoise Foulon, Pierre Doze, Alexandra Midal, Max Borka, Dieter Van Den Storm, Didier Krzentowksi, Jonathan Olivares, Urs Honegger, Milo Keller, Fabrice Samyn and Giampiero Pitisci.
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- Edited by Anniina Koivu
- Abitare 480 March 2008
As climbers in the 1960s ascended new routes that required multiple days to climb, it became imperative for them to find ways to sleep on the rock wall. Drawing from hammocks, cots, tents and sail construction, a generation of climber-designers invented a new typology: the portaledge. This archetype is liberated from the conventions of furniture design and its development took great ambition, courage and mental freedom. The design facilitates a radical form of life on earth and ascents that would be impossible with out it. The following historical information was gathered through interviews with Conrad Anker, Mike Graham and John Middendorf, climbers who were instrumental in the evolution of the portaledge over the last four decades.
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Essay for MYTO by Konstantin Grcic
Edited by Anniina Koivu
Abitare 476 October 2007
A stocky, Mexican, teenage rocker thrashes around the dance floor. In a tantrum he kicks and punches, he’s an indiscernible cluster of torn jeans, greasy black hair, flannel shirt and creeper shoes. He barely avoids a collision with the only other guy dancing, a raging Texan; enormous, bald, twenty-something, in cowboy boots and overalls.
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Essay on Konstantin Grcic’s Landen
Vitra Edition Catalogue
2007
Furniture, in so far as it carries meaning, is always about something. Throughout history, furniture’s subjects have included ancient gods, Jesus, rationality, ergonomics and fictional narratives. Konstantin Grcic’s subject matter is formed by the process of making the furniture itself, and not by external, predetermined or abstract values (that is, Jesus, rationality…). His process occurs in the specific context created by the personality of a client, the demands of a brief, a production technology, an intended user, a model-making method, or even the character of one of his four assistants who might work on a given project. Grcic is an unobstructed thinker; the only assumption that he makes is that furniture should be useful in some way. Moreover, he distinguishes between useful and functional: where function serves a predefined utilitarian need, useful only has to serve a purpose. By making inventively useful things, Grcic critiques the functions and forms of established typologies. He is also formally unrestricted. Working in specific contexts his logic guides the shape of his designs and since the contexts in which he works are diverse, so too are his forms. Grcic’s designs are liberated both functionally and formally. Although the purposes and forms of his designs are radically original, they almost always make historical references to older typologies and thereby carry familiar qualities. Grcic’s process, or subject matter, invokes a series of oppositions; craft model-making and industrial production, experimental yet practical uses, and forms that are at once new and historical.
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