Delivered to colleagues, friends and family via email.
“Peace is not something you wish for. It’s something you make, something you do, something you are, and something you give away.”
The boomers out there will recognize the inspiration of this year’s Object Agency letterpress and email holiday cards — John Lennon’s enduring message of peace, and, of course, the iconic cover of Abbey Road.
And in 1964, 50 years ago, The Beatles made their first visit to the US and historic debut on the Ed Sullivan Show.
I recently spent a lovely afternoon in Bologna with master designer Giancarlo Piretti.
Our time together included a tour of the impressive Piretti studio followed by a delicious lunch, over which we discussed design, life in Bologna, and people in common, including my maestro Ettore Sottsass.
Bologna is both charming and profound — not unlike many Italian cities of a certain era — with qualities we adore such as the covered arcades and narrow cobblestone streets lined with shops and food purveyors that seem to not have changed since the Renaissance. And Bologna is in the center of what is considered the home and the heart of Italian cuisine, and certainly the people of Bologna take that reputation quite seriously.
But it is usually the nuances that move us, and those can be found in the experiences of walking, observing, listening, touching and feeling. The sense of history, the sense of place, the genius loci embraces us and surrounds us with something that is likely taken in stride by the Bolognese, yet for an American, arriving from a country so young, with no real imbedded culture and seemingly disparate regional proclivities, it creates a profoundly deep experience that resonates in the memory and emotions.
More inspiration came when I visited the Museo Morandi presently temporarily housed in the MAMbo, or Museo d’Arte Modena di Bologna. To be in a gallery with an entire museum’s contents of Morandi ‘natura morta’ series of paintings was inspiring. For me, the discipline and rigor plus the color palette of simple still life paintings were incredibly compelling. They resonate as much as ‘organized objects’, carefully arranged, through scale and composition, color and materiality, so that they in fact might seem random if not for the studious attention to the negative space and table surface that frames them.
These are lessons that as a designer, can be taken to heart. Since I am most always drawn to the abstract, these figurative pictures represent another way of seducing my imagination and discovering how it can inspire my own creativity.
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Giancarlo Piretti is creator of the Nima Chair for Object Agency client American Seating. View our video at vimeo.com/channels/objectagency.
This year, 31.4 million people living with HIV/AIDS were able to celebrate another birthday thanks to the pioneering work of organizations like DIFFA.
The designers chose the birthday theme to give hope, to celebrate life, and to encourage perseverance in the face of adversity.
The walls were clad letters and characters that spell out “Happy Birthday” in over 20 languages, including Afrikaans, Hindi, and Turkish.
The pendant light fixtures were designed to look like party hats floating above the invisible guests at the birthday party. The chairs are modeled after the Le Marie chair by Philippe Starck. They were chosen for their ability to disappear, and allow the environment to stand out. Additionally, a single red chair could take center stage, with the others falling away.
A note of gratitude is attached to each guest’s gift.
Four graduate interior design students worked on the table: Ellie Cunningham, Kristin Eskridge, Lucy Gregory-Roberts, and Jana Homes. All four are in the third and last year of an MS in Interior Design at Pratt Institute and are enrolled in a year-long Exhibition Design Intensive studio, taught by Professor Jon Otis.
Object Agency is proud to be a supporter of DIFFA (Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS) and to participate in the annual Dining by Design fundraiser.
Photography courtesy of Xenia Rollinson, www.xeniaalexandra.com
Object Agency principal, Jon Otis, presented his design concept Golden Mean Glass Matrix this week at the 2014 Interior Design Educators Council Annual Conference.
Of 63 creative scholarship submissions, 28 were selected to present based on “aesthetic and conceptual achievement, as well as scholarly writing documenting the creative process.”
Jon’s presentation included a discussion of the role of proportion in design followed by images of the process of crafting a “Golden Mean Glass Matrix” prototype at Corning Glass Lab. www.vimeo.com/channels/objectagency
Golden Mean Glass Matrix is a concept Jon developed to be produced along with his Fusion concept at the Corning Museum of Glass (CMoG) GlassLab July 2012.
Learn more about Jon’s work with GlassLab.
