Blueprint

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Bl THE MAGAZINE FOR LEADING ARCHITECTS AND DESIGNERS

HOUSE OF THE YEAR - JÄMIE FOBERT - ' TOH SHIMAZAKI

AALTO REVISITED 000 il + AUSTRIAN DESIGN SUPPLEMENT ANA

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I hazard that we live in a time where we read captions before we look at the things they serve. Picture going into an art gallery: perhaps either

of the Tates, Britain or Modern, where it could be Gainsborough or Gilbert and George that greet you. Where do your eyes go first? To the picture on the wall? Or to the information caption next to it?

Looking at things can be a pretty unwieldy experience. Destabilising, even. The caption - next to a colour-field painting by Mark Rothko, for example — calms you. It tells you how to look and sometimes, even, what you're unable to see.

It brings you in from the cold of not knowing, and warmly embraces you, almost in an instant.

We often go to exhibitions with other people. We realise that seeing the world is as much about how others see the same things, and the similarities and differences that those systems of sight share. Reading a caption is an imaginary conversation with an omniscient person who is not in the room but who knows about the things in it. Effectively, the caption knows things on your behalf. It reduces the need for you to arrive at the exhibition already armed with a given horizon of knowledge. It tames terrifying mystification. Which is precisely why captions can become pernicious.

In our art-as-entertainment ecology, the balance between just enough caption and too much is abused. There's a desire to explain in words what should be a result of experience. We know this; and we often hate that the captions have us in their thrall. But we're becoming addicted to them.

One of the liberations of the Enlightenment was the notion that we would be able to discover ‘reason’ for ourselves, and not be forced to ingest it on the terms of a superior ‘other’ force, such as the King or the Church. But this freedom has its own alienating drawbacks. One is not being able to divine reason when it is apparently right in front of you. Abstract, modern art made us feel that way. Which is why art critics invented themselves. Then came the curators. And, most recently, the education departments.

Bertrand Russell once said: ‘If a man can speak a language nobody understands, he can say what he wants! Politicians and madmen know this. Dictators do otherwise: they rouse the masses with tell-it-like-it-is clarity. It's my hunch that in a liberal democracy, where freedom to interpret is an inalienable right, we seem to want more and more mechanisms to halt the alienation of free meaning.

Those 152 words mounted on foam-core, placed neatly next to that painting, are one of our must- have means of meaninglessness today.

HE OBJECT Y SHUMON ASAR

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BLUEPRINT APRIL 2007

Swedish designer. Alexander Lervik is divining a new path for Scandinavian furniture design says Tim Abrahams

In 1998, Alexander Lervik's degree project established him intemationally. Ten Stools - Ten Decades began as an autodidactic history lesson. The young, academically disinclined Swede taught himself the past century of design history - and his nation's

role in it — in 10 easy pieces. More importantly for us, the collection, and Lervik's career since, tell a great deal about contemporary Swedish design. Looking through the century- spanning collection, two pieces in particular catch the eye. The 50s stool is generally Scandinavian, like Jacobsen. The 40s stool is constructed from beech and saddle-girth and is Mathsson abstracted - a reduction to the essentials of what we understand as Swedish design: clean lines, honest, made of wood. Rolf Fehlbaum saw it and helped Lervik tour the exhibition internationally.

For Lervik, this historical design programme has defined his career. In 2005, he created another exhibition, Five Playful Chairs, which was picked up by Pascale Cottard-Olsson, owner of an eponymous gallery ubiquitously described as ‘the only design gallery in Stockholm’. The Icon chair revisited the history theme. The piece encased models of Vitras classic chairs in perspex: mini Bertoias and Saarinens frozen in time. Lervik has bucked the puritanical Swedish trend and made his playful approach work. There is very little opportunity to play in mass production. You have to make your own opportunities, he says.

Swedish manufacturers have taken to Lervik's reworking of a halcyon era of Scandinavian design. His Dolphin easychair and Neptun table, for previously ailing Swedish manufacturer Johanson, breathe new life into the heritage of that historical moment: pressed-wood utilitarianism given dynamic emphasis. ‘For too long, Swedish manufacturers didn't adapt. Recently they have learned that they must change. It is a pity that they have changed in the same way, but I think they are beginning to understand, says the designer.

This year a major Bruno Mathsson exhibition is touring the world to celebrate the centenary of the

designer’s birth. A biography of Yngve Ekstrom, the founder of Swedese, by his daughter Brita-Lena Ekström, dominated the book stands at the Stockholm Furniture Fair. Swedes are now scrutinising their heritage rather than just dining out on it. Lervik is engaging seriously with this tradition even as he recognises that the world has changed. There are things I

make that no Swedish manufacturer would produce; my alien cupboard knobs, for example; he says. Yet he acknowledges that the relationship he has with Johanson is likely to produce a higher-quality end product than working with a remote fabricator. ”I can be at Johanson’s factory in half an hour, he says.

However, in contrast to his design heroes of old, some of them fabricator/ designers, Lervik's relationship with the industrial fabric of his country is far looser. It is impossible to tell where most modern furniture is made by looking at it. Only in extreme circumstances can you tell where it has been designed; he insists. But it is clear that in this globalised market, in which Sweden’s social model creates a comparatively high labour cost, design manufacture

faces a threat. According to figures collected by the Swedish Federation of Wood and Furniture Industry, the gap between exports and imports

is narrowing. Sweden is still a net exporter of furniture, but only just. IKEA is partially responsible, outsourcing furniture manufacture for domestic consumption.

Of course, it takes talent and fantastic ideas - pace the stool project — but, like the retailers, designers such as Lervik are making globalisation work for them, while Swedish manufacturers are [earning slowly. At the Stockholm Furniture Fair, Lervik's new piece (above) was a coat stand inspired by streetscapes in Asia (he travelled there last year). Having fought hard to estabtish an alien pattern in Sweden, he can dip in and out of the mainstream. This year he is planning a lighting show in a cave under Stockholm. Yet the pioneering spirit of the Fifties still haunts him and his colleagues. In 2005, Lervik launched a social project and exhibition to imagine new Utopias, co-opting scientists, artists and designers from all parts of Swedish society. Was it productive? ‘Well, it was for me, he says.