Graphic Journey Blog

Graphic Journey’s mini creative review of 2016

Of the many things I’ve seen and heard this year, the following, in my view, are the best, with a few of the worst that really infuriated me.

TV

The Icelandic noir crime series Trapped was one of the better crime productions, not only for its creepy storyline but also for the wonderful, relentless, snow-swept locations.

Happy Valley. Series 2 was as magnificent as the first series, with consistently outstanding writing from Sally Wainwright and wonderful performances from the entire cast, especially Sarah Lancashire.

Fleabag. An amazingly revealing and original series from writer and star Phoebe Waller-Bridge. It is funny, edgy and very moving. 

Going Forward. Another outstanding writer/comedian is Jo Brand, and Going Forward was funny and touching in equal measures. 

Films

Joachim Lafosse’s, L'Économie du Couple (After Love). An intense observation of a marriage breakdown performed with utter commitment by the film’s two leads Bérénice Bejo and Cédric Kahn. More

20th Century Women is set in Santa Barbara in the late ’70s and focuses on Dorothea Fields (Annette Bening), a wonderfully eccentric single mother and divorcée living in a dilapidated but charmingly eclectic house where she lets two rooms to help make ends meet in order to bring up her son as a decent human being, with much angst and hilarity on the way. Written and directed by ex-graphic designer Mike Mills, whose earlier film Beginners was a delight too. More

I, Daniel Blake is Ken Loach’s precisely targeted indictment of our welfare state. It is Loach at his very best. More

Following A Single Man, director Tom Ford follows up with Nocturnal Animals and proves that he is to be taken seriously in this nearly perfect thriller. More

Manchester by the Sea. An incredibly powerful and moving story of loss, with an Oscar-deserving performance from lead Casey Affleck. 

Ethel and Ernest. The story of Raymond Briggs’ young life. Despite it being an animated film, it pulls no punches. Humorous, beautiful, moving and tragic. Watch it

Product

Terence Woodgate's elegant  Solid - Carrara marble table lamp.

Theatre

Yerma. The Young Vic restaging of Federico Garcia Lorca’s 1934 tragic masterpiece ‘Yerma’, reset in 21st-century hip London society. With two standout performances from Billie Piper (in the main role as ‘Yerma’) and Brendan Cowell as her husband. More

The Almeida’s stunningly brilliant production of Uncle Vanya. Imaginatively staged and directed by Robert Icke, with a wonderful cast headed by Paul Rhys. 

Architecture

 

The Switch House Tate. One of the most inhospitable, dismal architectural experiences of 2016. Bleak and cold, with no attempt to create an uplifting experience for the visitor. More

Graphics/Branding

Two diabolical rebrands appeared on the scene. First was the hideous Addison Lee courier and car service. It could have been so good in the right hands. 

British Steel introduced a shamefully embarrassing new identity, as opposed to reintroducing David Gentleman’s perfectly thought-out original.

But there was a welcomed and brave move in accepting that an earlier logo from the 1960s still works perfectly. Sean Perkins at North resurrected the baby from the bathwater of the ill-judged Co-operative rebrand of a few years ago.

Nat West's so-called "gentle evolution" of their logo by making what was originally simple complicated. It will be hardly noticed by most but will cost many millions to implement. Such is the insulting disregard that banks have for the public's view of them.  More

This is graphic design at its very best: simple, meaningful, intelligent and witty. Created by Paula Scher at Pentagram NYC for The Heart & Stroke Foundation of Canada. 

Posters

2016 saw another group of inept ‘fine art’ collection of posters, this time for the Rio Olympics. Repeating the dreadful mistake of the 2012 UK Olympics with equally dreadful posters, again headed by Tracey Emin. An insult to all serious poster designers. More

Books

A Life in Letterpress. Alan Kitching’s life work in print. A doorstopper of a book, beautifully illustrated.

Nobrow has published the graphic novel, Audubon that centres on explorer John James Audubon’s ornithological quest across America during the 19th century. Written by Fabien Grolleau and sensitively illustrated by Jérémie Royer. 

