This is the third issue of Anima, and it has a new format and look, thanks to Cabinet Milano. They have worked hard to create a magazine that offers substance as well as a striking graphic identity.
In this edition, Dalia Al-Dujaili writes about the essential role that design and architecture play in the struggle of the Palestinian people to protect their identity from erasure. She speaks to designer and architect Lara Salous, artist Jordan Nassar, and brothers Yousef and Elias Anastas, who are partners at AAU ANASTAS, and co-founders of Local Industries, Radio alHara and The Wonder Cabinet.
We also look at the politics of data, with Ayla Angelos in conversation with Mona Chalabi. The strength of Chalabi’s work is in the personal quality that she brings to the impersonal nature of statistics. She combines the analytical skills that she learned at the Bank of England, an institution with impeccably establishment credentials, with the vulnerable simplicity of hand-drawn illustrations as the starting point for her work. Even before she began using data to tell powerful stories, she had realised that no matter how apparently objective a question, how it is framed will always shape the possible answers. At a time when we are deluged with unreliable information, Chalabi attempts to offer clarity beyond journalism and achieve the quality of art.
Natasha Levy meets three of the founding members of Black Females in Architecture. BFA is a collective originally set up in the UK with the aim of addressing the barriers that woman of colour face working in architecture and construction. It is still an overwhelmingly male and white profession. In the UK, only 31 per cent of architects in practice are female, despite the fact that just over 51 per cent of architecture students are female. Black women make up less than 1 per cent of architects in Britain, even though they account for 4.2 per cent of the general population. The ambition of BFA is to make architecture a more equitable profession, but also to impact on the nature of architecture itself.
At a time when plastic is seen as a threat to the planet’s sustainability, Katie Treggiden asks if this material, once seen as magical in its properties, can ever be redeemed. A number of designers and their clients are trying to find better ways of working with plastic, for example, is striving to reach net zero by 2030, and has started publishing environmental passports for its best-selling products that give a precise measure of their carbon footprint. Year-on-year it has reduced its emissions and has taken action at every level of its activities, from boosting vegetable dishes at Salone del Mobile Milano, and keeping its supply chains short. Importantly it is ensuring that its products are made as much as possible from recycled and recyclable materials, without the use of glues. That means no more virgin aluminium, and reformulating its plastic chairs. Starting with Barber and Osgerby’s Tip Ton Chair (2011), now known as the Tip Ton RE (2020), Vitra uses recycled single-use plastic containers collected from German households in the Gelber Sack or ‘Yellow Bag’ programme. Shampoo bottles and yoghurt cartons are cleaned, crushed and melted to make a material that will last at least 15 years, and then itself be recycled.
Sustainability is more than a strictly technical issue; it is also an emotional and subjective one. Virgin plastic produces a glossy finish when it emerges from the mould. The Tip Ton RE is rougher and comes in slightly different colours. To see these characteristics as positive qualities rather than imperfections demands a change in the perceptions of designers and their clients. Like a sophisticated fashion brand that uses mature models with lived-in faces on the runway – to project inner beauty, rather than teenagers without a wrinkle – Vitra presents the reformulated version of the chair as characterful rather than blemished. The influential Dutch industrial designer Hella Jongerius set the tone for Vitra’s approach with what she called a love letter to grey. “Dear Grey, since I saw you on the Tip Ton chair, I can only see this new world. Never saw such a layered and lively grey. I adore all your little freckles. They make me melt. Black and white are forever changed, thank you for opening my eyes.”
Catherine Ince is a curator with a lot of experience in the archive. She was responsible for a major exhibition at London’s Barbican Arts Centre on Charles and Ray Eames that took her to the Library of Congress and the Vitra Design Museum to study the Eames’ papers. The documents, models and prototypes that they left behind are an essential tool in any attempt to evaluate their achievements. More recently she has worked at the Victoria and Albert Museum, an institution that has several million objects in its collections that the public rarely sees. She added to them by working on the acquisition. She also helped shape the museum’s collection store that opens in May, which is one of a number of attempts around the world to display archives in new and accessible ways.
In this issue of Anima, she discusses the significance of archiving, a special kind of collecting that might be seen as representing one end of a spectrum. One extreme is all about cataloguing order and control, and at the other it turns into a form of hoarding.
In a world that is constantly producing more and more, how can the archivists keep track, and is there ever a justification for throwing something away?
Alongside Michael Anastassiades, Isabel + Helen and Piero Gandini, we also speak to Carlo Ratti, the first Italian to take on the role of director of the Venice Architecture Biennale – his theme for 2025 is titled Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective. – since Massimiliano Fuksas who, 25 years ago, came up with the hard to pronounce theme of Less Aesthetic, More Ethics. Fuksas commissioned a film and installed a series of projectors to show it floor-to-ceiling along one wall of the Corderie, while on the other he displayed the work of all the architects that he had invited to take part. The problem with this arrangement was that the film was invisible with the lights on, but with the lights off, all the other work was in gloomy darkness. At the opening Fuksas could be seen walking along the Corderie – Venice’s ancient naval dockyard – switching lights off, followed at some distance by French architect Jean Nouvel, carefully switching them back on again. Those were the days when architects still tended to dress from head-to-toe in black. I remember realising that Nouvel was about to win the Golden Lion for his installation when he disappeared from the room, returning shortly afterwards having swapped his black Yohji Yamamoto suit for an identical outfit in dazzling white, in the knowledge that he was going to stand out.
Design is a way of understanding the world around us. It can be deeply political; it’s a means to address the crises that face us.
Anima is exploring these issues.
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