‘Craft’ is a loaded term, often negatively associated with village fete knitted tea-cosies, knick-knacks or brown lumpy pottery. Wandering around Design Miami’s ‘Craft Punk’ exhibition at Spazio Fendi, it is refreshing to see a revival of interest in the idea of craft as a skilled creative discipline involving intricate knowledge of materials and hand-manufacturing techniques.

For the Salone week, Spazio Fendi has been converted into a buzzing hive of noise and activity, a performance space with young designers creating craft-based products in makeshift open studios.

In one corner you step into a cluttered leather workshop, with Simon Hasan’s bubbling pots and steaming tea-urns boiling leather ready to be converted into vases and stools. Hasan revives a forgotten technique, Cuir Bouilli, used in medieval times to make armour and drinking bottles. He twists and stretches the boiled leather over vase-shaped formers, using Fendi’s wooden shoe lasts, bits of scaffolding and other oddments to create curious but beautiful vessels. The leather hardens irreversibly, holding its shape, and is then hand-stitched and sealed with resin, resulting in functional vases suitable to hold water. As a performance, it is fascinating to see the transformation from a soft, shapeless sheet of hide to a rock hard three-dimensional product.

Peter Marigold also works in leather, using a box of miscellaneous off-cuts and scraps from Fendi’s studio to produce a meandering crazy-paving table. Growing every day, the tessellating tabletop sprawls across the space with contrasting flashes of colour and finishes - silvery snakeskin, hot pink and electric blue.

Other highlights to spot were Kwangho Lee’s knitted hosepipe chairs and Studio Glithero’s photo-sensitive ceramic vases, slowly rotating in front of a spotlight to produce ghostly patterns.

No hint of crocheted toilet-roll covers here. 

Craft Punk
Spazio Fendi
Via Sciesa 3

Words and images: Tamsin van Essen

The Goldsmiths Design group at the Salone Satellite 2009 arrived in Milan with 4 bags of hand luggage, containing their computers and printers, and a miscellany of tape, pens, stickers, sketchbooks and white paper. On arrival at their booth, they built their space by scavenging the rubbish of the other exhibitors, creating tables, desks and chairs.

Planning of what to show that best represented Goldsmiths began about a month ago. They decided to create an interactive studio, asking the public what they want next from design.

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Jaime Hayon’s Crystal Candy Set, a collection of nine pieces for Baccarat is the Grimm fairytale I’ve been looking for to saturate my unearthly, fantasy steeped dreams. Each one has an otherworldly feeling evoking images of curiosity cabinets full of locked secrets, wraithlike druggists’ jars lying in wait for jolted lovers and hastily buried desires. The sinister ruby reds, emerald greens, slightly tarnished gold and cut crystal conjure dreams of Absinthe drinkers lurching around in darkened corners to music no one can hear, culminating in blood being spilt after arguments over pocket watches and chipped gold coins.

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Diesel’s outlook and flair touches every area of the globally admired brand and their recent collaborations with Patrizia Moroso and Foscarini are no different. An air of confidence and glamour exudes from the exhibition space within the company’s spacious penthouse on via Stendhal, prevented from appearing overly self-assured by an obvious grunge authenticity and what seems to be a genuine lust for the darker side of life. The collection’s title, ‘Successful Living from Diesel,’ is somewhat tongue-in-cheek and pokes fun at the swarms of suited businesspeople plaguing the shows of the bigger names in the interiors industry, searching for status within their wares.  A mark of success, Diesel may only be to some, but the claim of “living” cannot be challenged.

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If you’re a designer no doubt you have come across the legend that is Barbara Chandler. If you are a follower of design, then no doubt you have read some of her articles in a variety of newspapers and magazines, including the London based Evening Standard.

Barbara stood out from the other journalists that I have had experience with, for the pure and simple reason, she did her job well.  There is nothing more entertaining than having a journalist cut and paste your press release directly, you won’t find this lazy approach with the Chandler. “I learn as much as I can, and I love it!”

She has a passion for her trade, the people she meets and a desire to learn and understand, that results in real journalism.

I caught up with Barbara at the DesignersBlock show, intrigued to see how her trade has evolved over her 35 year career. 

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