Advertising

Wales’ Christmas drink-driving campaign, by the Cardiff- based agency Bluegg, underlines the tragic loss of a loved one on Christmas Day.

Art

The Royal Academy of Arts, Abstract Expressionism exhibition was an absolute joy but rather too crowded.

Stamps

Agatha Christie: An intriguing series of six stamps designed by Jim Sutherland and Neil Webb, complete with hidden clues.

TV Commercials

The wonderfully pure Wes Anderson envisioned Christmas train trip for H&M. Watch it

Radio

Florian Zeller’s award-winning stage play The Father, translated by Christopher Hampton for BBC Radio 3. Centred on a man disappearing into the world of dementia. With a moving performance from Kenneth Cranham. 

The Switch House: Depressing the spirits

The Switch House

I have put off visiting the Switch House, Tate Modern's new extension, until now. Actually, I should have put it off longer as the experience was deeply underwhelming for me.

The perfect place to sit and contemplate suicide.

Above the Switch House basement space, looking more like a design by Ken Adam for a Bond movie.

Once again the Tate chose Herzog and de Meuron to design this new building and internal galleries from scratch. It sits on the footprint of the old Bankside power station oil tank space. And that is where Herzog and de Meuron have clearly taken their inspiration for the internal areas of the upper floors of the new building. One needs to understand that the original tanks were housed in a harsh reinforced concrete underground space, with little in the way of the comfort or aesthetic quality.

Just a small sampling of the many depressing stairways.

Architects have fallen in love with concrete all over again and lust after the many disastrous buildings of the 1960's. All of the internal spaces at Switch House are built in raw moulded concrete reminiscent of wartime German bunkers and gun emplacements. Perfect for those uses but not to bring joy and to lift the spirits of the many visitors that pass through this building.

Above mean, claustrophobic stairways all clinically lit with bright white LED tubes, making everyone look like they are going down with the flu.

The grim widows and horrid detailing. 

The light through the windows is reduced by 50% by the outer airbrick style arrangement coating the exterior of the building, making the common flow areas really gloomy. I would have thought a prerequisite of a gallery space is to create excitement not to depress it, something that Herzog and de Meuron has effortlessly managed to achieve. And then there were lifts. The slowest and erratic ever. In the end, I opted to climb the 10 floors.

Those bloody lifts.

I was in Venice earlier this year and visited the Punta della  Dogana design by Tadao Ando it was an absolutely uplifting and beautiful architectural experience.

He also works extensively with concrete but he handles is with such confidence and elegance plus his detailing down to the smallest item. Something greatly lacking in the Switch House.

Tadao Ando's concrete is beautiful and sparing.

Tadao Ando can really lift the spirits as here at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas

An amusing side issue is the problems caused by the Switch House's 10th-floor external viewing terrace. This looks onto the surrounding London cityscape. But on one side it looks directly into block Neo Bankside, where the luxury flats go for £4.5m a pop.

How the other half live.

But viewing across to these immaculately furnished apartments I was unaware of any sign of life. Apparently many are just London flats for the international jet set. On the street, 12 floors below there were people sleeping in doorways inside cardboard boxes.

Smoke and mirrors

For the past 25 years, I have been a regular at the Renoir Cinema at the Bloomsbury Centre; it’s really my local and has been there since the ’70s.

But a year ago, just after I had renewed my membership, it closed for a £6 million renovation and expansion. It was supposed to be finished in December 2014 but dragged on until March 2015.

Now, I would be the first to say that the old Renoir was clearly losing money hand over fist – you’d be lucky to find six other people in either of the two screens on any night and the loos were disgusting – but even so, it was like a comfortable old slipper and I was used to it.

Now all is squeaky clean, with pink polished plaster walls inset into brutalist concrete to accentuate its ’70s architectural heritage. It now boasts six screens, which can be found by negotiating a labyrinth of corridors.

 One of several creepy corridors below stairs

There is a whole new subterranean floor to contain these extra screens. And you’ll find a bar on each of the three levels but, oddly, there is no longer a box office (not a good move).

