London Report: Searching For Surrealism
The tribe of professional trend watchers who migrate to design shows are scouting the London Design Festival this week for further evidence of the pendulum shift from the highly branded slickness and restraint of the last decade to a more expressive mode. We saw it at the Milan Furniture Fair in April, where Marcel Wanders, Jaime Hayon, and others exaggerated the scale of ordinary household objects to create a trippy mini-revival of surrealism.
So is Alice in Wonderland invited to London? Hard to say. I did stumble on a bit of surrealism yesterday at the Aram Gallery, which is showing prototypes from 70 students studying with Ron Arad at the Royal College of Art. Their assignment: to update the classic spring-balanced anglepoise lamp from the 1930s. A 26-year-old Portuguese student named Tiago de Oliveira Martins de Fonseca concluded that he couldn’t improve on the design, which has already gone through countless refinements. Instead he would give it a well-deserved respite from its upright position by splaying a rubber version on its side, like melting objects in a Dali painting.
“I thought I could give it a rest from its stiff vigilance,” he told me by email earlier today. “Most anglepoise lamps end up in the same position for months. We barely touch them.”
No word yet on whether his design, No Angle No Poise, will go into production.
So is Alice in Wonderland invited to London? Hard to say. I did stumble on a bit of surrealism yesterday at the Aram Gallery, which is showing prototypes from 70 students studying with Ron Arad at the Royal College of Art. Their assignment: to update the classic spring-balanced anglepoise lamp from the 1930s. A 26-year-old Portuguese student named Tiago de Oliveira Martins de Fonseca concluded that he couldn’t improve on the design, which has already gone through countless refinements. Instead he would give it a well-deserved respite from its upright position by splaying a rubber version on its side, like melting objects in a Dali painting.
“I thought I could give it a rest from its stiff vigilance,” he told me by email earlier today. “Most anglepoise lamps end up in the same position for months. We barely touch them.”
No word yet on whether his design, No Angle No Poise, will go into production.
Posted by: Michael Cannell on Sep 19, 07 at 11:30 AM PDT
