Three books on design: exploring Japanese craftsmanship, vegan interiors and the world we’d like to inhabit
Formgiving by BIG, Naomi Pollock’s Japanese Design Since 1945, and Vegan Interior Design by Aline Dürr look at how we shape, and are shaped by, the world around us
Formgiving by BIG, Taschen
Ideas will ping around your head as you read Bjarke Ingels’ conclusion to his trilogy. Not simply descriptive, the essays, synopses and prognostications afford readers architectural thrills on Earth and in other spheres: we are asked, for example, to imagine building on different planets, Mars for one, although it may take hundreds of years to “terraform [the planet] to have a biosphere”.
Readers wondering whether Ingels is overstepping his mark as an architect are obviously new to Bjarke Ingels Group, which thinks BIG. He and his 500-strong crew believe architecture is “losing its monopoly on offering places for social interaction” to online platforms, leading to a future in which watching and doing, and virtual and actual reality, will be inseparable.
In this volume, BIG plays on the Danish word for design, “formgivning”, or “giving shape” to a world we would like to inhabit. Among the 65-plus projects chosen are developments made more humane by the presence of courtyards; a waste-to-energy plant in Copenhagen that also serves as a ski run for mountain-starved Danes; and other multipurpose buildings that open architecture to different types of users (a museum doubling as a bridge is also a breathtaking sculpture).
The sole project from China is Shenzhen Energy headquarters, whose “engineering without engines” concept removes from buildings the dependence on machinery: its rippled facade minimises thermal exposure, thus cutting energy usage.
Japanese Design Since 1945 by Naomi Pollock, Thames & Hudson
Japanese Design Since 1945 is a thorough study that sifts through post-war history to examine the country’s most remarkable designers and products. For an industrial design leader, however, curiously only a small number of luminaries are household names. Designer Shin Azumi provides a partial explanation, likening big companies to schools: designers learn on the job and are expected to be cogs for life. But some have earned recognition, about 70 of whom Tokyo-based American architect Naomi Pollock spotlights from different fields.
Among the most famous are polymath Kenya Hara, Issey Miyake (who considers his clothing to be products) and Naoto Fukasawa, whose fruitful relationship with Muji grew from his CD player with an exposed spinning disc at the centre. Two others are Butterfly Stool designer Sori Yanagi and his father Soetsu Yanagi, founder of the Japanese folk art movement.
In her adopted homeland, Pollock makes the most of the “good design everywhere”, much of it in homes. She draws out of lingering shadows scores of quiet achievers, including Asao Tokolo, whose 2020 Olympics emblem is a casualty of Covid-19. Then there are the products, many of them “everyday icons” without designer tags.
Among the hundreds showcased is the onigiri wrapper, ingenious but for the food labels that ruin the rice balls’ rip-and-eat magic. Like the many items highlighted, the book is a keepsake. You can almost feel the craftsmanship while turning the pages.
Vegan Interior Design by Aline Dürr, Self-published
Vegans, look around your home. You may not lounge on a leather sofa or sleep beneath a down-filled duvet, but what about that woollen throw or those silk pillow cases? Was cruelty involved in their creation? Now consider your walls: standard paint includes animal products such as casein (a milk protein), ox gall (a wetting agent), even beeswax (which can be used as a binder).
Vegan Interior Design should open the eyes, and furrow the brows, of the growing number of consumers of only animal-free products. But Aline Dürr will not win over many habitual carnivores, which is a shame. That owes much to her writing style, which leans towards clobbering, even though the author, an interior architect, says the book is not intended to scare or upset.
We are told that cows, trafficked in India for leather, are taken to slaughterhouses where their heads are “beaten to a pulp with the help of a hammer”. Citations and context would help bolster the cause.
Most useful is Dürr’s research on alternative materials (“leather” can be made from mangoes, textiles from banana silk) and warnings about the uses of cats and dogs. And if Denmark’s cull of 17 million minks last year made you flinch, at least rules are changing elsewhere. The Dutch are set to close mink fur farms in 2021. Dürr, for one, will be encouraged.