On two recent visits and running late, I wanted to swiftly buy my tickets, which you now have to purchase at any of the three bars. So I’m on the ground floor and the person in front says: “… and can I have two diet Cokes, a brownie and a slice of carrot cake, that’s it – er no, sorry, and a cappuccino.” The clock is ticking away and all I want is my ticket. The guy serving behind the bar turns to me and says: “It might be quicker if you go to the bar on the lower ground floor.” I rush down the stairs (the film had already started). Now at the downstairs bar. Yet another person in front: “… and two glasses of Sauvignon Blanc and two of those flapjacks.” I zip further down to the bar below and at last am able to buy my ticket.

Doing away with a box office at a cinema is very unwise. Anyway, I have been there three times since, and there has been no change on being able to buy tickets speedily.

I’ve also had time to experience the new boutique-hotel-style interior. It was designed by Takero Shimazaki, new to me but the Curzon has made great play on the fact that he designed Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck Restaurant in Bray. The ground floor has a vast bar spanning the full width and seating areas peppered with Eileen Gray sofas, which are positioned to look out of the Panavision sliding windows that open out onto the main exterior spaces.

You descend the pink polished plaster walled stairs to find two other bars set against a backdrop reminiscent of sets from a David Lynch film – chairs parked in murky underlit corners, where you could imagine a vertically challenged man appearing through a radiator accompanied by a sinister throbbing ambient hum. Apparently, Tarkovsky’s ‘Stalker’ inspired Shimazaki, but I think he must have muddled his DVDs?

 One of the new lower ground seating areas

 A scene from David Lynch'e Eraserhead

 And Lynch's Mulholland Drive

 I think David Lynch would like these new spaces

On the recent occasions that I have been there, no one seems to sit in these lower ground rather oddly disturbing spaces. I am always amazed at how few interior designers really understand how people like to ‘feel’ in interior space, like so many restaurants with flat walls and ceilings creating unbearable noise levels so that you and everyone around you need to shout at the top of your voices, plus the harsh downlighters (especially in the loos), where you are reduced to the look of a mass murderer on the run. 

It was sad to see the removal of the old Renoir sign to be replaced by the ‘on brand’ Curzon. It is now called Curzon Bloomsbury. But it could have easily been called Curzon Renoir. Oh well, I guess I’ll get used to it and will allow more time to buy my ticket. And I’ll watch to see how the people who use the spaces force change: it’s how buildings learn. But I have to say the loos are great.

 

 

Ahead of the curve

Back in 1967, I was working for an American design consultancy that had set up shop in London. 

This book was produced while I was there. Roger Harris, who had just joined us, designed it.

It was about the contemporary interior design of the period, and Roger produced the whole book on a classic Swiss grid system of verticals and horizontals, except, that is, for the cover, where he introduced a curve to reflect the very curvy furniture that populated the book and a more general change in the air for graphics.

 A very curvaceous Sophia Loren in The Millionairess 1960, directed by Anthony Asquith

In fact, the ’60s and early ’70s were all about the reintroduction of the curve in graphics, furniture, architecture, textiles, shop fronts, typography, wallpaper, restaurants, lighting, magazines and film stars (yes, even they were more curvy back then), and there was even a revolving restaurant at the very top of the Post Office Tower below (now called the BT Tower), at which I was taken to lunch.

Many of the concrete brutalist buildings constructed during the 1960s were often softened by the occasional curve. This one, a multi-storey car park in Gateshead, was made famous in the crime film Get Carter but, like so many of these inhuman structures, has now been demolished, along with the many hastily built high-rise flats that alienated so many of the people that had to live in them.

The car park in Gateshead made famous in the crime film Get Carter.

 Below the Barbican Centre opened in 1982 designed by Chamberlin Powell and Bon.   

Shopfront for the Chelsea Drug Store on Kings Road 1970.    

The Kineta Holiday home designed by Alexandros Tombazis 1968  

Former bank of London or Lloyds Bank. By Clorindo Testa, Buenos Aires 1960's. Picture from buenosairesphotographer.com  

 The Queen Elizabeth Hall's curved doors at the Southbank Centre arts complex opened in 1967

Oliver Mourgue's chairs used in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey 1968

 

Joe Colombo's Universal chair 1965.

The TWA Terminal JFK designed by Eero Saarinen 1962

Arco lamp designed by Achilli and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni for Flos 1962.

Eero Saarinen seated in his Tulip arm chair 1956 and to the right his classic Womb chair 1947/8

The Dress Circle restaurant at Harrods 1968.

Margaret Calvert and Jock Kinneir’s now much-celebrated British road signs, conceived in the late ’50s and introduced nationwide in 1965, have lovely curved corners.

 

Biba packaging logo designed by Antony Little (1966)

Graphic for the Time & Place night club design by Bentley Farrell Burnett 1969

The influence of art deco and art nouveau filtering from the US was beginning to corrupt the hold that the hard-edged clinical modernist principles had on British graphics, perhaps with the added influence that the increasing use of LSD was having in changing visual perception at the time into a kaleidoscopic wonder world of possibilities. Whatever it was, the curve was finding its way into fabrics, wallpapers, shop fronts and restaurants. Let’s take a look.

 Design magazine cover by Bentley Farrell Burnett 1970 

Rubber Soul abum by The Beatles 1965 with hand lettering by Charles Front

 

Mary Quant in Honey magazine in 1965

 1960's Wallpaper

Chaise Longue designed by Geoffrey Harcourt 1970.

Fabrics designed by Barbara Brown 1965 (top) and 1967.

The first Pirelli Calendar designed by Derek Birdsall 1968.

  

Massimo Vignelli’s perpetual calendar designed in 1980

Derek Birdsall designed this first Pirelli calendar in 1968, which seemed to sync with Massimo Vignelli’s later perpetual calendar designed in 1980 and still in use in many studios and homes today, including mine. But wind back to 1959 and Willy Fleckhaus, art director of the legendary magazine Twen,often used curved borders to contain photographs and illustrations. A little later, Harri Peccinotti echoed Twen’s look on the very first Nova cover.

Twen magazine art directed by Willy Fleckhaus 1965 

Illustration by Heinz Edelmann for Twen 1965 

 

The first edition on Nova magazine 1965 art directed by Harri Peccinotti 

Kartell storage units 1965 

In 1965, the Italian company Kartell introduced a myriad of plastic products in primary colours employing the curve.

 The Olivetti Valentine portable typewriter designed by Ettore Sottsass with Perry King in 1969 

 

The Brionvega TS502 in 1962 and the radio designed by Marco Zanuso and Richard Sapper

 

Chromed Tubular Metal and leather Sling Chair for OMK designed by Rodney Kinsman 1967.

The 620 Chair Programme designed by Dieter Rams in 1962 and recently reintroduced by Vitsoe in the UK.

 

Moonstrips Empire News created by Eduardo Paolozzi 1967. 

 

Table lighter designed by Dieter Rams in 1968 for Braun

 

Interior details at the Barbican Centre 1982

Joe Colombo Table Lamp 1964 

And I’ve noticed in recent years the curve has returned to grace many furniture and product designs… 

 

Flos table lamp Barber Osgerby 2011

 

Jasper Morrison Glo-Ball 1999

 

Portsmouth furniture range by Barber Osgerby 2000

 

Lunar range by Barber Osgerby 

Loop table by  Barber Osgerby 

 

 

Parcs office range for Bene designed by Pearson Lloyd

I could have gone on and on but I won't, you get the idea.

See my earlier post on brutlalism

Doughty doors

 

From 1812 to 1870 number 48 Doughty Street was the home of Charles Dickens.

Clerkenwell and Bloomsbury have been my own stamping ground since the early 1960’s. Many of the street names were used by Dickens for characters in his novels.

Walking down Doughty Street I have always been attracted by the doors, which front the many elegant Georgian town houses. I often think of the comings and goings of the myriad of people passing through those doors over the decades.

Come with me for a little door walk…

 The entrance to Charles Dickens house is via number 49 where the museum is housed 

. 

 

Thomas Heatherwick: Eternal enthusiast

The Google headquarters/Image copyright Heatherwick Studio

News last week that Thomas Heatherwick along with Bjarke Ingels will design Google’s new Californian headquarters prompted me to revisit to the recording I made with Thomas back in 2007 when he was on the verge of becoming the brilliant designer we all now appreciate.

To hear that conversation, where Thomas talks about his early life and creative path, just click HERE.

 And more of him here.

 

Sarah Wigglesworth: Breaking new ground

This is the architect Sarah Wigglesworth.

She is known for the ground-breaking Straw Bale House, which is both her home and her architectural practice...

Above the Staw Bale House completed in 2001

Sarah is not part of the ego-fuelled architectural edifices that are increasingly populating our skyline. Her buildings are on a more intimate scale, where people feel part of them and experience a tactile relationship with the space: be it a school, social housing, a community centre or a dance studio. All are given Wigglesworth’s recipe of alternative materials, sustainable technology and green integrity.

Above: Siobhan Davies Dance Studios

I recently recorded a revealing interview with Sarah at her office in North London. You can listen to it here.

 

Shock of the New: Robert Hughes

Hughes in full flight

BBC2 have been rerunning the wonderful Robert Hughes series, Shock of the New from 1980. Do catch the brilliant one on architecture, Trouble in Utopia. Hughes single-handedly dismantles the over hyped and pretentiousness that surrounded the high priests of modernist architecture with their total disregard for people.

And he shows the dreadful legacy of their over inflated egos. It is a tour de force in critical rhetoric and a joy to hear if you sync with his views. See it here. while it is still on iPlayer.

Holiday reflections

I’ve just returned from my holiday in Italy. I spent most of my time hiding from the 37 degree heat under the dappled shade of a grape vine, while looking across the valley to Poppi Castle…

There was little to do but eat, drink, chat, read, cook, look and think. My friends, who live part of the time in Italy, know my passion for magazines and a vast quantity of The World of Interiors going back to the 1980s was put at my disposal.

I became fascinated looking back over 3 decades of the publication. It was an encapsulation of design history. What it revealed is just how we all get seduced by fashion and style. Much of it, looking back now, was ridiculous...

The uniform of the 80's. The shoulder-padded baggy look, promoted by Hugo Boss and adored by City traders.

One style that stood out was Post Modernism from the 80s. The Milan based collective Memphis was probably the most influential in the genre...

Their work infected interior, product, graphic and fashion designers alike.

In the hands of Jean Paul Goude, Grace Jones became a Memphis inspired human sculpture.

With Boy George following suit. Below an array of over styled pieces, both impractical to use and the furniture uncomfortable to sit on. 

Karl Largerfeld, prior to his vampire look, in his 80s Memphis clad apartment.

And then there were the architects who went slightly nutty and produced a whole mass of buildings, most of which now look horrid. Unlike the former group of creatives, whose work is relatively disposable, we are firmly stuck with their architecturally shoulder-padded, bombastic buildings for the next century…

 

Above a particularly dreadful building in High Holborn, London. Somehow the architects they had the bright idea of shoe horning in an Eduardo Paolozzi sculpture. Every time I pass by, the figure looks increasingly uncomfortable set against its past sell by date backdrop...

The building has been empty for some time. I wonder why?

Architects impose their vision (ego) on us whether we like it or not. Sometimes the quality can be sublime, but more often that not, it is just plain depressing…

 

After that little collection, and at the risk of agreeing with Prince Charles’ view of architecture (which I usually don't) I offer you this…

No competition I think.

And on the topic of new 'landmark' structures, here is our latest addition to add to the beauty parade... 

Need I say more? Well, I will. We are all told that we are living in an age of dwindling resources, that recycling is vital and sustainability is ‘the new black’. Not a bit of it.  That stack of  The World of Interiors magazines, spanning 3 decades, and at least 4 major recessions, demonstrates that we just carry on in the same old way, spending and throwing away, spending and throwing away.

I can’t ever see it changing; fashion and evolving style is an integral part of our DNA. We find it impossible to give up.

 
 
 

Out & About

It is good to see that someone has a bit of humor aimed at Renzo Piano's towering phallus...